Downloaded the Emule program. Basically an improved version of infamous Kazaa.
Started some search and found:
Dweep Gold full version, Dweep Gold Keygen, and so on (Dexterity)

BongoBoogie v.13, Bongoboogie Keygen, ecc (Phelios)

I stopped here because I was already feeling bad.
So I think that's not true that shareware games don't get cracked. Maybe those 2 were particularly good and so that's why they got cracked...

Anyway is bad to see that there are some people that won't ever buy a game for 20$ :(

I tried the various trainers and cracks for my games that I found and most of them turned out to be useless. I've even found serial numbers in lists for my games, which don't and have never had serial number style protection, so I think some of those lists are just bs. They're trying to get people to buy porn or the list itself or other stuff. My version updating tends to happen faster than the hackers want to bother cracking smaller games like mine so it's not generally been a problem for me up to now.

I actually think it's kind of stupid that big companies do any crack protection at all. It really only serves to hurt their paying customers. How many times I've cursed them when they ask me to put a cd in the drive that's clearly not needed for anything but piracy protection. Of course there are NO major titles that aren't cracked and on the shelves for sale and often the cracked versions are leaked and on the shelves months before the retail versions arrive. It's really pointless. Any protection they do is easily got around. The only reason to add protection is to prevent casual copying and for that they only need casual protection.

I have seen CD's of my games for sale in Asia which were pirated and mass produced with color printing etc... but that's fairly minor as well because I currently don't get many sales out of Asia. (of course one may lead to the other, but I don't actually think that's the case - I suspect there just aren't many people in say malaysia, who buy shareware - it's true as well of countries that do protect copyrights... about 0 sales out of Singapore but I didnt notice mass piracy there on scale with malaysia thailand and china - localizing the titles may have something to do with that.)

Our own Space Tripper has been doing the rounds on the various pirate boards for a while. Ive not found Mutant Storm ... yet!

Personally, im not too concerned. Piracy will NEVER be the reason a game isnt doing well. Im of the belief that 99% of the people who pirate would never buy the game anyway.

... and to add...

In Russia, where piracy is the #1 form of software distribution, we effectivly had to publish our games, matching the piracy prices! Its the only way to make any sales in these regions.
The pirates sell games for $2 - $3, so we found a publisher willing to burn CD's, put them in a jewel case, and sell them for the same amount, to rival the pirates.
It does work. We've made over $5000 of sales in Russia, which we would have otherwise never seen if we didnt take this approach.

... if you cant beat them, join them? ;)

The pirates sell games for $2 - $3, so we found a publisher willing to burn CD's, put them in a jewel case, and sell them for the same amount, to rival the pirates.
Wow that's really low price!
But why did you choose to burn CD when you could sell them online, maybe with a special price to russians?
Did you had the game translated in russian?

Jack, we have to sell as Cd's to rival the pirates sources.
In russia there are pirates everywhere selling illegal CD's for such low prices. Selling online wont rival these cheap sources. Your avarage russian would rather pop out to his local game burner, and hand over $2 for a cd, rather than log on, and buy the game online for the same price..... in fact, what would stop other people worldwide from buying the game from our special cheap russian site?

Yes, its very cheap, but we would rather have those sales, then give them to the pirates. This wasnt our bright idea, our russian publisher suggested this is the only way to make any sales in the russian region. They even advanced us on royalties! ( which no western publisher has ever offered us )

We do have a special, full boxed russian version that sells for $20, but thats only available in the bigger cities. Everywhere else, its simply a case of matching the pirates price, to make the sale.

And yes, they are translated into russian, as well as many other languages.

The upside, The ONLY upside to seeing your shareware game on P2P would be that they're not stealing your bandwidth. You can always try to flood bogus keygens (that play madonna's infamous "What the hell are you doing" wav)

In russia there are pirates everywhere selling illegal CD's for such low prices. Selling online wont rival these cheap sources. Your avarage russian would rather pop out to his local game burner, and hand over $2 for a cd, rather than log on, and buy the game online for the same price..... in fact, what would stop other people worldwide from buying the game from our special cheap russian site?
Yes I understand your decision, and also I think it was a really good one.
Selling online is not common outside USA and some country in EU (UK, Germany, France, ecc).
About the fact that non-russian people could buy from your site, you could have put some control to check the state of the Credit Card owner... but surely would have been a little tricky!

They even advanced us on royalties! ( which no western publisher has ever offered us )
Well that was really strange indeed! What's the name of that publisher??? :D

And yes, they are translated into russian, as well as many other languages.
You've found that translating games make them sell more?
For online distribution usually games are in english, but for retail publishing it may go differently.
Some friend of mine published an adventure translated in russian and they said that they made as much money as selling the game in american market...!

I find it amusing that there's a keygen for Dweep Gold, which doesn't use reg keys at all. Not much we can do to stop the warez versions, but the cracks all have various flaws or simply don't work at all.

Meeklits, a puzzle game I made, has been cracked. I'm not really pissed about it - on one hand someone is illegally getting your game, but on the other hand, it shows that your game must be of some quality that someone is willing to go through the process of hacking it.

I have two ways to combat this:

1. Technical Approach - I have a banned name list in my game. All hacked names, which I searched on the net, will not work on future versions.

2. Psychological Approach - The game will display, in a very VERY large font, "Register to: <Your Name>". If someone used a cracked version, the game will not feel authentic and personal. It is like receiving a diploma with another name on it. :)

I think psychological deterrents are an excellent idea. Those "registered to (your name here)" really make it uncomfortable to share a game with a friend or something like that, and likely most of the piracy we face is that kind of casual copying.

The russian publishers are at:-
http://www.snowball.ru/

Good people, that do what they say.

As for the translation issue ... maybe that needs another thread.
Feel free to start it Jack!! ;)

Originally posted by Steve Z

2. Psychological Approach - The game will display, in a very VERY large font, "Register to: <Your Name>". If someone used a cracked version, the game will not feel authentic and personal. It is like receiving a diploma with another name on it. :)

You could take this one step further...put their registration email there too. So then this game is wandering around on crack sites with their email address on the main screen...imagine all the emails they'll get for support, questions, complaints, etc. ;)

To BongPig: thanks for all the answers :) sometimes I get too excited an I start to ask thousand questions in one single post!

As for the importance of translation, there was another thread some time ago I think.

In my opinion translation is useful only for games with much text on screen. Otherwise is pretty useless: everyone know the meaning of words "Start", "Load Game", "Quit" :D

If anyone is interested in hearing about the online registration validation method to prevent (or atleast deter) piracy, run a search for my thread on Dope Farmer.

Its been working fairly well, but it still requires a good bit of tech support, more than an offline method :)

Alex

Tried the search but didn't found the method you're referring to.
Maybe the post got erased with server crash?

Sirr,

All they need to do is crack the part of the code that contacts the server, that way they avoid any type of verification at all.

There's a crack for Fitznik that lets you exit rooms without getting all of the keys.

I was amazed. It is totally and completely pointless. Especially when you can type 'solveit' and it will show you how to get the keys.

just curious...were the games mentioned as being cracked using protection software like armadillo? i'm wondering if armadillo is worth it's price.

My primary piracy defence is that searching on google for "space station manager cracks" or "cracked" gives a lot of hits on NASA technical reports. This was planned all along .. :)

With frequent updates the value of copied versions greatly diminish. I am planning on adding an auto-updater to the game, making warez versions even less compelling. I think this "positive" building of sales greatly outweights "negative" prevention of cracks.

Yes auto-patcher inside the game would be absolutely cool and it would prevent cracking game.
I know a friend of mine who never bought an original software: then he tried Daggerfall. If you don't know, the first versions of that game were buggy as hell :)
So after he found that new patches were coming out almost weekly (and every time he had to find a crack for the new exe) he finally bought the game.
Is fun to see that bugs in this particular case were the primary incentive to buy a game!!! :D

Turning back to us, I found that esellerate give the VISE installer which has the auto-update option as you install the game. I think that is really a nice feature, so your users'll always have latest version of game.

The problems with of-the-shelf protections are if they get popular, someone will probably make a "universal crack" for the that particular protection. At least nowdays, the copy-protection writers don't boast about their "perfect protection".

there was this software company i worked for many years ago - they did a press release (probably to impress people), stating that they use the 'newest and best copy protection (tm)' in their software - needless to say what happened after that press release :)

don't make the crackers nosey is probably the best protection :p

I didn't even release my game yet and I think there's a crack for it! :D In all seriousness, it seems like crackers are going to crack your game 'if they want to', no matter how good the protection is. All we can do is make it a little tricky for the 'casual gamer' to crack, and I'll settle for that.