Loop Hero makers support piracy if sanctions stop you buying it

rockpapershotgun.com:

The Russian studio behind Loop Hero have encouraged would-be-players to pirate their game if they're unable to buy it due to the sanctions against Russia. Access to some payment systems has been lost following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, so the devs say if you can't figure out a way to buy it, hey, just download it. The route-building dungeon-crawler's publishers, Devolver Digital, have supported this.

Four Quarters, who stated their opposition to war on the first day of the invasion, laid out their stance in a post on VK (a Facebook-like Russian social network) on Sunday. With the main payment methods on Steam currently disabled for users in Russia, Four Quarters explained people had been asking how they could buy Loop Hero these days, and suggested a simple solution if would-be customers can't get anything to work.

"When all this will end is unknown, so everyone in such difficult times can only help raise the pirate flag (along with VPN)," they said (or, a machine translation says they said), going on to share a link to download Loop Hero through a torrent site. The game's publishers are cool with this.

"Devolver Digital fully supports Four Quarters as they navigate this incredibly difficult period," they said in a statement to cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer. "We've been communicating consistently with the team to help them wherever possible and were alerted of the statement ahead of time, which we back 100%."

After proposing torrenting, the devs seemed surprise by the attention this got internationally. They said in a (machine-translated) follow-up post on Monday, "We didn't do anything special, because there's nothing wrong with torrents." And in response to people offering donations, they said naw, don't sweat it,