Rampant in-game piracy stings real pirates

Players that have downloaded a bootleg version of Game Dev Tycoon are likely to find their gameplay hamstrung by an ironic bug, which introduces the effects of piracy in-game.

The developer behind the game, Greenheart Games, released a cracked version onto torrent sites, pre-empting the pirates with a bug that plunders your virtual studio’s sales by the very same means.

“The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail,” Greenheart explained on its website.

“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.”

After a few hours of play gathering your virtual game studio, a message appears tell you that your game’s sales have been negativity impacted by piracy.

From that point, everything pirate players is liable to be pirated, and it becomes impossible for them to turn a profit.

Bewildered by this game-breaking ‘bug’, some players that downloaded the cracked version have taken to the web to see if other users can help. Greenheart has collected some of these responses on its blog page.

After just one day on sale, Greenheart said 93.6 per cent of players had downloaded the cracked version rather than buying the legal copy.

“If years down the track you wonder why there are no games like these anymore and all you get to play is pay-to-play and social games designed to suck money out of your pockets then the reason will stare back at you in the mirror,” the studio added.