'We are going to look at regional pricing and more aggressive deals in lower wealth regions,' says Alex Nichiporchik after Punch Club struck by 1.6m illegal downloads

There’s a better solution to piracy than ‘crippling’ DRM, argues TinyBuild CEO

MCV Staff 1st April 2016 Publishing

TinyBuild has condemned the use of DRM to stop illegal downloading, despite its latest game being heavily pirated.

Punch Club on smartphones and PC was purchased by 300,000 people, but downloaded illegally by another 1.6 million – that’s 81 per cent of the total players.

“I do not believe we should cripple the experience in any way for people who actually buy our games,” CEO Alex Nichiporchik said. “We’ve seen the industry try this as a whole and it’s just backfired. Remember SimCity’s launch? That was awful.”

He added: “We are going to look at regional pricing and do more aggressive deals in lower wealth regions.

“We also need to offer more value to people actually buying the game. We would have had many more people who start playing on mobile and would buy it on PC if we had cross-platform saves. That was a misstep on our part.”

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