by Gavin G.
Ex-Trey Ex-trey, read all about it! Piracy Strikes!
Piracy.
It’s a hot topic on the internet nowadays. Game writers/bloggers getting on their soapboxes to denounce piracy while pirates launch into tired old arguments to justify what they are doing. Well now the denizens of the internet have sunk to a new low*
For the last week or so I’ve been discussing this with and old friend of Lo-Ping, DjArcas. FortressCraft is nearing completion but he is now having to include a feature he never thought he would have to think about on the Indie Channel… Copy Protection.
The Dream, Build, Play contest has noble intentions and I would applaud it for bringing in new talent to the industry that might not have considered it otherwise except for one small thing.
Anyone, and I mean anyone, can fill out an application and in five minutes have the keys to the kingdom, a copy of XNA that lasts until the contest ends in June. I joined up myself before writing this article and it took me all of five minutes, including download time.
Why is this a big deal? XNA is the toolkit that Xbox Live Indie Game developers pay $100 yearly subscription fees to access and keep their games in a tight-knit community without fear of exposure or theft. XNA saves the programs in a special filetype that only other copies of XNA can read, thus eliminating the risk of theft until DBP came along.
Free memberships to XNA combined with the fact that indie games are small and incredibly fast to download in this special filetype that XNA uses, DjArcas estimates there are 14 pirate-copy FortressCraft servers running right now. The scary bit here is that until Microsoft does something to fix this little problem, every game on the Xbox Live Indie channel is at risk of being pirated!
Hopefully Microsoft will fix this little problem fast, in a world where people will pirate five games that would cost them one penny [1], the popularity contest of XBLIC needs all the help it can get.
*Yes, I did make a pirate pun THAT bad.