As a way to market the game, they released a version of it on torrent sites with an unbeatable boss fight programmed in.
Lots of developers just shrug and accept this; there’s an argument that pirates will never pay for a game even if they can’t get it for free, and anti-piracy measures often end up inconveniencing legitimate users. 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.
The company recently analyzed their statistics, specifically for the game “Wayward Souls”.
It comes after Noodlecake were hit hard in the past when they found 89% of installations for a game called Rocketcat Games on Android last year were pirated.
And so what did the geniuses at Noodlecake do? Of course, the game was quickly downloaded.
Interestingly enough, Noodlecake Studios themselves were the ones who uploaded the game onto torrent websites, presumably to trick pirates into downloading the unbeatable version of the game. It featured a new enemy called “Daft Premium” who wasn’t part of the original version available on the Google Play Store and App Store.
The company created the honeypot of its new game, Shooting Stars! – which it drew attention to itself by way of an online statement – after growing frustrated with the difficulties incurred in prompting folks to actually pay for games, especially on Android devices, once they’ve been downloaded.
A spokesman for the firm said: “Firstly players must defeat a wave of bosses that have an obscene amount of health”.
“Dying sucks, right? But pirating indie games sucks much more”.
Boo yeah! The pirates would probably just laugh this one off but you know game piracy has always been a problem.
In 2013, developer Lucky Frame claimed that three weeks after its Gentlemen! game launched on Android, it had sold 144 copies, but had 50,030 unpaid installs. “Please support us and buy Shooting Stars!“.
