Follow the link for further reading.Game Dev Tycoon developers give pirates a taste of their own medicine
"Cracked" version uses in-game "piracy" to limit progress—with hilarious results.
Over the years, game developers have gone to great lengths to prevent players from pirating their games, from physical paper wheels to intrusive DRM. Other developers don't block piracy outright but instead attempt to shame or inhibit pirates by coding disruptive "features" that activate when a cracked version is detected. The developers at Greenheart Games took the second tack for their new title Game Dev Tycoon, but they did so in what has to be the most hilarious way we've ever seen.
On the Greenheart Games blog, developer Patrick Klug details how he intentionally seeded a "pirated" version of Game Dev Tycoon at the very moment that the title went up on the developer's store yesterday. This illicit version plays exactly like the official paid version for the first few hours, letting players control a miniature game development studio trying to release successful titles in a simulated marketplace.
After a while, though, those playing the pirated version will be confronted with a message that, as Klug puts it, takes "the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers."...Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally. If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.
The above article has also raised further questions about the practice:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/p ... rce=feedly
Follow the link for further reading.Piracy or baiting? The thorny legal question of Game Dev Tycoon’s honeypot
Is it piracy just because the user thinks it is? What if the developer encourages it?
Earlier this week, the developers at Greenheart Games distributed a crippled version of its new game Game Dev Tycoon disguised as a "cracked" version of the full game. The little Internet experiment served as an ironic and humorous poke at software pirates and a smart way to call attention to the challenges indie developers face with piracy.
But the whole incident also stirred up a tricky legal and ethical debate among commenters and editors here at Ars Technica regarding the actual nature of piracy. The basic question is this: can the people who downloaded the crippled version of Game Dev Tycoon, thinking it was a "cracked" version, really be considered pirates?
As a moral question, it's pretty cut and dried as far as we're concerned. The version of the game that Greenheart Games posted on torrent sharing sites came with a description that said the file was a "FULL VERSION... CRACKED AND WORKING!" Whatever the other facts in the case, the downloaders who saw that description obviously intended to download a free, unlocked version of Greenheart's game rather than paying for it. Morally, that's piracy.
Legally, though, it's another matter. To be guilty of copyright infringement, you need to obtain the software without the permission of the copyright holder. In this case, Greenheart was the one that originally put the "cracked" version of the game on BitTorrent and promoted it on P2P sites. Yes, the developer was doing it to prove a point, so it seems unlikely it will actually pursue any damages from the "pirates" it thwarted with the crippled game (UPDATE: Greenheart Games' Patrick Klug told Ars Technica directly that "it was never our intention to pursue any legal action against those people who downloaded the cracked version"). Still, if it wanted to sue any downloaders, would it even have a theoretical case?
...
