Developer Puts Game On The Pirate Bay Because Steam Key Resellers Are The Bigger Evil
from the gifts-for-the-poor dept
Leaving aside the AAA publishers for a moment, the video game industry is actually starting to get really good on recognizing better ways to react to copyright infringement other than pounding their fists on their tables and knee-capping their customers with DRM. This still occurs, of course, but we've also seen stories of publishers treating pirates as potential customers with whom it's worth connecting, giving away Steam keys on torrent sites, or just playfully messing with pirates instead of screaming at them. These efforts generally are done to the tune of great PR and the humanization of a content company that can only help their businesses.
And, thankfully, it's not a trend that is slowing down. Acid Wizard Studio, publishers of the game Darkwood, made some recent news by deciding to put its own game on the Pirate Bay.
On torrent site The Pirate Bay, typically the domain of illegal rips of media, one username among dozens uploading the horror game Darkwood stands out: the game’s publisher. Today, the Poland-based Acid Wizard Studio uploaded their own game for free with “no catch, no added pirate hats for characters,” their torrent description reads.
Now, why Acid Wizard Studio did this is somewhat unique in these kinds of stories. In part, the studio says it did this because it doesn't want to keep the game from those who truly cannot afford it. It aimed this message particularly at children who game at the pleasure of their parents' credit card bills. But while we've seen that sort of thing done before, the studio also did this because it believes the Steam key reselling business is the greater evil compared with piracy.
Acid Wizard saw a comment from someone who refunded the game because they didn’t want their parents to get stressed out over the bill, Acid Wizard writes on Imgur.
“If you don’t have the money and want to play the game,” they say, “we have a safe torrent on the Pirate Bay of the latest version of Darkwood.” They explain that a flood of emails asking for free Steam keys helped bolster their decision to upload a free Darkwood torrent to The Pirate Bay, and asked that those who can afford it later buy it discounted on Steam. It’s an interesting move that spits in the face of shady key-selling services like G2A, where Acid Wizard figures a lot of the free keys they’d send out would go. “This practice makes it impossible for us to do any giveaways or send keys to people who actually don’t have the money to play Darkwood,” Acid Wizard writes. “Please, don’t buy it through any key reselling site. By doing that, you’re just feeding the cancer that is leeching off this industry.”
The replies to the studio's message were almost universally positive, with many promising to try the game out via the torrent and buy it afterwards if they liked it. How many of those people ever would have tried the game out at all, illlicitly or otherwise, is impossible to determine, but it seems obvious that the amount of additional sales revenue that will be generated because of this is not zero. In other words, the publisher gets the good PR of treating people well, gets to make a point about a key-reselling industry that is genuinely pretty scummy, and picks up some indeterminate number of sales in the process.
That's the kind of nimble response to piracy the AAA publishers should recognize as a winning strategy.
Filed Under: darkwood, piracy, resellers, steam, video games
Companies: acid wizard studio, the pirate bay
