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from the deadwood-'deadweight'-delights-dollar-delinquents dept.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Acid Wizard Studio, the creators of the popular Darkwood game, have shared a copy on The Pirate Bay. The developers want to help out people who don't have the financial means to buy a legal copy of the game and also prevent them from going to unauthorized key sharing sites.
Online piracy is an issue that affects many industries, and indie game development is certainly no exception.
While some developers see piracy as an evil that needs to be rooted out as soon as possible, others are more open to the motivations behind it.
The average game fan may not have the financial means to try out all the new titles that come out every month, for example. While these people are not by any means entitled to a free copy, sometimes the human element resonates with developers.
Acid Wizard Studio, the three college friends from Poland behind the horror game Darkwood, started thinking about this when they recently received an email from a desperate young fan.
They recount how a fan, who loved the game, asked for a refund because he was worried about his parent's reaction to the cost. They realized this was not an isolated occurrence and decided to do something very unusual in the videogame industry: make a free copy available on a torrent! The story concludes:
"We have just one request: if you like Darkwood and want us to continue making games, consider buying it in the future, maybe on a sale, through Steam, GOG or Humble Store. But please, 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."
People who are into horror games can download a copy of the game here, or buy it here. The Imgur post with the full story of the developers, spotted via PC Gamer, is well worth a read too.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27 2017, @11:00PM
There may be cases where legitimate keys are purchased using stolen credit card details for money laundering purposes. The credit card owner notices the fraudulent purchase and issues a charge-back, but by that time the key has already been resold. The developer may then revoke the key, resulting in the one who purchased it secondhand losing access. The charge-back also means that the developer would be worse off than if the original purchase had never been made in the first place. But I agree that this does not reflect all key reselling scenarios.
From the perspective of a customer, my opinion is that DRM is a greater issue. Some companies have included DRM like Denuvo at launch and then removed it later after a certain duration of time has elapsed; while I oppose DRM in general (especially the intrusive variants), this approach is not as objectionable. If a game permanently includes intrusive DRM then I will never purchase it. Going back on topic, DRM-free releases remove the key-reselling part of the equation because there are no keys to resell -- and no sales are lost from the ones who would never have purchased it anyway.