Hotline Miami 2 Banned in Australia!...BUT

[haldarulon]

The Developer of the game wants them to pirate it!

 

The co-creator of Hotline Miami 2 has told Australian fans to bypass their country’s banning of the game by pirating it.

 

“If it ends up not being released in Australia, just pirate it after release,” Jonatan Söderströmm told a fan in an email subsequently published on Reddit. “No need to send us any money, just enjoy the game."

 

How mad is that?

A dev telling people pirate their software, I suppose with the success of HM1 they are all minted and i am pretty sure 60-80% of the people will go and buy the second one.

I know i will!

[Arthur]

A dev telling people pirate their software

I don't think Jonatan is advocating piracy per se. He's just saying that if people are unable to buy the game legally (as in Australia) he would rather you pirate the game than not play it at all.

 

 

I suppose with the success of HM1 they are all minted

The following articles about the first game are quite interesting too.

 

Hotline Miami dev says even bugs in pirated copies of his game 'worse to me than losing money'

 

Jonatan Söderström, the indie developer of Hotline Miami, isn't a fan of piracy, but that doesn't mean he's above helping pirates get the best experience possible.

 

"I don't really want people to pirate Hotline Miami, but I understand if they do," Söderström wrote last week on Twitter. "I've been broke the last couple of months. It sucks."

 

And yet, when the cash-strapped indie developer learned that his game was available as a torrent — and that some pirates were even complaining of bugs in the software they'd illegally downloaded — he did something unexpected. On Oct. 24, 2012, the day after Hotline Miami was released, he offered the pirates help in a post on The Pirate Bay.

 

His post appeared in the torrent listing for Hotline Miami; in response to a user who complained that their Xbox 360 controller didn't work with the game, Söderström posted a link to a fix.

 

As he was coding that patch, Polygon reached out to Söderström to find out why he'd reacted that way and how he feels about torrents. He's pretty sure that some of his other games have been torrented, but because they were freeware, he had no issue with it. Hotline Miami is different. This is a retail title, sales of which can stop him from being broke. So why did he offer his help?

 

"Because I've worked very hard on making an interesting experience that I want people to enjoy," he told Polygon via email. "Bugs detract from that, and that's worse to me than losing money."

 

He said that he doesn't "see anything positive" in determining the monetary impact of pirating Hotline Miami. Although he stops short of encouraging it, Söderström understands that there are potential benefits, too.

 

"I wouldn't be the person I am without piracy," he said. "I've found some really obscure things that have given me so much inspiration through piracy, and I never would have had a chance to experience these things without it. If pirates support the things they like, piracy would probably stop being a big problem."

 

The Hotline Miami sales story, and more

 

Exceptional top-down -'em-up Hotline Miami has sold 130,000 copies since launch seven weeks ago, publisher Devolver Digital told me today.

 

Project manager Graeme Struthers - "distinguished gentleman" to use his business card title - is "chuffed to bits" for the game's creators Jonatan "Cactus" Söderström and Dennis Wedin. "Those are some talented boys," he said.

 

But Struthers sighed windily about PC piracy, which ravaged Hotline Miami. "It has been torrented to such a staggering level, and given the file size of it, I mean, you can't really be surprised, right? You could pass this thing around on the world's smallest memory stick," he noted. "So it has been torrented to extraordinary levels."

 

He doesn't know exact piracy numbers and doesn't particularly care; it's a way of life on PC and everyone involved in Hotline Miami knew that. Jonatan Söderström even released a proper patch for pirated versions of the game.

 

"That's what he's like," Struthers said. "He just felt he didn't want people playing the buggy version of his game however they got it. He wanted them to get the patch. He basically said, 'I'm not going to criticise this, it's a fact of life. It would be nice if guys could find it within themselves to pay for it, but that's the world I'm in, so you know, you just have to take it for what it is.'"

[haldarulon]

Most of them comments are nearly two years Old!

 

Despite the game being distributed illegally selling 300 thousand copies of it is not bad!

I wouldn't mind putting them profits into my bank!

I know it's more than what I earnt in the last 5 years!

 

I really enjoyed the first one and already played a bit of the second one!

Can't wait for it! They can have some more of my money.

 

He does have the right attitude though! He is in it for the game!

[Arthur]

Most of them comments are nearly two years old!

That's because Hotline Miami was released in 2012.

 

He does have the right attitude though! He is in it for the game!

Ubisoft and EA could certainly learn a lot from him!

[Sdrawkcab]

Despite the game being distributed illegally selling 300 thousand copies of it is not bad!

I wouldn't mind putting them profits into my bank!

I know it's more than what I earnt in the last 5 years!

 

How many of those copies do you think they sold for full price though? I'd say probably less than 5% (though I am pulling this statistic out of the air), most of the people I know who bought it paid £1 or less, or got it in a humble bundle deal where most of the takings go to charity. Plus you have to factor in things like the distributor and publisher taking their cut, when you take those into account I really don't think the Dennaton guys make a huge amount of money. I'd imagine it's a decent living, but not megabucks.