This troper was involved in implementing a variant of SafeDisc on a computer game that was being sent to game magazines for reviews. (Game magazines were notorious for... well, being sources of pirated games at the time, shall we say.) We had problems getting this copy protection to work ''ourselves''; you can imagine all the fun that our reviewers had. Not surpringly, the reviews weren't very good. (And having a not-very-good game didn't help matters.)

So one day I'm looking through the XBOX 360 home page, when I see that the new {{Alan Wake}} DLC (The Writer) was finally out. "Holy Crap!" I said, "I'm gonna download that right now!" And so I did. I did this on my sister's 360, and then brought my hard drive with the game to my cousin's house. I set up and try to play the game there and... it gives me some message saying that there was an error loading the DLC files on the hard drive. I really didn't care, since I had gotten Sonic the Hedgehog 4 (which worked, strangely) and Dead Rising 2 that day, but that brought up an important question: Since I downloaded it on my sister's 360, what's gonna happen if I try to play it on ''my'' 360? Freaking copy protection...

It seems to really depend on the game. Some DLC is bound to your account, while others seem to tie you DLC down to your specific console. Only retreiving -in a sense: binding- your account to another console allows you access to your DLC again. Alas, I think retrieval of accounts can only be done once every 6 months (and you'll have to beg MS if you want to do it earlier). I understand the idea behind this principle, but damnit! I want to play my games on my GF's 360 as well, ''with'' my DLC!

This troper remembers the old days of copy-protection where you had to look up a specific word in the manual or use a code wheel or colour chart quite fondly. There was just something about it that made me smile when I saw those copy-protection screens.

''Frostsabre.'' This trope can be extended to anti-hacking programs found on MMO games. One infamous example is Mu Online and Game Guard. If you attempt to play this with a newer ATI card (5450 series or higher) with newer drivers then Game Guard accuses you of having a hacking program. A possible solution is to downgrade the ATI driver...but in most cases that doesn't work. Nevermind the hack hasn't been fixed for six months.

Another "Game Guard that doesn't work" case is Trickster and Windows 7. Apparently, the Game Guard driver hasn't been updated since 2006 or thereabouts. Fortunately, the developers had the balls to remove it, and Windows 7 players enjoyed the game. This Trope is protected against copying.