People who’ve pirated The Sims 4 are not the happiest of campers right now. Not only are they miserable, dirty thieves, their pilfered copies of The Sims 4 aren’t working quite right: when their Sims climb into the shower or sit on a loo, the pixelation effect that hides their fun bits in the regular game doesn’t end – it gets bigger and bigger until the entire screen is one gigantic pixelated mess. Like so:
Naturally many of them took to the EA forums to moan about their broken games, but as Eurogamer reports, EA said “it has no plans to aid those players unable to enjoy their pirated copies of The Sims 4.” Instead, the company is gently encouraging them to buy legitimate copies.
This sort of anti-piracy countermeasure is not new; many companies have in the past added bits of code that make stolen copies behave in inconvenient ways.
One of my favourites was in a game called Game Dev Tycoon: pirates would start the game out normally enough, but over time as their virtual studios became more successful, more and more people would steal the games they make to the point where the studio could no longer turn a profit. Oh, the irony! It was probably lost on many pirates, but it was a pretty clever (and educational) move by the devs.
What’s interesting to me is that by putting this sort of countermeasure into The Sims 4, EA is tacitly admitting that they, the biggest game publisher/developer in the world, is losing the battle against pirates.
Fortunately it also says that EA has woken up to the fact that invasive, irritating Digital Rights Management software isn’t the way to deter pirates since it doesn’t work anyway, and they are instead moving towards clever countermeasures like this one while also creating new products and services like EA Access (games for a monthly fee) and Game Time (full but time-limited trials) that genuinely encourage gamers to go legitimate by offering them real value for their cash.
Incidentally, The Sims 4 is available from today at retail and through the Origin client, and the brief time I spent with the game this morning after my review copy unlocked at midnight has lead me to believe this might be the best Sims yet. That’s thanks to a host of touches and tweaks that make the game feel significantly different, but in a good way, from previous entries.
[Source, Image – Joystiq]
