Most game publishers consider finding their games on torrent and peer to peer sites to be a disaster, but RedLynx has a completely different idea.
During a panel discussion at Develop Liverpool , RedLynx admitted that it has "leaked" its own game, Trials, to torrent sites on its launch day as a way to market the game.
The leaked version differs from the paid-for version in the absence of leaderboards, a feature that the company's CEO, Tero Virtala, believes to be the "soul" of the game. In doing so, the company hopes that users of "leaked" version would want to upgrade to the paid version once they began enjoying the game.
"Piracy is here, so how can we take advantage of that? What we did actually, on day one, we put that game immediately on all the torrent networks ourselves," Virtala explained.
"That game relies really heavily on the server side - the leaderboards are the soul of the game. I don't know if it's helped, I'd assume so because even though the version that we put on the torrent networks wasn't the full version, it's the version of the game without the actual soul, without the leaderboards to play against other players."
Virtala revealed that the game has sold close to 150,000 copies since it was launched 18 months ago and that "when we compare that hacked version with those who have access to leaderboards and are accessing our servers they match. So at least people have not cracked out leaderboards yet."
