Spamhaus keeps a list of spammers, do we need the same for crack sites?

I had an email the other day that was blank except the message 'this message was sent from an IP that is blacklisted from spamhaus' or something similar.

If we had a registry of crack sites, could we not pressure IPs and DNS managers into checking a 'blacklist' of website names before allowing hosting, so they can't just start up again on a new server a day or 2 later?

The BSA and FAST are all well & good, but places like 'Megazip.com' still seem to get away with it.

Software Piracy on the increase (http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2965020a6026,00.html)

it does seem to me that piracy is on the increase. i think not using serial numbers makes it harder, but with everyone on ADSL and using kazaa, its extremely difficult to stop the deteremined prate without really inconveniencing your legitimate users. Im not about to set up a server for web-based authentication any time soon thats for sure.
I welcome ANYTHING that makes it harder for these warez scumbags to do what they are doing.

On the plus side it looks like listgame.com is down ;)

Of course, domain names *do* change hands and end up in the care of innocent people who don't realise the baggage of what they're getting... :)

(A name like 'crackedwarezgamez.com' probably wouldn't end up with an innocent bystander, but 'listgame' sounds innocuous enough.)

it does seem to me that piracy is on the increase [...] but with everyone on ADSL and using kazaa[...]
Oh yes, but DSL is becoming more common for us developers as well. I was thinking about this lately, after finding my games shared via P2P. It shouldn't be too difficult to hack a eDonkey client so it distributes garbage under different names (that is, the same names of your installers on P2P) but reporting a correct CRC. I don't know the protocols involved but if this is technically possible, people downloading from P2P should end up with a corrupt installer and frustrated.

The same with bogus/partial-key-verification cracks, keygens and serials, without the need of going technical.

I welcome ANYTHING that makes it harder for these warez scumbags to do what they are doing.
Me too. I don't care many people say "don't worry about pirates, you're not losing sales anyway", it's very pleasing to see warez sites taken down :)

My opinion...

These piracy hunting threads are not helpful. They're probably bad for us and the forums. They're more likely to attract negative attention than save anyone here money. In fact, most of us are still small enough that piracy may actually help and not hurt our sales.

I understand that it can be frustrating to see your game for free on some crack site, but you have to look at this as a business decision. My advice. Concentrate on casual piracy. Put in some basic checks and balances to prevent the most casual easy copying and sharing, and forget the hard core pirates.

Ill note that the retail games that have fancy new copy protection methods are always cracked and copied to a zillion cd's with color packaging within a few days. Hackers like the challenge. Why retail companies waste their time on that stuff is beyond me. I can't think of a single title that hasn't been cracked and distributed within a week of release.

I'm sitting in a big mall in Malaysia now and there are about 10 stores here selling every game you can think of (including a few of mine) on cd for about 1-2$ and the police don't care. This isn't going away any time soon. Concentrate your efforts on stuff you can change and that's more likely to affect your sales.

That's great advice there, svero.

Why retail companies waste their time on that stuff is beyond me. I can't think of a single title that hasn't been cracked and distributed within a week of release.For retail companies, it's not a waste of time at all. The piracy protection placed on retail games is not to prevent cracking, but to delay it as long as possible.

Studies have shown that for every day after release that a pirate copy isn't available, the game can get tens of thousands extra unit sales.

There was actually a very interesing article about this in a recent MCV (a games industry trade magazine here in the UK) with figures from an independent analyst. They cited a few games that had kept the crackers at bay for the first one or two weeks after the game was released, and made a great deal of extra sales because of it.

Obviously retail sales strategy and online sales are very different, and this approach wouldn't really work for us. But don't think retail copy protection is wasted effort. If it holds up for just 1 week it is considered a success and well worth the investment.

... if it *works* and doesn't BREAK THE USER'S SYSTEM.

Sad when the legitimate purchasers have to wait for the cracks to come out to be able to play the game they bought! :)


Anyway. I think hassling big game-swapping forums is a good thing as long as it doesn't become an obsession. You can't stamp out all piracy, but there *are* people who will look for a freebie first and then cave and buy it if finding a freebie isn't easy. Keeping the trading scene underground, murky, and confusing helps convince the people who might buy that it's easier to just buy it.

So if with a little bit of work you can cut off a big group of people from easy access to warez links, well and good. But devoting large amounts of our time to *hunting* pirates is a waste. You can't catch them all and you're using up time you could be putting into your development.

But devoting large amounts of our time to *hunting* pirates is a waste.
I'd say it's almost a hobby :)

Agree that casual piracy is the thing that we must try to stop. Make no mistake, a web site with an open forum like listgame is very casual piracy. Read the messages, talk to the people that are there. They are mostly made up of our (and I guess most others here's) target market. Women aged 30+. What it is not, is l33t little script kiddies. It's grown adults who are finding it simple to get free copies of our software on that forum. Worse, they pass serials around like toffees and then use our bandwidth (*not ours because we have seperate full versions) to download the games they want, meaning that we pay to be stolen from. It seems as if most of them realise it's wrong, but soem have said 'I only share games I've bought', like that's ok. They're not just sharing with a few people either, it's hundreds and they in turn share with hundreds. This is certainly costing sales.

Listgame is the absolute worst-of-the-worst when it comes to piracy. It targets indie games almost exclusively and it allows people to steal in an environment that gives it all an air of legitimicy. They're even outraged that there are people trying to stop them doing it.

Like anything else illegal, piracy should be a cloak and dagger affair. It worries me that these people want to do it out in the open and get upset that they aren't allowed to do it in peace. Widespread and open piracy threatens our businesses because if people can easly get hold of something for free, then it's percieved value becomes $0. If we can do it, then we need to keep piracy underground where the general public do not just happen across it.

Listgame is back up & running, forum intact & everything :(

Grrrr!

I think we need a private forum to discuss this issues, with access given by moderators to "known" people only. We shouldn't let the guys that run these sites read what we may do to stop them...

http://www.nukepirates.com/ has list of pirate sites they've gone after and shut down.