Some Anti-Piracy Measures Might Actually Encourage Piracy

You may or may not have seen mention of the “giant pink scorpion” in Serious Sam 3 but I thought the concept proposed an interesting point of discussion.

In a nutshell, if you have pirated the game you’ll soon encounter the “giant pink scorpion” from the outset of the game which is seemingly invulnerable to damage. The net result is that your character ends up dead soon after and you won’t be able to progress any further into the game.

What I have found though across the numerous mentions of this anti-piracy measure is the inevitable curiosity of people to experience the scorpion for themselves (i.e. pirate the game). Depending how you look at it, this might contradict the purpose of the anti-piracy measure and perhaps encourage people to look into the use of patches and cracks to get rid of the scorpion once they have grown tired of it. Otherwise, the developers of the game might complain that given piracy dwarfed the number of legitimate sales they lost revenue as a result from a pure percentage point of view when in fact they may not actually have sold any more or less in actual volumes compared to prior instalments in the series.

This reminds me of another game that had perhaps or more brutal means of copy protection – Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. If you had installed a pirated copy or attempted to circumvent the copy protection on a legitimate copy and then started a new game all units on screen would blow up immediately. Certainly a frustrating experience for someone wanting to play the game while also robbing them of any chance to see what the game might be like (apart from seeing the graphics).

It’ll be interesting to see how much Serious Sam 3 ends up being pirated but my guess is that it’ll go through the roof for this reason alone.

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