Piracy is a huge problem for developers because it essentially means they’re not getting paid for every time a game has been pirated. Sure, there are legal ways to combat piracy, but recently we’ve started to see developers have fun with pirates by trolling them. For example in Far Cry 4, devs removed the FOV controls in pirated copies of the game.
Recently a developer by the name of Noodlecake Studios has trolled pirates similarly as well. The company has recently released a game called Shooting Stars!. It is a mobile game that costs a couple of bucks, and obviously there are some who are too cheap to pay that and have turned to pirated copies of the game.
However what happens is that the pirated version introduces an unbeatable boss, meaning that the gamer’s efforts are pretty much all for naught as there is no way of beating the game. At the end when the player dies, the studio includes a message saying how dying sucks, but how piracy is even worse. Hilarious!
Interestingly enough, Noodlecake Studios themselves were the ones who uploaded the game onto torrent websites, presumably to trick pirates into downloading the unbeatable version of the game. We have to admit that’s it’s funny and it’s a good trick. According to the studio, “We don’t think this is an answer to piracy, or that it will be a big motivator to suddenly stop cracking games but instead, we are embracing it, and hey, if one or two players decide to throw us a couple bucks in the process, then we call that a win.”