![]() 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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