Good anti-piracy measures are hard to find. At best, it can be an inconvenience for legit purchasers of games while other methods like SecuROM are almost universally loathed by gamers. It seems that to protect their latest title, Batman: Arkham Asylum, developer Rocksteady is taking a decidedly different approach.
Over at the Eidos forums, a poster showed up with an innocent query about why Batman's cape refused to open, allowing the Dark Knight to glide over a room filled with poison gas despite pressing the assigned key. Outed as having downloaded a leaked copy of the game by another user -- Arkham Asylum has yet to release on PC and no portion of the demo features a gas-filled room -- the forum admin hopped into the thread to mention that this is not actually a bug but a feature to prevent piracy:
The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free.
It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code.
Brilliant move, Rocksteady. It's nice to see that you are willing to go to a little effort in protecting your software instead of relying on annoying and sometimes gamebreaking methods. Kudos.
Conrad Zimmerman is Destructoid's News Editor and home to the busiest mustache in the gaming press. An amateur historian and pop culture fanatic, Conrad possesses a nearly limitless wealth of videogame factoids and a passion for the power of games to teach, inspire and entertain. He enjoys reading, writing and turning things which should be fun into work.
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Contest:
7:00 PM on 09.08.2009
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still...this is awesome.
still....i'm too poor at the moment top pick this game up.
It seems as if supermario land 2 had this feature also, becuase no mater what copy i got from the internet, it would always freeze at the first boss battle.
Or atleast a very funny one XD.
what did you expect from a company called Rocksteady?
::shakes fist::
:D
But it's also been cracked for a while too. Although it does really piss off the people who stole the game, so that's worth it.
Holy shit. OWNED!
That is the most interesting prevention method and should be looked into much more.
And if you don't think that, why are we giving Rocksteady credit and not others?
By the way, you'd be surprised how much this isn't stopping people from completing the game. I'm not going into anymore detail then that about this subject, though, on this website. Don't want people to actually go and do that, now do we?
I just needed to comment, because I was shocked this actually got its own editorial, without noting any previous efforts that are aligned with this same line of thought.
Not that any of this matters. The game will be completely cracked and working fine when the game is actually released, I'm sure. Just as every other attempt in the history of PC gaming to stop piracy, it will fail.
Why does nobody ever talk about people that pirate Xbox 360 games, by the way? I always found that odd.
"Hahaha I know for a fact that was cracked and fixed about 3 hours after they found it :)"
Exactly. And it was.
@Los255
"That is the most interesting prevention method and should be looked into much more."
I disagree, it really shouldn't be looked into more. It's a waste or resources, as it hasn't ever worked, so far in the past for other games. I applaud the effort and the thought, but it just doesn't stop pirates. The only effect it might have is day 1 or 2 that the game is out (that's being kind). After that, I can't imagine it matters anymore.
And has this been leaked now? That's cool. I need this game before the 11th, otherwise I won't be able to play it for a long, long time.
Although, I'm at college right now, and they don't really look kindly on pirates. Fuck.
@runtheplacered: Not really. It probably took all of about 10 minutes to add.
I commend the efforts of Rocksteady, but this isnt quite the way to stop piracy. Remember, most of the game crackers are doing it just to prove they can, not because they want to get games for free. Of course, they have to share their work for proof... which is the problem.
The bigger problem here, though, is that they let the game be leaked before release date. Considering how easy it is to download stuff these days, its pretty much asking for it, with PC gamers getting the oh so difficult choice of "wait weeks until release and pay for it then, while watching console gamers play" or "download now for free!".
I had no idea this was ever implemented in older games.
A game pitched to PC audiences correctly and providing the least amount of fiddling to get up and running is most important, and although copy protection stunts like a gimpy Batman is amusing, it clearly tooks the pirates next to no time to crack it.
If you propose a new system that is meant to be effective at blocking pirates, this only steels the pirating community determination to crack it.
I mean, take a look at Sins of a Solar Empire. It had no copy protection at all, except for a product key to register for updates and multiplayer. Were game sales crippled by piracy? No, it sold 200,000 copies in the first month alone.
I am in no way approving piracy, but sometimes DRM gets put in place that causes trouble for honest consumers.
I think one of the Sypro games had the same thing, instead at one point in the game a text-box in a cutscene explicitly told you that you were playing a pirated copy and you couldnt progress.