These three game developers pirated their own games on The Pirate Bay and look what happened


Check Out What Happened After Three Developers Pirated Their Own Games on The Pirate Bay and other Torrent websites

Torrent and Pirate websites are considered to be a bane for game developers, music composers and movie producers. They allege that torrent website and pirate website eat into their earnings by illegally offering users their copyrighted product for free. While this might be true, there are some who believe the opposite to be true. Some people think that torrent websites actually drive more users to their products.

Here are three game developers who think exactly the same. Kotaku reports that these three developers decided to wade into the shark-infested waters of The Pirate Bay and released their games.

For the uninitiated, most games come with a tool/feature called DRM called Digital Rights Management. DRM protects the games from being hacked and pirated on torrent websites. but many top hackers know the glitches/loopholes in the DRM software which they use to break the game and then release it on torrent websites like The Pirate Bay, KickAssTorrents, etc.

Fully aware of the DRM tool on the games they developed, these three developers put their games on sites like The Pirate Bay themselves as an experiment. Months (or in some cases, years) later, they say it was a worthwhile experiment, even if it didn’t improve their sales all that much.

One of the three is TinyBuild’s Alex Nichiporchik. Alex decided to use The Pirate Bay to drive sales to his comedy game, No Time To Explain. He put the torrent on The Pirate Bay back in 2011 a with the twist that nearly all of the characters in the version pirates downloaded were clad in little pirate outfits. Alex is pretty happy with his experiment. He says that the pirated version definitely created a buzz around the game but he can’t measure the exact number of sales that buzz led to. Six years later, he still gets occasional emails from fans about it.

He told Kotaku, “One, in particular, was a guy who pirated No Time to Explain, then made enough money to buy it and has been a fan of ours ever since. It’s definitely been a good decision. Your game is going to end up on piracy websites regardless, and you might as well have fun with it, and in a way prevent it from being a virus or some malicious software.”
Second game developers to put their game on The Pirate Bay and other torrent websites were makers of horror game Darkwood. Unlike Alex, the Darkwood makers put it on The Pirate Bay within two months after its official launched and they are quite happy about it. They received emails from people, some of whom said they didn’t even play horror games, with receipts proving they purchased Darkwood in support of the developers’ clear understanding that Pirates Are People Too. Darkwood also benefited from heaps of media coverage, some of which came from outside the world of video games.
Developers also decided to go with The Pirate Bay experiment and put their shoot-’em-up game Shooting Stars on the torrent website. The developers have a different story to tell. Developer Ryan Holowaty says that mobile gaming piracy is a different ball game altogether. “Looking at it from the perspective [of getting buzz], I would say it was a success, but from an actual stopping of piracy standpoint, it was a misfire,” Holowaty told Kotaku. He explained that Android piracy often comes from direct downloads, rather than torrent sites, meaning that the “official” torrent didn’t really reach the bulk of pirates.
Two of the three experiments prove that the torrent websites drive traffic to the original source be it movie, games or music as Peter Sunde and torrent supporters have always been saying. However, the movie and music industry disagrees and is adamant on closing the remaining torrent websites after having tasted success with the closure of YIFY Torrents, Torrentz,, Popcorn Time etc. in last two years. Only The Pirate Bay remains tall in all the mayhem of 2016-17.

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