EA Punishes Pirates with Proactive Pixel Censorship

Piracy has resulted in one of my favorite things to ever happen to the games industry: DRM. 

But not normal DRM, normal DRM is stupid—I mean the wildly creative, funny DRM developers will add to their game to punish players who pirate their title.   From the giant pink scorpion of death in Serious Sam, to the slow decay of your business due to pirates in Game Dev Tycoon, to the inane random messages Skullgirl pirates receive to trick them into admitting to the developers that they actually stole their copy, it seems developers have an endless imagination for fun ways to encourage people to buy the real thing.

EA has had a lot of crap thrown at it for its DRM policies, and not undeservedly.  Most famously, perhaps, was the completely unnecessary and sometimes game-ruining always-online requirement for the latest Sim City game—the one the developers claimed was 100% necessary but was in fact not necessary at all.  And it was the fear of myself and many others that the latest EA title, The Sims 4, would utilize a similarly oppressive DRM technique.

But happily, EA has found a way to punish the pirates and not the players with pixelation.

Now, any Sims player can tell you that anytime your character gets naked for any reasons, their genitals are pixilated out to avoid offending delicate sensibilities.  That remains the case in Sims 4, except when you pirate the game.  Because when you torrent Sims 4, the game gets a little over-ambitious with it’s censorship and decides to pixelate absolutely EVERYTHING!

Which, of course, cased pirates to accidentally admit to EA they pirated the game when they came to EA with a fix.  In fact, in response to pirates, EA said this;

“No plans to aid those players unable to enjoy their pirated copies of The Sims 4. Instead, the publisher urges affected players to purchase their own copy of the game which should lack the telltale pixelation."

Burn.   Of course, this is a popular game, and already people are claiming to have found ways to fix the pixelation issue, but that’s hardly the point: the point is that EA found a way to make DRM awesome again.  Go ahead and enjoy that much needed Karma point, EA.