Reminds me of the protection put into the game Earthbound (Mother 2) on the SNES. If it detected it was being run on a cart copier it would inject glitches at c

Reminds me of the protection put into the game Earthbound (Mother 2) on the SNES. If it detected it was being run on a cart copier it would inject glitches at certain points that made it almost impossible to beat, including freezing the game at the beginning of the final boss fight and then erasing all the saved games. Video is below. I agree with both sides on this issue. These are quite innovative techniques to protect the developer's bottom line, but they can be aggravating to some people that mistakenly end up on the wrong end of the fight. Personally, the issues you addressed, the one I mentioned and the article linked here are all common in that they are implemented in video games, which is (hopefully) only developed for entertainment purposes. I don't see much of an issue in doing so with games. Don't get me wrong, people put a lot of time and effort into playing games, myself included, and for the developer to potentially write some function that erases all my games or makes it impossibly hard to have fun using his product is mean. But, it's just a game. If Microsoft was to do the same idea and erase all Word documents on my computer if it detected my copy of Office was non-genuine could potentially devastating if I didn't have backups ready. I've already been caught in their Genuine Advantage filter with a legitimate license. I'd definitely rally behind and movement to prevent office or business software from doing something like this. Point being, the developer of Garrys mod is frustrated that people are taking his product illegally in order to entertain themselves. They aren't pirating the game to help cure diseases or end world hunger, they're taking it to entertain only themselves. It's just a game, and he's trying to have fun with the people that are pirating it who don't need to be using it to begin with. At least with this particular incident, false positives can be checked and remedies can be put in place for those few instances. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmyoV1bkXNI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmyoV1bkXNI