Arkham Asylum's crazy copy protection

The new game Batman: Arkham Asylum uses a fancy new copy protection scheme. In addition to the usual copy protection fare, this game hooks in additional check that occurs during gameplay. If the game has been cracked (had the copy protection removed), it will disable Batman's glide ability, effectively halting the player's progress through the game. What's curious about this is that the game never actually announces to the player that they've been caught trying to pirate the software -- it just appears that Batman can't proceed for some unknown reason.

One illegitimate user has already been caught by outting himself on the official support forums: http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=95030.

I'm left a bit puzzled about the efficacy of this copy protection strategy. Certainly, it will reduce the number of players who are able to enjoy the game without paying for it. It also wastes the time and bandwidth of the would-be pirates who download the game illegally, which is at least a moral victory. However, this system does very little to turn pirates into customers. In fact, I believe it may have an opposite effect.

Because the software doesn't explicitly notify the user that their copy is believed to be illegititmate, players are likely to blame the problem on a bug in the software. Because most stores don't accept returns on opened software items, it is unlikely that a user would risk purchasing the software in order to fix the problem. In fact, I believe he's more likely to tell his friends that the game is buggy and discourage them from purchasing it as well. If they continue to have this experience with software, they'll become less and less likely to buy products in stores. In the long run, this distrust can be hurtful to the entire industry.

While I'm definitely in favor of having a layered copy protection scheme, I think that covert copy protection is a sad, sad mistake. Instead, why not pop up a message to let the player know they won't be able to proceed until they legitimize their copy? You still get to play a gotcha on all the crackers -- they'll have to play through the entire game to make sure it's clean -- and you get to clearly tell your early adopters that you welcome them as customers more than you despise them as pirates.

Making a killing in the WoW auction house

I've been playing World of Warcraft quite a bit lately, and I thought I'd share a little about my recent experience on the auction house. I just leveled a new character and funded much of its gear with money from my main, so I was feeling a little poor all around. The alt had taken Inscription and Enchanting as professions, and I decided to see how they fared in terms of profitability... Wow.

Inscription allows the character to turn herbs into specialty pigments and inks, and then further convert the inks into glyphs. Two key points set it apart from other professions:

First, glyphs transcend character levels. A level 80 Paladin may desire many of the same glyphs as a level 20 Paladin would. This means that nearly every glyph that a scribe learns throughout leveling his profession is a valuable commodity.

Second, every glyph in the game can be normalized to the same underlying cost to produce. This is thanks to the fact that a trader in the high-level city of Dalaran will gladly trade you any ink in the game for your Ink of the Sea, the ink produced by the highest level of herbs currently in the game.

With these two factors in mind, I was able to produce a modest set of 100 glyphs to list on the auction house as an experiment. The accepted markup on glyphs is astounding! My cost to produce and sell a glyph is 3 gold plus about 5 seconds worth of time crafting and listing the item. I have been selling glyphs on the auction house for anywhere from 10-30 gold. That's up to 1000% return on my investment.

With the glyph business and a few side projects (dipping a toe into enchanting and Darkmoon Card sales), my net income is in the 1000s of gold every week -- for context, this character leveled decadently over the course of two months with less than a 10,000 gold stipend from my main character, an amount I'm confident I can soon produce weekly after some more refinement of my business.