Following the Australian Classification Board's recent decision to refuse classification to Hotline Miami 2, effectively barring the game from sale in the country, designer Jonatan Söderström has a piece of advice for people affected by the decision: "Just pirate it!"
Söderström's suggestion came in response to an e-mail from a concerned Hotline Miami fan, who asked if there was a way for him to obtain and pay for the game given the board's decision. "If it ends up being not released in Australia, just pirate it after release," Söderström wrote in reply. "No need to send us any money, just enjoy the game!"
The response was subsequently screencapped, posted to reddit, and confirmed as authentic by representatives of Devolver Digital. "He’s said similar things in the past and yes, I can confirm he wants people to enjoy the game," a Devolver Digital PR rep told Ars. "That was him," Devolver tweeted by way of further confirmation through the fictional Fork Parker CFO account.
This isn't the first case of a developer explicitly encouraging people to "pirate" a game for one reason or another. In 2013, developer Patrick Klug seeded an altered version of his Game Dev Tycoon to many torrent sites, forcing would be pirates to play a version in which their in-game studio inevitably fails because of... piracy. Developer Sos Sosowski used The Pirate Bay as a promotional vehicle for his game McPixel back in 2012, and dozens of indie game creators got together last year to distribute "The Pirate Bay Bundle" of 101 free games via torrent.
Still, a developer suggesting piracy as a way for potential players to get around government restrictions on a game's regional sales is relatively unique, as far as we can tell. One thing's for sure: we'll at least be able to avoid endless debates on piracy's effect on "lost sales" among Australians this time around.
