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 is the first and currently only example to feature anti-piracy effects, while the Baldi's Basics Plus is planned to include a lot more piracy effects. It is unknown if the game will remove the screen barrier while still running the effects.

Pirated Copy 1
This "" 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, with a lack of hair string, a frightened face, and large pupils. The background shows a room similar to Baldi's Office, while some eerie music is heard 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. The first level starts off as normal, but when Baldi begins pursuing, the game triggers a slight number of known effects that made it impossible to beat the level:
 * If going to the normal Main Mode or Free Run Mode without switching the files in the main menu, the school scene and the warning slides scene 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, softlocking the game.
 * When collecting two or half of the notebooks, Baldi will suddenly go insanely fast and there is no way to escape from him.
 * The player can actually bug out Baldi's speed, if they collect two notebooks before Baldi chases after them. The game will allow them to play normally until they collect two more notebooks in which Baldi goes supremely fast again.
 * Unless playing in Free Run Mode, it is impossible to complete the game as a result of this trick.
 * Two Principal of the Things instead of regularly 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 often, that the game basically crashes on startup, making it impossible to play.

Trivia

 * It is 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 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 "" image is reused on an error screen when pressing the name with lost or corrupted save file in Baldi's Basics Plus. Prior to V0.1.3, there was no error screen, and the game crashed after doing so.
 * Fake error after the ending.png of V0.3 of Baldi's Basics Plus, this image also appears in the ending, but in a random color shading.