Instead of inserting code into this patch that might make Hotline Miami more difficult to acquire illicitly, Söderström asked the pirates if they would be so kind as to update the Pirate Bay’s Hotline Miami torrents with the latest version of the game. In October Söderström went so far as to visit the notorious Pirate Bay website to give pirates a heads up that Hotline Miami would be receiving an imminent patch to fix a number of the game’s most obvious bugs. “So it has been torrented to extraordinary levels.”ĭespite the obvious blow this has dealt to the game’s bottom line, Hotline Miami creator Jonatan Söderström has actually been offering polite assistance to the game’s pirates. “It has been torrented to such a staggering level, and given the file size of it, I mean, you can’t really be surprised, right? You could pass this thing around on the world’s smallest memory stick,” Struthers said. Hotline Miami project manager Graeme Struthers recently sat down with Eurogamer to discuss the scope of the problem. The game, which pits you against overwhelming odds and tasks players with murdering their foes in the most gruesome, efficient fashion possible, has been a prime target for pirates since it debuted nearly two months ago. That preface is a solid description of the situation facing the developers of the recently-released Hotline Miami. As a result, many excellent games are crushed under the weight of thousands of freeloaders, thus depriving honest players of future games these smaller developers might create. This does certainly appeal to prospective fans, but it also makes these games trivial to pirate. In an effort to ingratiate themselves with fans who abhor any sort of digital rights management scheme these indie game creators often release their titles completely sans DRM. Though the above scenario is entirely hypothetical it’s all too real a concern for independent developers. Though your game is excellent, and lauded by critics and fans alike, you actually end up losing money on the project as tens of thousands of prospective players opt to simply download your game via torrent instead of forking over the inarguably reasonable $10 you’ve decided to charge for your title.

Unfortunately, there was one aspect of this project you didn’t think about beforehand: Piracy. You may not have the marketing budget that those companies boast, but your idea is just so clever that you have no doubt of its ability to become a massive success. An independently developed title, you believe, has just as much opportunity to find an audience in our modern era as a big-budget blockbuster funded by Activision or EA. You’ve got a wonderful, novel idea for a new game, and the necessary programming and artistic design skills to put the whole thing together, so you decide to create the game by yourself.

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