Who says piracy has to be a bad thing? Sean Hogan, co-designer of retro RPG Anodyne, has revealed in a blog post that promoting the game on The Pirate Bay’s homepage yielded its best sales numbers yet.
Who says piracy has to be a bad thing? Sean Hogan, co-designer of retro RPG Anodyne, has revealed in a blog post that promoting the game on The Pirate Bay’s homepage yielded its best sales numbers yet.
Before going into details about the campaign’s success, Hogan discussed how much everything cost on his end. “First, it cost $7 to do the promo, all $7 of which were for paying our hosting provider for bandwidth, Nearlyfreespeech.net. There were no other costs,” he said.
That $7 went a long way for the game’s creators: in just three days, the game raked in $12,000 and received an influx of upvotes on its Greenlight page. The effects of the promotion cropped up in other places as well, with the developers receiving hundreds of new Twitter followers and Facebook likes, and the view count for the game’s trailer passing 100,000.
Hogan is sharing a pretty in-depth breakdown of the entire ordeal on his blog, including details about where people chose to purchase the game, and how much they paid. Most sales took place through the Humble Store (4,511) to be exact, with $1.74 being the average going price for just the game. The average price for those who purchased the game and the soundtrack, on the other hand, was $2.76.
This only scratches the surface of Hogan’s analysis, and it’s well worth your time to mosey on over to his site and read up on the promotion.
Some of you might recall McPixel developer Sos Sosowski taking a similar route with his game and also experiencing success. It may not be the best path for every title on the market, but it seems like piracy might have a lot to offer to prospective developers.
And I’m not just saying that because I want free games.
