Overlapping checksums and delayed trap flags have been completely normal stock-in-trade of copy protection techniques for 30 years - Dungeon Master from the Atari ST was on here not long ago, to give one specific case study.
Another post indicates that attackers have a budget here. That's misunderstanding the nature of your attacker, which is probably "a skilled determined cracker with time on their hands". Challenges interest crackers. Budgets are only really significant if you're talking about hardware dongle analysis, or if you're offering a bounty to a +veteran for something rare and tricky. Software analysis mainly just takes skill, and time - but no, probably not weeks to a skilled cracker, or money. Two, three days maybe (although they will need to actually find the time)?
Perhaps there's a greater emphasis on first-day sales now, but perhaps that's the nature of publishers' expectations at the moment. Some publishers think they benefit from copy protection. Do developers really benefit from copy protection? Do users? Surely not, but it depends on how intrusive the copy protection is - and decades of experience shows that the more effective a copy protection technique is designed to be, the more intrusive and twitchy it is and the more of an inconvenience or disaster it is to the users (who, in such extreme cases, are actually very glad to be rid of it). Meanwhile, a copy protection that tries hard to not be intrusive - Steam - owns most of the PC gaming market by presenting a platform that's actually convenient, inexpensive, and fairly reasonably.
With years of developers viewing copy protection as a publisher demand, hence the lazy crypter-wrapper-based protections which are just plug and go, maybe that's lowered the effort crackers needed to put in too.
If the publishers are demanding more effort into it now (with the games industry thriving from a vibrant indie scene all the way up to Hollywood blockbuster budgets despite decades of nigh-unstoppable piracy) they're only really gradually rediscovering techniques some developers (and a few crackers) have forgotten - and ones the users would like to forget.
I don't know about you, but I don't want a return to the bad old days of words from the manual or black-on-black code wheels.
Comments
Overlapping checksums and delayed trap flags have been completely normal stock-in-trade of copy protection techniques for 30 years - Dungeon Master from the Atari ST was on here not long ago, to give one specific case study.
Another post indicates that attackers have a budget here. That's misunderstanding the nature of your attacker, which is probably "a skilled determined cracker with time on their hands". Challenges interest crackers. Budgets are only really significant if you're talking about hardware dongle analysis, or if you're offering a bounty to a +veteran for something rare and tricky. Software analysis mainly just takes skill, and time - but no, probably not weeks to a skilled cracker, or money. Two, three days maybe (although they will need to actually find the time)?
Perhaps there's a greater emphasis on first-day sales now, but perhaps that's the nature of publishers' expectations at the moment. Some publishers think they benefit from copy protection. Do developers really benefit from copy protection? Do users? Surely not, but it depends on how intrusive the copy protection is - and decades of experience shows that the more effective a copy protection technique is designed to be, the more intrusive and twitchy it is and the more of an inconvenience or disaster it is to the users (who, in such extreme cases, are actually very glad to be rid of it). Meanwhile, a copy protection that tries hard to not be intrusive - Steam - owns most of the PC gaming market by presenting a platform that's actually convenient, inexpensive, and fairly reasonably.
With years of developers viewing copy protection as a publisher demand, hence the lazy crypter-wrapper-based protections which are just plug and go, maybe that's lowered the effort crackers needed to put in too.
If the publishers are demanding more effort into it now (with the games industry thriving from a vibrant indie scene all the way up to Hollywood blockbuster budgets despite decades of nigh-unstoppable piracy) they're only really gradually rediscovering techniques some developers (and a few crackers) have forgotten - and ones the users would like to forget.
I don't know about you, but I don't want a return to the bad old days of words from the manual or black-on-black code wheels.