theory I heard today

I was telling a friend of mine today about GalCiv2, and how it was 10 bucks cheaper than other new games. I also told him there is no piracy protection, just a serial key for updates. Lastly, I told him the game came out very buggy with CTD's which would be fixed later. He then told me that the serial key for updates IS the piracy protection. simply because if you copy the game, and dont have the serial code you wont be able to get rid of the many bugs. aka the game wont be enjoyable. whereas the legal dudes have the code, update and their game runs smooth.

I doubt the bugs were planned against piracy, but it's an interesting concept. Buy legally or your game will crash. Oh, and the bugs were left in there by *cough* accident *cough*.

like I said, I doubt GalCiv2 was protected in this manner on purpose, but damn its a good idea

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Interesting theory but I highly doubt they would have purposefully left things in the first release for this reason. Chances are they just ran out of time and had to meet that last deadline. I am glad though that they chose the method they use. I doubt many other companies would show that kind of courage. And from the posted sales results I'd say their gamble paid off.

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From most of the posts I've read, the crashes were due mostly to old drivers for gfx cards and dual-core processors. That does make an interesting theory, but the SD folks are pretty straight-forward and I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt until given a reason otherwise. I think the way the devs have put it is that you miss out on all the improvements and added content from updates if you pirate the game.

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I never had any CTD's pre-patch anyway, so I can't say I agree with that. But also, it would be easy for someone to simply put the patch up for download on a pirate site as well, so it's actually less effective in purely preventative terms against piracy. But I think their openness and lack of evil-large-corporation CD-check schemes has cut down on people wanting to pirate the game.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

Lastly, I told him the game came out very buggy with CTD's which would be fixed later.

The overwhelming majority of CTDs at release were caused by hardware problems (bad drivers, overheating, etc). Not game bugs. Many people, self included, haven't had a single CTD in the release (and beyond) build.

Continuous feature updates, good customer support, and great accessbility (you can download the game any time, anywhere with just SDC and your cd-key, or if you lose the key, just the email address you registered it to! Even if you bought a disc in the store, you can pitch it and just use the cd-key) are Stardock's anti-piracy measures.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

I should also add, that I've seen many people who said they bought it/would buy it simply because of SD's attitude on DRM. Enough so perhaps even to completely balance out those who do pirate the game without eventually buying it.

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Heh I've heard stranger theories... but slightly amusing. I won't believe Stardock intentionally did this. But worth a giggle.

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I didnt say I agreed with him, just liked his idea (or rather the possibilities= you steal? game crash mwuahahaha). And yeah, I just realised most bugs were due to hardware problems...tried to edit my post for that but it wont let me for some reason. I get this funky white page with an error message (not the page not found one).

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yea, certainly interesting but highly doubtful because the bugs are just random things that pop up due to different things on computers, example supporting this.... I bought it and never had a single problem with the first version of it, i mean other then the random wrong text or something they just missed, I had no crashing/any other problems. guess i was just lucky

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I will have to agree with my fellow Colonial Fleet-er Josh_88 on this, the bugs are too inconsistent for the conspiracy suggested above (not that anyone has seriously suggested that it is true).

However Frogboy has stated in the past that the constant updates are what amounts to a form of soft copy protection. Each update makes the game better, so you can either pirate an off-the-shelf version of pay for a version with constant refinements and improvements.

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Serial IS piracy protection. It's just not an obnoxious one.

With that said, I doubt stardock or any company would purposely leave bugs in their game. It makes a game look really bad if it wouldn't run properly and the company would risk potential customers as the customer would label the game with poor quality.

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