Chris Rock once said on monogamy that a man is “basically as faithful as his options.” In other words, if they have the ability to cheat, they are much more likely.

The same can easily be said when it comes to videogames and piracy. Everyone knows how much of a problem piracy is, yet many still succumb to the allure. After all, it’s easy, it’s free, and you don’t even have to see the victims if you don’t look hard.

However, the victims are very real, and the numbers to support it are staggering. Take for instance the recently released indie game “Game Dev Tycoon,” where you are tasked with running a video game development studio. It’s been announced by the game’s developer that figures seem to show that of the roughly 3300 copies of the game being played so far, a whopping 93.6% are pirated copies. Naturally for a small studio like Greenheart Games, or anyone really, those are crippling.

While cases like this are all too common, this one does have a silver, and very humorous, lining.

See, it turns out that a large part of the reason that the developers have such accurate figures for the pirated copies, is because they released their own pirated version of the game. Besides using it to fish for statistics, they also programmed these games with a very important feature, where a warning message pops up that the fake games your fictional in-game studio develops are being heavily pirated.

The problem becomes so great, that sooner or later you eventually will lose your studio as you usually can’t profit enough to get ahead, making those copies of “Game Dev Tycoon” essentially unwinnable.

While that’s humorous enough as is, the best part of this story has to be the befuddled reactions from the users of these pirated copies, as they just can’t understand why this is happening in their game, and are pleading with other players for a way to resolve the issue. One even remarks that the whole thing is “not fair,” while another asks is DRM can fix the problem.

While the irony there is seemingly only lost on the people affected, the real irony is that the people who pirated the game about running a video game development studio seem to have gotten the most realistic version of that process. Gaming needs an indie scene to challenge the perceptions of the industry and test the waters of what works and what is accepted at large. Piracy kills that creative market, and unfortunately a viable solution on a massive scale has not been presented yet, and quite possibly never will.

Still though, it’s nice to know that pending financial and creative doom hasn’t deterred the better spirits of at least one developer, and it’s hard to not applaud them in their efforts to make a small, but very clear, stand against the matter the best way they know how.