The eternal battle between game developers and those who would pirates their games will probably rage on until the sun is nothing but a cold husk at the center of a burnt-out galaxy. Preventing people from stealing your game is a hard-fought battle for most development teams, but the folks behind The Sims 4 came up with a clever way to do just that: by censoring the pirated copies.

Kotaku reports that those who illicitly gained access to The Sims 4 will find that, rather than just pixelating their sims when they need their privacy, pirated games become pixelated entirely, rendering the title a blurry, unplayable mess. The end result is that the pirates can't play the game and generally reveal themselves online when they ask for help with it.

This isn't the first time developers have cleverly fought back against piracy: pirated copies of Batman: Arkham Asylum, for example, had a glitch in it that would cause Batman to flutter his cape repeatedly and crash when trying to glide. Video Game Tycoon, a game about developing and selling video games, would let players make a fair amount of progress through it before bankrupting their projects. The cause of the bankruptcy? Piracy. That's right, to combat pirates, Video Game Tycoon let them have a taste of their own medicine. Though clever measures like these will hardly stop the tide of immoral gamers willing to steal their goods rather than pay for them, it will at least slow them down a bit.

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