Machinarium at 5$ amnesty sale after suffering a huge 90% piracy rate

When the Czech developer Amanita Design created the Flash-based, award wining game Machinarium, where you play  as a little, good-intentioned robot that tries to get by in a very pale, mean, robot-driven world, they made the game with any sort of DRM protection. Altough this step was taken marely to enhance the users’ confort, it also made the pirates jump go wild, just as Amanita’s Jakub Dvorsky explains:

“”We released the game DRM-free which means it doesn’t include any anti-piracy protection, therefore the game doesn’t bother players serial codes or online authentication, but it’s also very easy to copy it, our estimate from the feedback is that only 5-15 percent of Machinarium players actually paid for the game”.

This means that over 90% of the people  playing the game didn’t in fact, pay for it, so the company mobilized a campaign which they call “Pirate Amnesty sale”, meaning that until august 12, the game will be 75% off, to the symbolic price of 5$. The same game was 20$ just last year.

This is not the only time this happens however, as another famous game created by the company called “World of Goo” suffered the same fate. In fact, the company was forced to migrate their games to Linux just because hacking the games are a bit harder there. Now the Linux version of the games accounts of 35% of their profits, despite the fact that Linux only holds little over 2% of the total computing market.

The demo of the game can be downloaded from here, as well as buying the full version.

Source: arstechnica