A few weeks ago the highly anticipated game No Time To Explain was officially released. Since the beginning of the year the indie game developers worked day and night to complete it, so it must have been quite a shock to see a pirated copy appearing on The Pirate Bay shortly after the release. Or perhaps not? Could it be that this blatant act of piracy is in fact a clever promotional move?

Early 2011 game developers Alex Nichiporchik and Tom Brien announced that their newly founded company tinyBuild was working on the release of No Time To Explain, a flash-based platform game.

Based on the trailers alone the game got raging reviews from prominent game sites. ” It looks amazing,” Kotaku wrote, and Destructoid labeled it a “terrific premise.”

In the months that followed the developers raised $26,068 from supporters through a Kickstarter project, and mid-August the game was finally released to the public. Unfortunately, as with all games, it didn’t take long before a pirated version ended up online.

However, the pirated version of No Time To Explain that was uploaded to The Pirate Bay is rather special. Unlike the regular game it has a clear pirate theme, with all the main characters wearing pirate hats. The game was literally ‘pirated’.

To confirm the suspicion that the pirate themed game was actually released by the makers themselves, we got in touch with developer Alex Nichiporchik. He confirmed that they are indeed responsible for the release. Alex came up with the idea of making a special release for sites like The Pirate Bay a while ago, and his partner Tom Brien’s suggested adding the pirate theme.

“We thought it’d be funny to leak a pirate version ourselves which is literally all about pirates and pirate hats,” Alex told TorrentFreak. “I mean, some people are going to torrent it either way, we might as well make something funny out of it.”

No Time To Explain “Pirate Edition”

“With indie game development, the whole motto is to constantly update the game for free to the userbase. For pirated versions this makes things really confusing with version tracking, so we were more comfortable with making a joke out of it and so that people who appreciate it could buy the game and thus help us do more dumb stuff,” Alex said.

The idea to release a pirated copy themselves comes from the realization that it’s impossible to prevent unauthorized downloads anyway. In fact, it is often argued that for smaller indie releases the promotional value of a ‘free’ release may actually lead to more people buying the game.

“You can’t really stop piracy, all you can do is make it work for you and/or provide something that people actually want to pay for. For us this is humor, we like making people laugh,” Alex told us.

Thus far the idea appears to work out as planned. The response from the public is overwhelmingly positive, and perhaps even more importantly, the pirated copy hasn’t hurt sales a tiny bit. If anything, tinyBuild has sold more games because they uploaded the game to The Pirate Bay.

“We saw very positive WTF REALLY feedback from users, and saw reactions that people bought it simply because they liked the joke. So we don’t see it hurting sales in any way,” Alex said.

Indeed, in some cases piracy is actually a good thing. The above is yet another example of what happens when piracy becomes promotion, something that’s certainly not unique to this particular case (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc).

Those who haven’t played the game yet, you’re encouraged to pirate it on The Pirate Bay. Those who like it are of course welcome to buy the regular release as well, which reportedly is less buggy than the pirate-themed version.