   Indiegame dev and piracy
  Has anyone who sells their games online ever thought of using the persons Credit Card # they bought the game with as their Cdkey?1) Would discourage people sharing cdkeys massively2) You get their credit card # when they buy the game so people can't complain that the system isn't safe. If the online buying is safe what makes the cdkey activation so unsafe.   
  Do you want me to buy your game or not?   ;  Personally, I would be selling games via paypal.   ;  Wouldn't it be better to just generate a unique key given a credit card/PayPal/whatever order, and then the customer could just use that?   ;  Regardless of the legality of piracy (and I'm sure most of us know where to stand on this), doing such a thing as making a key based on their credit card is just asking for a class action lawsuit if not a prison sentence.As for indie gaming and piracy, I don't think it's nearly as big of an issue as vs the commercial world.  Unless you're trying to support yourself off the game (such as what major companies would do), piracy might even have a little beneficial results for you.  Besides, I personally believe depending upon what you make, most likely the community you target for your game will more likely be willing to actually pay for the game than if you went to a much broader audience.   ;  And besides that, most of the time a 'kracker' will find the actual authentication function in the executable and remove it.A more interesting question is how do you stop it?  :)Happy coding   ;  Warren Spector (GDC 2005): "I never minded piracy. Anyone who minds about piracy is full of s***. Anyone who pirates your game wasn’t going to buy it anyway!"He makes a fair case.   ;  Well, I perceive 3 groups.non users - cant afford it, don't buy itnon payers - can afford it, don't buy itpaying users - can buy it and do buy itThose who use pirated software are spread in the first two groups, some people in these groups will use your software and some don't, and those who do will get it from pirates.   ;Quote:Original post by rian carnarvonWarren Spector (GDC 2005): "I never minded piracy. Anyone who minds about piracy is full of s***. Anyone who pirates your game wasn’t going to buy it anyway!"He makes a fair case.Very well said by master Spector, if that is a genuine quote [smile] Actually, as others here have noted, certain anti-piracy measures may infact discourage potential buyers from buying your game. But there are no black and whites when it comes to this topic, there are differing opinions and you can't really tell for certain who is right.  Personally I think that you shouldn't abuse your paying customers; you should try to keep your anti-piracy system discrete and try not to violate your users' privacy. Anti-piracy can help to a certain extent, but from there on I believe you are just making matters worse. Basically, you want average Joe to buy your game and then convince average Bob to buy it as well, instead of just handing him a copy. Unfortunately it's (currently) practically impossible to prevent a game from being cracked.   ;  Oh, its genuine. He closed the ranting session of GDC 2005 with it.   