Comments - Sutrabla

Dear SomaticVision,
Having a serial key to activate your game is in my opinion not the problem. Even DRM is not a problem unless it causes problems. Even big budget games, if they even have limited activations, those used activations expire after some time automatically. Then people would not have to contact you to unlock the game again. Shame you removed your game from Greenlight as you could have used Steamworks as DRM.
I understand you want to protect your IP and that's reasonable. But there must be better ways to do it than limit to 3. Maybe start by limit to 3 and have activations re-added automatically after say a month. And then after a year or two remove this restriction completely. If people not willing to pay the cheap price for a game, they also will not pay even $1. A pirated copy will never equal one sale, sad but true.
DarkSpore had always on DRM. It has been shut down... XBox One, I bet you heard about the major negative public reaction on their DRM. They reverted their decision. These are not comparable with an 'indie' game with limited installs, but the more limited a DRM is, the more negative it is precieved. It's not about protecting your game from the 'pro' crackers, its just to protect your game from being given to a friend by your average joe. As you're a programmer you might find a better and more consumer friendly way to implement DRM. Trying to make a DRM that is uncrackable -ever might be impossible. Has been tried... and never succeeded.
Ignore pirates and cracked versions, focus on people who pay for the game.
Hope you understand what I mean.

Ah, my bad. I thought Desura offered the same. On/off-topic... this game was removed from greenlight, which is unfortiunate.

First of all, I am not against DRM. I beleave DRM like Steam or Desura are great, you can re-install as many times you want without worrying about installers, patches, CD's and so on. However, I am not for DRM that will decrease the confort of legitime users like Always On DRM or Activation limits. I would not have a problem with those if it would never cause problems, but as we all know Murphey's law... I install-remove games when I want to play them. I'm not gonna keep games installed on my HDD forever. Because of this the activation limit might very well be the worst kind of DRM. Do the used activations expire over time? Anyway, I hope you find a good solution as tbh, contacting devs or publishers to ask to reactivate the game is not only a waste of time, it's also anoying for all parties involved.