RedLynx: We put Trials on torrent sites

By Games Industry.biz Published 6 November, 2009

Devs hoped to take advantage of piracy.

RedLynx has admitted that in order to market Trials 2: Second Edition on PC it leaked it to torrent sites for pirates on the same day it was released to paying consumers, GamesIndustry.biz reports.

The pirated version of the game does not include support for leaderboards, said company CEO Tero Virtala, a crucial feature that is the "soul" of the game. Without it, he hoped users of the hacked version would want to upgrade to the legitimate copy once they began enjoying the game.

"Piracy is here, so how can we take advantage of that? What we did actually, on day one, we put that game immediately on all the torrent networks ourselves," revealed Virtala, during a panel discussion at Develop Liverpool yesterday.

"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."

Virtala said that the game has sold close to 150,000 copies since it was launched 18 months ago. "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," he added.

During the same discussion, Torsten Reil of NaturalMotion expressed his frustrations at the amount of piracy for the company's iPhone title Backbreaker - despite the game being sold at the lowest possible price point on Apple's App Store.

"We know anecdotally that even at 59p a lot of people have pirated the game," he said. "At 59p it's pretty fair to assume that a lot of those pirates would have been able and would have bought the game, but there's an overall attitude that it's fine to pirate."

While technology can be employed to hinder piracy of games on all formats, Reil said that it's just as important to try and change the attitude that content should be free for consumers.

"There is in general a feeling that IP and content should be free. That's fine to say, but if you have to pay all the people that actually put their heart and soul into a game - who have to pay a mortgage off and have children - it becomes much more difficult. Yes, you can limit [piracy] with technical tricks, but there needs to be an overall change in the perception of IP and the people who create it."

Picture of Games.

About Games Industry.biz

Read more articles from Games by visiting the Games Industry.biz archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (21) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • kingmong #1 2 years ago

    arrr... fairly warned be thee says I

    touch me loot and ye'll get me boot. avast ye dogs!

  • conners #2 2 years ago

    Dear Reader's Digest.

    An interesting approach, but why not offer the same choice to all of us honest, decent folk as they did to the thieving pirate chav bastards?

    I.e. Why not offer the game free to everyone at launch (without leaderboard support) and give us the choice of "upgrading?"

    Yours, completely fucking confused, of South West London

  • kangarootoo #3 2 years ago

    A good experiment. Good to see a company trying out new ideas.


    @conners

    But that is exactly what they did do. They did offer you the same choice. They put a version of the game on torrent networks.

    Using bittorrent isn't illegal in itself, just downloading pirated software is. So if they put this on the torrent networks themselves, it is free for you to download. They gave it to you for free. What is the problem?

  • VicViper #4 2 years ago

    I applaud their efforts, they just trying to get paid for the work they put into the game.

    If companies keep trying things like this someone is going to either figure out how to make piracy impossible through most awful DRM or some near impossible happer get the game how you want but make it worth our while to keep doing the finacially medium. lets hope we get the latter.

  • smoison #5 2 years ago

    I admit I downloaded the torrent to give it a try.

    I didn't even notice it did not have the leader boards, but it did convince me to buy it when it showed up on steam at half price.

    Its a very good game, and a worthy sequel to the flash based web game that proceded it.

    So at least ONE person bought it BECAUSE of the torrent.

    P.S And the leader boards are actully a really great to get you to replay the levels.



    Edited by 1 at 06/11/09 @ 16:32

  • Byzanite #6 2 years ago

    The "leaderboardless" game was a demo then...? (albeit a large demo) .. just put on Torrent sites..... ..ok.

  • Xerx3s #7 2 years ago

    Good to see that they are actually trying to find a constructive method to fight piracy instead of the usual counter-productive consumer raping.

    Hope that it worked out for them but I doubt it.

  • Waffleaber #8 2 years ago

    Interesting approach, I'd've been happier with a more expansive legit demo though. Two tracks through the one on steam wasn't enough to get me to buy it.

  • Shinetop #9 2 years ago

    Interesting. I've never played the XBLA version for the leaderboards, just for the puzzle/skill factor. Thanks for telling me that I could have played it for free with your blessing, RedLynx. Thanks for telling me that after I forked over those Microsoft Points, apparently solely for a feature I don't care about.

  • Shinetop #10 2 years ago

    But that is exactly what they did do. They did offer you the same choice.

    No they didn't. Saying "Buy our game!" and then keeping quiet about the one they just pot on torrent sites is not "offering you the same choice."

    What is the problem?

    The fact that they didn't just flat out tell people they could torrent the full version with their blessing? Some people actually believe, like RedLynx, that it's not just okay to pirate stuff. But now basically RedLynx is telling us to pirate their stuff because who knows, it might just be the full game minus leaderboards they put there themselves.

  • Nithron #11 2 years ago

    Ah, people finally taking advantage of piracy rather than spending vast amounts of money trying to stop something that's very nearly unstoppable.

    What i'd like to see is companies selling serial codes on their own, on their websites. That way, people who have torrented the game can get a legitimate serial code if they want one, saving them having to wait for the game to be delivered, and saving the publishers money on bandwith. Win-win, surely?

  • conners #12 2 years ago

    @ shinetop

    Well said. That is my point entirely - dropping a freaking stealth torrent is hardly the same as a 2 week marketing campaign.

    @ kangarootoo

    Read my post carefully.

    Read the post by shinetop.

    Stop and think for a few minutes. Have a cup of tea perhaps.

    Wait for the penny to drop. Ah, there it is.

    Agree that we have a valid point

    Delete your post.

    Goodnight and thank you.
    Edited by 3 at 06/11/09 @ 17:35

  • Gnoupi #13 2 years ago

    Really smart approach. If you release your modified version on the torrent sites, then people will run to this one, and it will be the most popular, so no other version will really be downloaded.

    People are rushing to download the one with the most seeders, so this way, they went first on it, preventing even a cracked version, which would access leaderboards, to be downloaded widely.

    Quite smart, I have to say.

  • Skurmedel #14 2 years ago

    If they wanted to see how many downloads of this "pirated version" would be converted into sales, it would be completely pointless to tell people about it before hand. That would more or less pollute the results.

  • solidSnake04 #15 2 years ago

    pirates are the ones who really wouldnt buy your game regardless of wether you sell it for 1p or £50.

  • Rack #16 2 years ago

    It's an interesting idea, but I for one would be likely to buy the pirated version if I'd downloaded the legit version for free. There's little more soul destroying than slogging your guts out to get the best possible time only to be told you've come in position 167,453

  • Eraysor #17 2 years ago

    I paid £1.49 for it in a Steam sale, and I would have happily paid more!

  • WJF #18 2 years ago

    I didn't think pirated versions of games have access to online content anyway as a rule (certainly other heavily-reliant online games like Spore and UT didn't)

    So it's kind of pointless uploading your own game as a way of making them buy the full version because some guy will always upload exactly the same non-online version; probably three minutes later.

  • YourMessageHere #19 2 years ago

    This is a sensible and effective strategy that is decidedly more progressive than the big business approach of pretending piracy is entirely evil. It's true of music, it's true of films, it's true of anime and it's true of games - I have respectable, legitimately owned collections of all of them and in all cases, about half of the collection is stuff I've pirated and liked enough to buy it. Many of my friends are the same. In the case of gaming, it's entirely because of piracy that I got into it in the first place - a friend gave me Quarantine on 5 x 3.5" floppies, and I loved it enough that it was the first game I bought on CD-ROM.

    @ conners & shinetop
    Just because they don't tell you about something, doesn't mean it's not available to you. This concept is known as "shopping around" in retail, or "research" in other fields. It is not anyone's responsibility but yours to stay up to date. Also, just because they put it out there, it's not exactly right to assume they are giving you their blessing to go and leech it; clearly their intent was to beat the pirates with the first version to get the number of seeds up and hence get people to download their crippled version instead of fully cracked versions, rather than to spoil the cognscenti with (most of) a free game. The guy only says he did it, not that it's OK to go and download it.

  • Collymilad #20 2 years ago

    I don't get some of the comments here...

    They are hardly offering average consumers the same thing, since they are less likely than pirates to go to a torrent site and try and get this in the first place.

    Secondly, how do you work out that they have somehow won a victory by "crippling" the release? If it is possible to somehow crack it to have LB support people who care about LB will search for that one and get it (eventually there will be a decent amount of seeds), people who don't, well...where's the victory there?

  • Ryze #21 2 years ago

    Hear, hear