C&C Generals had a thing where if you had multiple clients with the same CD key in a multiplayer game everything would be fine for a while, but 10 minutes into the game all the buildings of the people who duplciate keys would explode.

This happened a few times at LAN parties to my friends, some of whome gave each other the game by copying the install directory across. Took us a while to work out what the hell was happening.

Which is interesting because Starcraft had a specific "Spawn Install" so you could have two people play multiplayer from the same license.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_installation

I wish this were more common. This is how games should be made and played, imo.

Don't really get the idea behind fighting cheating in SP games - you just destroy the game for yourself. In MP on the other hand you destroy it for others. Maybe some kind of telemetry + ML analysis could help here as the current methods seem to have holes in them that get found out eventually.

Piracy is not Cheating (or rather it is, but a different kind: cheating the developer out of his money):)

How buggy was it?

I remember in Settlers 2 or something (before Ubisoft ruined it) the iron smelter was producing pigs in pirated versions.

However, it wasn't extremely good at detecting them leading to pissed off legit players.

No idea, my first encounter with Serious Sam was a cheap Steam bundle so it never happened to me. They're really fun over the top games and hearing about that "feature" it made so much sense. The developers definitely prioritize fun over taking things seriously (no pun intended).

Oh I've played all the Serious Sams :) It's about the only modern 3d shooter series I can still stomach. Battlefield of Honor of Duty and derivatives take themselves too seriously and are too much for hypercompetitive dudebros.

This is a neat little reference to pig iron, probably the only kind of iron one could produce with a settlers style smelting operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_iron

These sort of protections are fine until they trigger on legitimate installations. Red Alert 2 has a copy protection mechanism that destroyed all of your buildings a minute into the game, but it is notorious for triggering on legitimate installations of the game. I've seen it happen in the original release (even on a fresh Windows install when I was attempting to resolve this issue), The First Decade rerelease, and the Origin release.

The creator of Game Dev Tycoon, a game where you play as a small indie studio owner, created a patched version of the game and released it in piratebay. In this version after a while you would get an event that your latest game creation was cracked and uploaded to a pirate site and as a result your revenues would tank and you would go bankrupt.