“Serious Sam” Creators Think Up Creative Ways to Stop Copyright Infringement

Could it be that the confused and congested bureaucracy known as our country’s DRM laws (which basically protect game companies like Croteam from being pirated), don’t amount to jack sh*t?

As the staff at Guyism astutely notes, perhaps the most important step to battling piracy is to make games that don’t suck?

But what if that’s not enough to stop piracy? Obviously we’ve had this problem with music for some time now, but interestingly enough, video game companies like the guys of Croteam are busy working on a creative way to f*ck over thieves.

How are they doing it? Two words: pink scorpion.

Those two words amount to a hell of a lot of trouble for anyone who’d want to screw over the makers of “Serious Sam” by stealing their product by sending a giant Pink Scorpion to wreak havoc and destroy everything in sight.

It’s something we’ve seen before (not personally, we don’t pirate) with Bohemia Interactive using Degrade (a.k.a. Fade technology) to prohibit individuals from pirating their games. In the case of Bohemia, they degraded the graphics and made the game look shittier for anyone using a pirated game.

As pointed out by their CEO Marek Španěl:

Pirated games are not worth playing, original games do not degrade. Some of the symptoms are funny, usually annoying…players with pirated copies have lower accuracy with automatic weapons in both single player and multiplayer, and occasionally turn into a bird with the words “Good birds do not fly away from this game, you have only yourself to blame.”

Španěl also points out that for every three legitimate buyers playing the multi-player versions of their games, there were 100 FAILED piracy attempts, illustrating just how problematic piracy is in the gaming community.

With the likes of EA providing some rather tenuous and frustrating methods to play online, and many forms of DRM being counter-productive to the user experience, are tactics by Croteam and Bohemia Interactive the future in anti-piracy? Does it present more of a humorous slant on the problem or an actual, valid solution to the difficult problem of anti-piracy itself?

The answer will most likely rest in how stringent gamers are on the authenticity of a game. We know that right now, any effort to “open up” DRM is a welcome sight, whether it is successful or not.

RELATED LINKS:

The Online Piracy Act: What You Need to Know

Fox Delays Content For Online Piracy

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