Indie dev disappointed at low piracy rates of new game

More than a month after he proudly released his debut game into the world, independent developer Andrew Watson has expressed his dismay at the disappointingly low number of entitled freeloaders who have so far bothered to take the pitifully small steps necessary to pirate it, a fact that has left Watson scratching his head and wondering at the injustice of it all.

“Everybody knows that pirates are degenerate bottom-feeders with absolutely no sense of decency” said Watson, who has spent the last five years holed up in his bedroom writing the game.

“They know my game is available on all the major torrent sites and yet they continue not to download it for nothing,” he continued. “I simply can’t understand the mentality that drives these robbing tightwads not to just go ahead and pinch it already.”

Watson added that his message to each and every one of those disgusting, rapacious parasites was “it’s there for the taking people, come and get it.”

Pilfering sources confirmed that Watson’s game “The Untimely Adventures of Captain Wimblebee” — a retro-themed 2D platformer with a time-travelling mechanic — has to date been downloaded for free by a paltry fourteen thieving scumbags, leaving its creator with the awful sinking feeling that all of his hard work and sacrifice has gone to waste.

Telling reporters that he’d been “far too busy working” these past five years to pay much attention to his physical and mental wellbeing, or to spend quality time with friends and family, a sickly, lonely Watson admitted that his only thought had been to get the game finished so that every unwashed, basement-dwelling troglodyte out there would have the chance to steal it.

Watson is sick to death of pirates not illegally downloading his game!

“I haven’t spoken to my own mother in five years and I’ve also got this worrying rash on my legs that I haven’t had time to get checked out yet,” Watson lamented. “I’ve worked so hard and for so long, and for what? I mean, is it too much to ask these chiselling lowlifes to click on a damn link?”

Watson also vigorously defended his decision to release the game without any form of digital rights management. “DRM doesn’t stop pirates, nothing does,” he averred. “They’ll steal anything and everything, just because they can.”

“Oh God, why oh why won’t they steal my game?”, Watson added.

But Jason Smith, the fifteen-year-old boy who first made a pirated version of Watson’s game available on the internet, provided a clue to the reason behind the general indifference felt towards it by copyright infringing dirtballs everywhere.

Contacted via email, Smith had this to say: “This game is OK, kind of. But it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. It’s a pixel art platformer with a twee name and a gimmicky twist. Normally I pirate everything I can get my hands on, but I pirated five games just like it last week alone. Why would anyone in their right mind need to pirate another one?”

Smith concluded: “I don’t know why I bothered to seed the torrent even. I must have been pretty bored that day lol.”

Watson, meanwhile, is convinced that the lack of mooching interest in his game has affected his standing in the tight-knit independent game developer community.

“I was on Skype with some of the other guys,” Watson said. “Phil, Markus and Jonathan were all boasting about how many times their games had been downloaded from sites like The Pirate Bay or wherever. But when they asked how many times my game had been stolen, well, I just didn’t know what to say.”

Watson confirmed that he then had to excuse himself from the conversation and go to the bathroom so his peers would not see him start to cry.

In a final of act of desperation, Watson has even attempted to persuade family members to pirate the game, to no avail.

“I sent an email to my mother last week, including a link to BitTorrent,” said Watson. “She wrote back saying it had taken her a few moments to remember who I was, but she agreed that this torrential thingamajig, as she put it, was pretty cool.”

Watson said that although his mother had not yet pirated the game, she had promised to get around to doing so once she was through watching the entire first season of Game of Thrones, which she was then downloading.

Despite these and other setbacks, Watson has not let go of the dream of one day creating a game that every hateful, scrounging, half-witted ingrate will want to rip off. He has recently begun development on his next big project: a sandbox building game to which he has given the tentative title “DigCraft”.

“This is one game those thoughtless kleptomaniacs won’t be able to resist pirating,” said a clearly agitated Watson, steeling himself before he once again retreated to the solitude of his bedroom.

“Just you wait five or so years and you’ll see.”