Re: [GD-General] Protecting our game

[Bob <ma...@mb...>]

brian hook wrote:

> Exactly.  People tend to grossly overestimate the technical
> sophistication of the average user.  There is tendency to project our
> own particular biases and proclivities onto that of the "mass market",
> and this often ends up making developers waste a lot of time.


You are right about that, I admit. But my bias is a similar gripe to
those of the registry entries and hard drive garbage that pops up during
the next trojan hunt. No matter how explicit your description of the
demo functionality, both the pirate and the cracker will jump on
time/execution limited software. For the pirate it's easy warez on
someone else's bandwidth, and for the cracker it is something akin to
fixing an annoying bug (especially when a twelve hour file transfer
offers only one hour or a handful of executions -- RealArcade, anyone?).

For the common demo user intent on stealing, it is no less trouble to go
Google for a ready-made patch/crack than to re-install. And the honest
customer (with impeccable ethics and no technical savvy) will probably
forget about the demo come payday since it was deleted right after it
stopped working.