Bloodygoodgames: Jeff seems like a nice guy, and his games look amazing, but seems to have the business sense of a newt.
Considering that he's been in business for as long as he has, serving a very narrow niche market (and before that, a narrow niche market which was piece of an even narrower niche market), I'm pretty confident that he knows what he's doing in terms of selling his games. I will agree with you that he's certainly an oddball in trying new ways of doing it.
johnki: Basically, there's a code on the title screen. When you buy the game, you enter the code and they'll send you a new code generated from that code once the payment is transacted. Then you enter the code in the game, and voila, registered.
Which is really no different than the way a lot of shareware used to be distributed and sold, back in the day.
johnki: If you uninstall/reinstall or install it on a new computer,
every single time that you install it, there's a new code on the title screen, meaning you have to dig up your bank/Paypal/what-have-you receipt and send it to their support address, along with the new code.
On Mac OS X, the serial number and registration are stored in .plist files which are pretty easy to find, copy, and move between computers. I have no experience with the Windows versions, but I don't see how it could be different - the system was designed to deter casual piracy while minimizing annoyances to experienced users who needed to move their games between computers.
It's a pain in the arse to be sure, but it's a minor annoyance since I'm still free to copy my game to as many systems as I please. In any case, I've emailed Spiderweb's support to also reregister games I've bought, and IIRC they just asked for my old code. They've also replied pretty quickly, too.
In any case, they switched over to a slightly-less annoying system (where you just punch in a code) for both Avernum: EftP and Avadon.
