Most amusing anti-piracy measures in games

[unfairlight]

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.

Alan Wake did that, save for the intentionally leaking thing. It gave the main character a pirate hat throughout the entire thing, but I think the game still worked as normal.
I'd do something a bit more destructive, like by blueballing them at a major story point and deleting saves or effectively making the game into a demo asking people to buy the game after you boot again. Just "revealing someone as a pirate" isn't really worthwhile since no one cares.

 

[Dayyālu]

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

The Long Live The Queen dev did a similar trick, putting out several pirated copies in which your character got tortured in her dreams by a pirate version of herself.

Gal has a sense of humour.

 

[luj1]

Serious Sam 3. I did manage to crack it in the end, though.

 

[DraQ]

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.

That's amusing.

 

[Glop_dweller]

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.

Intolerable insult is a real consequence, as is the virtual slap to the face by those unentitled to the work.

_____
I was once told a story second hand about a guy who made a security tool [software], and had some exorbitant licensing fee; (really insane price, but he thought it was worth it... and perhaps it was). The story goes that he was approached by an arm of law enforcement, and they demanded a copy for their own use; he was fine with that so long as they paid for it. They scoffed, and demanded a free copy. He refused. They pirated it, and supposedly it locked up their network, and they had to get him to undo it.

This was told to me in earnest by someone who knew the man, and really believed it; so who is to say...

I always side with the developer on this issue, but this story highlights a problem. The developer who protects their work that aggressively, allows the pirate to weaponize their work; what if that had been a hospital that some vindictive bastard (or nut) had installed the pirated software to, for the purpose of locking their network?

_____

The best anti-piracy measure that I know of, is for a particular application that I use often, where the developer also wrote the e-commerce platform that distributes it. The customer's copy of the software is watermarked with the customer's own login credentials... which means that anyone using that (personalized) program can login to the original customer's account with the developer's company.

*Just imagine if Steam & GoG both embedded your respective account login & password information into every game from your library with them...
_____
lol@Nikt

 

[Nutria]

Newly discovered Vigilante malware outs software pirates and blocks them

When viewed through a hex editor, the executables also contain a racial epithet that’s repeated more than 1,000 times followed by a large, randomly sized block of alphabetical characters.

Okay, come on, which one of you did this?

 

[anvi]

I remember code wheels which were 2 cardboard disks stuck together with a pin and you had to rotate it to reveal a code and get into the game. Kids at school would take them apart and photocopy the two parts to copy it. Some games would ask you for the first word from various pages in the manual, so people just wrote a list of the words and numbers. I remember that thing with the bird in Arma2, there was a similar one when a company made the screen turn green or something and people on the forum complaining about it got shamed. Another dev went on bit torrent and took the IP of all the people downloading his game and then banned them all from the forum.

 

[ExposedBrainMatter]

Back in the day Game Maker used to have pirate symbols over your game if you had a pirated copy... except it happened to legit copies and made everybody mad lol

 

[mondblut]

The funniest thing about these measures is when the entire internet starts crying that the game is a broken, unplayable mess, and mortified developers rush head over heels to salvage their reputation.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The anti-piracy measure where they include a 300mb virtual machine with the game's exe and pay off reviewers and "journalists" to say it doesn't hurt performance.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

During (humorous) internal discussions on possible anti-piracy measures, there was a joke suggestion that v1.0 should have an 'expiration date' assigned to it.

Example: v1.0 is out, but stops working 30 days after release. The time limit is patched out the moment there's a scene release of the game (or prolonged if 2 weeks pass without a scene release).

It's impractical (and possibly illegal), but I found it amusing as hell.

 

[laclongquan]

The funniest thing about this thing:

All the above mentioned that use antipiracy measure in their games?

Yeah, them? They are mostly unknown, limited sale, games

ANd the moral of the story?

Dont use antipiracy measure in your game if you ever want, ever hope for a successful game

 

[Denim Destroyer]

Lenslok was a form of copy protection which required a special lens to decode a scrambled message on the computer screen. There were two problems with this. a game needs to be probably formatted for your screen so the message could be displayed. Screens that were too little or too big could not properly be formatted thus locking you out of the game. Also the more obvious problem was being locked out of the game if you lost the lens.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Lenslok was a form of copy protection which required a special lens to decode a scrambled message on the computer screen. There were two problems with this. a game needs to be probably formatted for your screen so the message could be displayed. Screens that were too little or too big could not properly be formatted thus locking you out of the game. Also the more obvious problem was being locked out of the game if you lost the lens.

you also had something like a 15 second time limit to descramble the text

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Save game as a service. Or/and microtransaction to save or start a new game.

 

[Baron Dupek]

I still think that there is something fishy in STALKER Clear Sky. If you play without disc in DVD drive later in the game Hog (mercenary boss) won't talk with you and you won't progress.
Because it's not like Shadow of Chernobyl where everybody can die and quests fails one after another and you would still finish the game. Quite contrary - it's linear as fuck, and you need Hog.
Hope you enjoy playing with jet engine by your knees for ultimate Zone experience, cyka.

Save game as a service. Or/and microtransaction to save or start a new game.

Bet on Soldier save system but adapted by modern game live-service publishers.

 

[ELEXmakesMeHard]

Quest for Glory 4 had an unusual approach to this. You could play the pirated game just fine, but if you wanted to unlock healing pills & stamina pills you had to look up a kind of "recipe codex" from the manual, and input the right combo of 5 elements.

 

[Red Hexapus]

From the top of my head:
> In Settlers 3, your iron smelters instead of producing iron you would produce pigs, which made making weapons impossible
> In Alan Wake, you would play the entire game with the main character model wearing a pirate eyepatch.
> In Witcher 2 (i think), the models of sexy women (like the one in Roche's camp) would be replaced by a model of an ugly old one. Imagine the sex scenes....

Also, remember that long time ago I've played Gobliiins on Amiga and the screen would get progressively darker and darker so at some point you couldn't see shit. Couldn't find info about it though, so I'm not sure if it's that or something else.

PS. just remembered, there was also some Game Studio tycoon game, where at some point you would start losing money in an accelerated rate, because everyone pirated the games you made.

 

[Red Hexapus]

Quest for Glory 4 had an unusual approach to this. You could play the pirated game just fine, but if you wanted to unlock healing pills & stamina pills you had to look up a kind of "recipe codex" from the manual, and input the right combo of 5 elements.

Not only this, but you need Hydration Potion to progress in the game which requires the formula for Dr Cranium. This means you could solve 80% of the puzzles and then get stuck.

 

[Hag]

Rayman 2 takes pirated games very literally :