after checking out registration methods,
i thought of a way to give the user a product key
and make a program that gives him an activation
key in the case he is eligible for one.

then i heard about activatesoft ( http://www.activatesoft.net/services.asp).

it seems to do the same thing,but i think they made it
too complex and might frightend the buyers...

any thoughts on this?

Read this article:

http://www.avault.com/articles/getarticle.asp?name=regblock

and then tell us what you think. My personal opinion is that regestration should be as easy as possible.

I have thought about this issue a great deal, and I'm starting to agree with the article. My theory is that as copy protection increases, buyers decrease.

The simple truth is that the people who pirate games are not going to pay you. Adding copy protection just makes it more fun for them...they get to go looking for a crack online, and to feel all cool and l33t. The sad truth is, no matter what you do, they are going to break the protection and distribute it.

What's even worse is that almost all efforts at copy protection cause pain and suffering to the user. I get pretty sick of all the games that I own that require the CD in the drive when I play. I swap around between games a lot, and get tired of swapping disks and having a stack of jewel cases on my desk. Some games even have performance problems because of the CD protection systems.

Look at TurboTax and their activation system that ties your software to a single machine. They even install spyware that writes to your boot sector! We've used TurboTax for many years. This year, as soon as I heard of their activation keys, we went out and bought TaxCut instead.

We need to focus on our customers, and spend our efforts on making them happy to give us their money. Time spent on hackers is time that could have gone towards your product.

@milieu:
my problem is the casual copying, not the hackers.
people who copy the game because they can,
and 90% of them wont do that if theyll need to
invest more time than the normal copy&paste.

I fully agree with Gilzu. I'm not the first person to point this out, but every consumer thinks they behave rationally and honestly. If you make your game too easy to duplicate, people who consider themselves to be normal, law-abiding citizens are very likely to copy your game. I believe it's good business to slow this "casual copying" down. I've read enough articles and developer testimonies that point out positive results despite a minor inconvenience to the comsumer, so I'll be heading down the same road.

I didn't mean to imply that I thought the absense of registration or copy protection schemes is a good idea. I just feel that the process of registering should be as easy as possible and should not unduly inconveniance your paying customers. The activatesoft.net scheme seems to be a system that could become a hassle for customers.

As a purchaser of software, I want my activation code to be sent to me in e-mail, and I don't want any sort of communication between me and a server somewhere when I activate. I want to be able to reuse that key as many times as I need, and I want it to be valid for that version of the software, forever.

Other problems with activation schemes such as the activatesoft scheme show up when someone buys multiple applications with these schemes (you upgrade, and then you've got ten or more apps you have to reactivate, and if you've used up your activations, you've got to mail or call the company and get approval), or when the company goes out of business, and you're hard drive crashed, at which point, you can no longer activate. Do you really want to trust this to a third party provider that could go out of business leaving you with lots of copies of your application out there with no way to activate them? Talk about a customer relations nightmare.