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I suspect that it's mostly an issue of money. Releasing a game, even for free download, costs money in the form of staff, servers, bandwidth, etc.

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Not to mention with the advent of digital distributors such as Steam, making an ancient game available for $2 still draws in a couple buyers every now and then without any marketing or much effort.

In fact, Commander Keen, a game that was released by iD Software 20 years ago, is available on steam right now for $5.

Naturally, there should be some drop off point in sales where the PR becomes more worthwhile than the couple bucks.

If there's DRM involved, the conversion from disc to bare .exe would have a minimal cost involved, I suppose. But releasing your game as a torrent would erase the cost of servers and bandwidth.

EDIT: MechCommander was released as a torrent. Microsoft (you know, that Microsoft) owns the IP.

But releasing your game as a torrent would erase the cost of servers and bandwidth.

A game via torrent? It's probably already been "released" for them...

They only get the promotional benefits if they create an official release.

or if some idiot out there finally figures out how to monetize torrent... even an included movie ad or something... or a modified game that shows a boot screen with an advert would be completely acceptable to me.

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