Turning the tide on pirates

With all the talk at the moment of PC games being delayed due to fears over the widespread piracy of games on the medium (despite the fact the first version of MW2 to get the Jolly Roger was the 360 version) it's nice to see a developer turning piracy around to its own advantage. Matt over on Gamesindustry.biz has been chatting with PCF's favourite arcade biker, Tero Virtala, CEO of RedLynx, developer of the brilliant Trials at the Develop Conference in Liverpool.

RedLynx actually used the popularity of torrent sites to drive interest in their full game by seeding a neutered version of the game around the web themselves. The only thing it was missing is what Tero calls 'the soul' of the game: the leaderboard. Without the ability to see where you stand in the grand scheme of things, or the ability to shave tenths of a second off your buddy's time, the game does indeed become quite soulless. The hope was that people playing the neutered version, and enjoying it, would then want to pay to get the full version with full access to the leaderboard.

In the eighteen months since the game was first released it has sold around 150,000 copies, and that tallies with the amount of people on the current leaderboard. "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," Virtala goes on to say.

It's an interesting take on the psychology of both the demo and pirates. Would those people pirating the game have bothered if they'd known it was basically a demo version? Probably not, but it got the pirates playing, spread the word about the game and obviously didn't impact on sales to any great extent. Obviously it's not a quickfix for the PC games industry, but at least it's a start in the right direction. Realistically you'll never eradicate piracy, but if you can start thinking of ways to make it work for in the whole any exposure is good exposure kinda way then we can maybe begin to turn the tide.