Most amusing anti-piracy measures in games

[Jack Of Owls]

First off, let me say that I love clever game developers that program anti-piracy measures into their games that are designed to fuck your shit up after you started the game and already invested a fair bit of your time into it. They're just protecting their IP and having some fun while doing it. My only real personal experience with this was Arma 2. I'm ashamed to admit that I first pirated the the game a few years ago, started to really enjoy myself, then right in the middle of an important firefight, I permanently transmogrified into a small flapping bird. It was such a profound WTF moment for me that rather than being angry with the developers I laughed out loud and enjoyed the joke on me and went on to BUY the game when it was on a Steam sale.

Other classic, evil anti-piracy measures include (or so I'm told):

- one of the Batman games where you leap off a high-rise with the intention of soaring over Gotham's beautiful nighttime vistas with your capeshit but instead plummet, futility flapping downward unto death.

- They Are Billions. A recent RTS/zombie apocalypse City Builder where, in the prated version, you proudly work for hours building your first impenetrable fortress against he outside hordes only to have those hordes magically spawn inside your cool, steampunk fortress and promptly wipe you out. Surprise, surprise, surprise. With Love, from Numantian Games.


I noticed in one of the recent Cleve topics a pirate boosting that he pirated Grimoire and I was thinking how adorable it would -- and of course the obvious scenario -- if Cleve coded some anti-piracy protection into his golden baby, like, say your entire party being suddenly graphically, hideously slimed, meated, prostated and finally consumed by the terrifying homonoid creatures based on the original 8-bit art assets of Stones of Arnhem, but death is, of course, only the beginning of your suffering; now forced to wade hip-deep through unimaginable squalor for all eternity (I'll leave it up to Cleve to envision what this would be. Welcome to Dante's secret, special easter egg Circle of Hell, you pirate fucks!).

What are some other "protection" schemes in actual games that made you smile?

 

[Outlander]

In Serious Sam 3 a giant, fast-moving, undefeatable scorpion-man would appear in the first map.

In Alan Wake I think they let you finish the game but your character sports an eye-patch with the skull and bones.

I don't remember which game had a malfunctioning elevator as an anti-piracy measure, and it was hilarious all the people asking for help about it on the Steam forums.

 

[Mark Richard]

My favourite is still the meta anti-piracy measure from Game Dev Tycoon. Players with a pirated copy would eventually go bankrupt as their in-game products were pirated at an ever-increasing rate.

 

[Swigen]

A lot of Steam games are on this pirate site, GOG I think it’s called, well the cheeky devs have made it so it takes 17 times longer to download a game from GOG than it does from Steam!! Hahahhahahhahahahha!! Pretty good piss take, that!

 

[DalekFlay]

A lot of Steam games are on this pirate site, GOG I think it’s called, well the cheeky devs have made it so it takes 17 times longer to download a game from GOG than it does from Steam!! Hahahhahahhahahahha!! Pretty good piss take, that!

Get better internet, farmer boy.

 

[Swigen]

A lot of Steam games are on this pirate site, GOG I think it’s called, well the cheeky devs have made it so it takes 17 times longer to download a game from GOG than it does from Steam!! Hahahhahahhahahahha!! Pretty good piss take, that!

Get better internet, farmer boy.

But it’s not problem on Steam! Might be cuz I’m trying to download it through the Galaxy app, but every time there’s a tasty sale on GOG I’m hesitant to pull the trigger cuz it’s sooooo fucken slow.

 

[Norfleet]

My favourite is still the meta anti-piracy measure from Game Dev Tycoon. Players with a pirated copy would eventually go bankrupt as their in-game products were pirated at an ever-increasing rate.

Which is funny, because to the best of my knowledge, this has never actually happened and there is not a single company that has actually suffered any real consequences from piracy, "on paper losses" notwithstanding. In fact, companies like Microsoft effectively built their empire on piracy: Do you think Windows would have taken off with the installbase it did if it was not widely pirated from offices, thus sealing in a userbase and pushing away competing alternatives? As Microsoft forgets this and tries to tighten their grip over the years, you notice how they've been losing ground against competing alternatives. Installbase is everything, once you stop being the absolutely dominant platform, people start supporting alternatives, and your hold weakens. A similar success story is in WinRAR, whose "antipiracy" just amounts to firm warning that your "free trial" has expired, without actually stopping you, which allowed it to gain ground against its ZIP competitor.

 

[DalekFlay]

But it’s not problem on Steam! Might be cuz I’m trying to download it through the Galaxy app, but every time there’s a tasty sale on GOG I’m hesitant to pull the trigger cuz it’s sooooo fucken slow.

They both download at the same 30-40MB per second for me, but I don't use Galaxy.

 

[oldmanpaco]

In Starflight if you answered the code wheel wrong when leaving the starport Interstel Security would eventually track you down. Good times.

Also was it Curse of the Azure Bonds that tossed you off a bridge if you answered the question wrong three times?

 

[ultimanecat]

Spyro: Year of the Dragon on PSX had several layers of copy protection running checksums essentially in real-time where if it detected a pirated copy, a character would tell you and the game would become a buggy mess:
-the game would soft-lock or become unpausable
-the language would randomly change
-enemies would not drop needed items
-random levels would load instead of the desired location
-if you somehow reached the last boss, you’d be kicked to the title and your save deleted

According to an old GamaSutra article I read, it managed to keep a functional game off of piracy sites for... two months, and it kept a full-time programmer busy for three months to implement and made Q&A much more difficult before release, so I’m honestly not sure if it was worth it.

 

[Zarniwoop]

X: Beyond the Frontier had one that made your credits halve every few minutes if your game was pirated. Hilarious.

 

[markec]

In Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders if you enter a wrong code during the game you get sent in a pirate jail.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

In Starflight if you answered the code wheel wrong when leaving the starport Interstel Security would eventually track you down. Good times.

Also was it Curse of the Azure Bonds that tossed you off a bridge if you answered the question wrong three times?

I remember playing Starflight on my C64 in the late 80s and legally renting the game from a small company in the mid-west. I had only one week to play it, along with about 3 or 4 other rented titles, so I would copy the disks using nibbler software, then take the manuals and codewheels down to my local library and use the photocopiers to copy them. But then after I had returned the games and was all set to start enjoying Starflight at my leisure, I discovered 100% garbled graphics on my screen whenever I encountered alien races in space. I wonder if that was part of the copy protection. Heh.

 

[jebsmoker]

ARMA games gradually become unplayable if you play them pirated

 

[Removal]

Earthbound boosted the numbers of enemies by a good amount on pirated copies, and when you got to the final boss the game froze, asked you to reload and then deleted all your saves

 

[Echo Mirage]

ARMA games gradually become unplayable if you play them pirated

And turn you into a seagull at random.

 

[Falksi]

They took it too far when they started attaching canons, long nines and swivel guns to the boxes.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

They took it too far when they started attaching canons, long nines and swivel guns to the boxes.

Are you talking about Arma? Well, I would personally consider having First Contact aliens in Arma to be taking it too far over that. lol.

 

[Reinhardt]

In early versions of Battle Brothers, if you pirated game, after some time there was only thieves available for hire in all villages.

 

[Garbage]

Anti-piracy measures are dead, nowadays the hip thing to do is to punish paying customers with shitty DRM that impacts the game performance/loading times

 

[unfairlight]

My favourite is still the meta anti-piracy measure from Game Dev Tycoon. Players with a pirated copy would eventually go bankrupt as their in-game products were pirated at an ever-increasing rate.

Only in the copy that the developers themselves put on TPB, actually.

 

[unfairlight]

Puggsy on the Mega Drive is not so much amusing as it is notable. It detects pirated copies via SRAM present on the cartridge, as SRAM is used for storing saves in most Mega Drive games. However, the game uses a password system and has no save system and hence no SRAM on legitimate cartridges; and since pirate cartridges were all largely the same and had those SRAM chips on board if it detected them it didn't allow you to continue past an easier version of the first boss.
Worms Armageddon on mobile gave pirated .apks a pirate hat and a very low health pool.
GTA IV gave players a perma-drunk cam that got shakier and shakier and a constantly decreasing health pool if they pirated it.

A very small Youtube channel has a series of various interesting anti-piracy measures in games. It's interesting trivia.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4AXcZfFojN4jiycgl0DT2rqwAC5fpUZ-

 

[Azdul]

Developers of Titan Quest thought it was a great idea to crash without a message if the game detected a pirated copy.
After launch the popular opinion on Internet forums was that the game was a crashing piece of shit, which limited sales.

There was mildly amusing interview with one of delusional managers saying that piracy destroyed their company reputation and they had to close the studio.

 

[Norfleet]

Only in the copy that the developers themselves put on TPB, actually.

That's pretty funny.

I know if I make a game, I am totally leaking it on TPB in a way which is pirate-themed, so the game works, but you'll be hard-pressed to post a screenshot that doesn't reveal you are a pirate.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

fantadomat cannot enter this topic, can he?