At Develop Liverpool this week, RedLynx CEO Tero Virtala said his company had intentionally leaked its motorcycle game Trials HD to P2P sites.

"The only difference was that the leaked version did not have access to the online leaderboards, which Virtala claims is the 'soul' of the game," writes The Escapist's Greg Tito.

"Has it worked?" asks paidContent's Patrick Smith. "The company has shifted almost units 150,000 of Trials since its launch 18 months ago — which at $9.99 per unit is just under $1.5 million, so not bad considering almost the whole game was made available for nothing on the day it launched."

"As this was quite a niche game, it’s hard to tell whether the upload actually stopped piracy of the full game," counters Geek.com's Matthew Humphries. "If you released a big budget title like Gears of War, and then uploaded a version without co-op play to file-sharing networks, would it stop the game being pirated? I doubt it."

"It is good to see that companies are recognizing that giving away games on torrent sites can actually help to market their products," writes TorrentFreak's Ernesto. "Making demo versions of a game available to the public is not necessarily a novelty, but uploading these onto torrent sites is an opportunity that only a few have taken advantage of."

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