McPixel developer Sos Sosowski has taken a different tack, one that gives new meaning to the phrase "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Starting this morning, and through the entire weekend, Sosowski is actively directing people to pirate his game using the Torrent link posted on The Pirate Bay, and asking them to donate whatever they want in return. What's more, the pay-what-you-want sale is
being actively promoted on the front page of The Pirate Bay, where tens of millions of visitors will see a short, conciliatory message from Sosowski (seen above)."I know that not everyone can afford entertainment. But everyone needs it," the message reads in part. "And even though I make games for a living. I am most happy just to see people enjoy them. So today, you can download a torrent of my game. And if you like it, throw some coins in my general direction."
This isn't the first time The Pirate Bay has donated its heavily trafficked front page space to promoting a specific project. Since January, dozens of artists have been featured as part of The Promo Bay, which is what the site calls its rotating "promotional apparatus" for unnnoticed artists of all stripes. But while The Promo Bay effort attracted over 5,000 applications in its first three months of existence,almost 90 percent of those seeking promotion were musicians, with the remainder reportedly mainly made up primarily of authors and moviemakers. This is the first time the front page banner has been used to promote an indie video game (though the front page featured print-and-play collectible strategy card game Empires & Generals back in May, and the banner has linked to internal searches for Grand Theft Auto in the past).
Sosowski's path to The Promo Bay didn't go through the normal application process, though. It all started last month, when Sosowski tells Ars he was actually excited to find that McPixel, which launched in late June, had become popular enough to warrant a torrent on The Pirate Bay. Sosowski went into the comments for that Pirate Bay torrent post, politely asking for donations and offering a few free, legitimate gift codes for those who felt they really couldn't pay anything.
That kindhearted response attracted the notice of a Redditor who said "these kind of developers truly deserve recognition." The Reddit community apparently agreed, as the screenshot of The Pirate Bay comment attracted enough attention to hit the top position on Reddit's front page, leading to a barrage of traffic that shut down the official McPixel web site (The Pirate Bay torrent continued to work just fine, we assume). It wasn't until after the site was retored and Sosowski hosted a popular Ask Me Anything post about the deal that The Pirate Bay came calling, offering him the promotional spot "upon noticing how cool I am about all that," as he put it to Ars Technica.
The donation sections of McPixel.net comes way down the page from the torrent link right at the top.
The front page of McPixel.net currently features a large link to The Pirate Bay torrent download, which features a full version of the game for Mac, PC, and Linux (versions for iOS, Android and Blackberry are also available for sale). You have to scroll down well below that to find a PayPal donation link for the game.
As of this writing late Friday afternoon (less than a day after the promotion started), Sosowski says he's has sold over 300 copies of the game at an average of $1.43 each. That might seem like a slow start for the donation effort, especially considering that the BitTorrent download recently hit over 3,000 simultaneous seeders. It also seems a bit small compared to other pay-what-you-want download efforts like The Humble Indie Bundle, which quickly made millions taking donations of as little as a penny for a package of five well known indie games (though even that effort ran in to its own piracy problems).
Still, it's a significant increase from the 100 or so copies of McPixel Sosowski sold for $10 on the game's first day of availability (before attention from Reddit and "Let's Play" videos on YouTube).
For his part, Sosowski isn't worried that promoting a game on a site known for piracy might be more effective at attracting more pirates than actual paying customers. "The game was already available on TPB beforehand, and I believe if someone didn't want to pay, he just didn't," Sosowski told Ars. "It is up to people to decide how much they would like to pay for the game, and I have no worries. I am happy that more people can enjoy my game. ... TPB is one of the most visited sites in the Internet, and simply having a game there is a form of advertisement and promotion.
And since he doesn't see any direct profit from those using a Pirate Bay torrent anyway, Sosowski said that his best recourse was to tell his story to that audience and hope that some of them choose to pay up. "I think that if people who torrent the game are aware that there is a live person behind the game, and makes the game for a living, they are more willing to provide support than to a giant lifeless studio," he said.
"That's what I would probably do, at least."
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