Gaming's most fiendish anti-piracy tricks

gamesradar.com

18 points·cssndrx··6 comments

Heard of one game manufacturer that willfully distributed a version of their game on torrent. The torrented version of the game came bundled with a live webcam virus. They then made a website to stream the pirates on webcam. Ouch.

So you didn't find a story of a legit game manifacturer commiting multiple felonies just to embarass those darn pirates a little .. implausible?

Neutering game play is a particularly bad way to punish pirates -- they're likely to tell all their friends that the "game sucks" and leave bad reviews on the web. Bad reviews don't deter the "try before you buy" pirate crowd near as much as they deter legitimate purchasers.

One thing you'd think they'd learn: DRM schemes like this punish legit customers more often than pirates.

Most of these can be fixed with a JPG scan.

The ones that modify the game can be fixed with a drm crack... With the side benefit that the cracked games are guaranteed to never mess up, where the real game did mess up for legit players sometimes.

The 'secret code' ones can all be solved easier with a keygen/lookup than actually doing the work... And of course, only pirates will even know there's a keygen/lookup program out there. And if they lose it, they just re-download it, unlike the physical media.

I wonder if any game companies have secretly released their own pirate version, complete with money making dodgy-ware, to try and get some money back.

Back? That's assuming the pirate would have otherwise bough the game. This is only partially true. Without piracy, most pirates would play fewer games.

And by the way, it appears some did: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738447

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