Putting Piracy to Work

A regular check up has revealed that piracy of Vintage Pachinko has become much more aggressive since the release of 2.0. Some of the piracy I am now seeing is quite frankly very brazen. No longer limited to back-alley file sharing channels, it seems that some operations now have no problem with putting a full, searchable, attractive web site together offering direct downloads of many paid titles.

I was hoping to release Vintage Pachinko 2.1 this weekend. I will unfortunately need to delay that plan while I implement some countermeasures. Rather than freeze potential players completely out, though, I hope to use this as an opportunity to convert some of the purveyors of these pirate sites. Starting with this new version, unlicensed installations will operate in a reduced-functionality mode. In this mode, winnings will not be saved, players will be unable to unlock new pachinko machines, and a nag message will appear fairly frequently. Properly licensed users will notice no change aside from the additional permissions required licensing and integrity checks.

The beauty of the scheme I am using is that none of this is announced in-game until a couple of minutes into play, so a quick spot check by a malfeasant distributor reveals nothing amiss. They release the app to their sites, and unwittingly become part of the underbelly of my marketing network when my app convinces unlicensed users to convert.

I really hate having to focus attention on things like this when I could be spending time providing a better gameplay experience. However, this is the world we live in, where theft from small merchants like me is seen by some as a way to get ahead, so some basic measures need to be taken. I know anything I implement could probably be broken, but hopefully it will not be found to be worth the effort, with so many other apparently easy targets out there.