It's not uncommon for content producers to go crazy when they discover their work is being made available via The Pirate Bay. But while the big movie and music studios think the answer is to legislate and then sue everyone into submission, there is another way. Games developer Jonatan Söderström aka Catcus went into the comments section of The Pirate Bay and started giving free customer support to pirates. Has this Swede gone mad or does it just make better sense in the long run?

Released just three days ago, PC game Hotline Miami is somewhat of a hit already. This retro-style top-down action game (think the original Grand Theft Auto) is getting rave reviews – Eurogamer barely had a negative thing to say about the title and awarded it 10/10 and at the time of writing its Metacritic score is 86.

Of course, no matter how good (or bad) a game is, one thing is almost certain – it will turn up pretty quickly on file-sharing sites. Hotline Miami is no different.

The game was released on Tuesday and then just a day later it turned up on The Pirate Bay. People were quick to download it and happy to leave mostly positive remarks in the site’s comments section.

However, a few people had a couple of problems getting the game to run.

“Whenever I try starting the game I get [an] error,” user randir12 explained. “Error defining an external function.”

“Sometimes the game works if I click ignore, but there’s no sound.”

It’s customary for torrent users to help each other out in comment sections, but on this occasion help came from an unexpected corner.

“Hey there! I’m Jonatan Soderstrom, me and my friend Dennis Wedin made this game,” wrote a user called cactus69.

“We’re working on an update that hopefully will take care of any/all bugs, and we’ll try to do some extra polish in the next few days. Would be great if you could update the torrent when the patch is out! It’d be great if people get to play it without any bugs popping up. Hope everyone will enjoy the game!”

But Soderstrom, who is the driving force at CactusQuid in Sweden, didn’t stop there.

“For the ‘Error defining an external function’ problem, try restarting your system and play again, it can pop up when your computer has been running for a while. We’ll try to figure out if there’s more to it than that,” he wrote to randir12.

Soderstrom then went on to address a joypad issue being experienced by another user.

In a sign of disbelief at the Swede’s attitude, what followed next were a handful of fairly abusive comments from people who simply could not accept that a games dev would act like this and that therefore Cactus69 must be an imposter.

“Just for the record, looks like cactus69 is really Jonatan Soderstrom,” confirmed a Pirate Bay moderator, quietening the storm.

A little while later Soderstrom returned to the site advising Pirate Bay users that a “patch should be up soon” and to “feel free to buy the game if you like it.”

Later on Twitter the game dev was pragmatic about the downloading of his work.

“I don’t really want people to pirate Hotline Miami, but I understand if they do. I’ve been broke the last couple of months. It sucks,” he wrote.

People who appreciate a decent attitude and great retro gaming can help to ease Soderstrom’s financial position. Hotline Miami is available from GOG for just $8.99 or from Steam at 8.49 euros if that’s your thing.