Hockey Sim Development Ended By Piracy

By Paul Munn | February 6, 2007

Sports Interactive, creator of Eastside Hockey Manager 2007 for the PC, has ended development of the hockey sim after its sales collapsed in the face of piracy. Luckily it didn’t kill the company entirely, as they were able to reassign at least some of their developers to other projects. ArsTechnica reports that SI wasn’t even able to break even on the title in the face of an ever-rising number of bittorrent downloads of a cracked copy of the game. People were interested in and liked the game, but wanted to steal it instead of paying for a legitimate copy.

This isn’t some flyweight piece of shareware, either. I haven’t played it, but a look at the website seems to back up the developer’s statement that it has more licenses than any other hockey game. It also has a PC Gamer Editor’s Choice Award.

Ars did some digging and seems to have found that this is the first game that was slain by piracy, or at least the first game publicly stated to have been terminated this way.

Everyone wants new and fun games to play, and everyone wants smaller developers to survive. But if established developers with multiple projects can’t make money on their games due to piracy, apparently everyone isn’t getting their games honestly.