The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile , a sidescrolling, super-violent Xbox Live Arcade game released in 2011, has made the jump to PC by a somewhat unorthodox route: a Russian hacker pirated it, cracked it out of its Xbox shell, and released it into the wild to run free.
Via Eurogamer , a hacker by the name Barabus posted to the GameDev.ru forums that he was releasing the game because, by “ignoring” the PC platform, developers Ska Studios were forefitting their chance to earn money from the game. “After all, if they wanted to earn money,” he writes (in Russian—Google kindly translated the page for me), “then the game would be issued on all available platforms. If the game came out on PC officially, then this thread would not exist.”
Later in the thread, he added, “This is not piracy. This is restoration of justice.”
Interestingly, this seems to annoy me a lot more than it annoyed Ska Studios . Founder James Silva told Eurogamer “I'm totally giving the guy the benefit of the doubt... he probably didn't mean to come across quite the way he did with that restoration of justice stuff.” Ska's other member, artist Michelle Juett, came closer to calling this what it was: “I just see him as the overly-entitled gamer saying 'I deserve this because I want it!'” She did note, though, that the hacked port of the game was “kind of impressive.”
If you're the Xbox-owning sort, you can get a demo for The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile for free .
