I would like to release my game for pc as well as 360 and would like to know if anyone knows of any free or cheap was to tone down piracy of the pc version of my game?

You could start by reading through this thread. There's that big "Search Forums" button at the top for a reason. ;)

This is neither free, cheap, nor easy, but in my opinion, the best way to combat piracy is to make a compelling game that people want to buy.

If your game is worth pirating, it'll get pirated regardless of what you do. If it's not worth pirating, you'll just be wasting time. Companies like EA and others likely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars researching and implementing anti-piracy measures that still are cracked in mere days. Honestly the best thing you can do is make a really good game and sell it at a really good price.

The most effective way to curb PC piracy of your game is to only release it on the 360.  Sad but true.  Maybe build up a following first, then once your sales start to decline release the PC version of it.  By that time most of the 360 players that want to play it will have it. 

If you release both versions at the same time, chances are most indie game players who have a 360 also have a PC.  If you're game is good enough to be pirated you may lose 360 sales because people are just playing the pirated PC version.

You have a few options regarding piracy...

Additionally, if your game requires the services of a server on the internet, and that server is only available to people who pay you $5/month (or whatever), then pirating the game executable is not a problem for you -- in fact, you want the executable to be spread, because it means you get more paying customers on your server.

Social Loner Studios:

1. Don't worry about it, and just make a game that is reasonably priced, and fun to play, people will pay for

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Sorry, but this is simply not true.  If people can get it for free, they will.  In addition to that, people will absolutely pay as little as possible.  Sad and certainly disappointing, but true.

See here:Tap-Fu (iPhone) Piracy details

See here: 2D Boy's Pay-What-You-Want Birthday Sale Results details

If you don't want to be pirated you have three options:

• XBLIG
• Steam
• Games for Windows LIVE

If you don't think your game is good enough to make it onto Steam or GFWL, then it's probably going to be pirated if you release it on the PC.  And if you don't want to deal with that, then you're pretty much limited to XBLIG.

Nick Gravelyn:

If your game is worth pirating, it'll get pirated regardless of what you do. If it's not worth pirating, you'll just be wasting time. Companies like EA and others likely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars researching and implementing anti-piracy measures that still are cracked in mere days. Honestly the best thing you can do is make a really good game and sell it at a really good price.

caedicus:

I'm not aware of any evidence that shows that making a good game reduces piracy than making a mediocre one

No, but making a mediocre game surely will reduce sales as opposed to making a good game.

caedicus:

and simply lowering the price for the sole purpose to reduce piracy seems like shooting oneself in the foot.  

I didn't say to undersell your game. I meant to find a good price. That is, a price that is fair for what you're selling. Just because it's on PC and finished doesn't mean it's worth $20 or even $10. Lots of indie PC games out there could do pretty well at $5.

My point overall though has little to do with reducing piracy. I'm of the mindset that you really can't. If people don't want to pay for your game, they won't. So my thinking is make the best case you can for why people should want to pay for the game. Make it good and sell it at a fair price. Yes, it'll get pirated, but oh well. At least the customers who did pay feel like they got their money's worth. Plus if you spend a bunch of time worrying about piracy and implementing a bunch of protection schemes that ultimately won't do much, you lose a lot of time you could spend making your game better.

Dark Flow Studios:

If you don't want to be pirated you have three options:

• XBLIG
• Steam
• Games for Windows LIVE

I take it you don't believe in the "require an online server" option?

If you consider even popular casual games like Farmville or Mafia Wars, they have a server component these days. You don't even have to pay to play those games! Yet Zynga is making double-digit millions every month, according to all I hear.

If your game supports savegames, save to a server.
If your game supports trade, trade through a server.
If your game can use viral marketing, let users go through a server.
In fact, even if your game does none of that, find a way to create a community that makes the game require a server.

And before you complain about the $100/month or whatever you have to pay for a hosted self-managed server, you're supposed to make back a lot more than that in reduced piracy. If you don't, well, then why are you worrying about piracy in the first place?

jwatte:

I take it you don't believe in the "require an online server" option?

If you consider even popular casual games like Farmville or Mafia Wars, they have a server component these days. You don't even have to pay to play those games! Yet Zynga is making double-digit millions every month, according to all I hear.

If your game supports savegames, save to a server.
If your game supports trade, trade through a server.
If your game can use viral marketing, let users go through a server.
In fact, even if your game does none of that, find a way to create a community that makes the game require a server.

And before you complain about the $100/month or whatever you have to pay for a hosted self-managed server, you're supposed to make back a lot more than that in reduced piracy. If you don't, well, then why are you worrying about piracy in the first place?

I don't work for a game development company, but I do work for a software company. Our cheapest package for our software is $40,000. Time spent on protecting the software via any technical means? 0 hours.

Software piracy is protected legally not technically. I'm with Nick on this one. If all you're really concerned about is someone stealing your game, it's not really worth your time figuring out how to protect yourself from that. Accept it as part of the cost of your development. People ARE going to steal it. Spend less time worrying about protecting yourself from them and more time on figuring out how to convince people they want to buy your game.

sigh, I'm actually not sure why I'm replying in this thread. This topic seems to come up every couple of months and everyone gives that same answers each time. No one is really changing anyone's opinion and the people who ask are already so firmly entrenched in the feeling that they HAVE to protect their game from piracy there's no point in people like me responding.

Good luck finding a solution that works for you.

I guarentee that anyone who has to ask a forum full of armchair lawyers and mostly very amateur game developers this question doesn't have a game worth pirating. If you really had a game that was going to make enough money that piracy is an issue you would also have lawyers and publishers who would be able to answer these questions for you.

The ZMan:

I guarentee that anyone who has to ask a forum full of armchair lawyers and mostly very amateur game developers this question doesn't have a game worth pirating. If you really had a game that was going to make enough money that piracy is an issue you would also have lawyers and publishers who would be able to answer these questions for you.

The ZMan:

If you really had a game that was going to make enough money that piracy is an issue you would also have lawyers and publishers who would be able to answer these questions for you.

How does this fit into the recent iPhone games piracy topic? If your game's sold for a buck only and piracy is in the above 90% range of your players then it's still an economical disaster, irrelevant how much money you would have made without the cheap guys. On the other side there's the World of Goo pay what you like model that seemed to be fairly successful (might be because of the quality of the game, though). In the end it boils down to people are a cheap and greedy bunch, trying to fight their thinking via any sort of copy protection is pointless and the money invested into that might better be spent into some form of marketing (maybe including that stealing your game would kill your kittens by starvation due to the lack of money to buy their food). Releasing a game for free with ads might also be an option…

I do think that it could complicate development.

Of course it does! It adds a whole new feature! If protecting against software piracy was free and no work, don't you think every software on the planet would use it?

The easiest way is to wrap your software in a dongle protector. This doesn't even need any changes in the program, but it's probably pretty easy to break. I don't know who make those these days, but Google ought to know. However, this is not cheap!

The cheapest way is to design in server requirements, so pirating the game simply is not an issue. This costs nothing (except for the server fees), but it's a whole lot of work. The good part about it is that it's virtually unbreakable if you do it right.

SIMPLE ANSWER.  YOU CANNOT STOP PEOPLE FROM PIRATING YOUR SOFTWARE.  THE HACKERS ARE JUST AS SMART OR SMARTER THAN THE DEVELOPERS.  LOOK AT THE BIG NAME COMPANIES LIKE EA ACTIVISION HECK EVEN BLIZZARD.  ALL EASILY PIRATED.  ALL.  NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO, THEY CAN GENERATE SERIALS, THEY CAN GENERATE FAKE SERVERS FOR ACTIVATION, THEY CAN GOINSIDE OF YOUR CODE AND COPY OUT ANYTHING THAT STOPS THE PROGRAM FROM EXECUTING.  TRUST ME.  I HEAR PEOPLE ALREADY HAVE DRAGON AGE ORGIINS HACKED.  NEED FOR SPEED SHIFT WAS HACKED IN LIKE A WEEK.  ALL YOU CAN DO IS PRAY THAT THERE ARE ENOUGH PEOPLE WHO DONT KNOW HOW EASY IT IS TO GET HACKED STUFF TO BUY YOUR GAME SO THAT YOU CAN MAKE A LIVING.

Geez, no need for screaming, Alecto....

George Clingerman:

I don't work for a game development company, but I do work for a software company. Our cheapest package for our software is $40,000. Time spent on protecting the software via any technical means? 0 hours.

Software piracy is protected legally not technically. I'm with Nick on this one. If all you're really concerned about is someone stealing your game, it's not really worth your time figuring out how to protect yourself from that. Accept it as part of the cost of your development. People ARE going to steal it. Spend less time worrying about protecting yourself from them and more time on figuring out how to convince people they want to buy your game.
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I have to agree with this one. although games that uses a server is probably one of the best and easiest ways to protect your game, but make sure the server actually serves a purpose and that it improve the gaming experience. still everything will get cracked if worth cracking.

another good idea was Xbox first and later PC, only if your game can be played on Xbox of course.

make buying a copy easy, use methods like pay-pal, Ideal (for the Netherlands for example) people dont like when its a hassle when they buy stuff, they want it and FAST.

but i would focus on making a great game first anyway :)

I'd agree with the poster who said if people can get something for free they will do. Sad but true, better to just accept that and work with it.

Just accept that some portion of people will pirate your game no matter what you do. If you really go overboard adding anti-piracy measures, the only one's you're hurting are your customers who now have more hoops to jump through in order to play your game.

Oli Norwell:

I use elicense in my PC projects, it's a pretty good DRM solution, people get to play the games for a couple of days then it locks up until they provide a licence key, which they buy using a credit card/Paypal. I think this type of solution would work fine for any PC XNA game created by those on this site.

Whats the cost of this, I hate websites that hide the costs behind logins and trials. It should be up front for everyone to see.

As far as I can see, most successful indie PC games distribute as shareware demos and sell keys to unlock additional content. 

Whether you use some 3rd party key software, or write a key algorithm yourself, you'll still have to sell the keys through some retailer.  I don't know anything about selling on the Xbox marketplace, but Microsoft must take a cut of that revenue, too.  Can't avoid it.

Sure, people could just steal working keys or write a keygen, but if they genuinely like your game they'll buy it.

I personally would not bother, as others have said, the right game at the right price and people will buy it.