It will be if TAGES has anything to say about it. They believe that they have a system that will make game cracking a thing of the past. While they do not claim their Tages Dynamic Virtual Machine (TDVM) is completely uncrackable they do believe that it will make cracking so time intensive that crackers will turn to games that are easier to open. This means that game companies who use the TDVM could maximize their profits, increase their sales and lower their worries. It could also mean that game prices could stabilize because many publishers have claimed the level of piracy of their games as one of the reasons for increased game prices (along with larger development costs do to larger and more graphically intense games).

So how does it work? Well the TDVM takes the game code and expands it. For example 5 game instructions would be turned into 50,000 executed instructions making it extremely difficult to track, dissect and decode. It also incorporates the debug and security code into the game code and forms pseudo code that is tough to read and understand. At press time there have been no actual cracks of TAGES protected games. There have been workarounds in the form of emulation tactics but they are working to block that avenue as well.

Fireglow Games and Spellbound Entertainment believe in the system so much they not only use it on all of their games now, they even sent a representative to Paris GDC to assist TAGES CEO Vincent Lefebvre with his presentation. “It works,” said David from Spellbound (no business card so I missed his surname, sorry David), “the sales numbers on the games have shown a distinct lack of that drastic drop indicative of a cracked version of the game becoming available.”

But as always you’re thinking who cares about copy protection, I just want games. Well a functional copy protection system is a difficult thing to master as many others have shown. If you look at some of the usual suspects in game copy protection you find they have not historically worked all that well and some even go so far as to making games unplayable. A prime example of that is SecuROM which is not only cracked within a week of game launch but also has serious incompatibility issues with a host of programs that might be installed on a machine. I even had problems simply running a SecuROM game on a fresh install of Windows XP.

The TAGES system is highly flexible giving the developer the power to encrypt various areas of the game instead of the entire game. This cuts down on resource consumption and helps prevent frame rate degradation. That means there should be no impact to the gaming experience, little noticeable increase in loading or initialization times. It means there should be no higher system requirements to accommodate the TAGES protection and overall it could be a great thing for gaming.

 As I stated before another benefit of the system could be the slight stabilization of game prices due to the lower rate of piracy. Now I won’t go so far as to say game prices will fall because we know that would just be ludicrous, now that the publishers have us paying the current rate they would never back off from it even though they would probably see increased sales in the end.

Denis (again no card, so no surname..sorry Denis) from Fireglow also mentioned that security updates could be sent in additional content for the games or in a game update. That means that it could make having a cracked or illegal version of the game simply not worth playing. You would have to not upgrade the game or you would have to upgrade and wait until there was yet another crack fix to get the game running again. Really, is a free game worth all that hassle? If you love games and want to play them then save up, dig out that pocketbook and give up some cash, after all without cash the companies would simply stop making games and then we would all be in a bad spot.

There is a lot of technical information that I absorbed during the session as well that isn’t all that interesting to the general gamer so I’ll compress it. When code is submitted to TAGES you can instantly generate 1000 serial numbers so that means those PR, marketing and sales people don’t get an unprotected copy. The protection works for both disc-based and online distribution methods and uses the same .EXE for both. Since a new virtual machine is created for each game it means that there is no reiteration of protection and if one game is cracked it does not mean all the others will. Daniel told us a story about how they used separate EXE files for each language but the Russian publisher did not want to use the system. The Russian EXE file was cracked and spread but it did not affect the other versions until an adaptation was made to use the other languages. So even in this case the TAGES system was not compromised. Having used the system before, it took 3 days of work by the lead coder on Helldorado to implement the system in their latest title. Fireglow did it in 4 days on their first title to use the system. So it shows it’s quite easy to implement on the developer end.

This was perhaps one of the most interesting sessions I attended and I was looking forward to it from the moment I read the schedule and saw it. Game piracy affects us all whether you believe it or not. If companies don’t make enough money on titles they stop making them. Since we all want the best titles available that means we need diversity in the marketplace. In the current day and age where giants are roaming the land in the form of EA, Vivendi/Activision/Blizzard, THQ and Ubisoft….we need those little guys to bring us the games that the big guns aren’t willing to take a chance on. But those companies need to know they have a chance to make a profit and with a drastically lower piracy percentage they would have that chance, they would make that game and we would have hundreds of interesting, fun games that we don’t have now.

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