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Indie Devs Upload Their Own Game To The Pirate Bay
dartttt writes "Indie game company tinyBuild Games, who released a platformer called No Time To Explain recently, uploaded their own game to the Pirate Bay. However, there's a key difference between the game they uploaded and the version you can purchase: the game characters wear pirate hats, and everything else has a pirate theme. One of the company's founders, Alex Nichiporchik, said, '[S]ome people are going to torrent it either way, we might as well make something funny out of it. ... You can’t really stop piracy, all you can do is make it work for you and/or provide something that people actually want to pay for. For us this is humor, we like making people laugh.'"
I want the real game, not some fake pirate themed one.
Umm, who is stopping you from buying it?
It isn't a fake. It's just differently themed in character design on the Pirate's Bay version
I want the real game, not some fake pirate themed one.
Umm, who is stopping you from buying it?
His mum won't give him any pocket money until he gets his lazy arse out of the basement and looks for a job.
I dunno, I'm actually half-tempted to buy this game because they're taking the inevitability of piracy, and getting a little bit of humour out of it. That and, unlike the two companies you've mentioned, the developers of this game are not actively prosecuting pirates. If anything, they're rewarding you for pirating... if you like pirate-themed games.
Because people will never RTFA:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6617784/No_Time_To_Explain_Windows_tinyBuildGAMES
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
They are creating buzz about their game. Its free marketing, and marketing is one of the areas that indies do not have a lot of money to fund.
I am positive that many people will download it for free and never even consider paying for it. However, I am just as sure that another large group of people will download it, try it, like it, and go and buy the version without pirate hats. (I am assuming that they have something in game or in the downloaded files that tells the end-user how to get a legit copy.)
I even expect that there will even be a small amount of people that will give money to the developer just for offering their game like this. Reasons for this will be because they legitimize p2p, to encourage more devs to go this route, or even just to give a big FU to companies like EA, Activision, and Ubisoft that think that DRM is the only way to succeed.
In the end, I would wager that they will make more money on this game by letting people download it for free than if they tried to actual remove their game from filesharing sites. (not that it is ever possible to completely remove a file from the internet.)
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
So the RIAA should put versions of their songs on TPB where every five seconds someone says "arrr"?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
How is this any different from RIAA or MPAA uploading fake torrents of their music and movies to make it more difficult for people to find what they want? They are doing exactly the same - polluting torrent sites by uploading fake content. I want the real game, not some fake pirate themed one.
The difference is the RI/MPAA is doing it to collect for IPs for their all-lawsuit business model. These people are doing it with the realization that a certain number of people are going to pirate it no matter what so they may as well make a joke out of it. I haven't downloaded the game but it sounds like it's otherwise the same as the original, commercial version save graphics.
Having a sense of humor about it seems to be a good thing if these types of stories are anything to go by.
=Smidge=
actually all mainstream music and film sucks indeed. and games. and im no generation x.
No. If you were, you'd be more likely to punctuate correctly and use at-least-approximately correct grammar. ;)
4) Plus, pirate hats actually make things better. So yet again the pirates get the best version :) Seriously though, they seem like they've got the right approach and there are some nice incentives to buy (you get "series 2" free apparently). I think it's a pretty clever way to get a demo of your game out there and talked about, I wish more developers took the playful approach rather than the "let's punish legitimate users with horrible DRM and still see pirate copies in circulation two days after launch" approach that seems to be the norm.