Garry Newman, the creator of the toolbox/open-ended game Garry’s Mod for the Half Life 2 engine, has just dealt with pirates in one of the most effective ways we have ever seen. There was no DRM involved, no complex anti-piracy protection, nothing more than a clever trick that took advantage of the instability of pirated copies of games.

You see, Steam keeps a list of which accounts spent money or otherwise legitimately own a copy of GMod. So all Garry had to do, was allow his game to check the Steam database and figure out whether or not it is legit. If it wasn’t, GMod would crash delivering this error “Engine Error: Unable to shade polygon normals.” The error message was then followed by a number which many users thought was an error code.

Here’s the thing. The fake error code wasn’t just random gibberish. Instead, the string of numbers returned was the pirate’s own steam ID. Unaware pirates everywhere have begun posting their own steam IDs to forums, asking for help, and blatantly admitting that they committed an act of piracy in the process. Genius!

The result? Banination! Not only are these pirates getting banned permanently from the forums they posted on, but they are also being locked out of Steam and GMod. Just to be sure that pirates would start posting, Garry himself started asking whether or not users have received an “unable to shade polygon normals” error message. He basically goaded the pirates into revealing themselves and banned them for their hard work.

However, there is a psychological aspect to this whole trap as well. Any pirate that posted this error message has basically been caught with their pants down. Legit users everywhere are now making fun of these pirates, and with the knowledge of their Steam ID, taking it upon themselves to harass them. Some users have gone as far as to troll the pirates, by telling them things such as “deleting the System32 directory will let the game work” and “you need to reformat your hard drive”. In short it has been an absolute wreck for the pirating community.

Frankly, the pirates had it coming. Garry’s Mod is a ten dollar game. Ten dollars! That’s about as cheap as you could expect for an open world toolset like this. Heck, I’ve seen it on sale on Steam for one dollar in the past. You can find enough change on the street to pay that fee.

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