LÖVE

Lüv wrote:Yea, but this world isn't perfect...

And it never will be.

vrld wrote:Has anything ever prevented a game from being pirated?

The multiplayer part of most modern games can't be pirated, unless you connect to cracked servers. The same thing can be replicated to some degree if a game is made online-only, like Diablo 3, for example. The only offline DRM that generally works (to my knowledge) is FADE which is used in ARMA 2, and it's pretty damn complicated.

Lüv wrote:

Robin wrote: To play it you would still need to download the game to play it. The only way you can really make a difference is if the only thing the players get is a small program that sends key presses and mouse clicks to the server, and receives screen shots to show the player what is going on. That would be awful to play.

apparently you have not heard of MIINECRAFT
or lol, WoW, or any other login based game.
Wow...

Erm, no. Those games simulate almost everything inside the game's engine, only receiving and sending a small amount of data from the server (such as player positions, damage received/dealt, etc.). Do a little research before making such assertions.

Lüv wrote:apparently you have not heard of MIINECRAFT

Just want to point out that it takes a google search and about 5 minutes of time to extract the source from minecraft... Editing it to do anything useful on servers is the hard part. (But no that hard, as it has been done before.)

The only reason it hasn't been swarmed by pirates already is because of the accounts and servers. (Oh, wait, cracked servers)

Any game can be pirated. I am not saying that that is good, but it is true. There is one solution that will ALWAYS work though:

Make your game open source. People by definition cannot "pirate" a open source game.

You can make a game with visible (or even semi-visible) source without attaching a liberal Open Source license to it.