I've really been enjoying my time with Project Zomboid, unfortunately some people decided it was better to leech off the developers rather than give them any money for their hard work, not surprising really.

...these ‘auto updating’ versions of the game could screw us completely. We have a cloud based distribution model, where the files are copied all over the world and are served to players on request, which means we are charged money for people downloading the game. Whether piracy actually amounts to lost sales we’re not going to get into. The possibility that it raises awareness and promotes the game cannot be ignored, but the difference is offline versions on torrents, which we’ve been largely unconcerned about, do not cost us real money, only potential money, and even then we can’t really guess at what the net effect is. Likewise people who download the game through our website only download it when there is a new version, so once every week or so. These new pirate copies have an ‘update now’ button which will download the game every time it’s clicked, potentially every time the game is run by everyone using it.

A pirated version was created which allowed anyone with an illegal version of game to directly update it through the developers own servers. The devs have to pay for the bandwidth and deal with traffic from all those stolen copies. So they've taken down the game entirely for the next few days until a solution can be found. Having preordered it and been really impressed, this sucks. It also sets back their plans to release a public demo so even fewer people will get a chance to try out this truly unique game.

In short, Pirates are assholes.

A pirated version was created which allowed anyone with an illegal version of game to directly update it through the developers own servers. The devs have to pay for the bandwidth and deal with traffic from all those stolen copies.

That's funny. 

That's pretty goddamn disgusting. If you want to pirate, fine, do it. God knows it's been made easy enough to do, but this is just wrong.

As someone who's of the "piracy != lost sale" camp, and who frequently torrents games for various reasons, this is shitty as hell.
 
Sure, I pirate games. Say what you will about that, whatever, that's not my point. But it takes a special kind of asshole to go out of their way to literally and directly take money from developers like this.

@KingWilly: Speaking of disgusting things why do you have a duke avatar?

In some ways a downloadable version of the game is kinda nice, but the devs constantly updated the online version, to have to manually install a new copy of the game each time is going to be an issue unless they change their dev strategy.

@KingWilly: Speaking of disgusting things why do you have a duke avatar?