Developer deliberately sent its PC game to pirate sites

Posted Nov 6th 2009 5:30PM by John Callaham
Filed under: Downloads, Driving

While most PC developers dread the thought of their games being pirated on torrent web sites, one game developer actually sent a build of their game to pirates site deliberately. Gamesindusty.biz reports that's exactly what happened to Trials 2: Second Edition, the 2008 released racing game from developer RedLynx.

The developer's CEO Tero Virtala said the version of the game they made available to pirate sites lacked the online leaderboards of the full version. His hope was that the pirates would like the game enough to pay for the full version. So far 150,000 copies of the full version have been sold and Virtala states, "When we compare that hacked version with those who have access to leaderboards and are accessing our servers they match. So at least people have not cracked out leaderboards yet."

Tags: pc-game-piracy, redlynx, trials-2-second-edition

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

That's pretty cool.Posted at 8:36PM on Nov 6th 2009 by Einhanderkiller

I think you meant to write "game developer deliberately sent a stripped-down version of its pc game to pirates in an attempt to upsell them on full versions".

Quote: "That game relies really heavily on the server side – the leaderboards are the soul of the game. I don't know if it's helped, I'd assume so because even though the version that we put on the torrent networks wasn't the full version, it's the version of the game without the actual soul, without the leaderboards to play against other players."

In other news, developers release free demo versions of their games in hopes of selling full versions. Also, you should've added a link to the story (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/redlynx-we-put-trials-pc-game-on-torrent-sites).Posted at 1:56AM on Nov 7th 2009 by B