You ignore the fact that the purpose of DRM is to minimize piracy, not prevent it completely.

if it introduced even a slight inconvenience in pirating the games it would probably already shave off a nice amount of pirating.

PS: Puppy Games is just one guy trying to make a living from his games, it's not really much of a "company".

Is it just one guy now? I know for a while it was at least two, possibly three.

Also, PuppyGames are the people responsible for LWJGL[1], which IMO is the best way to go for making games in Java.

[1] http://www.lwjgl.org/

AFAIK there is just one programmer, and he is on the LWJGL team but is by no means the only LWJGL developer.

There might be someone else working with him, I couldn't really find anything about it.

EDIT: apparently there are 2 people, Cas & Chaz:

http://www.javagaming.org/index.php/topic,23005.msg190715.ht...

And in that thread he did confirm they only make $250/month, split two ways. That's sad. I bought their first game years ago (I forgot it's name, but it doesn't appear to be for sale anymore). It was really good.

Alien Flux. Thrice cursed. Mention it not.

Why?

Total failure of a product which did almost everything just exactly wrong. Wasted a year of my life on it before I realised it was a total flop.

Sounds like there are some lessons hidden in there...I personally would love hearing the story, a post-mortem of sorts :)

> purpose of DRM is to minimize piracy,

Oh, that depends very much. Some other reasons include limit resale/kill secondary market/otherwise control distribution, track users/usage, be able to force update/patches/deactivations/etc on users, your publisher is an idiot.

OK, but it's not going to minimize piracy at all. Big-name games get pirated more and more and their attempts to "minimize piracy" are much more intrusive.

If those don't deter people, a little flash of a name isn't going to deter people. The people who consume pirate media are just going to wait for it to pop on the torrent, just like anything, and crackers will have it out in a jiffy (assuming there's an audience that wants it...) specifically because there's nothing to crack. You just register the game as "1337 h4x0rs group", or better yet, go into a hex editor and replace the name of the person to whom the game is really registered.

If people aren't deterred from cracking out SafeROM etc., they are not going to be deterred from cracking out a little name flash. They aren't even going to bother with it, probably, and will just put the game out there. So what's the point? I don't get it at all. Who is deterred by this?

    Big-name games get pirated more and more and 
    their attempts to "minimize piracy" are much
    more intrusive. If those don't deter people,
    a little flash of a name isn't going to 
    deter people.

How do you know they wouldn't have been pirated even more without these measures?

In this particular instance, I think the fact it's a small fish game actually helps, since it will be harder to find well seeded torrents of it compared to the latest and greatest AAA extravaganza.

And do you think he'll automatically renew "1337 h4x0rs group" 10 keys limits after getting 1000s of requests to register the game under any single name?

I hope Cas will post some stats about how this worked out for him (assuming he can compare piracy rates between this and his previous games), I'd be very interested to find out how it fared.

Here's how it works. There is a small number of experts that crack games. Then there is a large number of non-experts that download cracked games.

Unless the DRM can somehow stop everyone from the first group (in this case it won't), the second group will not be affected at all. For them, what DRM is used is irrelevant.

The Puppygames DRM could be an interesting case, though, since there are multiple ways to pirate it. The expert crackers, having read about the DRM, will find a way to disable the game's network connection.

However, there are presumably many not-quite-expert crackers who may not even realize the game has DRM beyond displaying a name and e-mail address. These people will register the game with a suitably anonymous credentials, maybe test it on a couple more machines, then upload it. They won't know the "crack" is ineffectual until they get an e-mail asking them to reset their ten registrations. And unless they keep replying to this e-mail for every ten downloads, their upload will stop working.

Two key questions: How many wannabes are there for every expert? And how many times will someone download an ineffectual crack before giving up?

Do you have a credit card for that Sir Pantsy Higginbothom?

Do they use the name of the credit card holder? I hope not, because that can cause lots of issues. What if you're a kid and use your mom's card? What if you borrow a friend's card because you don't like banks? What if you use a company card because you're a game developer and it's a legitimate expense to research competitors? etc.

I assume that like most places, they register a separate name that you provide, not necessarily linked to your card.

It looks like their "DRM" is more nagware than DRM.

You can pirate it easily enough, but it forces you to admit to yourself that you are doing something ethically dubious in the process.