Over the years, I've been convinced that indie developers should not really focus on DRM, focusing on paying customers. Also over the course of several years I've also suggested quite a few times in the business forums that indies should even consider intentionally releasing their games on piracy sites, possibly with added in-game ads or other incentives to legally purchase the game.

Looks like somebody finally did that with an added ironic, and very beautiful, twist.

A game studio called GreenHeart Games developed "Game Dev Tycoon", a game where you run a virtual software development shop. They released it DRM-free for legal purchases.

They also seeded a special build for pirates. In the pirate-released build, the virtual game dev studio does well for a while and then starts to have their products get hit by piracy.

The studio's blog post is one of the best things I've read all year: http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/

Reading the forum posts where game pirates complain about piracy and ask for new forms of DRM is just incredible.

Thats pretty hilarious and one of the reasons you should always add a serial key to your games even if they are single player and DRM free, its quite nice to be able to filter out support requests from non customers.

That links dead for me, this is one i found though(i assume it's the same):

http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/

edit: seems my link just went down as well.

anywho, i did read the article, it defiantly is a unique game for them to do this with. And i feel bad for them, having those numbers to backup piracy vs legitimate sales must hurt quite a bit.

I'm guessing that that bit of their site is getting hammered at the moment. There's an article about it on PCGamer that has the important details.

And i feel bad for them, having those numbers to backup piracy vs legitimate sales must hurt quite a bit.

Those numbers are typical across the industry.

www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-has-90-piracy-rate/

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/364271/pc-piracy-rate-above-90-says-ubisoft/

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/08/machinarium-suffers-95-piracy-rate-offers-5-amnesty-sale/

They are also typical of every single game I have worked on professionally since the late 1990s.

In a depressing turn of events, one of our games about 8 years ago became extremely popular in Eastern Europe. We didn't translate the game into any of their languages, and we couldn't get it distributed in that region. Based on the online telemetry, we had many times more active players in Eastern Europe than we had total sales across the globe where we did sell the game. We ended up seeing about 95% piracy on that game, too.

Realy good read, Its funny to see the comments from the people that did pirate the game :)

This goes beyond a meme. The whole definition of irony now has to be rewritten. smh. LMAO. That was an awesome article. Thank you for that.

Saw this from one of the Razer heads. Definitely an interesting tactic and one I thoroughly enjoyed reading about.

Hhahaha, yeah, saw that a few moments ago. Very clever indeed :D

Anyway, that quoted comment makes me wonder:

If I make an average game 5-7 I get some cash which is understandable but then if I make an 9-10 game I earn the same cash because I get the message for the piracy

That sounds kinda familiar doesn't it?

Over the years, I've been convinced that indie developers should not really focus on DRM, focusing on paying customers. Also over the course of several years I've also suggested quite a few times in the business forums that indies should even consider intentionally releasing their games on piracy sites, possibly with added in-game ads or other incentives to legally purchase the game.

i think the same way and will be doing that.