I think the creators of this know that it will be hacked and know it's only a matter of time until it's broken. What I think they are trying to achieve with it is to protect sales from casual copying for the first sell through sales wave. Sales stats have generally shown that a solid 60% of a game's sales happen in the first 30 to 60 days. And if they can protect the game effectively for that space of time they can minimize loss's during that time. After that they release a patch that removes the code and then the game effectively become "DRM Free". I might be misunderstanding this concept, but that's what is seems like they're saying without actually directly stating such.
Yep, I believe that is exactly what they are doing, and IMO is the way DRM should be done with games.
This is pretty much /thread.
All further discussions are pretty much pointless since this amazing "anti-tamper" technology has been tampered without any problem within 2 days of release, and it probably took "that long" because the only game using probably it wasn't a priority for the cracker.
Valeroa: Stillborn DRM scheme.
They deserve to get sued by the makers of City Patrol: Police for wasting their money on empty promises, and go bankrupt quickly.
Here is the issue, I haven't actually seen any confirmation that Valeroa was completely defeated. We've seen schemes like this in the past, and while the cracking groups have put out games they have said were cracked and working, the results ended up being the game actually wasn't fully cracked and didn't work properly. Sure, the "cracked" game started up and seamed to work, but only to a point. In some cases, the anti-tamper DRM didn't kick in until the very end of the game. Literally, if the game detected tampering, the game would freeze during the final boss battle
and delete all your save games! Making it impossible to actually see the ending of the game. And this was on a game that took most people over 24 hours of gameplay to finish, so a rather long game.
So we really can't take the cracker's word that Valeroa has been totally defeated. We have to wait for someone else to go complete the game to verify. Valeroa does differ from the DRM methods we are used to seeing in recent times(but still not new). Just because a cracker gets the game to run doesn't mean the game is actually cracked with Valeroa.
No it doesn't. Steam DRM is so laughably easy to defeat that it doesn't prevent any piracy at this point. Games protected by only Steam DRM are usually cracked and made available on pirate sites within hours of release.
The end result is the same no matter what. There will always be differentiation, simply because we are different.