[porphy]

Gotta dissagree with you on a couple of points.

Sure, your welcome

First off dongles add to the cost of a product.

True, but you do get a non interfering and less intrusive copy protection compared to a lot of the others out there, those qualities are what quite a few customers say they want in the first place from a copy protection, if one is deemed necessary.

Second they each take up a slot on the computer, and with multiple dongles they are easy to missplace.

Yes, and a dvd takes up the only slot in the player...


Most users have more usb slots free for dongle use, and shifting a few dongles around won't wear out or risk any game media. On the other hand people do seem to loose or destroy their game dvds a lot as well.
I don't really see why dongles should be more prone to misplacing than other things. Their use is not like a flash memory which you bring with you to work or to friends. If one keep loosing stuff it's probably not the dongles fault...

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.

I can't see that this would be a good argument against the dongle though. True, everything can be cracked but I think it is quite clear that the codemeter dongle is much harder to crack than many other copy protection schemes out there, which makes it even a better choice for niche games. I bet even a niche product as SB Pro PE would be cracked by now if this wasn't the case. You can illegally download SB Pro PE right now if you want to, so it's been floating around in pirate waters for quite a long time, but it's still unbroken.

Wibu systems has also offered money to anyone able to get through the dongle protection on a few occasions. Of course this is a bit of media stunt, but you don't see any mainstream game protection even offering that challenge...

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.

I said it I was surprised that not more developers of less mainstream games used it. Even if the whole industry used dongles, why do you think managing all your game dvds is less nightmarish than have a collection of dongles, should it come to that? If this was the case I'm sure one would have the ability to store licences from many companies on one or a few capable and secure dongles. With the dongle you can have as many backup copies of the game as you want.

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.

Well, I don't know the details of the dongle hardware but the Wibu one uses a special chip, but is recognized as a usb mas storage device, and it communicates through its own software. The Wibu dongle that protects SB Pro PE can, according to the company, hold 1000 licences on one stick... and you can already have different licenses from different vendors on the same dongle. The licenses can be configured in a number of ways, even controlling what version of the program you are entitled to run.

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.

I don't know why they are supposed to be a problem to computer support personal. Maybe you mean that if you have problems running the software or getting the dongle to work, support will be swamped by requests that are hard to troubleshoot? My impression is that the codemeter dongle is less an offender than most drm solutions in that respect.

The dongle isn't perfect, but given the options I prefer this compared to crappy dvd drm checks, online and restricted activations, keeping track of no-cd solutions for every game patch when you run in to trouble, intrusive protection that makes it a gamble to upgrade your hardware or changing OS. I haven't tried Steam myself, but I guess it's not as secure as many developers would like...

Cheers Porphy