Janko in a Jar

You can see how many downloads can pirate users produce here and number continued to february (5714 downloads) and still not even 1 sale more than other months with 10x less downloads. On the other hand downloads do me no harm other than 6GB of transfers which is still survivable. But if one has a much more popular and bigger game this can be very expensive joke. It happened to Motorama which recieved 60GB/day transfer after it got cracked.

You can’t really prevent them from downloading without affecting the normal demo downloaders, but you can do a soft redirection and use those downloads to your own good.

You publish your game at download.com (for example) which hosts your download file and redirect all suspicious downloads to them. That way you get rid of the bandwidth and your game rises by popularity on download.com list which by itself is very good thing. You are also not preventing anything to false positives.
How do you define suspicious? You can do it by HTTP Referrer or by country (using an IP). Referrer has no false positives but can be gotten around easily (but there is not much reason for them to fake you, because they get to the file anyway). Country can of course have false positives but if a non-pirate downloads your game from download.com is no tragedy anyway.

How do you redirect? Because most pirate websites link directly to your instalation file you can’t use PHP (unless you stream instalation file with it) but MOD REWRITE rules in your Apache. If you go the referrer way you can also catch referrs on all your webpages with php and change download page accordingly - for those pirate downloaders that did wisit your page first.
Concrete code? I just registered Kubi at download.com yesterday so I have to wait for 15 days to get listed. Then I will make and publish all the necessary code.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 4th, 2006 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Other stuff, In biz mode, I, small game dev.