This has to be one of the most self-righteous arguments from a developer I’ve seen in a while. So you’re basically saying you decided to put the game up for free on torrent sites, then people saw it and said “hell yeah, I’ll download that for free” and then you realized people weren’t going to pay for it because you had posted it on the torrent site. But hey, you included a section in the game where they were guilt tripped for pirating it. And I’m sure that really ruined their day.

Because you know what makes someone resort to piracy? Ease of access and lack of customer loyalty. If your fans do not have an easy, safe way of downloading your game where they feel that game will be safe and secure, they won’t want to buy it. And if you have not established a strong connection with your fans through community development and prior quality of your work, your fans will not be likely to purchase your game.

So please. Go ahead and generalize gamers as being filthy pirates who will ruin the game industry. We ruined your chance of breaking even making this game, so we certainly deserve to get thrown under the bus on this one. After all, you are making a video game for gamers to play, but there’s so many of us that maybe we won’t notice you’re using generalizations to insult us all for something that perhaps a few hundred thousand people did.

And regarding the “irony” of this situation. The irony is not that people pirated this game and then played a game where a game company failed because of piracy. The irony is that you posted your game to a torrent site, watched in horror as people downloaded your game for free when they were given the option, and then got self-righteous when you didn’t make enough money to get that kitchen remodeling your wife has been begging you for.