A Game Designer’s Lore

I recently bought “Das Schwarze Auge - Drakensang” and it is a respectable RPG with a very well done implementation of the “The Dark Eye” pen ’n’ paper ruleset. It’s not extraordinary yet I can recommend it. But actually I do not want to go into any details about graphics or gameplay. In fact there was a thread on the publisher’s official bulletin boards that tells the players about the “pecularities” of Drakensang’s copy protection. Since the info is in german I’ll translate the given information analogously: [...] If Drakensang notices that [SecuROM] copy protection was overridden, it may happen that the player runs into the one or other “dead end”. [...] Even if not obvious, a version of the game running with a no-dvd crack may destroy your savegames permanently.

So when I browsed the boards for a bit, I discovered that there seem to be two or three quests throughout the game which are broken in case you use a cracked version of the game. For instance, there is one quest reported where a progress-critical NPC will not show up. During another quest you are supposed to get into some kind of dungeon but if you play a pirated version of the game you arrive in another dungeon with no exit instead. Sounds fun, huh?

Basically I really think this kind of game breaking copy protection is ingenious - if only done right! Radon Labs/dtp made one critical mistake: they do not show the player directly that he ran into some copy protection. At a first glimpse it seems to be a nasty bug. A really nasty bug since it eventually breaks the main story line in a story driven RPG. As expected this leads to annoyance due to the “bug”. In consequence players raid the dev’s/publisher’s boards and complain about the game being heavily buggy, or even worse, they start rating the game down at online stores or with their friends.

“It’s only the pirates, so ‘who cares!’”, you may state but then you miss some points.

Firstly there are players that buy games but crack them in order to play them without changing discs every time (I myself sometimes belong to this kind). If I would know about this kind of copy protection in advance, I would not do so. In Drakensang’s case though, you did not get any information about this, neither in the manual nor in other media coming with the game. Since the save games are corrupted by the copy protection, too, you cannot even erase the crack and go on from your last saving point. This way you as a dev really scare off your customers since you cannot assume that every customer looks at your bulletin boards. Accordingly some customers may take above mentioned measures.

Secondly there is the risk that your copy protection incorporating this “game breaker-feature” may not work as intended on systems other than your test ones. This happend with Drakensang, too, so they are now having some angry customers posting on their boards and calling the customer support. Once again the lack of information poses the risk that these customers may leave and even advise against the game.

To avoid these issues I would suggest a possible solution that erases the information deficiency in both cases and still provides the same protection as before. First of all, add information about the copy protection mechanism clearly readable to the manual and to the installation and start-up screens. This way you can make sure that most of the honest customers at least get enough info to not make any mistakes.

Second to that, inplement the “game breaker-feature” in a way that clarifies what just happened. Let’s take the example from Drakensang where the NPc will not show up to complete the quest. A better solution would be having the NPC show up but not tell the player about the quest, but instead tell him that he probably is playing a cracked version of the game.

When that happens to a pirate, he will either not care and delete the game or he will be already drawn into your game and will spend some money for a legal copy. On the other hand, a customer will not think of a game-breaking bug but call the customer support instead. In either case do not break the savegames! Customers will be annoyed if they already spent some hours in the game only to discover that they have to restart just because of a faulty copy protection. And with pirates you provide them some support if they really decide to buy your game since they can play from the point where the game broke for them. Why punish a software pirate if he turns into a paying customer? A working savegame is more of a incentive to buy the game already.

To come to a conclusion, I’d really love to see more copy protection working this way. It is not that difficult to integrate when thought about in design phase. It will not annoy paying customers with DRM that requires an internet connection or complex and unhandy serials. And you save time for a demo of your game. Why? Every game gets pirated sooner ar later. Use this fact for your own advantage. Put the time required for demo development into debugging and deliver a better game. This way you may at least harvest these pirates that claim themselves only pirating games in order to try them out and buy them if they are worth it. They are even taking care of distribution by themselves. And last but not least it does not pose more risk to malfunctions with your copy protection then it would anyways.