Garry’s Mod creator Garry Newman has just released a patch for his sandbox game, which includes an interesting way of handling pirates. Specifically, a pirated version of the game will return an error named “Unable to shade polygon normals”, and if you search Google for this string, you’ll see that quite a lot of folks are experiencing this error. Furthermore, if posted on the Steam forums, the error code also includes the user’s Steam ID, which gives Valve an easy task of finding out who the pirates are.

Newman acknowledges that it’s fairly simple to crack the new patch, but it wasn’t his intention to create uncrackable DRM, it was, as he put it: “Making it uncrackable isn’t the motive here – laughing at [pirates] is”. Indeed, Garry, and well done.

Besides revealing sales figures for their own games, it has been revealed that Garry’s Mod has sold 312,541 copies on Steam. This has undoubtedly brought much financial happiness to creator Garry Newman, who must have gotten over $3.12 million from the sales.

“GMod hasn’t just given me financial stability,” wrote Newman on his blog. “It’s also made me a lot more experienced in c++. I learned how game engines are meant to work. I got to fly to Valve HQ.”

The Source-powered mod allows gamers to take models from various games into an open sandbox and play with them accordingly. It is usually used for forum lulz, but also has serious uses. The mod requires at least one Source-engine powered game to be installed.