Good anti-piracy measures are hard to find. At best, it can be an inconvenience for legit purchasers of games while other methods like SecuROM are almost universally loathed by gamers. It seems that to protect their latest title, Batman: Arkham Asylum, developer Rocksteady is taking a decidedly different approach.
Over at the Eidos forums, a poster showed up with an innocent query about why Batman’s cape refused to open, allowing the Dark Knight to glide over a room filled with poison gas despite pressing the assigned key. Outed as having downloaded a leaked copy of the game by another user — Arkham Asylum has yet to release on PC and no portion of the demo features a gas-filled room — the forum admin hopped into the thread to mention that this is not actually a bug but a feature to prevent piracy:
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.
Brilliant move, Rocksteady. It’s nice to see that you are willing to go to a little effort in protecting your software instead of relying on annoying and sometimes gamebreaking methods. Kudos.
