Rocksteady: the smartest developer on the planet

Link: http://www.gorillajumpers.com/articles/rock_steady.htm

Written by KatanOmega - 9/10/09

We all know that piracy of games is a major problem for the industry and for years developers have tried to figure out ways to stop people from downloading and playing cracked games. It seems that Rocksteady might have come up with an answer to that oh so important problem. Not only that, they even have pirates outing themselves on their forums. Many developers choose to install invasive DRM software on to an unsuspecting players machine which tends to piss people off a little. Rocksteady has taken a different approach and in my humble opinion, it's fucking brilliant.

I gave Rocksteady allot of shit before Arkham Asylum released. To be honest after looking at the games they had developed in the past I was expecting Arkham Asylum to be another turd in a long line of shitty Batman games. Not only did they prove me wrong and deliver the best Batman game ever, but a possible GOTY as well.

On top of all this they included a glitch in the game that only affects people playing cracked versions. If you are playing a cracked Arkham Asylum the glitch can detect this and disable Batman's glide ability. While you can progress through parts of the game without glide. There are certain points where you must have it to proceed. Arkham Asylum is so good that I guarantee that allot of those pirate bastards are going to run right out and buy a copy so they can finish the game.

That's the brilliance of Rocksteady's simple ruse. Not only are they thwarting pirates from playing their game illegally, they are also going to get at least a few of them to buy the game. I can't believe that no other developers have thought of this before, at least that I know of. I bet you Will Wright is pounding his head against a wall right about now. What really makes this story priceless is that pirates are actually on the forums outing themselves, check this out...

Pirate: "I've got a problem when it's time to use Batman's glide in the game. When I hold , like it's said to jump from one platform to another, Batman tries to open his wings again and again instead of gliding. So he falls down in a poisoning gas. If somebody could tel me, what should I do there."

Admin: "The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free. It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."

How awesome is that. Rocksteady you are now my numero uno, pimp-daddy, super-fly, favorite developer of all time. I look forward to see what you think up next!

wow, interesting. Pirates would eventually find their way around it though

In all honesty they should replace "not being able to glide" with "lots of flashing images and maybe even a scream, followed by 2 girls 1 cup"

that'll teach em not to fucking pirate.

hahaha yeah that would be funny

How does the game know it's pirated? How do they know it won't affect legitimate customers?

This will be circumvented shortly if it hasn't already. Very cool that a lot of the bastards made a fool of themselves on the forums.

This isn't the first time this has been done, but I think it should be done more often. Look up Earthbound hard mode copy protection for (I think) the first time this has been done.

Personally it kind of sucks IMO, cause when I by games I usually run the no cd crack on them so I dont have to worry about swapping disks.

Many games have done this...

In Red Alert 2, 2 minutes after the round started all your units blew up and you lost.
In Mass Effect, once you made it to the Normandy the map screen didn't work.

Though the subtleness of this made it amusing as some people thought it was a bug or whatever and posted on the edios forums.

all there is left is to see game characters do the rick roll for pirating the game

"What is a pirate without his wings?" - Balthier FF : Revenant wings