Pirates are one of the most cited reasons why game companies don't develop for or release games on PC anymore. Ubisoft is the chief complainer but even companies as PC-centric as Crytek have changed their tune in today's world of piracy. It has become extremely easy for even the most modest of PC users to figure it out and the files are everywhere. It falls to companies to find new and exciting ways (or in Ubisoft's case, horrible ones) to combat piracy.
That is just what Croteam, developers of the Serious Sam series and the just-released Serious Sam 3: BFE, did. People who pirated the game early will find an unkillable, amazingly fast pink scorpion that chases them throughout the game. This beast can kill you rather quickly in the brutal world of Serious Sam and is unrelenting in its quest to shoot pirates in the face.
I love when developers do things like this. Pirated copies of Batman: Arkham City had a Batman that couldn't glide. Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 would destroy all your units at 30 seconds into a match. Perhaps the funniest was the pirated copies of Micheal Jackson: The Experience for the DS, where the game would play extremely loud vuvuzelas over any of the music in the game. A clever, anti-DRM system is always more enjoyable than an install limit or an activation server.
I know that these anti-DRM methods are usually patched around rather quickly but I have to give it to those developers that put it in anyways. It is creativity and imagination like that that will lead to the real way to combat piracy on the PC.
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