The most hilarious anti-piracy features in video games

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500 Comments

  1. Can't you beat Arkham Asylum even without the glide or grapple, thought people figured that it lmao

  2. That sucks because I believe you should buy legally but you should be able to download games anywhere I own all of my games but I download them third party because they run smoother especially fallout games

  3. Kinda hoping they were gonna include Ace Attorney Investigations 2 in this. If you try to pirate it, the game IS entirely playable, but its all in a made-up language

  4. Feels like @OutsideXBox already did this better in one of their "7 …" list videos.

  5. Another funny notable one is LoZ Spirit Tracks allowing you to play but entirely removing the controls on the train that gets you around the map

  6. I don't see the problem with the last one 🤨

  7. Anti-piracy was probably most necessary during the 1650s to the 1730s.

  8. Another fun one was the gamedev simulator game (don't remember the name). If you pirate the game, at some point in the game you're gonna get hit by an event that says you can't sell games because they're being pirated, and in a few years your studio will shut down.

  9. Kinda hilarious that I often have pirated games in the past, but specifically bought the games that happened to have these anti-piracy measures

  10. I love pi. It doesn't need to be racy, though

  11. Was expecting Earthbound, which deletes all your saves & crashes just before the final boss, as well as making the game much more grindy

  12. Didn't the serious Sam one eventually become a self-imposed speedrun challenge?

  13. Here's a few more noteworthy anti-piracy measures:

    Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders:
    You could actually play a decent portion of the game, but when you reach a point where you might want to travel to other countries to progress, you have to enter basically a PIN to get on the plane. If you get it wrong too many times, Zak is thrown in jail with a pirate flag above his cell, and the jailor turns to the screen and says something along the lines of "As for you, I assume your finger slipped while entering the code, right?"

    Chuck Yeager's Air Combat:
    This old DOS game had the classic "look up X in the manual" piracy protection, but the things it asked you to look up was technical specs of various WW2 aircraft like the bomb bay volume of a B-17. Technically possible to answer without the manual, but this was long before the internet, so obscure trivia like that was almost impossible to know unless you were either an expert or REALLY into WW2 aviation.

    And as an honorary mention, Leisure Suit Larry:
    Also a game that asked questions to make sure you were allowed to play it, but it wasn't actually anti-piracy, it was an age check.
    After you enter your age (anything below 18 obviously tells you that you're too young and shuts down), it would ask you trivia that would be common knowledge for someone who actually is that old. E.g. if you said you were old enough to be born in the mid 50s, it might ask you about popular TV shows in the late 60s/early 70s. Something you'd be old enough to know about, but not recent enough that anyone younger would really know about it.
    If you tried to cheat the system by claiming to be a 1000 years old or something, it would tell you that the game might be a bit too exciting for someone of your advanced age and they didn't want you to develop heart issues and kick you out, same as if you said you were under 18. (Because you obviously were, why else try to cheat the system?)

  14. If they can put things in the game that are only there if pirated, why not just make the game not work all together?

  15. i've always wondered while these are all great, if the game can tell it's pirated, why can't it just stop itself from running instead? like just crash on purpose when you hit start or something

  16. In game dev tycoon your business would fail due to a high number of fans pirating the games you made

  17. The Serious Sam 3 one is pretty ironic because while its a good anti piracy measure for 99% of people, there is a small group of people that actually like the immortal death scorpion and use it at the center of challenge runs

  18. They're saying is if you don't have the money or are too poor to get it jump in a pit got it

  19. Not sure if they did this in the remaster, but the original Alan Wake would be entirely playable, but have Alan wear an eyepatch with a skull and crossbones all the time, occasionally asking on loading screens things like "Hey, since you're enjoying this, maybe just buy it?"

  20. I heard pirated Bethesda games work better and have fewer bugs

  21. They should have talked about the old spyro anti-pirating system

  22. I wanna see someone do a full completion of SS3 with the scorpion

  23. I legally own gmod and I still had error models in the past due to not owning all the games for all the files needed for models.
    So I downloaded them from a website (that I don’t remember sorry) and downloaded the one’s gmod told me were missing.

    I miss the old gmod days, anyone else remember when it was full of game modes—?

  24. Americans on their way to demonize online theft:

  25. But yeah That only happens if the guys that made that torrent didn't remove tjose

  26. You know what's best about these anti-piracy mechanics? They were quickly overcomed, separating qualified pirates from amateurs

  27. I have pirates all those game (either from el amigos or pirates Bay) but i have got none of these issues although not sure about the witcher 2 one tho

  28. If a game can tell that it was pirated, why doesn’t it just not play?

  29. Played all of these games pirated and didn't get any of these problems

  30. Gmod you also get the errors if you don't CSGO or any skins packs from CSGO. So Gmod made the packs free for download so people can actually enjoy the gamr without having to buy every CSGO game or game made by that company

  31. since this video is about anti-piracy, I would like to take a moment to remind everyone that unless it's an indie game, the companies making these are worth millions, if not billions of dollars. it is 1000% morally a-ok to pirate AAA games, especially if you're already struggling financially

  32. How do they program these piracy measures?

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