Thanks to a bug in the pirated version, sales of the game increased by 300%

Developer and CEO of Big Ant Studios Ross Symons (Ross Symons) yesterday, May 25, spoke on social networks about a rather interesting decision that the studio has taken to combat piracy. Naturally, developers could just use DRM protection to fight piracy, but any gamer knows that doesn’t work. Some AAA video games are leaked to torrents even before their official release, so the creators of Cricket 22 decided to introduce a special bug into the game that simply prevents gamers who downloaded the product from a pirated resource from enjoying the gameplay.

The developers’ solution turned out to be extremely simple – if the game is pirated (of course, they don’t specify how exactly this is defined in Big Ant Studios), then between matches or right in the middle of the gameplay, the Cricket 22 screen starts to actively flicker. It looks as if the gamer has problems with the video card or a bad connection, and this, apparently, upset the pirates very much. Indeed, it is extremely difficult to enjoy a project when the screen is actively flickering literally at any moment. The pirates even went to the developer’s technical support forum, asking for help in this situation.

However, there are also bugs that dishonest players could simply not pay attention to. For example, errors about connecting the controller may appear on the screen, or the gamer will lose 100% of the coin tosses before the match, and sometimes the “eternal rain” begins, due to which the match will not continue. The developers even have a special panel with settings that allows you to choose a villainy for pirates – there is even an option with a black screen and a message that the battery in the gamepad needs to be replaced. And, as it turned out, this approach worked – the number of copies sold of the sports simulator increased by 300%.

Source: Trash Box

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