On Sunday, Green Heart Games released Game Dev Tycoon for Windows, Mac and Linux. In a attempt to defeat pirates the company posted its own cracked version of the game to the usual places.
Game Dev Tycoon is all about making video games in different eras similar to Kairosoft's Game Dev Story on iOS. What the cracked version of the game does is introduce piracy in a way that it slowly depletes the players bank account until they eventually run out of money and go bankrupt.
The best part is that the developer then started receiving messages from people who pirated the game complaining about the piracy in the game. The irony is thick on this one.
Here are some of the messages:
"Why are there so many people who pirate? It ruins me."
"There's no point in inventing a new engine because the revolutionary game made out of it will get pirated and I will not be able to cover my expenses."
As the developer wrote on their blog, "As a gamer I laughed out loud: the IRONY!!!
However, as the developer, who spent over a year creating this game and hasn’t drawn a salary yet, I wanted to cry. Surely, for most of these players, the 8 dollars wouldn’t hurt them but it makes a huge difference to our future!"
In other depressing news, of the 3,318 people who played the game in the 24 hours after its release 93.6 percent of them did not pay the developer anything. Think about that for a moment.
