In an interesting marketing strategy the Trials HD developer, RedLynx, decided to seed their own game on a couple of popular torrent sites.

The game they uploaded was fully functional apart from one key feature which were the leaderboards. The idea being that people would become addicted to the game and then go out and buy the version with the leaderboards to compare to their friends.

Unfortunately there are no stats to show whether this idea worked or not but I have more than a little bit of scepticism that it did.

Pirates often try and excuse themselves by saying they are just trying the game and then if they like it they will buy it, well this is possibly the biggest lie out there as their has been surveys and research done into this theory and the cheap ass pirates always come up short.

No matter how cheap the game is the pirates will still rather just steal a copy than actually part with their hard earned money for the game, for some obscure reason they don’t seem to be able to understand that the developers also work hard and would like some reward for their effort.

I don’t know whether to congratulate RedLynx for trying a new way to combat piracy or trash them for giving pirates more excuses for pirating… I can hear them now

“It’s not pirating because the companies put their own games on Torrents for us to try”

Source: Joystiq