bdizzle said:
honestly the easiest way to stop piracy is to stop making it interfacable with a PC. Yeah it'll drive up costs probably, but it'll work I think. That means a new way to distribute the media (no cds/dvds) and no standard pc interfaces (usb, sata, etc).
Cartridge-based console already did that. The companies making piracy tools then made their own interface devices for computers. You've also got all the consoles using the internet now, which means they can communicate with other internet devices (in fact they have to for the internet to work), so you could get rips of games extracted and transferred that way (such as how people rip original DS games via homebrew and the DS' wireless connection). GBA carts didn't use a standard PC interface, and DS cards don't either, but they made USB interfaces you could plug a GBA cart into, and memory card interfaces enclosed in an adapter shaped like an official cart (hello devices that allow SD or micro-SD cards for GBA and DS). Non-standard media isn't going to stop the piracy, because someone will just adapt it to interface with something standard.
As long as piracy is cheaper to do in the long run than buying the games, it's going to happen even if the startup is expensive. I remember seeing GBA flash carts several years ago selling for nearly $200 US, and lots of people were talking about using them. $200 was steep to start the piracy, but once you got into it, you had a library of ROMs that equated to thousands of dollars if you'd legally bought them all. That's the fuel that keeps the process going.
PS3 seems to be being spared from it because of the mandatory firmware updates, and people haven't figured out custom firmware to the level the PSP is at right now, plus BlueRay burners and blank media are still so expensive that it pretty much costs the same as buying the game to pirate it.
All that happens with piracy, and why it's hard to stop, is that it triggers an arms race, similar to the one unofficial software like cheat devices get tangled in. They update the system to blcok the exploit the known device uses, and the people making that device update it to use a different exploit. Updatable firmware just means they don't have to release a new console model to try to stop new people from getting into piracy, ala PS1 with the removal of the Parallel Port starting with the model 9000 to stop people from using Action Replay and external modchips, which just prompted development of Breaker Pro and disc and memory card dongle-based Action Replay. It's a viscious cycle, and nobody's going to stop it, because they still get at least temporary results out of every cycle.
Heck, the new protection method used in DS Crystal Chronicles was cracked in about a week, and is no longer an issue for many of the affected devices. The protection worked in that some people likely got impatient and went out and bought it (increasing sales of the game), while the determined pirates were patient and waited, knowing a fix would be found, or bought a known more compatible device to replace their outdated one (making those pirates still come out ahead in cost since they still spend less money per game they obtain). It's a never-ending battle until the console dies, in which case the pirates win, since they don't have to deal with upgraded protections after that point, and thus are left with a very finite number of issues to deal with.
They can't even shut down game distribution effectively anymore, with all the decentralized filesharing protocols out now. Sure, take down a web site. The torrents from that site still work with DHT, and people can generate new torrents from the completed files.
It's a horrible position to be in as a game developer, but there's not much that can permanently be done about it. There are people working on the piracy side that have vast technical knowledge or aptitude and will eventually crack any protection scheme or custom media format. Humans design the protections, humans can break or bypass them.
