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For decades, video games have implemented various ways of dealing with piracy with copy-protection techniques—today, it is mostly referred to as, Digital Rights Management or DRM for short. According to bartleby.com, “DRM is a technology that protects digital content via encryption and the access control mechanisms that allow a user to view the digital content. In general, to control what we can and can’t do with the media and hardware we’ve purchased.” In the personal computer space, DRM has been implemented in other software even before they were in video games.
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In 1974, the Altair 8800 Computer was released as the first personal computer to be based on a microprocessor. Its first software, Altair Basic, was a high-level language for the system and was developed by an upcoming developer called Micro-Soft. It was made and distributed using long and thin pieces of paper with holes punched through it in a specific sequence called paper tape. A member of the Homebrew Computer Club made fifty copies of Altair Basic and started distributing them illegally. In this sense, Micro-Soft was not get enough royalty fees from the system since many of those systems already had illegal copies of Altair Basic on them. In response, a letter was sent out by its cofounder, Bill Gates; it stated “as the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? Is this fair?” Since paper tape only manifested as a physical technology Due to the physical limitations of paper tape as a technology, copies could not be actively altered without changing the software itself; thus, not much can be done to alleviate the issue of the distribution of illegal copies of software. It was time for other technologies to step-in and fix this issue.
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Alt-Microsoft Adventure
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The first game to introduce copy-right protection was “Microsoft Adventure” and it was released on floppy-disk. According to TechSpot.com, “the scheme worked by distributing the game's data across abnormally numbered disk tracks, so the TRS-80's operating system needed special instructions to read the Microsoft Adventure disk.” This technique was known as on-disc-key-protection.
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The code of the game was distributed through a different numbering scheme across the disk tracks that is normally used when reading the disk; thus, it would require the operating system to receive special instructions when reading the game.
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Alt-Manual Lookup
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-----------------
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In the 1980s, video games would come packaged with a manual that has a plethora of different commands. When you boot up the game, it would prompt you to enter one of those specific commands—this can vary from any kind of information that the developer deems fit. From entering an answer to the name of one of its characters to a specific non-associating list of letters, the experience can be from intuitive to down-right aggravating.
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One method would take it a step further by providing what is called a code wheel. The game would give off a random code. The game copy would then instruct the user to match the code wheel with the corresponding random code and enter what lies beneath that. Another method requires the user to input a serial number that is found on the bottom-left of the game case and it corresponds to that specific game copy.
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Online Activation
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This type of copy-right protection requires the user to contact a server and binds the installation to the game copy that can come with a variety of different requirements that have to be met. The most used method is that the game can be required to be only access by your account once the purchase has been made. Another method was to link the game to the user’s own computer configuration which would generally be tied to either your CPU or motherboard—once it is installed, it would only grant you a limited number of installs.
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Always Online DRM
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Always online DRM forces the user of the product to remain connected to a server through the internet. If the user’s computer loses connection, the game will crash. Most games of this kind keep your data on the server, it will only save the data that it recorded. If the servers for the video game shut down forever, the game would be rendered unplayable for the user. This has sparked some controversy with players since this means that they would only have access to play the game in the form of an access key; thus, rendering the user to not have any physical ownership of the game. The most notable implementation of this being called Denuvo.
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Denuvo was founded in 2013, a company that spawned from a buyout of DigitalWorks—a division that was a part of the Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation (DADC). Notable examples of video games with the software include “FIFA 15”, “Dragon-age: Inquisition”, and “Lords of the Fallen”. For games to use Denuvo, game developers must integrate the software into the game itself; thus, making it very hard to patch it out.
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References
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==========
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Computer Security and Data Encryption
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https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Computer-Security-and-Data-Encryption-FKWJ53NJDBRS
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History of Altair 8800
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----------------------
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https://history-computer.com/altair-8800-complete-history-of-the-mits-altair-8800/
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The first video game with copy-right protection.
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------------------------------------------------
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https://www.techspot.com/trivia/93-which-games-first-ship-baked-drm-copy-protection/
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Denuvo
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------
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo
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History of DRM and Copy Protection in Computer Games
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----------------------------------------------------
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https://youtu.be/HjEbpMgiL7U |
