Almost from the very start, computer and console games have been subject to heavy piracy. From simply copying floppy disks to more sophisticated reverse engineering of entire games cartridges, the activities of pirates have been as creative as those of the game developers themselves. Platform owners and individual games publishers have introduced one protective technology after another, only to see those safeguards thwarted and their intellectual property stolen, resulting in hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of lost revenue. The problem is so bad that some publishers are beginning to consider dropping support for the most compromised platforms, giving up entirely on potentially lucrative market segments.
Studies show that successful anti-piracy can increase the revenue associated with a particular game by up to 50% and more. Consider the difference even a 25% uplift could make for a company, especially as most of this uplift goes straight to the bottom line.
Unfortunately, protecting against games piracy is not easy. Games are demanding applications, with tolerances that demand the utmost performance from their associated hardware, whether a handheld game device or a top-of-the-line gaming PC. Trying to inject some kind of protective technology is a daunting task: how can you ensure the integrity of the game without slowing it down, without making it take more space, and without slowing down the development cycle? Many approaches have been tried, but none with lasting success.
Fortunately, Metaforic offers MetaFortress anti-piracy on a variety of gaming platforms, significantly increasing piracy protection, and reducing the piracy revenue drain. No technology can ever stop all hackers, but MetaFortress has been designed to significantly extend the useful life of individual games, and even if one game did become partially or fully compromised, this would have no effect on other protected games. MetaFortress is easy to apply (it’s an automatic build-step process), typically impacts performance <1%, and case studies show it outlasts alternative solutions by up to 100x. Now is the time to increase your revenues with almost no effort.
Learn More
For more information about our products and how our customers are using them in the Games market:
Read More:
The electronic games market currently generates >$46B revenue, and is expected to grow to >$65B over the next 3 years.
Nevertheless, significant revenues are lost to piracy: for example, a 2009 study found that ten piracy sites provided downloads equivalent to over $10B in revenue in just 1 month.
