Serious Sam HD I believe had the unkillable scorpion. Other games have their own forms of “silent” drm, some of whom take it as a challenge. You are giving an example of DRM that affects all products and all consumers, and your disc check DRM example is flawed because these are examples of poorly executed DRM mechanics that rely on hardware or software requirements that people don’t always conform to.Įarthbound had DRM, to my knowledge, amongst my friends and on the internet, I pretty much never heard of any legitimate consumer being affected by it. This “DRM” did not affect any legitimate person cause the DRM was never even IN the legitimate version in the first place. It still has nothing to do with MY point. Nor I with them, though I’d suggest that perhaps if they had attempted to work some of the aforementioned examples into their simulation, it would have been instructive on how they can actually embrace tactics that can make them a great deal more money than just trolling potential customers. To be fair, there are still individuals who either can’t make a legal purchase because of payment-issues or who genuinely cannot afford the game. When I was younger, downloading illegal copies was practically normal but this was mostly because global game distribution was in its infancy. ![]() And to their credit, the developers seem to be quite level-headed about piracy in general, particularly when this game’s user-base is 94% from unauthorized versions (though that may have been sprung by the developer releasing their own cracked copy). The answer, of course, is this is a trolling attempt, not part of the sim at all. And what about indie developers that utilize CwF+RtB, like tinyBuild or contributors to the Humble Bundles? Why isn’t there room for all of them within the simulation? After all, I’m fairly certain folks like Ubisoft, EA, and the like haven’t been driven into the ground by piracy. If the result of piracy in the cracked version always results in ruin for the developer, then we know the simulator is flawed. On forums, the pirates were asking for help, saying things like “Can I research DRM or something?” and “Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me!” Detecting irony, it appears, is a skill.Īll that said, and perhaps this makes me weird, my first thought once I’d stopped laughing was that the simulator had failed completely. Besides that, the effects of the trolling in the responses of some of the infringers are downright hilarious. It is a bit of passive aggression, but one which both makes a point and isn’t angry or mean. You do get to try the gameplay out for a bit before encountering the trolling code. The cracked version doesn’t disrupt the entire game, as Ubisoft’s vuvuzella did. It’s really hard for me to get mad at them for this. If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.” ![]() “Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally. So, as players spend a few hours playing and growing their own game dev company, they will start to see the following message, styled like any other in-game message: The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail… Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers. Such is the case with Greenheart Games, who released their game Game Dev Tycoon, and simultaneously released a cracked version that trolled infringers magnificently. While I have some of the same issues, I find it even more entertaining when a move like this is done by an indie developer, particularly when that developer goes out of its way to otherwise be exceptionally level-headed about the pirating of their game. Certainly I have no sympathy for the pirates, nor for Ubisoft, whose trolling attempt was a minor hiccup corrected when other cracks of the game came out. I’d of course prefer they have done something a bit more forward-thinking than simply trolling pirates, but it made me laugh. As much as I hate Ubisoft, it made me smile when they released a version of one game that filled the audio up with vuvuzellas if it was a pirated copy. When we have talked about game developers messing with pirates in the past, I’ve actually found it quite entertaining. Tue, Apr 30th 2013 10:49am - Timothy Geigner
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