This used a multi-layered copy protection scheme. The first layers would show a dialog and quit. Later layers got progressively more vicious:
1. They'd remove 1 out of 10 gems needed to complete a certain level.
2. They'd randomly corrupt data.
3. They'd change the UI language at runtime.
Read the post-mortem I linked above; it's really fun. The basic idea was to require crackers to play the entire game very carefully, looking for subtle side effects that broke game play.
Ultimately, the protection was a success: It took almost 2 months to crack the game, resulting in a full Christmas season's worth of sales IIRC.
This is all based on the idea that people who pirate games (or movies, etc) are also very impatient. I'm sure that's true for a certain percentage, but I don't know if it's that significant.
A current example is Dragon Age: Inquisition, which took a few extra weeks but still got cracked. But the game still has a ton of issues on PC (even for legitimate owners), so it's probably worth waiting another month or so for patches anyway.
> Two months may not seem like a long time, but between 30 and 50 percent of most games' total sales occur in that time. Approximately 50 percent of the total sales of Spyro 2, up to December 2000, were in the first two months. Even games released in the middle of the year rather than the holiday season, such as Eidetic's Syphon Filter, make 30 percent of their total sales in the first two months.
I think the 'success' was being able to delay the crack long enough for Christmas sales. Although whether the crack would have affected those sales considerably might be debatable.
This used a multi-layered copy protection scheme. The first layers would show a dialog and quit. Later layers got progressively more vicious:
1. They'd remove 1 out of 10 gems needed to complete a certain level.
2. They'd randomly corrupt data.
3. They'd change the UI language at runtime.
Read the post-mortem I linked above; it's really fun. The basic idea was to require crackers to play the entire game very carefully, looking for subtle side effects that broke game play.
Ultimately, the protection was a success: It took almost 2 months to crack the game, resulting in a full Christmas season's worth of sales IIRC.