TL;DR: – Independent game developer allows his own game (a “game developer SIM” – how meta can you get ) to be pirated, with a little catch – in the pirate version, players end up bankrupt and losing because rampant piracy prevents their games from selling.
What I found most chuckleworthy are the desperate pleas from players who downloaded the pirated version asking for clues on how to avoid piracy in their SIM.
There was a game - something similar to Operation Flashpoint games - that had a unique anti-piracy measure. If you used a pirated copy, your guns and vehicles would gradually get less and less accurate, making the game unplayable.
In one of the Serious Sam games, if you pirated it an indestructible red scorpion boss spawns and haunts you until you die making it effectively unplayable. I’ve heard that putting this sort of creative and amusing anti-piracy mechanisms in games may reduce the sales, though. The pirates start spreading the word that the game sucks and some pirates just want to test the game before buying and they won’t buy it after it doesn’t work properly for them. It’s still pretty amusing way to deal with the issue, especially in the case linked by the OP.
As funny as it sounds developers have tried the “sabotage the pirated version” approach before and all it does is kill sales because people assume the game is just broken.
) to be pirated, with a little catch – in the pirate version, players end up bankrupt and losing because rampant piracy prevents their games from selling.