And more to the point, if DRM makes that small a difference, then I'm sure they were happy enough to get to pocket the money that would have gone to pay for DRM.

I've got no idea how much that costs, but I'm going to wager that it increases the number of sales one needs to make to break even dramatically. Particularly for smaller studios.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons they chose to go without. They didn't say what the cost of DRM was, but they did note it was significant.

I get the impression that piracy is proportional to a game's popularity. It would only get pirated to hell if it was popular. If it was popular it's bound to sell 10x the number of pirated copies.

p.s. Awesome Blupi avatar.

Actually, indie devs are doing just fine. Piracy rates for them are largely the same as for everyone else, whether they choose to use DRM or not.

There's no reason to use DRM, it actually makes code harder to test in many cases (home grown DRM) and it gets broken regardless. When you're small alienating one single customer is far worse, word of mouth is likely to be your main form of advertising, keeping someone from mentioning how much they liked your game to try and prevent piracy is a good way to screw yourself.

This is actually used to support quackery and such. Declare award for proof, sit on it and never acknowledge a winner. Strict management of tests such that no-one can win, not co-operating with people willing to try it, and if all else fails outright denial if someone manages it.

Even the one by James Randi is fishy, and he's hardly got a bad reputation. People who make these challenges are in a position where they cannot allow the test to be beaten by any means. And so they never will. Period.

Maybe so that holding down shift would become illegal :D
I'm guessing they did it just as an experiment.

Back when the games had the disc in drive type copy protection, at some point I figured out that in some cases you can bypass it as easily as by selecting the cd/dvd drive with the disc inside it and adding it into a zip file, then unpacking the zip and installing it from your hard drive. Turned out to be very useful in many cases where the game wouldn't install because it had problems believing that the disc was in fact inserted into the drive (I believe it had to have been copy protection of some sort, because the normal installation method couldn't read the cd, but the zip program could). For some games it also worked as a no-cd solution as long as I didn't delete the hard drive copies of the install files. I'm guessing that was illegal too, but the protection was only really effective at keeping me from playing the games I bought.

/edit: Checked wikipedia and according to it (and my understanding of it) the local law states that I can bypass even complicated copy protection if it's keeping me from using the product, so I guess that stuff was legal after all.

I've actually seen it replicated on TV. I'm not exactly sure what all the ingredients were, but the drive was a Plextor something and the error could occur when (I'm guessing WinXP) were booting with a R/RW disk (blank or not) in the drive. Basically the error was that the drive would start spinning the CD much, much too fast for much, much too long. Especially writable CDs tended not to be perfectly balanced, so between bad luck and wear the CD would eventually come apart inside the drive, literally resulting in an explosion of CD and drive tray shards. It was quite impressive, really. So much so I'm more than a little bit surprised it's HW StarForce is infamous for wrecking. It was sufficiently violent I would have guessed they'd be infamous for sending people to the emergency room.

Sfon is most likely right that the prize for proving the SF problem is designed in such a way that it isn't practically possible to claim it. For example, if you need 200 reboots to reliably detonate a drive with SF, limiting entrants to 10 attempts makes it highly unlikely anyone can claim it.

IIRC you need to uninstall and reinstall the drivers, not the drives. At least it's supposed to work in some cases.

hehe, trust me when I say . . . I tried everything. Even re-flashed the firmware. This was several years ago but It was an expensive exercise that I will not soon forget . . . =)

Edit: I bought two more identical drives, installed them . . . worked perfectly.

Your first paragraph is basically what I was trying to say. And I agree completely with the second paragraph.

Ah yes, I remember one of friends mentioning that back when the game first came out; essentially he said 2DBoy was selling so many copies legally that the makers "didn't care" that people were pirating, or that the cost of trying to keep people from doing so wasn't worth it.

Thanks! It's Speedy Eggbert here in America (well, eGames brought it a little popularity in the late 90s/early 2000s) and I consider it my favorite game of all time because it brought me such immense joy. :) (I loved platformers but didn't own any game system, so this was a godsend on PC.) However super-unlikely I'm hoping it (maybe bundled with Blupi 2) gets added to GOG's list, because it's classic for me. (The company ?Epsitec? is based in Switzerland or Sweden, right? Something like that...)

There was a Myth Busters episode about something like this. They showed that an error like that could pierce skin and even kill someone. At 52x speeds, a small amount of deviation in a disk can shatter it.

I didn't realize that TQ had disk based DRM; I know that they had some weird DRM which caused extreme rubber banding it the game thinks its pirated. Unfortunately, it seems to have caused problems with legit users as well. (As much DRM causes)

Switzerland is a lot more likely because I'm pretty sure the original language of the games was French. I'm trying to get hold of the first Blupimania game that I played when I was younger. All I can find is Blupimania II which is completely different. =(
There's also a bizarre RTS called something like Blupi's World...

Oh man I remember the problems TQ DRM caused the lan center I worked at. The DRM would check to see if the disk was in the drive at random intervals during game play and if it didn't detect the disc the game would crash out with a generic error message.

Another really annoying thing was how the characters where tied to the CD Key. We got our games through iGames, all of them where legit copies with CD-Keys. So we installed the games normally and made the disk images to run the game without having to hand out our disks to the customers. Only problem was each player was only able to play on the 1st PC they created their characters on.

We ended up having to install them all with the same CD-Key so the characters could be used no matter the PC the customer was using.

Speaking of THQ games Company Of Heroes REALLY pissed me off while I was working there. Not because of DRM but just because their patches where so prone to failing. Each time we would get a new patch I would have to reinstall at least 1 copy of the game from scratch when one of the patches failed.