We got our first torrent link today, I feel like a real developer… but I want to take the link down.
How do I do this?
Thanks Ryiah!
Congratulations! I would be more worried if they don’t pirate your game.
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Speaking of piracy popularity there are currently 22 seeds and 4 peers according to the following torrent status checker. I’m now curious how many seeds and peers it is normal to have for a newly released game and if you could draw conclusions on popularity from it.
No clue, I’m not familiar with torrents. Could you write a script that mines data on this for a while and then check for correlations?
I doubt it’s a 1 to 1 correlation in popularity / real sales. I think there’s probably also a big factor in how much people hate the company behind the game. I’ve read tons of youtube comments recently along the lines of “Fvck 'em, I’m gonna pirate all their future games”. And then there’s probably a strong correlation between certain target audiences and people who pirate more games proportionally.
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I don’t completely understand piracy. There are multiple reasons for it. I get it when the games are expensive and people can’t afford them… But when you have the money or the game is really cheap I just don’t get it. I’m going to make my game free when I finish it anyway. And if I do good I might make one that I can sell. I know it will be pirated if anyone is interested in it. But I’m ok with that as long as I still make some money.
@frosted more you fight with piracy, more determined people you make to distribute games.
I am actually surprised, how fast game was pirated 
Not that pirating is something complex, specially Unity, but that you gained popularity enough, to such occurrence to happen.
As mentioned, and discussed in other threads, consider piracy as free marketing and analytics.
People who wants buy, will buy anyway. You can force greedy, or poor people to spend $$$. At worse, they will look at something different.
Even if you delete somehow reference from google, you can use different search engines, which will show such results. So a bit wasted effort. Then you got torrents on torent websites and other websites, which store pirated software. No really worth to spend time and effort fighting with windmills.
All that’s true but we only got like 5 videos of the game listed so far and one of them isnt a video its bloody skidrow dropping a torrent. Lol.
Trust me, game isn’t popular enough to warrant piracy. Although were starting to get a little tiny bit of traction.
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My first commercially released game was pirated within 24 hours. Not because it was popular, but because an automated tool was scraping every new game on the distribution channel.
Copy protection would have helped there, but not much.
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Good point. I did forgot completely about bots.
Just dont bother. See it has free PR.
I just wish they updated the game, the skidrow version is way behind the legal version of our game.
What’s the point? If the game has any traction it will reuploaded in no time, take it as a compliment and advertisment (not free of course).
After all out of ten people pirate it, one may bother to buy it, if it is worth it, the rest wouldn’t buy it anyway so it is a “win”.
If it is hosted on popular torrent sites bother to leave a sincere comment as of who you are and what the game and thereof sales of it means to you and your team, some guilt tripping never hurts.
PS: huge companies lost this war, you definitely not going to win it.
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I’m not trying to stop pirating from happening.
I just don’t want them to come up in the first 5 or so links!
You should have to work just a little. 
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Your taking the wrong approach, as in you cant stop this happening or even lessen it, and the more you try the more actively it will be pirated, searched for and therefore will rank higher and higher in torrent listings.
The best anti piracy would be registering an account on every torrent site that indexes a torrent of your game, and writing a personal heart felt message as a comment on each torrent (copy and paste after you written a good version to put everywhere) to any who would read that this is your life and you are a small indie and cannot afford to have copies pirated, and that your not trying to stop anyone pirating but if they enjoy the game if they could purchase it would mean the world to you etc etc.
Devs of terraria did this and saw a big influx of people coming from torrents to paid versions. Its about all you can do, try and remind them that its affecting someone and hope some will convert.
Ultimately though its just part of the industry and not much can be done 
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Create an account and upload fakes.
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Again though, I’m talking about the google search results not torrent lists.
This is not some pirate group intentionally responding to the game, this is just automated bot downloads and page generation. For very small releases, pirate links come up too high in the search results because there aren’t enough other links to push them down.
There are honestly too many releases now days for pirate groups to pay specific attention to any one specific indie game. Within 24 hours we were on page six of the ‘new releases’ tab sorted by release time.
IE: If you search for terraria - you will not find torrent links in the first 1-2 pages of results.
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Your searches must not be the same as mine. Searching for “To Battle! Hell’s Crusade” doesn’t show any torrents on the first page. I have to add “torrent” onto the end of it to see anything. Terraria is the same for me.
Video tab has skidrow featured midway down. Problem is - this page is actually more important imo for players looking for gameplay examples when deciding if they should buy.
Ah. Finally found it on the bottom of the second page. Honestly give it a few days and it’ll likely be drowned out.
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