60,000 pirates? Cop 7 is having a hard time

The seventh part of the cult Czech point-and-click adventure Polda is going through hard times. The new adventure of the new detective Pankratz is crushed by pirates. The warez version appeared on the Internet immediately after the release and there is a lot of interest in it, but the sales of the game are stagnating and the costs have not yet paid off.

At the same time, I recorded on various torrents, warez forums and Uloz.to. over 60 thousand impressions of Poldy 7. This is especially scary given that 1208 people have supported Hithit, the game has only 62 reviews on Steam, and SteamDB statistics show that Only 7 hundred players play legally.

“The pirated version appeared right after the release. When I write a comment about this, people scold me.” chief developer Petr Svoboda complained to colleagues from Vortex. Svoboda tries to remove pirated versions of his game from the Internet, but fighting windmills takes up almost all of his time.

“Sometimes I write an appeal to these pirate discussions, but more or less I meet stiff resistance, and people really scold me.” Svoboda adds that a pirated version of Poldy 7 appeared on the Internet before the official release, so it comes from the person who financially supported the title through crowdfunding on Hithit, where Polda 7 raised 1,437,011 CZK.

Those who illegally download Polda 7 are happy to name this amount. They claim that the authors have collected 359% of the required amount (the goal was 400,000 CZK) and no longer need the money. However, these people forget that game development is much more expensive. Plus it cost a lot Czech dub with professional actors such as Ludek Sobota as detective Pankrats, Piotr Rykhliy as Chestmir Rozmazl, Bara Shtepanov, Tomasz Matonoha, Pavel Vondra, Bogdan Tuma and others.

No one is claiming that if there weren’t an illegal version on the internet, that would force most downloaders to buy Cop 7. Martin Szovanek, co-owner of the Xzone store, points to almost zero marketing. 90% of orders have been received in the last two weeks, and the game has been on sale since the beginning of this year.

“At the end of the day, this bad news about piracy might help, because a lot of Poldy fans will know about the new part,” notes Watch out.

Maybe Martin Schovanek is right. Otherwise, Petr Svoboda throws other plans in the trash and goes to earn money as an ordinary programmer in order to earn a living. What are the plans? Petr Svoboda would like to bring the old parts of Poldy to Steam, remaster the second part, which is one of the most popular, or start developing a completely new Cop and some kind of dark adventure.