'Pirate It Rather Than Watch Playthrough on YouTube,' Ask Devs of Slay the Princess

Source: Black Tabby Games.

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Game developers and publishers generally have no sympathy for pirates. However, developers of Slay the Princess prefer that players check out a pirated version of their game rather than watch a playthrough on YouTube.

This is not the first time an independent studio has cited pirating its game as a "better" solution. Except that in this case it's not about money. Rather, Black Tabby Games is concerned about the player experience.

If you haven't heard of Slay the Princess yet, let it suffice for you to know that it is one of the best-rated indie games of 2023.

1. The title still has relatively few reviews - 19 and 16 on Metacritic and OpenCritic respectively - but almost all of them are very positive.
2. On Steam Slay The Princess was rated by nearly 6 thousand users and as many as 97% of them gave a positive review.

As noted by Black Tabby Games, the game has recently attracted a lot of new people. Hence the announcement by the developers (via X / Twitter), in which they openly encourage players to pirate Slay the Princess, if they are short on money.

This seemingly controversial statement is due to the nature of the game, to which the title owes much of its success. Slay the Princess is a very "reactive" game, in which the player's decisions are crucial. As a result, as the developers explain, impressions of the first approach to this game will not be the same if the player "looks at it through the prism of someone else's choices."

Source: Black Tabby Games / X/Twitter.

Slay the Princess is indeed a very unusual title. The devs themselves describe their work as a visual novel, which mixes concepts straight out of The Stanley Parable with The Wizard of Cthulhu and Disco Elysium, and also as... a love story. So I guess it's actually one of those titles that loses heavily from youtube playthroughs.