Anti-piracy

Purchasable games are known for containing **anti-piracy** elements, checking for alterations to the games alongside the existing copy-protection. The cracked copies contain various altered effects in gameplay different to legal copies, making any attempt to beat the games completely impossible.

*Baldi's Basics Kickstarter Exclusive Demo*, as of now, is the first and only example to feature anti-piracy effects, while *Baldi's Basics Plus* is planned to include a lot more anti-piracy effects.[*citation needed*] It is unknown if the game will remove the screen barrier while still ruining the player's experience.

## *Baldi's Basics Kickstarter Exclusive Demo*

### Pirated copy 1

The "`BadSum`" screen prevents the non-backers or backers who only donated less than $30 from playing the game regularly. This can also be accessible to backers who donated $30 or more if they copy and paste the *Kickstarter Exclusive Demo* folder and play the game in the copied file. Upon starting, the Basically, Games! team's logo first shows up normally. But instead of the main menu, the screen shows a dark image of a character resembling Baldi but in a blue shirt, without a hair string, a frightened face, and large pupils. The background shows a room similar to Baldi's Office, while "BAD SUM" is playing. The text reads the following:

Something isn't adding up!

Please restart the program. If this error
continues, this may be an unauthorized
copy of the game.

Please check refer to the manual for more
information.

### Pirated copy 2

Another pirated version, which was cracked poorly, is somewhat playable. Floor 1 starts off as normal, but when Baldi starts to chase the player, the game triggers some effects that make it impossible to beat the level:

* If playing in Hide-and-Seek or Free Run Mode without switching the files in the main menu, the school and the warning slides scenes intersect with each other.
	+ After the last slide in the school scene while the school scene and the warning slides scene intersect with each other, the main menu scene which appears to be invisible in the school scene will intersect with the school scene and the warning slides scene, soft-locking the game.
* When collecting two or half of the notebooks, Baldi will suddenly go extremely fast and there is no way to escape from him.
	+ The player can actually glitch out Baldi's speed. If the player collects two notebooks before Baldi chases them, the game will allow them to play normally until they collect two more notebooks in which Baldi goes extremely fast again.
	+ Unless playing in Free Run Mode, it is nearly impossible to complete the game as a result of this trick.
* Two Principal of the Things instead of one will spawn.
* Gotta Sweep's AI is adjusted to have no cooldown between sweeping times.
* The game will crash randomly often.
	+ Eventually, the crashing will happen so much, that the game basically crashes on startup, making it impossible to play.

## Trivia

* It was first considered by mystman12 in his Kickstarter comment since 2018 before the campaign accomplished its goal.
* All anti-piracy measures seem to be missing/removed from the current version of *Baldi's Basics Plus* due to its release on other platforms besides Steam.
* The anti-piracy screen from the pirated *Kickstarter Exclusive Demo* is similar to actual error screens in older games, including the SNES game *Donkey Kong Country 3*. The "**refer to your manual for more information**" part is a reference to some of these older anti-piracy screens.
* The "`BadSum`" image is reused on an error screen when pressing a name with lost or corrupted save data in *Baldi's Basics Plus*. Prior to V0.1.3, there was no error screen, and the game crashed after doing so.
	+ As of V0.3 of *Baldi's Basics Plus*, this image also appears in the ending, but in a random color shading.

## Gallery

The "`BadSum`" screen displayed in the pirated *Kickstarter Exclusive Demo*.
## References

1. ↑ "*That's something I have to look into more. I'm just not sure how to detect if the game's been pirated or not. I think it's pretty hilarious to mess up the gameplay in pirated version though!*" - mystman12's Kickstarter comment