The Witness took everyone by surprise, driving players mad with its challenging and thoughtful puzzles and earning several perfect scores from reviewers across the web. It’s definitely the first surprise hit of 2016, and people want to play it. Not everyone wants to pay for it, though. Jonathan Blow blew up Twitter, pointing out that his new creation was the most popular game on a “certain popular Torrent site.” Blow’s reactions were mixed. On one hand he pointed out that this definitely wouldn’t help them afford to make future games, but he also said that he’s glad that a lot more people will be experiencing the game.
He certainly wasn’t condoning piracy, though, and mentioned that he just didn’t have enough time to take precautionary measures to prevent piracy like he did with Braid. For Braid , Blow’s team flooded torrent sites with popular, fake and broken versions of the game to drive interested parties toward purchasing it. Developing and releasing The Witness was his top priority, though, and there were no extra resources available to allocate toward foiling pirates. He concluded by saying, “I don’t like DRM because I think people should have the freedom to own things they bought, but I also want to design video games.” While I’ll likely wait for the game to go on sale before buying it, I’m guessing that Blow and his team won’t have any trouble making their money back on this one, and then some.
Source: VentureBeat