Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) General Boy, that was fun! Purchased and returned.

In reality, all that copy protection really is, is slowing the pirates down, so that they dont instantly flood the market with the copies, making it no use for people to buy the game... Once the main market has bought it, the copies will start in anycase...

I am agreeing with Microsoft in one thing they did right.... activation... instead of protecting the CD, they protect the prolonged use of software that was not bought....

I would almost suggest something like that for future games too.... make the open window 0-3 days (i know people can finish the game in that time... but most people come home from work, play an hour or two). during installation the game can add a value to a file somewhere.... (doing it to registry is useless, because there are sooo many programs that watch for registy entries, that it will be found in 2 minutes flat) and once your time is up, lock the game... until activation is aquired (similar process to the starforce key - where even a mouse change would affect it, but after the activation, it stops checking for hardware changes). If you want to uninstall the game, it leaves the little code it wrote to the file there, making re-installation useless... and i can assure you most people wouldnt want to restore or re-install a computer just to get the game going again.

Yes i know that someone will bring out a patch that stops the activation check too, but you will have less hassles with people not liking the copy protection.... and possibly a higher success rate at keeping pirate compies under checque.