These trolling systems are eventually cracked as well. They only work at first because no one bothers to check for them.

I don’t claim to be an expert or anything, but from my understanding it’s all generally the same: identifying the code integrity checks that trigger the anti-piracy and either disabling them or injecting their own code that feeds them the values they want.

People very often think they’ll do something and will do something else when put in that situation.  Polls on what people would do in a hypothetical are wildly off from what they actually do when that hypothetical becomes reality.

One of the Serious Sam games had a boss on the first level that was invincible. It was a scorpion thing.

Yeah I would love it if Kotaku reached out to piracy groups and asked them what happens on their side, how long does it take to address these things, how do their comments blow up when fans suddenly realise the cracked game is unplayable. 

or you could argue that piracy INCREASED their sales since the pirated version served effectively as a demo.

I’ve heard about developers doing this in a lot of games. Something about a useless chicken gun in Crysis, not being able to glide in Arkham Asylum, that sort of stuff. But how does the game know that it’s a pirated version? What stops a legitimate copy from behaving in this way? Is there not a way to fix the pirated…

In my experience, when I ran a poll (this was some 6+ years ago though) on a pirate scene forum for an article I was writing, I asked how many people would buy a game if it wasn’t / couldn’t be cracked. Only 14% said they would buy the game if a game wasn’t cracked and it was a game they really wanted. Most said that…

“ He also says that since turning the anti-pirate measures on that sales of Cricket 22 “are up 300%”, thanking those who have “converted” to a legitimate copy,”

So, people pirating copies *ARE* lost sales then, as they could have bought it all along, and did when piracy was no longer a viable option.  Interesting.  

Go work a summer job?

“I have no choice...”  Fuck off.  You are literally on a “gaming reviews, news and tips” website which is an option to get an idea of a game before you buy it.

Sounds like an excuse, because demos are still aplenty, and most online Stores do have a period where you can still refund the game.

Is Chrome a game? Because if it is, then yes...they’ve done that lol.

Unsurprisingly, Nintendo is responsible for the most brutal anti-piracy measure I’ve heard of. If you played a pirated copy of Earthbound back in the day, the game would massively increase the rate of random encounters, and sometimes throw extremely high level monsters at you much earlier in the game than you could…

Not sure about the game saves one but Serious Sam if you pirated it had a invincible giant enemy that spawned and hunted you down in all the levels.

Wouldn’t the best thing be to disable saves in general?

Love these kind of methods. Could they also make the game take longer to load/save, make save games get really bloated (like multiple gigs of space per save), enemies gain healing and extra armor, or has a game done these?

They’re mostly steering clear.  Her being equally if not more guilty than him doesn’t sit well with their “Women can do no wrong” stance. 

All I can say is I’m happy she’s just doing whatever the hell she wants. Whether it’s good, bad, a cry for help, whatever people are guessing...it’s not for me to decide. The girl is living, so let her live.

I will always love Minnie Driver. She came to my city for a local cancer org’s fundraiser, and my dad happened to be in the hospital at the time being treated for pancreatic cancer (he unfortunately passed away nine years ago this month). She took the time to visit with a ton of patients, including my dad, without PR…