It took Acid Wizard Studio over four years to get their atmospheric horror Darkwood ready for full release… and just one week to intentionally release a clean, free copy of the game on Pirate Bay.
As reported by Eurogamer, the decision to put the game out to torrent comes purely down to wanting to share the game with people who couldn’t afford it. Rather than see the game shared illegally or via key reselling sites, Acid Wizard hope the gesture means players will pay them when they can, and stop feeding illegal distribution in the meantime.
“The sad thing is, that a lot of those are scam emails,” the developers say in a post update on Imgur. “You know, when people claim to be a youtuber or blogger and ask for a Steam key. That key then gets sold through a shady platform. To be honest, we’re fed up with it. This practice makes it impossible for us to do any giveaways or send keys to people who actually don’t have the money to play Darkwood.”
“Steam lets you refund a game if you haven’t played it for more than 2 hours, and as a developer we can see the reason why people refunded it. When we read the explanation from someone who wrote that he needed the refund because he didn’t want his parents to be stressed out when seeing the bill at the end of the month… well, it made us feel quite bad.”
“So we decided to do something about it! If you don’t have the money and want to play the game, we have a safe torrent on the Pirate Bay of the latest version of Darkwood (1.0 hotfix 3), completely DRM-free.”
There’s no catch here, by the way – no “added pirate hats for characters” or anything to intimate your running a free copy. Acid Wizard have just one request: “if you like Darkwood and want us to continue making games, consider buying it in the future, maybe on a sale, through Steam, GOG or Humble Store.”
Source : Google
“But please, please, don’t buy it through any key reselling site,” they add, “By doing that, you’re just feeding the cancer that is leeching off this industry.”
This isn’t the first time a studio’s torrented its own game, of course. But when asked how the altruistic move might affects sales, Acid Wizard’s Maciej Górny told Eurogamer: “We’ve reached the 12th spot on the Global Top Sellers list on Steam at some point and we’re staying on the first pages of that list. Overall, we’re very content, it’s been a tough and rewarding ride!”
We think Darkwood does something very clever, taking a top-down perspective, a traditionally informative and open view, and finding ways to obscure the world and hide things in plain sight.
