I'm a dev of a relatively smalltime project (Graphtreon says we're around ~450 for NSFW games on Patreon), but even so I noticed our public releases of our game up on pirate sites within about a month or so of launch. My views on it pretty much go like this:
- Stopping it is more or less impossible, and to really pursue it makes you look like a dick in the community
- Patreon is ultimately a tip jar, not a storefront, and people will either consider you worthy of a tip or not regardless of how they've played the game
- At most a leaked version is 1-2 months ahead of the version I already have out for free, and since I update every 2-3 weeks, pirate versions will likely remain behind patron versions for a while yet, so patrons still get value for their money
While I'd certainly like people to go through official channels, and if everyone pirated the project would die...it will happen. My primary concern is, despite the fact that pirates could just link up the versions I release myself, they go through the extra effort of repackaging and rehosting them (making the download files much larger in the process). This leaves me with concerns that some of these sites might be tossing malware in there while they're at it, and the last thing I want is someone's pc getting ransomwared and them blaming it on our game.
You do have a legit concern there with the ransomware/malware possibility. Here, we check those out to make sure it's clean. I will admit we have come across uploads with malware. So the uploads in the OP are safe but the ones in the wild? Coin toss!
I am aware that many developers try to compress the upload so its faster up and down.The biggest offender of all that "piracy" is when they use the game to make money off it. What happens is that many of them compress at zero compression so it's full sized and sometimes they will double up on the images, put in adverts for sites, etc. Then they put it up on premium upload sites that throttle the download speed unless you pay for a membership. Now when you pay for that membership, the game that spurred the membership gets a cut of your money. And in many cases, they get paid a certain amount per so many downloads since it's traffic driven.
So you can trust this site to provide clean downloads when we can. We won't turn developers away for any reason except for rule violations or constant "DMCA" trolling. In fact, we are aware they have ways around that and we accept that DMCA is part of piracy. So is waiting and watching for a leaked upload.
I only ask developers to look on the bright side. We provide your content for free at high speeds and do what we can to make it "legit" and to provide a link to your Patreon, Tumblr, DeviantArt, etc. We have 148,000 members right now and many have money to burn. After they try the game and/or see the OP, that's eyes on your patreon that could end up paying for your game. And if you read the threads, there's hundreds of members who openly admit being patrons plus some are actually high-tier patrons.
Simply put, that means that if they hadn't been to this site and seen your work, you would not have had all those patrons. Funny thing is, you can both curse and praise pirates.
