Here's a relevant article from RPS:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09/08/wait-whys-pirate-bay-promoting-an-indie-game/

My respect for this guy just upped. I bought McPixel on my Android.

In other news, cheap bastards will always be cheap bastards.

I have never understood what this stupid argument has to do with whether it is wrong. Call it murder for all I fucking care, the point is you're playing a game without contributing to its creation.

Wow, that's cool as hell.

True .

It's the same thing as F2P as me. I consider my self extremely wealthy compared to the rest of the world, I'm happy to help support games so others can access them. The shared experience is more important than making sure everybody "plays fair" imo. So for F2P games I'm happy to be one of the people who pays (supposing I do actually play it), for games like this, likewise. And I don't sweat people who can't. Sounds like this guy doesn't either and probably sleeps better at night for it.

Right and wrong are extremely relative.

I'm not necessarily opposed to this line of thinking, I am just saying the label is irrelevant. Argue the morality of piracy outside of this silly grammar correction debate.

Why does it matter? the game is already made and if you wouldn't pirate it what says that you would have bought it

I think most of the labels are an effort to draw a line in the sand about the morality or immorality of one party or another. Therefor the semantic debate will always be at the forefront, no one really wants to be the "bad guy" on this one. Fair enough, I guess. The whole thing is a symptom of a rather fucked up world and it makes me a tad sad to think about it.

I don't understand how this is a reply to what I said.

Of course it is, but from the other side so is "dude none of these people would ever buy it anyway, even though they obviously play a ton of games and have a gaming PC."

People try to present things in a way that suits their argument all the time, it's nothing new. And while copyright infringement is not theft in a court of law, you can't really scream at people for using the colloquialism of theft when they use it for ideas, women, time and other such things it's not factually relevant to.

My respect for this guy is high as hell right now, so I bought the game even if I wont get to play it often.

I may be getting lost, I only skimmed the RPS article, I thought it was relatively even handed, was there a semantic debate somewhere? I guess I personally don't like the term "theft" because it's poorly descriptive of the problem as I see it. I do see why people use it (for a couple of reasons), I just think it's a poor term.

At any rate, I don't want to get too sidetracked. What this guy did took some balls. He made a game and then despite being really indie, and probably having not made many sales, kept his shit together when he saw so many torrents. I know not every creator gets rewarded this way, but it's nice when stuff works out positively like this, it's good for everyone and shows maybe it doesn't have to be a war to the death.

I was just commenting on the surface argument that has existed for 10 years or more now, to be honest. Though I did read the Kotaku article on this earlier.

The goal is to get supporters, i.e. money. He's doing that the best way he knows how, and is getting a ton of press. Not sure I would really call it altruistic rather than calculated, but it's nice to see either way I suppose. Certainly better than big companies releasing shitty expensive ports piled on with DRM and then bitching about piracy.

He may be coldly calculating, as you say, I'm hoping he's just a decent sort of guy:)