Question about owner rights - SOW BOB

[flyingbullseye]

Honestly I can see both sides of the argument but in the end it will be only a matter of time before someone cracks the protection to get around whatever DRM is used. The only thing we can hope is if/when that happens it's a ways down the road for Oleg and team to recoup enough money to keep the series alive in the future. Since BOB is much like 1946 in the way that its not a arcade sim the draw will be smaller than your typical twitch shooter and probably lessen the chance of a crack. I do have faith that there will be a good balance between the need for protection and not screwing over the fans of the sim.

What are details about starforce Proactive?

On a small side note, what protection does 1946 have?

Flyingbullseye

[Romanator21]

I don't know about 1946, but I was able to transfer IL-2 v.2.04 from my home PC to my laptop with just my USB stick. I doubt 1946 has any changes.

[Lucas_From_Hell]

Starforce Proactive is simple: you type the serial, click "OK" and then it removes itself, without installing any drivers or something like that.

I think the only troubled way would be Rise of Flight's online activation. If everything is fine, then it's no problem, but you don't imagine how annoying it is when your internet connection is down and you want to play it, and you can't because you need freakin' internet to play the game...

[Letum]

I won't be buying it if it has online security that requires a connection to play (Like RoF). USB key security might be better.

[76.IAP-Blackbird]

I have bought nearly every il2 titel and addon wich wa in the stores in germany, rthe amount of money I have spend was one of the best I have ever done. Playing il2 since the Demo comes out and enjoying it until then online and offline. A very good game, with very nice details.

As I saw ROF`s first pics, I decided to buy it also, but after it was released .. I didn`t purchased it. Maybe I`m oldschool but I like to have a DVD box, a DVD with even a small handbook in it. Put it in the drive, install it and have fun!!! To staying online all the while, need every time a veryfication, good games doesn`t need any protection! They will be bought and played as originals.

I love il2, and I hope the upcoming game will be like il2 nor even better!

my 2 cents

[Lucas_From_Hell]

RoF isn't annoying at all.

I have the Rise of Flight DVD with me, and, despiste the time I was without internet connection, I had no problem at all with it.

You can mark a "Save Password" box in the game. With this, you'll only need to click "OK" after the game starts.

Guys, forget all this stuff people say about DRM. Yes, incidents happened with early versions of StarForce, but these were solved and don't happen. It's an effective protection against piracy, and ends up 'forcing' the ones who would be inclined to download for free to buy the real game. That helps a lot in finances.

[Letum]

When I spend cash to buy I game, I want to own it and be able to use it when
ever I want.

I don't want to just buy the right to connect to a master server to unlock the
ability to play the game only at the times when I have an internet connection.

That's not ownership of goods, nor is it a service (at least not a service to
me!), so why would I want to pay for that?

[Blackdog_kt]

Pretty much my view as well Letum.

In general, piracy is not stoppable by DRM. The only games that don't get cracked are games the pirates don't care enough about:

Originally Posted by flyingbullseye

Honestly I can see both sides of the argument but in the end it will be only a matter of time before someone cracks the protection to get around whatever DRM is used. The only thing we can hope is if/when that happens it's a ways down the road for Oleg and team to recoup enough money to keep the series alive in the future. Since BOB is much like 1946 in the way that its not a arcade sim the draw will be smaller than your typical twitch shooter and probably lessen the chance of a crack.

IL2 was famous enough to attract attention by pirates, but RoF for example is still a bit obscure in the gaming world (not many outside of the sim fans know about it) and the pirate crews don't want to spend time on it, as they do most of what they do for competition between them and not profit. That's why it's not pirated yet, not because the DRM is good. Since RoF's release i've seen 3-4 online-only DRM games circulating in pirated copies, it's just that the pirates prefer to crack a high profile title like Need for Speed Shift, Empire Total War or Modern Warfare 2, instead of a simulator that nobody knows about outside the sim fan crowd. You don't even have to pirate games to know all that, there are websites that list each pirated release and they are very useful to a buyer as well. For example, if you don't like the DRM method used in a game, you can check to see if it has been bypassed by pirates. If it is, then you can buy the game and download the protection bypass, so you can enjoy your legally bought game without DRM. The irony in this is of course in plain view, for a significant percentage of people purchasing a DRMed game is dependant on pirates.

Since any game will no matter be pirated at some point, a certain amount of lost sales is to be expected. The funny thing is, this amount of lost sales due to piracy could be about the same for all methods of protection, but the amount of sales lost to potential customer dissatisfaction is not the same for all methods.

For example, say that a game loses 10000 sales due to piracy if it uses an online DRM method and slightly more, let's say 12000 if it uses a simple cd check that is easier to bypass. However, the DRM version of the game would also lose at least 2000 sales from people who wanted to buy don't like the DRM. The irony here is that many legitimate customers who don't like DRM are waiting for the game's protection to be changed or by-passed before they buy, which effectively means that getting back those 2000+ would-be customers is dependant on the pirates releasing the "modded" version of the game's executables.

In any case, any kind of protection is only delaying the inevitable. All well-known high profile games receive the attention of the pirates at some point. What matters most is to have a game that takes time to crack, so that you can sell well during the first six months or so. Then, sales will gradually stabilize and the game will probably be already pirated anyway. At that point the DRM is already redundant and the money is in add-ons. A good compromise is what Bohemia Interactive is doing with the ArmA series. Recently, they released a patch that removes the DRM from ArmA2. This is a good balance between securing the important impulse buyer income during the early months of the game's release and making sure your customers don't have to deal with annoying DRM methods later on down the line. If SoW has any kind of troublesome DRM, i hope 1c will do the same and remove it after 3-6 months with a patch.

For me the best method would be a one-time activation that would not be dependant on your hardware. For example, Black Shark needs a deactivation before you make major changes in your hardware and then you need to reactivate, while RoF doesn't have this but it has an annoying always-online requirement and forced patching that you can't roll back if the latest update is causing your problems. So, why not take the best of both methods and leave out the bad? Let's say, instead of the activation process creating a registry key depending on your hardware (as it is in BS), it could create the key depending on user ID alone when you connect to a master server. The user ID could a combination of the game serial from the box, with the email/nickname and password chosen by the user during the registration process. The trick here is that this online connection would not need to be permanent like RoF, which will make it easier for you to play your game whenever you want and less costly on the developers since they won't have to maintain a lot of servers and bandwidth. It's just a simple case of connect, enter information ONCE and activate the game. Then you could use the software as you wished.

[AdMan]

DRM software kills PC games, most developers are wising up to this fact, I make a point to buy games that have no DRM, case in point: Dragon Age Origins, an EA game eho a couple years ago was the worst in this regard