Indie Stone’s zombie holocaust survival game Project Zomboid has been temporarily yanked from official distribution because somebody who thinks taking stuff from independent developers without paying for it is cool decided to wave the Jolly Roger over it.
According to the developer, a file is being circulated that downloads the game from the developer’s own servers when users hit the “auto-update” button.
“We’ve always turned a blind eye to pirate copies, even on occasion recommending people who had problems with the legit version try a pirate version until the issues are resolved. We realise the potential viral benefits of pirate copies, and while obviously we’d prefer people to purchase our issue is not with those,” writes the company’s blogger.
“However, these ‘auto updating’ versions of the game could screw us completely. We have a cloud based distribution model, where the files are copied all over the world and are served to players on request, which means we are charged money for people downloading the game. Whether piracy actually amounts to lost sales we’re not going to get into. The possibility that it raises awareness and promotes the game cannot be ignored, but the difference is offline versions on torrents, which we’ve been largely unconcerned about, do not cost us real money, only potential money, and even then we can’t really guess at what the net effect is.”
Yeah. Way to stick it to the man.
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