Big-name games get pirated more and more and
their attempts to "minimize piracy" are much
more intrusive. If those don't deter people,
a little flash of a name isn't going to
deter people.
How do you know they wouldn't have been pirated even more without these measures?
In this particular instance, I think the fact it's a small fish game actually helps, since it will be harder to find well seeded torrents of it compared to the latest and greatest AAA extravaganza.
And do you think he'll automatically renew "1337 h4x0rs group" 10 keys limits after getting 1000s of requests to register the game under any single name?
I hope Cas will post some stats about how this worked out for him (assuming he can compare piracy rates between this and his previous games), I'd be very interested to find out how it fared.
Here's how it works. There is a small number of experts that crack games. Then there is a large number of non-experts that download cracked games.
Unless the DRM can somehow stop everyone from the first group (in this case it won't), the second group will not be affected at all. For them, what DRM is used is irrelevant.
The Puppygames DRM could be an interesting case, though, since there are multiple ways to pirate it. The expert crackers, having read about the DRM, will find a way to disable the game's network connection.
However, there are presumably many not-quite-expert crackers who may not even realize the game has DRM beyond displaying a name and e-mail address. These people will register the game with a suitably anonymous credentials, maybe test it on a couple more machines, then upload it. They won't know the "crack" is ineffectual until they get an e-mail asking them to reset their ten registrations. And unless they keep replying to this e-mail for every ten downloads, their upload will stop working.
Two key questions: How many wannabes are there for every expert? And how many times will someone download an ineffectual crack before giving up?
In this particular instance, I think the fact it's a small fish game actually helps, since it will be harder to find well seeded torrents of it compared to the latest and greatest AAA extravaganza.
And do you think he'll automatically renew "1337 h4x0rs group" 10 keys limits after getting 1000s of requests to register the game under any single name?
I hope Cas will post some stats about how this worked out for him (assuming he can compare piracy rates between this and his previous games), I'd be very interested to find out how it fared.