Game Developers Honeypot Their Own Pirated Game With Unbeatable Daft Punk Boss

Canadian independent game-makers Noodlecake Studios have developed a novel way to discourage piracy — or at least make its perpetrators think a little harder about their behaviour — by pirating their own game and booby-trapping it with an unbeatable boss created in the image of helmet-wearing French dance lords Daft Punk.

The company created the honeypot of its new game, Shooting Stars! — which it drew attention to itself by way of an online statement — after growing frustrated with the difficulties incurred in prompting folks to actually pay for games, especially on Android devices, once they've been downloaded.

"It is getting harder and harder to get players to actually buy games, even for the low, low price of $0.99," the company wrote. "With Shooting Stars! we went premium at $2.99 on iOS because we believe that there is still a market for premium titles and felt like Shooting Stars! fits that niche. With Android though, one of the harsh realities is we see rampant piracy compared to iOS with our paid titles."

"Case in point," the company elaborated. "We launched Wayward Souls, one of the biggest, best-reviewed premium games from Rocketcat Games, one year ago to Android. Our analytics show that 11% of all installs of the game have been paid for. 11%.

"And that is just the installs we are tracking. Some cracked versions might have taken out those reporting tools."

Although the game-makers concede that it's impossible to tell how much revenue is really being lost to piracy — "many of those players would probably have never bought the game to begin with," the statement acknowledges — they nonetheless decided to have a bit of fun with the folks hellbent on cracking Shooting Stars! premium content for free, essentially by creating their own pirated copy of the game to let out into the world's torrent sites and direct-download forums a few days before its Android launch — with a specific difference from the vanilla build.

"Not unlike Game Dev Tycoon, we modified the game so that once players hit boss 3, they are confronted with 'Daft Premium', a new boss wave not found in the retailer version," the company explained.

"Firstly, players must defeat a wave of bosses that have an obscene amount of health. If they do manage to defeat them, then the final boss approaches, who has unlimited health.

"Once players die, they are encouraged to check out the full version of the game and help the developers out by purchasing the retail copy."

Despite the novel approach, Noodlecake say that they don't believe they're onto anything overly world-changing as far as the fight against piracy is concerned, and that a "legitimate" cracked copy has already appeared online to combat the honeypot created by the developers.

"We don't think this is an answer to piracy, or that it will be a big motivator to suddenly stop cracking games, but instead, we are embracing it as a fun marketing tactic," Noodlecake said.

"And hey, if one or two players decide to throw us a couple bucks in the process, then we call that a win."

Shooting Stars! is available on Android and iOS for $2.99.