14 DAY TRIAL // Machinarium, Amanita Design's beautiful adventure game, is now on sale in an attempt to convince the those who pirated the game to finally pay for the many hours of fun the title has provided for them. The game shipped with no digital rights management software on all the three platforms it was released, that is Windows PC, MAC and Linux. The sale is entitled Pirate Amnesty and allows pirates and non-pirates alike to buy Machinarium along with its soundtrack for five dollars instead of the usual 20.
In a blog post in the game's official site, the developers behind the game said that, “We released the game DRM free which means it doesn’t include any anti-piracy protection, therefore the game doesn’t bother players with any serial codes or online authentication, but it’s also very easy to copy it. Our estimate from the feedback is that only 5-15% of Machinarium players actually paid for the game. If you decide to buy the game, you can be sure you’ll support directly the developers, not any big publisher or distributor.”
The Pirate Amnesty sale runs until the 12th of August, after which the game will be sold on its usual price. It is really hard to understand how many of the pirated copies would have been sales if it was not possible to copy the game illegally. There is no established algorithm that gives a clear percentage and it is suspected that the ratio between potential sales and illegal downloads may vary from case to case..
It may be worth remembering that World of Goo, another critically acclaimed game developed by an independent outfit called 2D Boy, suffered the same fate. The two people that make-up the whole of the company said that around 90 percent of the players were pirates. Interestingly enough, World of Goo sold pretty well through online PC retailers and Nintendo WiiWare, despite all of this, keeping 2D Boy afloat. World of Goo was also free of any digital rights management software.