During their Reddit AMA, Introversion, the developers of the ace Prison Architect (as noted in our Prison Architect review), revealed their take on game piracy. “We think of pirates as marketing ‘leads’,” producer Mark Morris said. “They are interested enough to want to play the game, but not enough to part with the cash yet. Our job is to offer more value to those that have played the game and convince the pirates to upsell to the real thing.”
“I’m not sure how much success we’ll have with this, but we absolutely don’t want to punish legit players in any way whatsoever for the work of some pirates.”
It’s an open approach to game piracy. Something we’re seeing more from indie developers of late. With many more developers adopting DRM free distribution techniques, too, you’d be safe in predicting a vast increase in pirate versions of those unprotected games. That doesn’t seem to be the case, though. Still it seems to be the big AAA releases that see the most shares, despite being the most protected.
You can read through the rest of the AMA here.