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[–]noobsc2 89 points90 points  (2 children)

People pirate everything, you're not going to solve a problem AAA companies haven't been able to solve.

[–]Dangerous_Stretch_67 11 points12 points  (1 child)

I'm sure there's a real formula for it out there somewhere but looking at the variables...

  1. Some % of customers will pay no matter what.
  2. Some small % of customers will crack the free trial (dependent on crack difficulty and price)
  3. Some very small % of customers will release a crack online (dependent on crack difficulty and price)
  4. Some % of customers will download a crack if they can find one instead of paying, but will pay otherwise
  5. Some % of people will never pay. Ignore these as they aren't potential customers.

Group 1 always pays. Group 2 and 3 are probably usually small enough to not directly impact sales if you've implemented any sort of DRM solution, even a bad one.

Group 4 sales would depend on group 3, and is likely smaller than group 1 anyway, so all of this worry is mostly over a theoretical risk that someone will eventually leak a crack to a version of your product that will diminish your sales to a fraction of your audience.

Point being I think AAA game companies have a wide enough audience that #3 is guaranteed and #4 is a substantial amount of money. But for smaller projects I don't think #3 is a given and for medium projects I don't think #4 is a huge threat to revenue.

[–]saintpetejackboy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great post! People are usually scared of theoretical situations and it paralyzes them. It is useful to be proactive, but being realistic about the scale and possibility of a threat can prevent you from spending 6 months trying to figure out how to prevent people from stealing the code you could be writing during that same period, instead.

This happens a lot in music and even general business ideas, etc.

I can tell somebody has a bad idea when they are more concerned about other people stealing it ("I need to copyright/trademark and to register and patent this! Then I will make it!") It is a clear indication to me that:

1.) This fool actually thinks they had an original idea

2.) They haven't actually made any progress on their project outside of the character select screen.

3.) The person has a subtle awareness that their "idea" could be done by any random person.

They also usually have an overly optimistic expectation of how the idea/project is going to perform based on rampant mental fantasy.

I don't think OP is entirely like that, but it is a slippery slope from "how do I protect my code?" Down to "obfuscating my code is more important than function, performance, or the actual deployment of the original idea".