Lenslok was a pain to implement. I had Elite and the lenslok was very difficult to get just right.
I know other games employed it or something similar to it and tbh I understand its necessity but they surely could have come up with a better system than lenslok.
It was certainly novel I suppose, but typing the right password was down to utter guesswork 90% of the time! Oh, memories of gritted teeth and mumbled swears when it reset the Speccy and you'd have to sit through the loading all over again...
I do find it odd when people grumble about Lenslok. Yes, it was annoying having to spend the time entering the code before you could play having already waited for it to load, but I never had any problems actually using it. I always did the calibration thing, matching the width on screen to the same size as the flattened Lenslok, then fold it up and read the code from the screen. Why did so many people have problems with it (aside from having a TV too big to reduce the code to the required size)?
Elite and The Art Studio both used it and I put many hours into them, yet don't recall having to reload them because it wouldn't work.
I think I had (and still have somewhere) Tomohawk and Elite with Lenslok devices (I seem to remember Elite's was red?), I never had any problems either. I thought they were quite funky actually.
Looking back I think it would probably be quite easy to have worked out the letters without one, it already gives you OK, so how hard could it have been to work out where the columns went enough to guess?
I suspect the mistake of shipping the wrong one with 500 copies probably fed into bad feeling, nobody hates copy protection more than customers who can't use something they've paid for.
And I can see how anyone with a TV larger than a certain size would also struggle a bit, though you could always just move it further away from the screen. But then, if you had no idea how it worked, you'd maybe not know that.
Not being able to copy it would have caused grumbling in the playgrounds too. :)
I suspect the main reason they stopped using it wouldn't have been the bad publicity, but the cost of it versus the money they gained from more sales.
I remember using it once and ONLY once - ended up screaming "Bastard!" at the TV before giving away my copy of Elite (with the Lenslok) to an unsuspecting friend.
Serve you all right for playing Elite on a far, far inferior machine :-D
Now as for the copy protection that was JSW 2, I remember spending three hours copying the colour chart that came with it so that my mate could play it (I'm red/brown blue/green colourblind).
Serve you all right for playing Elite on a far, far inferior machine :-D
Now as for the copy protection that was JSW 2, I remember spending three hours copying the colour chart that came with it so that my mate could play it (I'm red/brown blue/green colourblind).
LOL. A work colleague was discussing this very same thing the other day. His method was to photocopy the colour chart on black and white paper and learn how to translate the various shades of grey into their correct colours through practise.
I remember using it once and ONLY once - ended up screaming "Bastard!" at the TV before giving away my copy of Elite (with the Lenslok) to an unsuspecting friend.
What kind of a rich spoilt brat were you that you could afford an expensive game like Elite only to give it away so quickly??? :)
I have five Lenslocks for various games. It looks like I was just shy of Ace and the Art Studio for a full set.
I suspect, like with all these things, the companies tried them out for a couple of games, figured that their sales weren't shooting up on account of reduced piracy, and then abandoned them for other methods.
I wonder if the people who created the Lenslock also created those annoying 'captcha' type-in sections you often have to use before download something from a sharing site? They both have the same affect when I fail yet again to guess correctly what I'm supposed to type-in grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
The companies probably learned the hard way - i.e. through wasted expense - what everyone with half a brain knew but wouldn't admit publicly. At least not loud enough to shout down the likes of our man Br*ce. That stopping people copying your game does not lead to increased sales. It just means fewer people have illegal copies. People who weren't going to pay for it either way.
That stopping people copying your game does not lead to increased sales. It just means fewer people have illegal copies.
I'm sure it makes some level of difference, there has to be a certain number of people who would copy it off their mate but ended up buying it instead.
Whether the difference it makes is worth the cost of adding the protection, especially when it comes to physical devices like lenslok, is debatable. The problem is that calculation is hard to prove without real data.
And when it comes to data, it's hard to get the data when companies are quite sketchy about sales figures. Plus, how do you determine if a game is selling well because of the anti-piracy measures, the price, or simply how well received it was by magazines or pushed by advertising?
I'm pretty sure there are anecdotal stories from various publishers which say the most important time for their game sales were (maybe still are for A1 titles) the first few weeks, so if you could prevent pirated copies during that point you protected your margins.
But then they are talking about competing with dodgy pirate sellers who would crack (zero day) and sell the games, which is a clear direct impact on sales, rather than playground copying.
Again it's a hard topic to get good data on, so hard to know for sure. These days some developers get good publicity from not using copy protection, and maybe doing that does increase sales for them in some instances. I'm not sure you can generalise with that though, and say it would apply to the latest GTA title.
I wonder if the people who created the Lenslock also created those annoying 'captcha' type-in sections you often have to use before download something from a sharing site? They both have the same affect when I fail yet again to guess correctly what I'm supposed to type-in grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Yeah I hate those things with a passion. Luckily, the new 'numbers' one seems to have been devised by someone who's not an idiot.
Comments
7 titles in all
A massive pain in the ar5e.
A small plastic device that you placed over the TV to unscramble a code which would allow you to play your purchased game.
It was designed to prevent copying, but it was massively unpopular with end users and had issues.
Consider yourself lucky enough not to have had the pleasure :)
I know other games employed it or something similar to it and tbh I understand its necessity but they surely could have come up with a better system than lenslok.
That was written by well known forum member obo.
Elite and The Art Studio both used it and I put many hours into them, yet don't recall having to reload them because it wouldn't work.
Looking back I think it would probably be quite easy to have worked out the letters without one, it already gives you OK, so how hard could it have been to work out where the columns went enough to guess?
I suspect the mistake of shipping the wrong one with 500 copies probably fed into bad feeling, nobody hates copy protection more than customers who can't use something they've paid for.
And I can see how anyone with a TV larger than a certain size would also struggle a bit, though you could always just move it further away from the screen. But then, if you had no idea how it worked, you'd maybe not know that.
Not being able to copy it would have caused grumbling in the playgrounds too. :)
I suspect the main reason they stopped using it wouldn't have been the bad publicity, but the cost of it versus the money they gained from more sales.
Now as for the copy protection that was JSW 2, I remember spending three hours copying the colour chart that came with it so that my mate could play it (I'm red/brown blue/green colourblind).
LOL. A work colleague was discussing this very same thing the other day. His method was to photocopy the colour chart on black and white paper and learn how to translate the various shades of grey into their correct colours through practise.
What kind of a rich spoilt brat were you that you could afford an expensive game like Elite only to give it away so quickly??? :)
I suspect, like with all these things, the companies tried them out for a couple of games, figured that their sales weren't shooting up on account of reduced piracy, and then abandoned them for other methods.
I wasn't rich. I bought it at a jumble/yard sale for ?2 - for a 10-year-old, that was a bargain.
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
I'm sure it makes some level of difference, there has to be a certain number of people who would copy it off their mate but ended up buying it instead.
Whether the difference it makes is worth the cost of adding the protection, especially when it comes to physical devices like lenslok, is debatable. The problem is that calculation is hard to prove without real data.
And when it comes to data, it's hard to get the data when companies are quite sketchy about sales figures. Plus, how do you determine if a game is selling well because of the anti-piracy measures, the price, or simply how well received it was by magazines or pushed by advertising?
I'm pretty sure there are anecdotal stories from various publishers which say the most important time for their game sales were (maybe still are for A1 titles) the first few weeks, so if you could prevent pirated copies during that point you protected your margins.
But then they are talking about competing with dodgy pirate sellers who would crack (zero day) and sell the games, which is a clear direct impact on sales, rather than playground copying.
Again it's a hard topic to get good data on, so hard to know for sure. These days some developers get good publicity from not using copy protection, and maybe doing that does increase sales for them in some instances. I'm not sure you can generalise with that though, and say it would apply to the latest GTA title.
Yeah I hate those things with a passion. Luckily, the new 'numbers' one seems to have been devised by someone who's not an idiot.