The mid-August Gamescom event is still weeks off but there’s no reason to put off readiness until the last second. tinyBuild games got a jump on the madness today by releasing the SpeedRunners build they’ll be showcasing at Gamescom, and they did it by uploading the torrent to The Pirate Bay. The build is an offline-only demo, containing four characters chasing each other over three maps, and you can play it either with local multiplayer or single player versus bots. At the moment this is also the only way to play the game offline without actually pirating it, and seeing as the offline-only version will be free when the game leaves Early Access it seems rude (moreso than normal) to take what’s going to be given.

Despite Pirate Bay’s more normal function of being a high profile semi-safe haven for illicit digital acquisitions, it’s been used many times before for various promotions of both gaming and non-gaming media. Game Dev Tycoon was released on The Pirate Bay in a version that worked for a few hours until piracy drove the player bankrupt. Adventure game McPixel ended up as a front-page promotion on Pirate Bay after the developer began giving out Steam keys on the torrent of his game. This isn’t even tinyBuild’s first use of the site, as No Time to Explain was uploaded in a version where everyone wore pirate hats. Even HBO will admit that the piracy rate of Game of Thrones is a kind of backhanded compliment for the show’s popularity, and a pirated episode today isn’t necessarily a lost sale. None of this is justification for IP theft (yes, yes, piracy isn’t theft, we know. Semantics, and until someone comes up with a word for taking something that should have been paid for that leaves the original version untouched, “theft” will have to do) but torrent sites are a big part of the internet, and viewing them as a potential tool is always going to yield better results than fighting a lost battle.