Amanita (The developers of Samorost 2 and Machinarium) have recently started holding a sale for their latest adventure game, Machinarium. The game is really good and has a pretty incredible art style. More information about the sale can be found here: http://machinarium.net/blog/2010/08/05/machinarium-pirate-amnesty/
They're holding the sale because the game has a 90% piracy rate, which is kind of dumb I guess. Just goes to show that while no-DRM seems to work on GoG, it doesn't work for everybody.
Edit: It's Amanita, not Amantia. Thanks for correcting me d:

While this might work to some degree, I think it might also deter people who simply haven't bought it yet and don't like the 'pirate' implication.

NO-DRM works on gog because gog is fairly known, most gamers don't ever visit a developer website, much less an indie developer's website, and since they'll only see it on places like steam and such (where it's 20$) they pirate it.
Regardless, I heard good things about machinarium so I'll be buying it.

What's that on your shoulder? Is it a chip?
I kid ;) But this doesn't seem dumb at all. If you find that 90% of the people playing your game haven't paid for it then would it make more sense to try to keep them from playing or to try to get them to want to pay you?
It's a good thing for me that you started this thread - I bought Machinarium back in February, but it got lost in my backlog and I haven't played it yet, and I had forgotten that I have it.

I agree entirely.
Now being a GoG I don't mind if games are a little behind the curve but you simply can't charge $20 for that 2d point and click thing anymore. I think that was the real issue here.

I've never heard of this game before, but was nice that they had browser playable demo on site. And the game was fantastic, worth well the money I just payed for full version, and linux version available too! It is kinda sad though that gems like these don't get the mainstream attention.

Machinarium was simply too expensive. I picked it up for $7.50 in the Xmas sale with Samorost2 and didn't regret it but I certainly would have if I paid $20 for it let alone €20 on Steam. If they had priced the game at $10 they would have sold more and been pirated less and still would have made a decent profit.

Goddamnit Machinarium is a beautiful and brilliant piece of work. It's completely worth $20. More so than other games priced at that amount.

Bought it today, and I doubt the sale will attract a meaningful number of that '90% pirates'. $5 is still $5 more expensive than FREE, and they can invent various rationalizations to justify their behaviour ("I won't pay for a Flash game!" or "I'm too paranoid to buy anything online!").

I wouldn't touch most of Telltale's stuff even if it was free, and i think Machinarium it's defnitely worth the 20 bucks. Different tastes i guess.
Edit: Reading that back i feel i should clarify that i wasn't making any judgement about the quality of Telltale's games or the talent of the folks who make them, i was merely saying they aren't my kind of game.

Well, it's a cute game with a gorgeous art style, so $5 is most certainly worth it if you're interested. It's worth at least 3 times that, in my opinion.
Only 5-15% of the people who played it actually bought the game? Where do they get these piracy estimates? Sounds a bit like a random impressive number they pulled out of their ass for the occasion.

Sounds reasonable. Not sure how they got their statistics, but World of Goo did something similar a while back. I'll link to the RPS article since it presents the information in a more readable fashion
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/15/world-of-goo-piracy-rate-82/
Not directly relevant, but I imagine something similar would be used with this.

Looks like a nice game and 5 dollar is worth an experiment.

I meant it was dumb that 90% of people playing the game pirated it and didn't buy it.