Quote:
Originally Posted by porphy
The dongle is the best copy protection I have tried so far. 
I'm surprised that not more game developers uses this way to protect their games, at least for games that are a bit less mainstream and are supposed to be played more than a few weeks to beat them. One dongle can hold all the licences for your games. Also it is a good long time solution as you always can offer the game for a new download and the customer can make as many back up copies they want.
Every copy protection method has its problems, even the dongle, but from a customers view it has the least practical problems as it never interferes with any other computer or hardware stuff you do. Ok, it can in rare cases malfunction, but eSim games have top notch support to quickly solve something like that. Perhaps that's way some companies don't want the dongle, they want a fire and forget copy protection. Which of course is a pipe dream.
From a producers perspective the dongle has one outstanding attractive trait as it, as far as I know, never have been cracked, which is very unique.
cheers porphy |
Gotta dissagree with you on a couple of points. First off dongles add to the cost of a product. Second they each take up a slot on the computer, and with multiple dongles they are easy to missplace.
Also dongles are not invulnerable forms of copy protection, they have been broken in the past (particularly corporate programs that use dongles, and ones far more sophisticated the one SBP uses), but the groups that do the breaking have to have an interest in doing it. That in a nutshell is why SBP hasn't been broken yet. Not because it can't be done, but because its such a niche game nobody (with the ability) cares to bother.
Last I dont want to think of the nightmare if the entire gaming industry used dongles. One dongle is manageable, 2 is tollerable, a dozen or more is not. Generaly speaking you wouldnt be able to transfer licenses between dongles otherwise it makes them very vulnerable to being bypassed/duplicated. Most commercial dongles use unwriteable memory or/and other hardware and individual to a specific program. An encrypted key on a flash drive is as easy to bypass as that on a cd or dvd.
Typicaly dongles (the sophisticated kind) in the past have been limited to high end professional software worth 1000s of dollars. They are also the bane of computer support personal.