Darkwood developer puts their game on Pirate Bay

Darkwood is one of the rare games that successfully went through the Early Access process at Steam. It did take the game four years, but it was finally launched some 10 days ago. As the devs said: “Early Access has helped this project tremendously, and even though we have stayed in development for way longer than we anticipated, thanks to your feedback Darkwood has grown in scope and complexity in ways we have never imagined possible”.

Sounds like a great story, however, the developers, Acid Wizard Studio, decided to put its own little twist to it. They have put out the game on Pirate Bay by themselves, practically offering the game for free to anyone who wants it. Why? Because they are making a statement against re-selling game keys on shady websites. This is a problem that has been persistent recently, probably culminating with Bulletstorm dev pulling out of a deal with G2A.

As it turns out, the developers were flooded with scam mail, asking for review or giveaway codes. Mostly these were people claiming to be youtubers, bloggers or similar. The studio said that they were fed up with it and that “this practice makes it impossible for us to do any giveaways or send keys to people who actually don’t have the money to play Darkwood”.

Acid Wizard stated, in no uncertain terms, that they didn’t want people buying their game through any of the key reselling sites, in case they did not have money. They pleaded to players not to keep “feeding the cancer that is leeching off this industry” and said that those who cannot buy the game now should try to pick it up at a sale in the future.

“If you don’t have the money and want to play the game, we have a safe torrent on the Pirate Bay of the latest version of Darkwood (1.0 hotfix 3), completely DRM-free,” says Acid Wizard.