You don’t have to put so many words in the search field of Google to find all kinds pf serial key generators, torrent files, cracked versions of the game. It’s a shame that somebody chose this form for getting themselves a copy of the game without paying for it and to make it hard for the company that continues to develop it and which need the money to pay all kinds of outcomes during the development and all people that is involved and spend a lot of time on making new versions and improve the game into a second version.
General said there is a bunch of small software developers out at the markets that maybe just have 1-2 employees and spend a lot of time just to make cheap and useful software. There are many small game development companies too that may just be based on one single employee that develop the whole game and probably spend a lot of time on this. Anyway piracy hurt them all in some way. It hurts those that got small budgets and are self-employed and that probably only produce one or two application per year. Even producers of add-ons for the Microsoft Flight Simulator have to deal with this problem. And freeware developers do also have problems with piracy and cases of copyright infringement and all kinds of other problems where there is a manipulation with the freeware to remove its original author.
It’s a strange world we are living in. Piracy hurt us all in some way, and especially those who are not a part of the largest companies such as the music recording industry or the movie industry where we have some giants that probably suffer less or nothing on piracy. It hurts a lot more those who are small individual companies or self-employed developers, because they don’t have a massive amount of resources to protect the work from all kinds of piracy that is performed today.
I hope those of you that got a pirated copy of Ship Simulator that want to see more of this game in the future support it by paying for it. It’s a matter of having an understanding about what software or game development is about and what costs that is involved to develop it from 0 to 100%.