Hasta La Gadget!

Game piracy isn’t just something that affects big studios, and it can have a huge impact on smaller teams; that’s why the coders behind Game Dev Tycoon decided to release their own cracked version, albeit with a moral lesson hardcoded for pirates. Fully expecting a cracked copy of the game to surface shortly after the $7.99 Game Dev Tycoon was released, Greenheart Games pipped the pirates to the post and added a torrent of their own. However, what downloaders didn’t realize was that the cracked version had a bug the authentic one didn’t: players would inevitably run into the effects of game theft.

After a period of play – particularly if the pirate gamer is doing well, their in-game studio creating highly-rated titles – a message from one of the virtual dev team pops up warning them that piracy has become a problem:

“Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally. If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt”

After that point, it’s pretty much game-over for the player’s studio, with their bank account shrinking and bankruptcy the only result. Unsurprisingly, the clueless pirates weren’t too keen on a game that seemingly had no outcome but failure, missing the irony of their own behaviors in the process.

“Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me! I had like 5m and then people suddenly started pirating everything I made, even if I got really good ratings (that I usually get). Not fair” Anonymous complaint

After a single day out in the wild, over 90-percent of those playing Game Dev Tycoon were using the cracked version, Greenheart Games discovered, thanks to some phone-home anonymous usage code built into both versions. Unfortunately, attempts to actually encourage those who might be tempted to pirate the game to instead pay for a legitimate copy have floundered, the developers say.

Whereas Greenheart Games says it will still continue with non-DRM on its titles, that isn’t the approach some teams have decided to take. Notably, Microsoft is believed to be adding a mandatory internet connection requirement to its next-gen “Xbox 720” which would require titles be installed to the console’s hard-drive, and then connect to a server to be validated before play can take place.

Greenheart’s site is currently up and down, probably due to interest in this little life-lesson, but you can find the Google cache here.

Game dev releases sabotaged torrent to teach pirates with irony is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

With the recent launch of Mega, Kim Dotcom has been on the upswing lately, at least when he’s not getting stranded by a busted helicopter. Recently, he sat down with the Financial Times to discuss his status as a hero/villain, the future of content delivery, and the $20,000 he claims to have sunk into iTunes downloads. More »

When North Korea isn’t busy shooting missiles into the sea or photoshopping its navy to make it look a little less pathetic, it takes to a very global hobby: torrenting. TorrentFreak took a peek into exactly what the would-be-supervillian nation-state likes to pirate and, well, they’ve got to get their surveillance software somewhere. More »

Verizon, which just recently finished its acquisition of Mohave Wireless, has been pulled into a copyright legal spat, with a studio that produces adult films having subpoenaed the ISP for copies of its six-strike alerts against the individual being sued. That’s not all the information the studio wants, however, with it prying farther into the subscriber’s Internet usage.

We knew the six-strikes system was coming for quite some time, with it suffering a delay before its targeted roll-out date last year, finally going into effect on February 25 of this year. The system is being utilized by the big-name ISPs – Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Cablevision – to curbstomp piracy via education using a variety of punitive methods often decried as draconian in nature.

While leaked memos and such had revealed ahead of time the various punishments subscribers would face under the six-strikes system, they were officially revealed a couple days after the system went live. You can read a detailed write-up of each ISP’s six-strike system here, but the basic idea is that when a copyright alert is triggered, the subscriber will face throttled speeds, an educational session, limited website access, or other similar effects.

Now, a little over a month after the system went into effect, a Verizon subscriber is facing legal action from Malibu Media, producer of adult entertainment, over alleged sharing of copyrighted materials. Malibu Media has subpoenaed Verizon for copies of the six-strike notices the subscriber received under the new system, as well as information on how much bandwidth he used and a list of viewed pay-per-view films he watched.

The twist in the case is that Verizon said “No.” It says that in addition to Malibu having harassed it in the past, the ISP wishes to protect its subscribers from “shakedown tactics against Doe defendants.” The studio has pushed back and is trying to force Verizon’s hand, but that issue aside, there’s a larger one at play: will the six-strikes system, which was designed and intended to serve merely as an educational tool on the realities of copyright and infringement, be used as a weapon against the browsing public?

[via Torrent Freak]

Lawsuit attempts to use six-strikes copyright system in case against Verizon subscriber is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Game of Thrones season three premiered last night, and that’s kind of a big deal. If you’re a fan, you’ll need no convincing. But if you need proof of its potency, here you go: according to numbers collected by TorrentFreak, the Game of Thrones season three premier now holds the record for the biggest BitTorrent swarm ever. More »