Take note, Toronto game devs: Indie developer Greenheart Games launched their first game — Game Dev Tycoon — over the weekend and leaked a special unbeatable version to torrent sites in an effort to get game pirates to think about the consequences of their actions. Game Dev Tycoon is a Sims-like simulator game where you start a game studio in the ’80s, and then go through the motions of making sucessful projects, growing and making more complicated games until you’re a massive global game studio. The paid version of the game allows you to do this as long as you make the right decisions and gauge the market correctly. The pirated version that Greenheart leaked does not. In fact, once players start making highly scored games, they get a screen that says that while the game is very popular, players are only pirating it, and this continues until their studio goes bankrupt.
Greenheart managed to find some comments left by some of these Game Dev Tycoon pirates, and the results are pretty hilarious. One frustrated pirate asks if there’s some kind of DRM (Digital Rights Management) that can help rid the world of the piracy that is killing his profit. In a wonderful twist of irony, another says, “Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me!” Usage stats currently estimate that 93% of players of Game Dev Tycoon are playing a pirated copy and not the genuine version.
Now, this move probably won’t stop people from pirating the game for long because now that people know it exists, someone will leak the genuine version. But the creators are hoping that maybe the experience will give some of these pirates pause before they hit the torrent button next time. If there was ever going to be a game that could teach people about the consequences of pirating a game, it would have to be one called Game Dev Tycoon, right?
So please, if you want the game, please buy it. Game Dev Tycoon is only $8, and DRM free.
[via Greenheart Games Blog]
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Megan Patterson is the Science and Technology Editor at feminist geekery site Paper Droids and currently a Toronto Standard intern. She also tweets more than is healthy or wise.
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