Be a pain to recompile for every user, but if some one bought it then uploaded it to pirate sites everyone would know who did it.

Putting on my legal glasses and telling you that the only thing you would know then would be the name of the guy for whom the installer was supposed to. The rest is a legal challenge and is very difficult, if ever, to prove. That's by design.And I could bet that you don't want any pirate to get in the delivery line then, grabbing installers (or serials, or certificates) which were made for legal customers, now spreading them (which isn't a fictional scenario).If I steal your car and run it into some friendly people, you are only accountable in the case of securing your car, and that's very much the outcome of every lawsuit were "tagged" data played a role.You can sentence people and companies for not watching (enough) over their goods, but unless you catch the same guy uploading the stuff to share sites, you can't take him into account for actually sharing it illegally. Maybe you can drive him to a guilty plea, there's a chance of course.As we all saw, even large companies don't do everything correct and timely when it comes to security on their side, so we shouldn't rely on countermeasures which have the same impact on piracy as all the ones before. Close to nil and first of all, not measurable. The same things, when getting hacked, also quickly turn around and harm the valid customers then, so that data collection on the dev's side gains attraction of another illegal branch too. As seen.You can measure sales, but you can't measure any piracy impact, broken sales, 'sales which would have been there if' and so on. Correct me if I'm wrong, but e. g. the big music industry rides that 'we've measured piracy impacts' since the very first days of selling music. The only reliable thing to say is that there is an impact, but everything regarding its actual size are assumptions and you don't get sentenced for assumptions. And that's the state that industry is in, since decades.There was a bigger flight sim dev not to long ago, stating his "methods" of measuring the impact of his enhanced protecting at later prodcuts. From just reading the lines on how "scientific" the process was made, you would get a good view on the word 'naive' in conjunction with anti-piracy measures.So Nemeth may enhance their countermeasures and hope for the better. But I can tell you that heavy protection isn't and never was the force for people to actually buy a thing.There are quite some companies out there still going with simple serials for example, and they are all still in the business and they may also share the same amount of piracy losses (remember? we can only assume them) as the other ones blaming the bad pirates for their also bad sales.Blaming the unknown mass ('pirates drove our business down!') is easy when there aren't any numbers but tons of stereotype/superficial knowledge around.But looking a bit closer forms up some questions where the answers might not clearly show that pirates are the only cause for bad sales. If you want to avoid those answers, better start the blaming thing again.PSS may be out of the business and Nemeth is temporarely down, but only they know the full spectrum reasons there, hopefully. There is/was no special pirate focus on PSS or Nemeth, there's a general driving force behind those activities and unless your products attract enough good people, it doesn't matter if you secure it with a serial or a genetic scan, they will buy it because they like to buy it from you. At least, I buy stuff without being forced to and some of you may act like this too.

'CoolP'... you couldn't be more wrong than you are in this latest post of yours.

'CoolP'... you couldn't be more wrong than you are in this latest post of yours.

Care to elaborate your opinion?I for one agree with several points..1) Trying to use a "brand" to "expose" the uploader could open a whole slew of legal ramifications and would probably result in more costs to the developer.2) there is NO proof that extreme security protection has increased sales. There is 'speculation' that it, in fact, hurts sales. Personally I buy a product based out of need for the product BUT if the built in security were too cumbersome, I'd search for a replacement product.3) there is no way to prove 'lost' sales - that argument has been going on since the early days of shareware.So what exactly were you referring to Ed?Vic

That is a bad day to be a Nemeth customer. I'm not and probably never be. Helicopter is not my thing.So because they lost 3% of their sales "97% never had intention to buy it anyway", The legal customer will have, in the next future, to accept a restrictive Anti piracy software... Great...What about making the people who bought it, feel exclusive ? Tuto, video, Paint, Deeper manual, etc... Only accessible by them ? By curiosity, I went to the official forum, Problems section. It's unbelievable all the flaws this addon have ! And of course no demo or refund. So the guy who work 200 hours a month with "after paying critical things" has 150$ left for hobbies, can be crossed by spending money on a bad addon.

Care to elaborate your opinion?I for one agree with several points..1) Trying to use a "brand" to "expose" the uploader could open a whole slew of legal ramifications and would probably result in more costs to the developer.

No, not really. It's like when your car is photographed running a red light. You have to prove it isn't you... despite the fact it is your car. Evidence isn't slander or libel.

2) there is NO proof that extreme security protection has increased sales. There is 'speculation' that it, in fact, hurts sales. Personally I buy a product based out of need for the product BUT if the built in security were too cumbersome, I'd search for a replacement product.

Wait... on one hand you say there's no proof protection increases sales yet on the other you attempt to claim it hurts sales? Holy imaginary argument Batman! I'm a developer. I have information you don't. I can state, under oath in a court of law that protection increases sales. I can guarantee that I would not purjor myself doing it. However, your counter-claim would indeed fall under the heresay realm and be dismissed immediately. If the court required physical evidence to back my statement, that too exists. It's time people stopped making claims they have absolutely no information regarding whatsoever. Piracy hurts sales. Period.

3) there is no way to prove 'lost' sales - that argument has been going on since the early days of shareware.

Bull. And that's as politely as I can put it. It can indeed be proven. If you have a product that sells thousands of copys per day/week... then seeing a dip in sales might be much harder to quantify. However.. if you have a product that in it's lifetime you can expect 3000 or so total sales... and the sales are steady at 300 per month... then drop to less than 10 per month in the month the product shows up in the pirate board(s)... it's most certainly quantifiable.

I will point out here to some users that the FS addon world is already barely profitable. While large game studios still make nice profit with rampant piracy, us tiny developers get hit really hard. It's not like we're bathing in the sun off the coast of Mexico spending our profits. The reason we even exist is purely out of passion for what we do, and its unfortunate that so many users suck that passion right out of us.

When I wrote...and some people wil still claim that piracy doesn't harm anyone! I ws was asked Who claims such things and where?I think the answer to that is here!

I think it is pretty obvious that copy protection will increase sales, since there will undoubtedly be some out there who would want something enough to pay for it if they could not get it for free, yet who would otherwise have gone via the dodgy route of acquiring that product had it been possible to do so. But that's an entirely scenario from imagining that every pirated copy of a product represents a lost sale, because the only way that would be true is if there were absolutely no opportunists out there who will have something they would never have considered buying, just because they can do so with ease. Nevertheless it is still a big problem; the fact is, software piracy, like illegal music downloading, is regarded by many as a socially acceptable thing to do, a subject which people are not embarrassed to admit to at all, even though it is quite clearly theft. And until the day when that kind of stealing has the same stigma as shoplifting or pickpocketing etc, it is likely to remain that way too.One only has to look at how many record shops have disappeared since the advent of music downloading to know all this is true - the notion that you can be sat down in your home whilst committing that crime, with little chance of ever being caught, has turned many an honest person into someone who will cheerfully illegally download what they might once have bought. This is in fact why pretty much every musical act there is has to go out and play live these days in order to make money, because their number one album sells 200,000 copies these days, whereas back in the seventies when you couldn't download stuff, bands had to sell a couple of million copies to get an album sitting at number one and could afford to whizz around the skies in private jets. It is also why we used to see bands going on tour once every three years, simply to promote their new album, whereas now they go out on a tour every year, or even more frequently, and they're all queuing up to play every festival they can as well, because that's the only way they'll ever be able to afford that LearJet. Hence the increasing number of stadium gigs as opposed to bands playing 3,000 seaters, like they used to. But when bands can play a stadium tour to several million people across the world, yet they've only sold 200 thousand copies of their latest album, you don't have to be a maths professor to know that what you are seeing, is piracy writ large across the surface of the planet.Until piracy is regarded as morally wrong by the wider public, something that people would be embarrassed to admit to amongst their friends, it's going to stay that way, so we can understand why copy protection is here to stay too, because we simply cannot trust ourselves to be honest when we can get away with not being, not whilst it is socially acceptable. A good first step incidentally, would be for the industry to call a spade a spade, and stop referring to it as 'piracy' with all its lovable rogue Captain Jack Sparrow connotations, and instead call it what it is - thieving.Al

The good old days of music when someone like Little Eva could sell over a million copies of a record and yet get a $50 weekly salary at the time she made her records. Patsy Cline having to proclaim "No dough, no show" because this was a time when concert promoters often cheated stars out of their money by promising to pay them after the show but running with the money during the concert.Now things are bad in the music industry, where the lowest paid of the top ten richest musicians only made $20 million dollars. Bring back the days before the MP3's came out so that the record companies and concert promoters can make a decent living instead of most of the money going to the musicians who create and perform the music.Regards, Mike Mann

I think it is pretty obvious that copy protection will increase sales, since there will undoubtedly be some out there who would want something enough to pay for it if they could not get it for free,

I wonder where this no protection demand you are answering to was ever stated here or in that other piracy related thread lately, Alan. I mean, I even underlined the vital parts of my text. :mellow:Mr. 'Holy imaginary argument Batman! I'm a developer' (sic!) even quoted vgbaron correctly (he spoke of extreme security protection), but then answered to a question/demand that was never asked while mgh still remains on the 'I insult everybody knowing about piracy of being a pirate' level. Impressive.I mean, yeah, we can continue to think that being a flight sim gauge dev overrides any available knowledge on the (flight sim) customer side and we can also listen to WarpD when he mixes up aspects of criminal law and civil one or states (in another thread) that platforms like Steam don't have any piracy problems because they are so well protected. We could do that. :rolleyes:Now, I don't think that Nemeth sailed unprotected through the Internet waters so far. If they think they can increase sales with driving the protection up to new levels, that's their business. But some comments around here already gave a glimpse on some more promising approaches which are also in use at other devs, successfully and without dropping their pants. One just has to read them, in full. :smile:In short, focus on increasing sales (by raising the appeal there) not on decreasing pirate numbers (which you can't count or measure, as shown).

I will point out here to some users that the FS addon world is already barely profitable. While large game studios still make nice profit with rampant piracy, us tiny developers get hit really hard. It's not like we're bathing in the sun off the coast of Mexico spending our profits. The reason we even exist is purely out of passion for what we do, and its unfortunate that so many users suck that passion right out of us.

As far as I can see, nobody in this very thread questioned your described financial aspects and I think that everyone around is happy that quite some of you do a good and fair business for people loving their hobby.Your customers will also not only consist of Porsche drivers and Wall Street big names, so we are actually all in the same boat of watching the incoming as well as the outgoing money.I didn't buy your fine airport because that protection forced me to, I bought it because it seemed appealing and of high value. Since it proved these aspects when using it later I will surely buy your next one too. That's business, a loyal two-way relationship. And your KSFO is a benchmark on quality, no question.Reading about your planned updates there also stresses that impression.Fictional case: If you would start doing bad sceneries, your sales would go down and your piracy users might also increase their numbers. If you then would increase your protection measures to achieve more sales, I would call you nuts.

That is a bad day to be a Nemeth customer. I'm not and probably never be. Helicopter is not my thing.So because they lost 3% of their sales "97% never had intention to buy it anyway", The legal customer will have, in the next future, to accept a restrictive Anti piracy software... Great...

That's not how the math works. If there are 10,000 pirated downloads, 3% would be 300. But they likely weren't going to sell anywhere close to 10,000 legitimate copies. They could end up selling 700 copies, which when added to 300 would make 1,000. Then it's 30% of their sales lost.

I wonder where this no protection demand you are answering to was ever stated here or in that other piracy related thread lately, Alan. I mean, I even underlined the vital parts of my text. :(

Who says I was answering anyone with my post?Al

That's not how the math works. If there are 10,000 pirated downloads, 3% would be 300. But they likely weren't going to sell anywhere close to 10,000 legitimate copies. They could end up selling 700 copies, which when added to 300 would make 1,000. Then it's 30% of their sales lost.

You're right, maybe 0.3% is closer to reality

Who says I was answering anyone with my post?

Well, after the all seeing dev set up the train in the wrong direction for others to follow, the thinking of mine may at least become reasonable.But thanks for clarifying that, Al.By the way, great review on the CS 707. The thing went through a major price point correction and we may all guess that this actually helped more on the sales than any protection thingy ever could. The bad guys only have two options. Go pirate or pay XX Dollars. One part of the appeal is formed by a smaller (not zero or close to!) difference and a ton of other appealing parts are done with service, value and the feeling that the thing was a good buy.Fail on one and the buyer won't come back on the next title. That's the tricky dev situation everyone around has an understanding for, so nobody ever questions it for good reason.Guys, the question Nemeth have to ask themselves isn't 'how can we bring down piracy numbers (which we can't see or measure)?'' but instead 'why did/do only few people want to buy our stuff?'And there's a big difference between those two vital questions, a whole world for some.