Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood Message Board  

It also had a commercial protection - SecuROM.

Bound in Blood has no protection indeed - Seems like UbiSoft gave up!

And you did not cause any fight anyways.

Alot of companys have been giving up recently, they don't even have cdkeys for the most part xD

The stupid thing about this commercial protections is that they encrypt only the main game exe. So WAREZ groups need not do much of hard work. Just dissemble the EXE and rip the code off.

Tages and STEAM are perhaps the only two protections that don't carry this routine, but still they even do get cracked.

But still it was alot harder for WAREZ groups to crack TAGES - As I saw in the Riddi.ck Dark Athena release - Only DarkC0der was successful.

It depends on how hyped up the game is, Rid**** - Will always be low on anyone's list as...to be honest, it's always a disappointment game.

Do you know what's involved in removing commercial protections from games? It's not 'easy', and you can't just 'disassemble' and 'rip the code off' Just so you are under no illusions about that. It's also more of a 'wrapper', not encryption

Darkcoder played on the fact that the paul.dll module is used for activate & play on many securom titles. It get's accessed at launch. That module isn't protected, and I think that's what you were getting at above, when you said about only the .exe is encrypted. It's very simple to get it to think it is validated, and the rest runs on from there.

As for CD-Keys, the 'cleverer' companies, will see that a serial for single-player is completely pointless for the most part. It's only ever good for MP, when the key is verified against a known database of released keys. Why EA keep releasing their game's with the same key-check (same algorithm they've used for years!) I don't know.

The big publishers know that their game(s) will get cracked, but it's just that initial sales period that they aim to get through. So long as they shift xxx amount or make a certain amount in their target timeframe it doesn't matter after that. It's just the get enough people to buy it to start with. Many companies have released updates that have removed the protection (Egosoft for example with the X3 games, and Lucasarts with many of their titles) after it has been out for a while.

[Edited by PhoenixCH, 6/30/2009 2:42:30 AM]

What the publishers and producers should focus on,
is the multiplayer part of their games.
Cause that's about the only part they can secure entirely against piracy by using auth. servers.
So instead of taking out features from the MP part of the games, add in all the good stuff to that part, and people will be more interested in buying it.

I did not get more on detail with me explaination as you did it right now because this is not a board that deals with it. We all were talking in general.

And the thing you are talking about is with the latest SecuROM 7 PA protection where paul.dll is a module used to deal with the activation of the game.

And the protection I was talking about was TAGES, which used DRM i.e. Digital Rights Management. And this protection limited the license key to usage on only 3 systems.

And as you mentioned about 'wrappers' let me give some examples. The best example is the Reflexive arcade protection.

Reflexive arcade wraps the game's main exe into .RWG format (I have made Trainers, so I know this), and then it creates a 250-300 kb Launcher that is associated with ReflexiveArcade.dll that compares wheter the product is activated or not. If activated, the Launcher launches the game instantly, if not - It pops up a nag screen showing the Time left in the Trial.

And talking about the CD-key protection in EA. I figured out their routine is same on all titles which makes it to easy to create keygens for thier products within no time (I have no knowledge on keygenning or removing commercial protections).

Yeah no worries, I think you misunderstood me completely, hehe. Check PM dude