Indie Devs Tell the Sad Story of Game Piracy with Pirated Games

Game Dev Tycoon has been launched recently and its developers have created a very special version for those who choose to pirate the game.

Upon release, Greenheart Studios upload “cracked” versions of Game Dev Tycoon in multiple torrent sites. This version is complete similar to the full game but only up to a certain point. The game itself is a game-development sim where the player creates a studio aiming to become the top player in the game development scene.

Those who opted to install the pirated version of Game Dev Tycoon will be able to play the game up until the moment where the player’s studio will start to encounter a big problem:

Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally,” reads one in-game message in the pirated version of Game Dev Tycoon. “If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.

So in a carefully crafted case of irony, those who pirate the game will have their quests of game dev glory squashed by piracy itself with every effort of the player steadily losing out to increasing piracy losses in-game. Now we’ve seen some other companies do things like this before but surely this is the most intricate of them all.

Greenheart Games has noted though that only 214 have chosen to purchase the game versus the 3,104 or more who opted to pirate the game in the first 24 hours. In a follow-up blog post, Game Dev Tycoon co-creator Patrick Klug stated that:

We are not wealthy and it’s unlikely that we will be any time soon, so stop pretending like we don’t need your 8 dollars! We are just two guys working our butts off, trying to start our own game studio to create games which are fun to play.