Developer Greenheart Games has come up with an impressively smart anti-piracy measure for its first game, Game Dev Tycoon - in which people who've downloaded a cracked version will feel the effects of piracy in-game, too.

As an experiment, the developer decided to release a cracked version of Game Dev Tycoon onto torrent sites along with the genuine version, pre-empting piracy. "The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail," explains Greenheart on its website. "Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers." After a few hours of building up your virtual game studio, this message appears: From then on, everything pirate players make in-game has a huge chance of being pirated, and it becomes almost impossible for them to make a profit. The most brilliant thing about this is the responses that Greenheart has found online from players who didn't pay for the game. Ahh, the irony. There are plenty more over on Greenheart's site . This isn't the first time that developers have tried to make a point with anti-piracy messages. Rocksteady released a cracked version of Batman: Arkham Asylum onto the Internet that was complete except for one tiny detail: Batman's cape-glide ability didn't work. Back in 2001, Operation Flashpoint's developers decided to make the game degrade slowly as pirates played, with enemies becoming ever stronger and guns ever weaker until the game eventually became unplayable. For me, though, this is the cleverest.After one day on sale, Greenheart says, 93.6% of players had downloaded the illegal version rather than buying it legally. "If years down the track you wonder why there are no games like these anymore and all you get to play is pay-to-play and social games designed to suck money out of your pockets then the reason will stare back at you in the mirror," the developer says.Nonetheless, creator Patrick Klug isn't mad at pirates, and doesn't believe in DRM. He entreaties them to spend the 8 dollars and see what the game really should be like If Greenheart's anti-piracy measure made you smile, check out eight other hilarious examples of creative video game anti-piracy measures.

Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter