I have to imagine a comment like this does absolutely nothing to their sales figures. People who were going to download a cracked version of their games anyway remain unaffected now that they have a blessing, and I doubt people who weren't going to pirate would now feel more inclined to do so.

This seems like good PR and frankly it should probably be the default position for games studios.

Their reason is: people is using g2a for "discounted" keys.

Where the "discount" comes? Easy, some asshole buys from their website many keys with a stolen credit card, then they will need to refund it + pay an expensive fee for the chargeback.

I'm not a dev but at that point I would just give up selling keys by myself and I would just rely on steam for fraud detection. The only case where the 30% fee is justified

I wish more companies did this; however, I believe most CEO's have the biased view that everyone has at least some money to spare which, as you probably know (likely on personal level), isn't true.

I understand that participating in cultural aspects of society must cost money due to the very nature of economics (if you want the artist to continue to make art, make sure they don't starve to death) but 'pirating' things is there not only as a stop gap to terrible service and personal risk (privacy violations, etc.), but also as an equalizer between those that have, and those that don't.

This approach makes so much sense from a business perspective.

How many here have this experience: out of my entire friend group that I grew up playing video games with, I can't think of a single person who kept pirating games after acquiring disposable income, even though we all exclusively played pirated games as teenagers. Without piracy, none of us would have had access to any games, and very likely none of us would still be into gaming today, spending probably thousands of euros every year on games, consoles, PC components, etc.

I don’t think this post is allowed on lemmy.world.

The Darkwood devs did this even though they only have one game out, they even uploaded the torrent

If you can't otherwise afford them. Pretty important “if”. And then only until you can afford them.

Now I have to buy their games lol.

Now if only there was a way to safely pirate stuff without the possibility of the binaries having keyloggers or cryptominers embedded in them. I seem to recall some studio hosting an official torrent on their website precisely for this reason.

I might buy one of their games just to offset someone who can't. I absolutely appreciate a business with this kind of attitude. Like someone else said, the people who pirate it probably weren't going to buy it anyway. Might as well get some goodwill out of it.

I mean I don't think the pirates needed their permission, but it's a nice gesture at least. Accepting the reality that people will pirate your games makes for much better PR than trying to crack down on it through DRM.

That's awesome of them! What's their best game? I'll buy a copy on Steam.

I'm pretty sure I was friends with the founder of that studio back in the suprnova.org days when his username was RunsWithScissors and he was a full-blown pirate.

they’ve always tacitly been cool with it. they’ve dropped little hints like this into their games since the 90s.