Garry's Mod Pirates Get Stung

[Actual]

This confuses me, are they playing pirated games through steam? Or does the pirated game never interact with Steam?

If it does surely they can simply compare the game you are playing to your payment history to see if you've pirated it.

 

[DTWolfwood]

ah so this amounts to nothing more than a simple slap to the wrist until they find another cracked copy of Garry's mod.

guess its a moral victory XD

Not entirely. Garry is a provably smart guy, this is an ingenious way to root out pirates. Now this method won't likely work the same way twice, but who's to say he couldn't do something similar in the future.

True degenrate thieving scum... I mean pirates, have a wide variety of smart people on their side too, and will likely find a way around this in the future, but it certainly has an effect on those pirates right now.

thats an arms race as old as gaming.

still not as severe as it could have been.

 

[Anarchemitis]

Ooo normals issues not fun.

 

[beema]

Remember when Gary's mod was free?

Yeah...

 

[mew4ever23]

Well done, garry. Well done indeed.

 

[esplode]

Garry's made this into an art.

Remember when Gary's mod was free?

It also was no where close to as good as it is now.

 

[D33dl3]

nicely done

 

[Icehearted]

More cleverly pulled than the Batman Arkham Asylum pirate trick. A respectful nod. What a shame more companies exploiting DRM couldn't be this intelligent about it.

 

[The Red Spy]

Garry's Mod, by the way, costs just ten bucks and can be purchased via Steam [http://store.steampowered.com/app/4000/].

I believe this sentence has been fixed.

 

[Android2137]

As long as anyone who has been falsely targeted gets appropriate tech support, I'm behind this 100%.

 

[dfphetteplace]

And now, if someone who pirated it was going to buy the game, they won't.

 

[ddq5]

Sat what you will about the ethics of piracy in general, but do not. Fuck. With. Indies. Pirating an independent developer's game is just low, it's personal to them. In this case, the pirates had it coming.

 

[newwiseman]

I've always been fascinated by the number of individuals who pirate something and then call tech support because it isn't working.

Now I don't openly condone piracy but I'm not fully against it. But I am against these ignorant hicks, they are the ones who actually hurt companies and studios by wasting their fucking time asking for help when they never bought the product to begin with. Forcing devs to spend time tracking bugs that aren't really there, ignoring those that are, and hiring tech support to answer calls. Then there are the actually bandwidth fees incurred by companies updating these dumb asses software.

I'm all for stings like this, dip-shits deserve to not be allowed to use software, paid for or not.

 

[Canid117]

Fear the mighty Mjolnir!

 

[tzimize]

I support this but do think that Steam should allow for some sort of review of cases where gamers claim they had a legit copy and were mistakenly banned.

Not gonna happen unfortunately, and is the reason why I am not very fond of this. Its funny, in a way...but if this hurt even one legitimate consumer then it has not been worth it. In that case he has lost one paying customer (for the future) and gained nothing from those that didnt pay anyway. :\

 

[FightThePower]

"...while others are simply put off by the sheer unfairness of not being allowed to play a game they didn't pay for."

This is absolutely hilarious.

 

[ActionDan]

Oh hell yes. Amazing stuff.

 

[BabySinclair]

That's good, props to Newman for the sting.

 

[Delusibeta]

I support this but do think that Steam should allow for some sort of review of cases where gamers claim they had a legit copy and were mistakenly banned.

Not gonna happen unfortunately, and is the reason why I am not very fond of this. Its funny, in a way...but if this hurt even one legitimate consumer then it has not been worth it. In that case he has lost one paying customer (for the future) and gained nothing from those that didnt pay anyway. :\

a) The punishment is getting permabanned from Facepunch's forums. Whoop-de-doo.
b) Gary can cross-reference the "random" string of numbers (which is actually their Steam ID) to see if the user in question did buy the game.