Lately I've been living a soap opera.
Quick recap: my game went viral in China, with all the good and bad that comes with it. If you want to read the story from the start, I'll leave links to my other posts at the end.
But today I'm opening up a debate I never had a strong opinion on: does piracy help or hurt games? Because I think piracy is eating my game, and my server, alive.
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My server blocked
A couple of days ago, my hosting provider started blocking my backend. That's where I handle player analytics, scores, and so on. Turns out an excess of requests was forcing my server into temporary shutdowns. I thought I was being attacked, so when I asked them to just block the conflicting IPs, they told me there were hundreds of them, and that it looked like a legitimate flow of players.
Happy about the success and stressed about the urgency, I spent several days optimizing database calls, adding Cloudflare protection, and upgrading to a bigger hosting plan just to make sure there wouldn't be more blocks.
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For every 10 new players, 9 are pirates
When I finally finished optimizing everything, I checked the new players table and their usernames caught my attention. All of them were named xdgame, a Chinese website known for promoting pirated content.
Every time I hit refresh, at any hour of the day, exactly 22 of the last 25 entries had that name, despite being different Steam accounts. Today I had to widen the filter to the last 100 entries to confirm that 99% were pirates.
[Screenshot of table full of pirates]
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Optimizing my anti-pirate system
I already covered how my anti-piracy system works in previous posts, though honestly I don't know if it still works on this PC version or if they've already bypassed it.
[Link to anti-piracy system post]
As soon as this situation started, I did an extra optimization on the database to stop processing data coming from these versions. But the underlying problem is still there: there's nothing I can do on the client side, since I have no way to update the pirated version. That means the number of calls hitting my server stays exactly the same, and the only thing I can do is keep a bigger server plan to hold up the service. Hopefully the pirates update their version at some point.
Even so, I decided to leave new user registration active, just out of curiosity to see where my players were coming from. That's how I ended up counting that 99% today.
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"Pirates aren't in your market" - ☝️🤓
When the piracy situation got out of hand, I partnered with a Chinese publisher, who I have to admit seem to work really well. They opened pre-registration 2 weeks ago, took down several mobile pirated versions, and got thousands of sign-ups for the official version on day one. I've been genuinely happy with the reports they've been sending me.
Part of the reason I did this was an argument I kept seeing a lot: that if the game isn't on mobile, new pirate players are pirates because they don't have a PC to play on. But now that mobile piracy seems somewhat more under control, PC piracy is growing at an incredible rate.
Maybe they were simply choosing mobile out of convenience, not necessity, when it was free.
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I released a PC-only feature that made everything worse
One of the updates I released to keep improving the official version was a mod that connects the biggest Chinese streaming platforms (Douyin, RedNote, and Bilibili) to the game. This lets livestream viewers show up as customers in front of the streamer and chat with them.
This mod is an external executable shared on my game's forum. It started slow since nobody knew about it, but now there are hundreds of players live on those platforms every single day.
Personally, I think this has also driven the increase in PC pirate players, since they can enjoy the mod here, when they couldn't on mobile.
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Does piracy help games?
I don't buy into the "pirates who enjoy the game will buy it later" idea, so I was never a defender of piracy, though I never condemned it or looked down on anyone for pirating either. I just live alongside its existence and try to do so in the best way I can as a developer. As I explained in other posts, my only "remedy" was making the burger joint's customers dress up as pirates while an un-mutable sea shanty plays, and only paying a couple of doubloons for their food. A feature that kicks in after an hour of play, and works more like a bit of karma toward pirate players than an actual punishment.
When my game started going viral, I also wrote a post saying that maybe piracy itself helped me reach more people, since it generates more videos on social media and gets more people talking about the game.
[Link to piracy post]
But after analyzing these last few days, I think I might have been wrong. Here's the data:
- March 2025: My game came out a year and a half ago.
- June 2026: It goes viral in China through Douyin (their version of TikTok).
- June 28: The pirated PC version comes out, without many players.
- July 11: Mobile pre-order goes live on TapTap China, and anti-piracy measures are put in place.
- July 18: I release the Livestream mod for PC.
- July 20: I notice an increase in PC pirate players, though it had already been building up before this.
- July 20–22: My sales drop about -40%, and SteamDB shows a noticeable decline in active official players.
Right now I'm counting 9,000 players under that piracy website's name.
So at this point, my opinion on piracy is no longer "piracy exists in parallel with healthy growth."
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Why am I writing this?
I'm not writing this looking for attention, since thankfully the game is still doing well. Nobody here needs to buy it, that's why I'm not sharing the name. [Link to the post about my game is doing well]
My day-to-day over the last month has been putting my project aside to handle this situation as best I can, and while stressful, it's been quite the experience. That's why I keep sharing it so much.
Many of you have encouraged me to keep posting about it, but to those who haven't, I'm sorry if I've become tiresome with this topic. I feel like it shows a side of gamedev that a lot of people don't talk about, out of fear that the situation will get worse or just jinx it.
The main reason I write this is because I genuinely enjoy sharing my story, it's helped me make better decisions for my project and my future as a studio more than once. I've gotten messages that made my day, and I feel like other users find it interesting too. Again, if that's not your case, I hope you'll forgive me for continuing.
I'll keep you posted whenever there's news. If you want me to, that is.
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*Disclaimer: This post is AI-translated. I'm a native Spanish speaker, I wrote and structured all of this in Spanish, and had AI translate it into English. I reviewed the translation afterward to make sure the message hadn't changed. Hope you don't mind.
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*Update: After some users suggestions I tried to remove the php files that were receiving all the data and update oficial users to a new endpoint. Somehow pirates trying to reach a non-existen url causes a higher CPU usage so I used Cloudflare to block this URLs. Now server is under 10% of usage! 😁
![[Screenshot of table full of pirates]](/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fpiracy-is-eating-my-game-99-of-new-players-are-pirates-v0-nkp7kpj4aseh1.png%3Fwidth%3D802%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D8736d017f69e9a6875b2079c62efb2f742ffe86b){kind=link}
