RedLynx: We put Trials PC game on torrent sites

PogMoThoin

Trials developer RedLynx has admitted that in order to market its PC title it leaked it to torrent sites for pirates on the same day it was released to paying consumers.

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 out leaderboards yet," he added.

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This is actually the first time I've heard of this game

Kinetic^

It's a great game. I originally played the demo versions on Miniclip.com and there was a release recently for the Xbox 360 as well. Simple but fun.

Interesting that they put it out there themselves, I'm not sure many of the more established developers would do the same though.

Dcully

Picked up the demo on xbox live arcade the other day on the strength of a thread about it on the xbox forums here and must say its a superb title, really great fun and challenging.
Only for ive too many games atm id deffo buy the full game.

PogMoThoin

Supposedly Nero have been doing this for years, Nero is an average dvd burning software made famous by being the most pirated, they upload each new version themselves. Its a tactic that works, pity more developers wouldn't use it to their advantage.

Spunog UIE

Soooooo what we're saying is that its okay to download copyrighted material

Trials 2 Torrent

PogMoThoin

But if they uploaded it themselves then its a legal torrent

L31mr0d

I played the flash version of this game yonks ago (2002 maybe?) and it had the same system. You could play all you wanted but to get your score saved (and to access the later courses) you had to pay.

Looks like they are just doing the same thing again with the full game release.

I can see something like this working for a game which is mainly a leaderboard game (I have little interest in it) and high score based. But this model would not work at all for games which have a large SP aspect.

Nick_oliveri

PogMoThoin wrote: »

But if they uploaded it themselves then its a legal torrent

Or would it make the copyright they have on the software null and void?

Overheal

Nick_oliveri wrote: »

Or would it make the copyright they have on the software null and void?

No it would not.

It does mean its free to play. Not Open Source. Just because I bot the Orange box - this does not give me any possession of Rights to it. This gives me the right to play it, not disassemble and remarket the product.

The Source Code and Intellectual Property associated with it is still the property of RedLynx.