Machinarium Suffers from ~90% Piracy Rate

You know… as much as I hate DRM (and trust me, I hate it), I can begin to understand its use when I read stories like this one. As it appears, a highly-acclaimed indie title called Machinarium, which costs only $20 on a regular day, suffers from a ~90% piracy rate. You read that right… for every 100 people who play the game, only 5~15 people actually paid for it.

Is it just me, or is a statistic like that just a little bit o.O? As tackled in our news just yesterday, there are some who believe that it’s alright to pirate “sometimes”, but “sometimes” doesn’t seem to make much sense when we’re talking about 90% of people for just one game. With numbers that stark, it’s clear that while DRM-free games are appreciated by gamers, a huge number of them still have no intention to pay for them.

I might be a bit hypocritical, because when I picture people pirating software from the “big guys”, I don’t feel so bad. But when people pirate a game (and a great one) from an indie developer who usually lives entirely off of that one game for a while, I can put myself in their shoes. Personally, I couldn’t imagine developing a game that was going to be stolen to such a large extent… and I’m not quite sure how I’d react.

The argument made in yesterday’s post was that there are people who truly can’t afford to purchase such things as games, but we’re talking about a $20 offering here, not a $50 one. And that in itself isn’t the staggering part… that part is the fact that the numbers are just so dang high. It’s mind-blowing to me.

The most interesting thing about all of this might be the fact that these developers who are hit so hard by piracy seem to know what they’re doing when complaining about it. This year alone, we’ve had many game developers come out with complaints, and offer their games for a discounted price, and then see them fly off the virtual shelves. Of course, a quick infusion isn’t going to make up for 90% of pirated copies, but it sure doesn’t hurt!

Those who are piqued by Machinarium might want to act fast, as the game and soundtrack are being offered together for a discounted price of $5 until August 12. If you are not sure if you’ll like the game, there’s a demo available. I have the game, but never got around to actually playing it… I need to get on that. The demo was a lot of fun.

Machinarium is point-and-click adventure game by the makers of web games Samarost and Samorost2, Czech independent studio Amantia Design.