‘Cricket 22’ developers fight piracy with constant rain and evil “control panel”

Anyone trying to pirate Cricket 22 is being caught out after reporting their errors to the game’s forums, with more fake problems in store for the pirates.

This comes from developer Big Ant Studios’ founder and CEO Ross Symons, who took to Twitter recently and talked to Kotaku about how the team has fun when combatting players who pirate their games.

When asked about the game’s piracy protection measures after reporting a 300 per cent jump in Steam sales, Symons said: “It turns the screen white. We also have other things in store, where you 100 per cent lose the toss, it rains forever at your first bat, kill the controller and report controller batteries to be flat, lots of little things we can turn on at off at a whim.”

Whilst the idea of developers messing with game pirates is nothing new, Symons and Big Ant Studios are clearly having fun with Cricket 22. In the past Nintendo removed train controls from pirated versions of its 2009 DS game The Legend Of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, and Rocksteady removed the ability to use Batman’s cape in pirated PC versions of Arkham Asylum.

“These back and forth battles were one of my favourite things in life, which eventually they’d win,” said Symons of the pirates. “But I have to say the current crop of pirates aren’t as hardy as those in days gone by. They’ve got no spirit, literally given up within a few days. A really sad state of affairs.”

Symons also told Kotaku that the team has a “control panel” that it uses to select exactly what happens to pirates in Cricket 22, which backs up what the CEO said about having “some fun at their expense,” on Twitter.

“Not to mention that many of the pirated versions contain trojans, spyware, and they risk a lot more than the cost of the game,” Symons added.

In other news, information from a Steam database listing seems to indicate that PlayStation’s exclusive game Returnal is coming to PC.