A much
ballyhooed new
copy protection scheme soon to be used on
Codemaster's new
game Operation Flashpoint. Here's the idea: over a period of time, a pirated video game equipped with this FADE technology will discover that it is not the original and gradually degrade key portions of
game play until the game itself is no longer entertaining.
What a fucking joke. Here's a few reasons why fade won't work:
- The most important part of the whole copy protection thing is still easy to crack. If they game never knows its been pirated, it won't start degrading. See [how crackers break copy protection
- Game designers will be reluctant to fully implement this technology because, who wants to spend years developing a game and then add months to a development cycle in order to effectively and thoroughly ruin your own game.
- Finally, most importantly, this is why the cracking scene exists. This is the entire reason for being. If ripping, cracking and distributing games was a piece of cake, everyone would be doing. There is a reason why the scene has grown the way it has. A lot of people think its greed, but, the real reason is because the challenge exists. Now that the cracking scene knows about this new method of protection (I learned about it from a major internet news outlet) it will be the biggest deal since bread came sliced. Every group and his mother will be rushing out to crack the new FADE enabled games to see who can get there first and when one does, they'll get a little bit more of some imaginary unit of respect than the others.