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Amanita’s “Pirate Amnesty” sale: Machinarium $5 through August 12

Amanita Design, the developers of the critically acclaimed adventure/puzzle game Machinarium, are holding a "Pirate Amnesty" sale through August 12. For the next few days, the game will be available for just $5, 75% off its previous $20 price. The thought behind this is to pull in some of the people who have already pirated the DRM-free indie game with a great deal. If you've already pirated the game and still don't want to drop $20 on it, you can legitimately purchase it for $5 and be certain that you supported a great indie developer in the process.

People, this is how you deal with piracy. Instead of introducing increasingly draconian measures that barely prevent people from pirating games and either inconveniences or enrages people who legitimately buy your games (I'm looking at you, Activision, EA, and Ubisoft), focus on appealing to gamers' better nature and try to pull pirates toward legitimately buying your game.

Piracy is an unfortunate reality of software. It's impossible to make a game completely pirate-proof, and to claim you have done so is inviting legions of extremely skilled code crackers to prove you wrong. You can lock down more and more features and require constant registration and authentication, but for every pirate you thwart in that manner you piss off at least ten people who actually paid for the game.