This is a fascinating little blip that popped up this morning and bears a mention. Games company GreenHeart released an $8 game called Game Dev Tycoon. He sold a few hundred copies and, as a special treat, released a torrent of the game with a special feature built-in: after hours of play, the little virtual game devs would get a sales report that said pirates were stealing the game so much that the company was going under. Hilarity ensued.
Gamers with the pirated version resorted to complaining about the product on various forums, wondering why their choice to pirate an $8 game was coming back to bite them. To wit:
Sadly, all of this irony still didn’t make GreenHeart games much money, as over 90% of the users downloaded the pirated version. The creator made just $2,140 as of yesterday. Hopefully all of this attention is getting creator Patrick Klug a little more cash, but it’s a sad situation when an industry that lionizes the indie refuses to pay for the products they champion. Information wants to be free, to be sure, but Krug needs to eat.
