Sadly Team Meat, alot of people don't f*cking care if they announce they like a game they stole.

Pretty healthy attitude here. Considering there's nothing Team Meat can do about piracy, they could either cry about it, or take the high road. They took the high road. Good on them for that.

Would they prefer that those people bought the game?

Yea, they do care. They just won't get butthurt over it.

To be honest, Team Meat have little to complain about seeing that they've made a ton of money on it. However, they are complete idiots for announcing their thoughts in such a blasé way - it just means that freeloaders take the high road and other indie devs will suffer for it.

*slow clap*

The only problem with their logic is that you pirated a game and your friends want a it they'll probably pirate it or you'll pirate it for them.

Fine, piratebay it is then

I'm sorry, but that just FUCKIN STUPID! It is breaking my brain!!

How the name of sweet holy hell can anyone be fine with that? It just doesn't compute. It doesn't matter how much money you've made. That's a lot of money you won't make. That's a lot of money you guys deserve to make! It's madness to not care!!!

I'm having a brain aneurysm just thinking about it.

I bought the limited edition last week for $8 at Walmart.

If you pirate an $8 game you should ask your mom for spare change or something.

Eh, I still think that there is a circle in hell for people who pirate indie games.

@lenigod

your quite the grammer nazy alot.

I agree with them in a sense; piracy will always be a shitty thing to do, no matter the case, but from a monetary standpoint, it may not always have a huge impact. Sure, if piracy weren't an option, those people may act like cunts on the Internet about games costing too much, but they probably wouldn't buy things they can't afford.

That's one type of pirate: the kind that is broke but has an entitlement complex about being able to play anything they want in spite of that. Here and there, they will buy games. While stick reprehensible, they generally don't take away from sales. They are the ones whom Team Meat believes would not go around telling people they stole this and that, so "I'm awesome."

Then there's that other kind of pirate. The one we all want to pretend doesn't exist, but is unfortunately becoming more and more pervasive. The kind that not only pirates games, but shows no remorse for it, and would rather just shout "Fuck you!" to the industry in any way they can, all the while devouring games for free. They're the ones who have said to me, in a chatroom, when I announced that I just purchased Game X, "Haha, I torrented that weeks ago. Why would you spend money on it?" These are the bastards who are ruining it for everybody, who have no respect for games or their creators and who couldn't give a damn how much they steal and for what purpose. Pirates of this nature spread their disease like wildfire, tragically, and they are the ones Team Meat should fucking care about.

As one of the guys who put together the Humble Indie Bundle said, most PC game piracy does not directly correlate to lost sales. The pirated copy to lost sale ratio is much lower than for console games.

Perhaps more importantly, it's pretty useless to care since there is nothing they can do about it. It's like asking someone to be angry at hurricanes or tornadoes. Besides that, gamers today are so entitled that they fly into an internet rage over any kind of DRM, then come to threads like this and moan about piracy. You can count on a tirade by Sterling on both topics on a monthly basis.

Team Meat seems to have about as healthy an attitude on the topic as is possible.

But the people who have stolen it will just say they like it and not mention the stealing, and probably share it with those friends that thought it looked cool. I don't see how that's going to come back to sales.

Also, they are a company of 2 so it's not like they have as much costs as other developers.

Pirating Super Meat Boy is the same as pirating Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty. It's stealing all the same. In fact, the latter two are worse, as SMB IS cheaper, so you're in effect stealing less.

@littlebigd What you're not computing is that piracy isn't as simple as X copies "stolen" = Y $ lost

If someone downloads an unauthorized copy and plays it for 5 minutes, or even an hour or two, and never touches it again, does that really hurt sales if they never would have paid for the game to begin with?

It's absurd to assume that if piracy were impossible, those 200k people who would've illegally downloaded the game would then buy it.

Sales are lost, no question but nowhere near as many as piracy stats migh indicate. The way they're looking at it is that getting the game into the hands of 200k people is worth it if maybe only 25k of them would have actually paid to begin with. Word of mouth can be priceless.

I got this for frigging 3 squiddly-dids when it was on sale 8D fuck piracy RIGHT UP THE ARSE

There's nothing they can do about it, so they're just going to live with it. I like that thinking.

Piracy can absolutely lead to sales down the lines. Let's say we have a broke-ass college student who scrapes up change for the essentials (food and beer). He wants to play games, but he can't justify spending his limited funds in that manner, so he picks them up off torrent. A few of those he really likes, and takes note of the developers. Eventually he gets a job and begins buying games off Steam. He might even buy the games that he'd pirated previously, perhaps from guilt or maybe just because it's less hassle. Almost certainly he would look for games by the developers he noted before.

I'd wager this is a pretty common scenario. In situations like this, piracy actually contributes to sales, more so than if the guy had remained PureHeart Bear and not pirated and instead went without gaming at all. I still say Team Meat's positive outlook is the most healthy outlook a small-scale developer can have.

Heavy DRM probably causes more lost sales than piracy, so it's better to not give a shit than go all out against it.

@pokota True. The only problem I see with it is for example you pirate a new game, then later buy it off, say, Steam sale for -75%. It's still buying the game you pirated previously but..I don't know. Seems kinda iffy. Better than no sale at all, at the very least.

they sold a fucking ton of that game. Your game is allways gonna get pirated, maybe you will find that some people will buy it for 2 dollars later if they liked it.

To all potential pirates, from a former buccaneer:

Pirating a game is a pain in the arse. You either have to deal with crappy torrent sites, shady warez-crackz forum sites, #irc channels with millions of other pirates in line ahead you, or dead RS links galore before you can even download the game you want - which can take about two months for the DL to complete because of all the aforementioned BS. Afterwards, you'll need to find a working hack for the DRM to even be able to play the damn thing! Worse, you can find out the game file you just spent two months downloading is corrupt and you've just wasted all your efforts for nothing!

Please save yourself some grief; get your games legitimately!

Ahh - What a refreshing viewpoint from a dev team that has made a boatload of cash.

I'd like for them to have that same attitude if they had only sold 10,000 copies of the game while the other 500k+ copies were pirated. Oh...you mean they wouldn't because they'd be out millions? Right.

JamnOnTheOne beat me to it. Fortunately for these guys they've made a decent enough buck to say something as dumb as "meh we don't care we didn't make any money on X number of pirated copies." They'd be crying the blues if they hadn't sold as many copies as they had, and all there hard work had been for nothing at all.

Someone needs to be mad they didn't make as much money as they deserved to! I'll sit here and be pissed on their behalf damn it!

Can't really do anything about it. I bought the game on 360 and Steam though.