2b. Free with Ads. Yes, this is not for everyone, but many devs will make this path an option. Your buyers must realize that all ads can be removed for a fair price.

Turns out, the pirated copy had a special feature where the player would feel immense economic pressure from piracy, so a bunch of players asked how to win against this, it was pretty hard and really fun for people who knew what was going on.

Point is, you could hide an Easter Egg for pirated versions (can you detect the lack of signatures?)

Game Dev Tycoon

It's important to note that they didn't use DRM or anything like that to detect whether a given copy of it was pirated. They made two builds of the game: a normal one that they gave to paying customers, and the special one that they uploaded a torrent of themselves.

I hope you are super duper 100% sure the bug can’t happen otherwise. I would hate to be your paying costumer and ignored because your drm system is buggy.

It's something along the lines of: Pi+=2 in one place of the code. And Pi += 1.1415 somewhere else. And both are guaranteed to run at the start of the program so that Pi=3.1415

However one of those lines is hidden in a part of the code that the most obvious crack is going to remove.

I cracked an expensive FPGA simulation program (for which I had the license, but the FlexLM scheme based on the MAC address of the adapter was just too annoying to get working on Linux).

What they would do is have a sort of unit test of their license verification function at runtime. There was a check hidden somewhere that I never found, and if the license verification was changed to always return true, the unit test would fail. The simulator would continue working within a single module, but as soon as you tried simulating a larger project, it would return undefined values between all the modules, rendering the simulation unusable for any real project =)

(I solved the unit test by having the license check return true only for my hardcoded serial number, which is definitely easier than hunting for the different places where a check might be hidden)

https://bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/pirated-batman-pc-contai...

> "I've got a problem when it's time to use Batman's glide in the game," said user Cheshirec_The_Cat, whose appalling spelling we felt we needed to clean up. "When I hold [the button], like it says, to jump from one platform to another, Batman tries to open his wings again and again instead of gliding. So he falls down in the poison gas. Can somebody could tell me, what I should do there?"

The pirated version had a different name for one of the mannequins, but people loved the quote and the acting for yelling out the name of the mannequin in the movie, so that led to people would arguing in internet comments about the name used and you could get a feel for how prevalent the piracy was by upvotes

I think a fundamental aspect of cracking consists of disabling such detection mechanisms. But if the cracker only digs far enough to ensure that it seems to work without nags, and not far enough to find Easter eggs, then it will probably work for a while until people catch on and demand a further crack.

It's really the OS that needs to detect a lack of expected signature, because the cracker isn't going to be able to disable an OS feature unless they release the cracked app as a while VM or something. But that's a thing...

I believe there were several games that had a reputation for being horribly buggy that was at least partially the result of pirated versions having bugs intentionally introduced by the copy protection.

I believe the game you mentioned made it really obvious what was happening and why to avoid that.

Any time I've seen game devs try it the comments under those people were "you fix it by buying the game pirate".

And platforms like Steam allow you to review only bought games anyway

If the software supports getting updates, get the cracked copies to phone home and have a legal firm send them a warning they might be using hacked software.

Home users won't care, but legitimate businesses might convert to actual sales.

And if you made cracked copies phone home, that's something that would get removed by the cracker anyway most of the time.

Rather send a message directly through the software and give a link directly to purchase it. A bit cheaper and more straightforward, than finding out adresses and involve lawers. That should be the last resort.

Indeed! There's a nice anecdote from Paulo Coehlo (I don't like his work but w/e) where he was stuck in traffic somewhere in LATAM and a guy passed by his car selling pirated copies of his newest book. He then says this event made him feel like he had finally made it and even became a strong promoter of piracy, heh.

The Atari 800 cartridge address range could be populated with RAM, and cartridge images simply copied to RAM and run. Copy protection techniques usually involved figuring out sneaky ways to write to that address range (which would crash an image running from RAM).

Toward the end of one project, I spent about two weeks writing an encrypted, multi-stage anti-copy system. A few months after the game shipped, I asked my pirate "friend" about it.

"That was a hard one," he said, "It took us nearly three days to crack it."

For instance, current Netflix pricing I am okay with, with the content they have. If the price triples, you bet your ass I am going back to torrents unless they really step up the quality and quantity of content.

There is just very little incentive anymore. The skill level for hacking game DRM is extremely high now and those people would rather spend their time working on one of the many bug bounties where they can get huge payouts and public recognition for hacking ios vs having to hide behind tor and risk arrest to provide kids with free games.

A third option is a big looking what adobe photoshop did. Most people in the early days has an access to a cracked version and it became nearly the standard for image editing. And how did they then manage this: By adding cloud services.

You could maybe start small and say: „You can download our free templates (don’t know what type of software but I thought of some 3D models) from the web (new template every couple of month) and this works only with an activated version. By this you actively provide more value for your paying customer at the same time instead of wasting time and money to just make it harder to crack.

Very true. If they were never going to pay anyway, you haven't lost anything if they use a crack. It still irks though!

It's literally the same reason most companies give students essentially fire sale discounts (often just free) versions of their software.

They're probably pirating it because they aren't deriving much if any revenue from using it yet (it's either for personal use, they're learning a new tool, or they have no money). But having that person familiar with your software and trained on it means that if they reach a spot where they're using it profitably for business - it's basically a guaranteed sale.

"Sure thing, how many do you need?"

When I hesitantly reminded him we hadn't discussed prices yet, I was told it was free as they really wanted to snare us in as users before we wound up in paid work where we'd need to be productive employees fast.

I have since had three employers buy full licenses and support deals. Good call by Protel back then.

Instead, the value proposition to switching to paid became once it had established value to me, and I could benefit from the reduced exposure risk of running malware in the cracked version, and possibly get updates if they affected major things like stability, or new tool-sets or access to online data that was useful.

First, people or companies using the cracked version of your software were never going to buy it. These people do not pay for software, and nothing you do will convince them to pay for it.

Secondly, whatever measures you put in place to combat the cracked versions will potentially have a negative impact on your actual paying users - the real people you built the software for.

Extra security measures or hoops to jump through; extra validation or 'calls home.' - all extra things that can and will go wrong at some point for a real user.

Why would you inconvenience paying users to combat people who will never be paying users?

Ignore them, and spend your time improving your product for your real users.

[I've had 3 desktop apps cracked and hosted on Warez sites over the past 15 years - even appearing for sale on eBay on some occasions. I was worried the first time it happened, then I stopped caring. They made no difference.]

Not always effective for all applications though.

It's very bad economics to think of a pirated copy as a lost sale. In some cases the piracy helps drive sales!

I've heard this before but I'm not convinced this is actually true. Why? Because I use Netflix instead of torrent sites, and just accept the limitations of that format. Programs are tools vs of entertainment, but I don't know that the human psychology actually changes.

A neat trick they did was to introduce downloading as a feature. Now search results for "Netflix download" all talk about the built in feature as opposed to teaching how to rip the DRM off the downloaded file.

Regardless this just goes to show that the problem can be mitigated by making the legitimate route less painful than the illegitimate one. I used to pirate most of my music collection but now I use Apple Music because the friction of maintaining the library across multiple devices is so much lower.

Imposing restrictions and hoops to make your product harder to pirate is vastly inferior and in many cases entirely ineffective in than designing the product to be a superior experience to pirating it.

The ability to do so is going to vary wildly by the product itself, but that is the better way to achieve the goal.

There are people who will always pirate things, whether out of principle or out of economics. However there are plenty of people who would gladly cross the line if the legitimate route was significantly better, either by ease of use or design.

DarrenDev says there are no lost sales. However, I pay for Disney plus because I don't have access to invite-only torrent sites where the latest movies can be found but I'd still like to watch them. If I had access to those torrent sites or someone's Plex, I could cancel Disney plus.

A good portion of their user base got started using cracked copies of the software, as the price of something like the CS6 Master collection was well outside of the affordability of the average hobbyist.

But some of those teenage hobbyists grew up to go to college to expand on their Adobe tinkering to becoming professionals that sneer at people who use non-adobe products because of the price.

Businesses buy the software because that is what the talent is trained on. The difference between calling what Adobe has on the market a monopoly and an actual monopoly is probably only technicalities at this point.

Sure, most of this comes from the fact that their software really was the best of the best for the longest time, and their lead in technology and namesake is so far ahead of any of their competitors that it is laughable. their software was pirated obsessively because it was so good and so expensive, just like Waves $2,000 Mercury VST plugin suite.

There are other softwares, many of which are free or very affordable, that do 95%+ of what anything adobe or Waves does. But when you edit a photo with Gimp people will still instinctively say that you photoshopped it, and few people will ever care what plugins you used on an audio track if it's not autotune.

Its completely unaffordable to the student or hobbyist, the "home edition" is too limited to be useful, so everyone starting out uses a cracked version because its been the de-facto industry standard tool since forever for reverse engineering.

Later when those people get jobs, they become another paying (through work) licensed user of IDA Pro.

What's slowly fucking IDA now is finally there are alternatives, the NSA open sourced Ghidra which can replace IDA to some extent - so smaller customers (who were always treated poorly anyway) are moving away from their product.

Would you still pick Netflix over torrents if it cost €100/month?

When I was a young teenager I used to rip CDs from the local library (who could get almost any CD in a week if ordered).

Now I spent a fair chunk of money on both digital and physical (vinyl) supporting artists - because I can afford it.

Then they (the record companies) started suing their customers, and I stopped buying CDs. I've been listening to the same set of songs ever since, or stuff on youtube.

Never again will I feed that monster.

If there is no note whatsoever it's very easy to get to situation where user A starts to use it, pirates it, then just dumps it onto file share and tells others to use it.

If you are making money from something or using it enough that you want support / reliability, pay for it and shame on you if you don't

Don't gimp your cracked stuff for the college kids and evening hacks just trying to see if they like something or if they can build its use into a business.

I have pirated person when I was a poor student where it literally was money for food vs buying some software. I buy all my (commercial) software now that I can easily afford it and support multiple open source projects with donations. And the software houses, Bands and filmers who have seen the most of my money have been precisely the ones whose work I liked before.

The creators who have not been assholes about it (or even had some kind of humor in their response) are well remembered.

Sure there might be people who pirate everything out of principle, but my guess is that the majority will only do it if they can't help it any better.

Or, they would never have bought it if unable to obtain a pirated copy, but now that they've tried it, may purchase. Admittedly this is more true of games than other software. When I compare my steam library to my pirated library, many of my favorite games are in the overlap: I tried them first, loved them, and then bought them.

The non-overlapping are is likely non-trivial. There are surprising many shops that use professional software for client projects, could afford the license, but that prefer pirated copy to paying actual license fee.

Ofc persecuting non-professional users is pointless. Persecuting professional users in a smart way can lead to license sales.

I feel like easiest way to monetize apps like that would be free noncommercial license. Want to DJ your school party ? Go ahead, as long as nobody pays you it's fine, and if someone does, well, now you have money for license.

You're also building potential user base, when everyone can play with your software without limits many will pick it when they will do something commercial

https://virtualdj.com/products/virtualdj/price.html#comparis...

But you'd be insane to use a pirated copy of SOLIDWORKS for anything professional (like if you were the Cybertruck's door handle subcontractor or whatever), just like you would be insane to use a pirated copy of windows or Office. But let's be real, plenty of people do that. Whether it's because they're poor, or whether it's because they're cheap, or both, full list price is simply not gonna get paid, and so they'll go with the cheaper option - it's just that cheaper option happens to be a $0 pirated copy in most cases. Some offices will have one genuine copy for one computer and pirated copies for the rest of everyone, especially part-time contractors. In that way, a cheaper academic license, even accepting that there's no fool proof way of checking for that, or having a time-limited entrepreneur/start-up option will lead to more sales and more money.

It then becomes an exercise in the dark art of pricing things, to figure out where that sweet spot actually is. A 30 or 90 day copy which is hopefully long enough to build the bike shed, priced right, is an actual sale that can be made that otherwise wouldn't. A cheaper limited version for the non-premium seats at the company are other additional sales to be made.

Why not bundle a separate license for individuals with the enterprise license.

VSTs are pretty niche and the market is mostly people without much money. But you can find cracks being used in top studios, so...

I’m seeing many comments saying this, but it’s simply not true for commercial/industrial software. Outside of the US, even in large swathes of Europe, it’s extremely common to lose significant revenue to piracy, and if you make it too hard to pirate they will pay.

Companies (the customers in this case) that are happy to exploit workers in sweatshops? Also completely happy to use your software without paying for it.

In the vast majority of cases it doesn't mean that.

A lot of cracking is done for sport and to show off, especially when the protection is weak.

I don't use any cracked software, but I sure did when I was a kid without money. And I was so grateful for it, especially all the DAW and music production stuff.

There is an utilitarian argument somewhere in there about free software.

Copyright owners also habe legitimate interests in their products and are afforded with different ways to gain value from a software product that is locally installed.

Also, something like a self-contained, "portable" linked binary that creates value without any dependency on any online service will always be trivial to copy but also maximally useful.

(Edit: languages that depend on an interpreter don't differ too much, I think)

If your app isn't a game and/or you think that DRM isn't worth the platform tax, remove the DRM and focus on building relationships with your customers.

The one time I had software cracked and pirated sales pretty much dried up immediately upon its release.

This is probably true if your audience is primarily people who aren't particularly technically minded, but my product was no doubt most appealing to the same kind of people who know how to pirate software.