It’s ’cause they’re good guys (and a dog).
Developer Acid Wizard learned a lot making Darkwood, their first game. For one, they mastered their fear of the genre (survival horror). For another, they took a different approach; no jump scares, all terror.
But what’s more, they also learned something about dealing with consumers. And their response to a number of setbacks and consumer dealings is impressive. They uploaded the game to The Pirate Bay; the only catch being that they don’t want anyone to buy the game through those shady key reseller sites. As per their (frankly interesting) story posted on Imgur:
We’ve also been flooded by emails! There’s more of them than we are able to reply to, actually. The sad thing is, that a lot of those are scam emails. You know, when people claim to be a youtuber or blogger and ask for a Steam key. That key then gets sold through a shady platform. To be honest, we’re fed up with it. This practice makes it impossible for us to do any giveaways or send keys to people who actually don’t have the money to play Darkwood.
Steam lets you refund a game if you haven’t played it for more than 2 hours, and as a developer we can see the reason why people refunded it. When we read the explanation from someone who wrote that he needed the refund because he didn’t want his parents to be stressed out when seeing the bill at the end of the month… well, it made us feel quite bad.
So we decided to do something about it! If you don’t have the money and want to play the game, we have a safe torrent on the Pirate Bay of the latest version of Darkwood (1.0 hotfix 3), completely DRM-free. There’s no catch, no added pirate hats for characters or anything like that. We have just one request: if you like Darkwood and want us to continue making games, consider buying it in the future, maybe on a sale, through Steam, GOG or Humble Store. But please, please, don’t buy it through any key reselling site. By doing that, you’re just feeding the cancer that is leeching off this industry.
That’s all pretty cool of them. So, if you’d like to give a gesture of good faith in turn, the link to the game on Steam is below. Give it a try: and, if you like it, show your support by buying Darkwood. Just… make sure you do so on a proper platform, like Steam, GoG, or Humble Store.
About Author
