DRM News

You may not have heard of Finnish developer RedLynx. You have definitely never seen their wares on a store shelf (they don’t sell them there). Yet they moved 1.5 million copies of their games last year on Xbox Live Arcade, iPhone and PC digital retail.

In an article on Gamasutra, CEO Tero Virtala says that it started in 2008 with the release of PC title Trials 2 SE online.

“In 2008, we published one game, Trials 2 SE for PC,” he recalls. “It was well-received and sold more than 150,000 copies.”

“After that release, we started to focus more heavily on developing and publishing our multi-platform games on digital channels, significantly increasing sales,” the CEO continues. “Obviously, that strategy has worked well.”

What also worked was ensuring that demos were widely available (they claim over 5000 websites have had links to their game demos). Interestingly, they have also admitted previously to intentionally leaking one of their games on to torrent sites themselves, leaving out features in the leaked version in hopes of encouraging some of the downloaders to purchase the full game.

“Piracy is here, so how can we take advantage of that?” posed RedLynx CEO Tero Virtala, speaking at a Develop Liverpool panel reported on by GamesIndustry.biz. “What we did actually, on day one, we put that game immediately on all the torrent networks ourselves.”

According to the report, the leaked version of the game lacked leaderboard support, crucial to Trials 2‘s full experience — Virtala’s hope was that users who downloaded the game would enjoy it enough to upgrade to a paid version to gain the extra feature.

RedLynx has a slate of 8-10 titles scheduled for release this year.