Indie studio Greenheart Games carried out an unusual experiment last weekend: it made unbeatable copies of its latest game available on a torrent site and tracked the subsequent download numbers and player reactions.
It just so happened that the game in question, Game Dev Tycoon, tasked the player with running a game studio, but Greenheart altered it so that regardless of how well a player was progressing, piracy would eventually ruin their business.
On his blog, Greenheart co-founder Patrick Klug reported that after one day 3,104 torrent users had pirated the game, while 214 people had purchased it.
Continue reading...