CompuServe Messages

re 81758 I think I agree with everything you said. I am more worried about casual copying affecting overall sales. Sales of InterChange on the Amiga have been rather steady, all things considered. Sure, there's a burst of sales when we do a major release, but it's not like a game title. The support hassles for the dongle do scare me. We've never had copy protection before. Paying out $30 to the dongle company for every unit is a real pain, on top of the usual cost of goods, especially for those freebie copies to journalists. 🙂 What I'm most worried about is the headaches that will come from having the dongle: dongles that actually get lost, dongles that supposedly get lost, dongles "lost" in shipping, dongles that "weren't in the box", dongles that don't work on Customer's computer and they need this software to run by tomorrow morning, etc. Lots of potential ill-will, at $30 a pop. I've yet to think of a situation where someone will say, gee, I'm glad they added a dongle to InterChange. Maybe some animator who competes against another animator who's known to pirate everything… that's all I can imagine. I don't know if you caught the gist of this in my first message, but they have a dongle on 3D Studio, and it looks like they devoted a lot of effort to code within the program to make dongle-cracker's life a real hell. I've heard there's a number of tricks they play, in terms of purposely creating bad 3D data or renderings if the dongle isn't present. The error message "invalid normal array" is a red flag to their tech support that the program can't find the dongle. And there's other tricks, like not introducing these sorts of errors in a cracked copy until the 200th mouse click, thereby introducing a time element to determining whether someone's attempt at cracking has really worked. If I did that with InterChange, then people would blame the corrupted data on InterChange, potentially generating bad press or negative word-of-mouth comments. I know it's tough to win at this game…