The Talos Principle Traps Pirates in an Elevator

Croteam has taken an interesting approach to punishing those who pirate The Talos Principle: trapping them in an in-game elevator.

The Croatian developer isn’t suing pirates or tracking their IP addresses. Instead, it’s content to watch (and probably enjoy) the forum posts about players being stuck in an elevator.

It looks like the forum post referenced above has been deleted (probably by the person who initially posted it).

Novel approaches to punishing pirates are becoming more and more common. Back in 2009, Rocksteady slipped one into Batman: Arkham Asylum’s PC version, making Batman’s glide ability into more of a “plummet” ability. More recently, Ubisoft deliberately omitted a field of view slider in Far Cry 4, adding it in a launch-day patch, and watching the complaints roll in.

These sorts of approaches don’t last long, as pirates typically update their cracked versions to fix the issue once it’s known. Still, they represent what might be a company’s best chance to turn a pirate into a paying customer: annoyance. When it’s more convenient and more rewarding for someone to buy a game than to pirate it, you have a chance to make a sale. As long as you don’t ruin it with server issues or overly onerous DRM, that is.

Piracy is an issues that developers for all platforms have to deal with. I’m glad to see some PC developers trying new ways to do it.