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RedLynx Intentionally Leaked Trials To Torrent Sites
by Leigh Alexander
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November 6, 2009
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Piracy is a rampant problem in particular for small PC developers, but Trials HD developer RedLynx says it's looking at ways to leverage the issue to its benefit -- like leaking its PC game Trials 2 to torrent sites alongside its commercial release.
"Piracy is here, so how can we take advantage of that?" posed RedLynx CEO Tero Virtala, speaking at a Develop Liverpool panel reported on by GamesIndustry.biz. "What we did actually, on day one, we put that game immediately on all the torrent networks ourselves."
According to the report, the leaked version of the game lacked leaderboard support, crucial to Trials 2's full experience -- Virtala's hope was that users who downloaded the game would enjoy it enough to upgrade to a paid version to gain the extra feature.
In that way, offering the "leaked" version of the game was like offering a demo that simply leveraged the existing network of users who download games via torrents.
And Virtala said that the PC game pirates haven't yet found a way to crack into the leaderboards, which he says are the game's "soul" -- at least, that's his belief based on cross-referencing.
Trials 2 has sold close to 150,000 legitimate PC copies since its launch, he said: "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 our leaderboards yet."
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In my opinion, this is a brilliant way of circumventing piracy. Forget lawyers, developers are now enlisting saboteurs and vandals!
It is not the same, these guys here are only returning to the old (and awesome in my opinion) shareware model, you release a NOT CRIPPLEWARE stuff, and if the user wants he pay for it (or pay for more).
The crippled batman or mirror edge are just stupidity, specially because crackers usually can fix it fast when someone discover (I followed mirror edge, that in several points of the game made you slow so it was impossible to jump any gap, it took exactly 50 hours after the discovery of this system to a crack get released).
I think that the "licensing" model that is used today copied from the main software industry is one of the worst models existant, for some reason it promotes piracy and make your company "look evil" specially if you have a high price and insist on some stupid ideas (DRM, no re-selling anyone?)
What these guys did, is what id Software was doing 15 years ago, I remember having a floppy coppy of Wolf3D and Doom, that somsone got on a BBS I think (in Brazil there was no BBS too, international call is ridicously expensive), and only because I played their games that way that I know who they are, and probably this happened too with all other people over the world where the media do not got scared by doom (here we had no doom murder simulator panic)
@Helder: Consumer software has never had a non-"licensing" model. The only groups to buy actual ownership of video games are publishers. There are different types of licences: Some last forever (most games) while others expire (MMOs), Some are transferable and some are not. How much more are you willing to pay for a transferable license over the price of a non-transferable license?