Prevention of re-distribution

[Bilfr3d]

Here is pretty much a discussion for how the prevention of re-distribution could be achieved for KSP. I see a lot of younger kids at the school I go to play KSP. That's all well and good, but the thing is they all share it via their USB's etc. A few months ago only a few people in the school I knew of played KSP. Pretty much an entire GRADE now plays KSP from the re-distribution of it. That's about 200-300 kids. Say, only 10% of those kids actually bought it. that's only 20-30, so 180-270 kids haven't bough the game (theoretically speaking). The current cost of KSP on the KSP store is $30. That's $5400 - $8100 worth of gross revenue down the train. That's assuming only 10% of kids have bought the game. I highly doubt the figure is that high. And that is why I have created this discussion - to discuss on methods to stop the re-distribution of KSP. Through steam I believe this can be done by using the steamapi.dll and integrating it with steam etc, but I'm not too sure how this would be done for the KSP store. This would also mean that there would have to be two separate "branches" of KSP - the steam edition and the KSP store edition. Yes, that means more work for the devs in terms of making sure KSP itself is properly synced between the versions, but I'm pretty sure $5400 - $8100 would cover those costs... What do other people think about this? Have any of you people also seen anything like this?

[vexx32]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here (not really) and say that your estimates for piracy rates of KSP are quite unrealistic.

In addition, Squad have made multiple statements regarding DRM, and their position has always been "DRM hurts legitimate customers; we don't want any part of it." That does not seem likely to change.

I personally agree with Squad on this -- DRM is a waste of Squad's time, as well as their users' time. They have more interesting things to be doing than making more trouble for people who already pay for their product.

As discussing piracy is already clearly against the rules, and for these other reasons, I'm going to have to close this before it goes haywire.