Well, we did it. Two years ago, I said we’d eventually put out a polished up, nicer version of Bruiser & Scratch if we found the time. Between contract gigs in the middle of 2010, we found 6 weeks to put a tremendous amount of effort into rebuilding the UI, improving the gameplay and difficulty curve, completely replacing the character art for the main characters, adding music and sounds that were cleaner and more appropriate… just generally making the game as good as we could with the resources we had available. Oberon Media offered to distribute the updated game for us on various casual portal sites, as well as Replay Games helping us get recognition via Intel’s AppUp store.

Yesterday, the game went live early in the morning, which prompted us to put up the updated website (welcome, and I hope you enjoy it–put a lot of hours into it). Early in the day, it was exciting to see all the game portals listing the game: MSN, Pogo, I-Play, Yahoo.uk, and so on.

By nightfall, however, the top links were all pirate sites. Today, a mere 24 hours after launch, only 5 of the links in the first 50 reported by Google are legal sites that link to the game. The rest are pirate sites giving away our game for free.

While I can’t possibly be happy about this, the disappointing fact is that some people will want to go online and learn a little more about the game, possibly post on a forum somewhere with other people who are having fun unlocking game boards, or trouble finishing certain levels, etc. They will most probably have a hard time finding a place to do that because of all the noise.

Pirates will do what pirates do; stopping them is virtually impossible. There are consequences, however, which is that developers are moving more and more to online servers rather than download or packaged goods titles because it’s the best way to handle the issue of both pirates and second hand sales gutting the market. There’s a reason Gamestop is buying up online outlets: their days are numbered.

The point in all this? Traditional game development is a tough business. We’re hanging in there because we love it, and we hope folks (legally) check out Puzzling Paws. We’ve made free demos available on both AppUp and the various web portals.

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