I have been bitten twice by such schemes, although having a legit copy:
- In Settlers 3, buildings started to produce wrong items: iron instead of pigs etc. In a game that heavily relies on well crafted production chains, it completely wrecks havoc. It was fun for 5 minutes, but after finding out that it was actually a misbehaving copy protection, I was a bit angry. Also, explaining to support or other users on forum that your copy is actually legit only worsens the pain.
- Operation: Flashpoint was much worse. First of all, single player works as expected. But when the copy protection thinks you use a copied disk (or your CD-rom is not behaving as expected), it quickly started to ramp up the difficulty to the point where an enemy shot you with a pistol over a kilometer distance. It took hours of frustration until I found out what it was.
There are other games that implemented such schemes. Usually, they have one thing in common: they produce false positives that are much harder to detect than a simple "I think you have a pirated copy. If not, please ask support for further assistance."
In this case it might work, because Valve can actually revalidate whether the ID given has bought the game and rule out false positives.
This isn't actually a false positive. The system for catching people is a two part process.
1) Error is noticed, someone asks about it on the Steam forums.
2) User ID is checked to see if they have GMod on their steam games list. If they don't, then the person is assumed to have a pirated copy.
Now, we can still get false positives (someone is using a friends computer and posts under their ID, and the friend doesn't have Gary's Mod), but it sounds like this person was permabanned.
0a) Legit user is not able to play the game properly and wastes precious lifetime and falls victim to angry comments by fellow users in search for help.
0b) User is actually a pirate, but I really don't care about those.
It's a false positive because the error shows up in game when the game thinks you've pirated a copy, it's not just used to "out" pirates on the forum. If you read the post, the user in question was apparently unable to setup a server to play with his friends due to the error.
Reminds me of the protection put into the game Earthbound (Mother 2) on the SNES. If it detected it was being run on a cart copier it would inject glitches at certain points that made it almost impossible to beat, including freezing the game at the beginning of the final boss fight and then erasing all the saved games. Video is below.
I agree with both sides on this issue. These are quite innovative techniques to protect the developer's bottom line, but they can be aggravating to some people that mistakenly end up on the wrong end of the fight. Personally, the issues you addressed, the one I mentioned and the article linked here are all common in that they are implemented in video games, which is (hopefully) only developed for entertainment purposes. I don't see much of an issue in doing so with games. Don't get me wrong, people put a lot of time and effort into playing games, myself included, and for the developer to potentially write some function that erases all my games or makes it impossibly hard to have fun using his product is mean. But, it's just a game.
If Microsoft was to do the same idea and erase all Word documents on my computer if it detected my copy of Office was non-genuine could potentially devastating if I didn't have backups ready. I've already been caught in their Genuine Advantage filter with a legitimate license. I'd definitely rally behind and movement to prevent office or business software from doing something like this.
Point being, the developer of Garrys mod is frustrated that people are taking his product illegally in order to entertain themselves. They aren't pirating the game to help cure diseases or end world hunger, they're taking it to entertain only themselves. It's just a game, and he's trying to have fun with the people that are pirating it who don't need to be using it to begin with. At least with this particular incident, false positives can be checked and remedies can be put in place for those few instances.
The part about that "just being a game": Could you please explain that to my teenage self that bought 2 Games for 60 Dollar each (which was basically my gaming budget for a year) and then falling prey to a scheme that is really "defective by design"? In the case of Operation Flashpoint, it actually meant buying a new DVD drive that was compatible with the games copy protection as well.
Sorry, gamers are costumers, too. More so: they are premium customers, buying one of the most expensive entertainment products that you can get. No, I don't want to discuss this: If I bought a game and the developer takes actions that may incorrectly flag me as a pirate and then decides to _play games with me_, he is a selfish smart-ass that doesn't know a prime rule of software development: your clever scheme almost certainly has failures. Which for me as a customer means: sorry, I'm not going to buy from you again. Garry might be in the position to do so, but its still bad.
And if Garry wants to vent his frustration, he can do so in other ways, instead of firing a shotgun blast that may mostly hit pirates, but some if his fans as well.
And as shown below: there are cases where legitimate customers must work around that 'bug' to play the game.
So, it's a good idea to punish people that are trying out your software by banning them from purchasing it? Sounds like the A/B testing phase was skipped on that one...
How would you propose to do A/B testing with pirates? It seems like a bit of a difficult proposition. It seems to me the only way you could run such any sort of test for this is by doing exactly what Gary is doing. Hopefully, after some time is passed, he might be willing to share whether he sees an improvement in sales.
However, actions such as these aren't really about increasing the sales of any particular software product being sold. It's about creating an environment in which game piracy is frowned upon by the community in general. I'm not going to argue if it's effective or not (or even morally the right thing to do), but I think that it's missing the point to claim that if Gary does not see a direct increase in sales, then he's being foolish (which is what you seem to be implying). I suspect that this is more about respect†, than about money.
†Again, we can debate if this sort of thing is the right way to go about gaining it, see Argorak's comment for obvious reasons why you don't want to do this.
Where did you see they are banned from purchasing it? The article says the ban is in the forums. I don't think Garry or Valve would mind if people decided to then buy it.
If I'm banned from the lobby of the movie theater after sneaking in and watching the movie without paying, how do I discuss it with others after I purchase a ticket?
- In Settlers 3, buildings started to produce wrong items: iron instead of pigs etc. In a game that heavily relies on well crafted production chains, it completely wrecks havoc. It was fun for 5 minutes, but after finding out that it was actually a misbehaving copy protection, I was a bit angry. Also, explaining to support or other users on forum that your copy is actually legit only worsens the pain.
- Operation: Flashpoint was much worse. First of all, single player works as expected. But when the copy protection thinks you use a copied disk (or your CD-rom is not behaving as expected), it quickly started to ramp up the difficulty to the point where an enemy shot you with a pistol over a kilometer distance. It took hours of frustration until I found out what it was.
There are other games that implemented such schemes. Usually, they have one thing in common: they produce false positives that are much harder to detect than a simple "I think you have a pirated copy. If not, please ask support for further assistance."
In this case it might work, because Valve can actually revalidate whether the ID given has bought the game and rule out false positives.
But please, stop that stuff.