Anodyne dev: It's better to embrace piracy
Sean Hogan gives pirates his blessing, but game disappears from Pirate Bay anyway
After finding out his game had appeared on file sharing site The Pirate Bay Sean Hogan, one of the developers of 2D title Anodyne, decided to not only to give the pirates his approval, but to post download codes for it too.
"Yeah, 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," he later explained on Reddit under the alias seagaia.
"I think when you're a small group of developers (only my friend Jon [Kittaka] and I made Anodyne), it's better to have lots of people able to experience your game. 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!"
He also asked The Pirate Bay users to tweet him with feedback on the game and to vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.
Interestingly TorrentFreak is now reporting that the game has disappeared from The Pirate Bay, something which Hogan knows nothing about.
"Uploading it and then taking it down would have been genius, but I am not that smart," he said on Twitter.
In the past Jonatan Söderström of Hotline Miami fame has taken a similar approach to piracy, offering a patched version of his game to illegal downloaders.
I must admit the thought of adding your own game to torrent sites on release day is almost appealing. At least you could put analytics in there to get accurate figures on piracy, or some other means of getting something useful from the inevitable.
"Well, you know, murders happen. Seems silly wasting time trying to stop it, so lets just call open house"...
I'd rather look on business models that make games cheap and highly accessible (some even free) rather than extortionate prices and often little content.
Games should be so amazing and fill people with so much excitement and anticipation and content that they feel they want and need to invest in them.
Of course, game pricing and low content doesn't make an excuse for piracy but turning that on its head can make it worthless.
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Adam Campbell on 12th February 2013 9:52pm
And yet piracy rates on Android are still ridiculous. We know this because for every multiplayer game that starts, about 20 are rejected by our server license check. That's 20:1 just on a part of the game that's played the least. I can call in any of my mobile dev mates to give you similar stories if you think this might be due to something specific about our setup.
If people really did see the size and scale of this blatant lawbreaking, it would shake the world. There is no other area of crime that gets even close to this widespread ridiculous level. If 19 out of 20 people had been burgled on every street in England, you'd get a feel for the size of it. Especially if you were one of the 19 and that other 1 in 20 just said "tough"
It's bloody insulting to pretend "well they wouldn't have bought it anyway". I'm sure that's true for some, but if piracy was stamped out and one in ten casual pirates started paying for stuff, the value of the Android sector would triple overnight
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Paul Johnson on 13th February 2013 12:00am
The reason that consoles succeeded, despite their incredibly high game prices, is that they served as an anti piracy dongle. When this dongle failed, as with the PSX, the industry caught a very bad cold indeed.
These days we have business models that work round piracy. Hence the resurgence of the PC and the explosion in mobile gaming.
However we should never be complacent, a thriving business can be reduced to near zero overnight when the thieves discover a work around.
Not critcising your game's content or every game's content but you can either be in the camp that decides piracy should be embraced because there's no alternative or be in the camp that works on and finds an alternative and continues making amazing games.
I'm just saying its what we should aspire to as opposed to just complaining. You can't magically change people's behaviour but you can try or find ways to devalue 'stealing' a game.
As I said, you can always make it free(mium) or make it even cheaper. If not work with what you've got or exit the market altogether. Maybe nothing works and the whole industry is screwed but I don't carry that view.
Somehow a lot of games still manage to be incredibly successful even through adversity. Its not a fluke.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Adam Campbell on 13th February 2013 9:48am
The battle with piracy has been going on for decades, and to be honest it's done sod-all. By all means you have to try and do what you can to protect your investment, but at the end of the day it is an inevitability that the game will get cracked and pirated.
You can either take your blinkered view, or you can try and think outside the box a little.
All of our games have been pirated. And in the wonderful age of analytical reports, we can see roughly how many and where the games are being pirated. Now we've gained absolutely NOTHING from the pirated units at all. Why not try and think a little about how you can leverage these extra units out in the wild. Because it WILL HAPPEN.
I definitely see piracy as stealing, as a game is a product. Physcial or digital. But its quite interesting that different people have different perceptions of what the term actually means hence the marks ;)
The word pirate is suggestive enough as it describes a certain type of thief...
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Barry Meade on 13th February 2013 11:56pm