Noodlecake Studios Inc., which developed the popular Super Stickman Golf series, took the unusual step of creating an “illegal” version of its new game, Shooting Stars! and distributed it on file sharing websites after the company noticed a large number of illegal downloads of previous games for Android smartphones.
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The company recently analyzed their statistics, specifically for the game “Wayward Souls”. However, the situation over on the Android side of the universe is even more desperate; of all the Android installs of Wayward Souls, Rocketcat Games’ roguelike hit, only 11% were paid and the rest were pirated.
If people are gonna pirate your game, why not make the most of it? (Though of course it’s an issue here, too.) I’m talking about games.
Bosses at Noodlecake Studios have revealed they secretly uploaded the pirate version themselves to the net to catch out rogue gamers who didn’t want to pay.
The version of Shooting Stars seeded on torrent sites has a wave of boss characters called “Daft Premium”, seemingly inspired by music duo Daft Punk.
“Firstly, players must defeat a wave of bosses that have an obscene amount of health”.
Boo yeah! The pirates would probably just laugh this one off but you know game piracy has always been a problem.
“Dying sucks, right? But pirating indie games sucks much more”. The game isn’t even two-weeks old since its July 30 launch on Android. “Please support us and buy Shooting Stars!“.
By piracy we mean uploading a copy of the game to several torrent sites.
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“Developers have found ways around this by just giving the game away for free and charging via in-app purchases or using in-game ads”. Yup, the devs have decided to join the pirates in hopes that more people might be interested in the title and actually pay for it. As Noodlecake noted in a recent blog, finding an audience for premium games on iOS is getting trickier by the day, but it still has faith that there’s an audience out there for the company’s games, which is why it went with a $2.99 price for Shooting Stars.
