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Of course. It’s just that some are referring to this specific case as illegal downloading when it clearly isn’t.

26 days ago on Players who pirated 'Game Dev Tycoon' see their virtual studios hit by piracy 1 reply

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I agree with you in that pirates have no right to play the game. I don’t think many would disagree that “I wouldn’t have paid for that anyway” isn’t a valid justification for piracy either, but I don’t actually see anyone saying that. What it is a valid justification for is not buying the game. No more, no less. The developer didn’t lose 93% of their sales, that much is obvious. Exactly how much they did lose is impossible to know unfortunately.

This situation is a little special though in that pirates were the only people who seemed to know the game existed. It’s about as far away from scientific data as we can get.

26 days ago on Players who pirated 'Game Dev Tycoon' see their virtual studios hit by piracy 1 recommend

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Intent is often important, but I’m sure Tristan.Irwin is correct on this. The developers would never win any court cases when they seeded the torrent themselves. At the very least it would be considered entrapment.

The actual method of distribution used does not make something “official” or not. World of Warcraft amongst others distributes official patches via bittorrent. Many record companies distribute music videos officially via Youtube.

This situation is a bit like when SCO claimed in court that they hadn’t licensed any of their IP for use in Linux under the GPL license, but it turned out they had themselves provided downloads with that license on all the header files.

26 days ago on Players who pirated 'Game Dev Tycoon' see their virtual studios hit by piracy 1 reply 2 recommends