Noodlecake Studios has done its best to deter piracy, with a cheeky twist. The makers of mobile shoot-em-up game Shooting Stars! have decided to tweak the nose of would-be pirates by adding an invincible boss character named “Premium Funk” to the game.

Shooting Stars! is only $2.99 and available both on Google Play and the App Store. You can even check out a cute little trailer for the game below:

But $2.99 is just $2.99 too much for some people, so of course, piracy is an issue. Noodlecake actually uploaded the “pirated” version of Shooting Stars! to torrent sites themselves. Those pirates who couldn’t be bothered to fork over one-way bus fare to enjoy Noodlecake’s mobile game found themselves with an interesting surprise.

Come the third boss in Shooting Stars!, pirates run across a character named “Premium Funk.” Premium Funk is unstoppable, godlike…. in fact, Premium Funk is invincible. Noodlecake Studios lays out the jig on their blog:

“Not unlike Game Dev Tycoon, we modified the game so that once players hit boss 3, they are confronted with “Premium Funk”, a new boss wave not found in the retailer version. Firstly players must defeat a wave of bosses that have an obscene amount of health. If they do manage to defeat them, then the final boss approaches who has unlimited health. Once players die they are encouraged to check out the full version of the game and help the developers out by purchasing the retail copy.”

Once the pirates face their inevitable defeat, they are encouraged to actually purchase the game. But why did Noodlecake Studios bother to do this?

“Case in point. We launched Wayward Souls, one of the biggest, best reviewed premium games from Rocketcat Games one year ago to Android.  Our analytics show that 11% of all installs of the game have been paid for. 11%. And that is just the installs we are tracking. Some cracked versions might have taken out those reporting tools… knowing that the game was pirated and played 10x more than purchased from the store stings a bit no matter how you slice it.”

Yikes. Hopefully the extra poke of publicity helps Noodlecake Studios get their revenue up and their mobile game out there. Seriously, it’s only $2.99, y’all.