I want to ask, are there any experienced developers out there that have dealt with the issue?

My suggestion: save the efforts to avoid the unavoidable and put it into polishing your game to attract more paying customers.

are there any experienced developers out there that have dealt with the issue?

been there, been hacked, lost the company.

the only way to keep your software secure is to not put all of it on the users device.

short of that, there's drm technologies, hardware, software, or internet based. and any drm also requires anti-hack technology to protect the drm code.

when i first faced the issue, i developed an in-house hardware (key disk) based copy protection scheme, but with no anti-hack protection. that was sufficient for many years. the free online demo wasn't the whole game, and no registered user ever hacked the games. when digital distribution became the rave, i jumped on board the bandwagon like an idiot, and went to software (registration password based on hardware ID) drm, with no anti-hack protection. now the demo had the whole game, all you had to do was enter a password to mach your hardware id - or hack around the password checking code. Soon after the release of the software DRM demo, sales suddenly dropped to near zero. i discovered the game had been hacked, then posted on a website by a guy in nigeria with an isp in china, on a server in russia, or some such thing. lost the company, had to get a real job.

The ironic thing is i still get fan mail from folks who only played the hacked version - thinking it was a legit version.

The title that got hacked was Caveman v1.3.

Whether folks will buy legit vs download hacked depends on how rich they feel, how easy it is to find and download, and their morals. Unfortunately, the average impoverished college student will download rather than paying if possible (hey - that means more beer money- right?), or doing without due to moral principals.

How do you stop your game from being torrented?

How do you stop your game from being torrented?

You cant.

Not only can't you (short of some always-online type solutions), there's little evidence showing that's it's necessarily a bad thing (and before any passionate replies, I'm not weighing in here on the ethics of piracy, simply the effects of it. And, while yes, there are studies suggesting it can be detrimental, there are similar studies showing otherwise, and as far as I can tell, both conclusions seem to fall into how the data is interpreted as piracy numbers are difficult to interpret as they're not always lost sales, often overlap with paying customers, sometimes spur sales, etc, It's a complex beast).

I think what generally drives piracy is lack of availability/distribution, heavy-handed DRM, or prohibitively high costs. I'd suggest if you want the smallest possible amount of people pirating your game, make it accessible, affordable, and not burdened with drm obstacles. While there will always be people who will pirate the game regardless, these things push away otherwise paying customers, and it's this latter group that you should be concerned with. If you don't want to lose sales from people in other countries, make it available there. If you don't want to lose sales from people on a budget, make it affordable to them, etc.

Basically, start with the assumption that it will be pirated, but don't worry about that group, because they weren't going to buy your game anyway, and focus on offering the best possible product to potential customers.