Onnit Labs

Wednesday 20 February 2013

Indie game finds success through Pirates




While most game developers struggle with the online Pirate scourge, indie game makers Sean H. and Jon K. have turned the tide.





Sean and Jon made the news earlier in the month when the beta version of their indie game Anodyne found its way onto the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay. Instead of taking the usual approach and demanding its removal or attempting to persecute any downloaders, Sean actually approved of the torrents presence.

"It's neat that Anodyne's here and I'm glad that means more people can play it, though of course we'd love it if you bought the game!" he wrote in a torrent comment. "We're tryin' to get Greenlit on Steam so we'd really appreciate it if you and your friends gave us an upvote... Most importantly let us know what you think of the game and if you like it or if it fills you with a burning rage!"
 
He then went on to post free download codes for the game in the next comment, encouraging gamers to try the game, and spread the word on his behalf.

"Piracy is inevitable so it's better to embrace it - plus, it gives lots of people who couldn't normally afford the game the opportunity to play it - and I think when you're a small group of developers (only my friend Jon and I made Anodyne), it's better to have lots of people able to experience your game," he explained in a separate post on Reddit. "We hope enough people will like it and the word will get out, eventually allowing us to get onto Steam, which then lets more people see and play Anodyne!"

Sean and Jon took this momentum and ran with it, posting the game on the "legal" side to The Pirate Bay, The Promo Bay, offering the game for as little as $1 on the site. The game itself got about 40,000 hits and around 800 sales in the ten days that the game was released before hitting Pirate Bay, but during its 72 hours on the page it reached $12,000 and received a massive boost to their position on Steam Greenlight. The Anodyne site itself even got around 240,000 hits over the period, and most of those came from The Pirate Bay itself.

It's not the first time that a game has used pirating in its advantage, previous games such as Hotline Miami and McPixel had similar successes with their individual approaches to game pirating. God knows that the people that have suffered the most from the pirating crackdown has been the innocent parties, anyone who has had to use an online code or DRM services can tell you that. Is this the dawn of a new era in game pirating?

-Welsh 20/02/13

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