I’m not one to believe that people who pirate video games, movies, television shows, whathaveyous are costing anybody actual money. If that person never had any intention to buy said product in the first place then there’s really no money lost. Still pirating is often associated with theft of money in the media despite the above argument. Today, however, one indie developer may in fact have been victimized monetarily by the act of piracy.

The developers I’m referring to are the guys behind Project Zomboid, a new strategic take on the zombie apocalypse that brings some interesting gameplay mechanics not seen in larger, more expensive games like Left 4 Dead.

These developers were well aware that their game was probably going to be pirated (at this point I’m assuming all developers are). It just kind of goes with the territory. Despite that, they weren’t necessarily against it at least not in the same way that a company like EA or Activision are against it. They recognized it for what it was, as I explained above. Unfortunately, the pirates who are distributing the game via BitTorrent have created a version which automatically downloads an updated version of the game from Project Zomboid’s servers whenever a player clicks the “Update” button in game. This, in a sense, costs Project Zomboid money as the data to download is at their expense.

As you can imagine when somebody who hasn’t paid for a game is downloading via private servers they are, in affect, costing the developers money. To combat the issue, the developers have since removed the game from their servers for the day. As of this time, the game has not yet been restored.

[via Project Zomboid blog]