What to do when a game you put up with a premium price isn’t selling? Most developers would just offer a discount or lower the price but Noodlecake Studios has done something different. This time, the company decided to pirate it’s own game. By piracy we mean uploading a copy of the game to several torrent sites. 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.
Noodlecake has accepted the fact that it’s really difficult to sell games these days because of them pirates screwing the legit developers and people who work hard on their creations. If there’s a premium game on the Google Play Store and you don’t want to spend even just $0.99, go to a torrent site and you’re sure to find it there. Not that developers like Noodlecake Studios are money greedy but business is business and revenue loss is real, no thanks to piracy.
The company recently analyzed their statistics, specifically for the game ‘Wayward Souls’. It was a paid action-RPG title and they discovered that only eleven percent (11%) of the Android gamers paid for the app. The game has a lot of downloaders and players but unfortunately, majority of them were pirates.
And so what did the geniuses at Noodlecake do? Release a pirated version of the game. The devs trolled the illegal downloaders by releasing a different version of ‘Shooting Stars’ to several torrent sites. Of course, the game was quickly downloaded. 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 player needs to finish the third boss fight against an enemy that has unlimited health. Once the player dies, they are enticed to download and pay for the full version instead.
As if that’s not enough to make things more challenging for the pirates, Noodlecake posted a message that slaps the player for downloading a pirated game. This message is shown:
Boo yeah! The pirates would probably just laugh this one off but you know game piracy has always been a problem. The game isn’t even two-weeks old since its July 30 launch on Android. It’s currenly on sale at $0.99 and after a few more days, it will cost $2.99. I highly recommend you just pay for the game if you’re interested in this Rainbow Unicorn-approved ‘Shooting Stars’ and see what the pixelized rainbow lazers can do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK0-m4pwDA8?
Download Shooting Stars! from the Google Play Store
SOURCE: Noodlecake Studios
