An Open Letter to Yuzo Koshiro: I’m Sorry About the Piracy, but You Probably Screwed Up Your Release - itch.io
First of all, congratulations on releasing Earthion on PC. It’s beautiful work, and the love and passion involved is clear from the first screen shot. I really appreciate that you released a Mega Drive game in 2025 when it would have’s surely been easier and more profitable to work in a more modern format. You didn’t have to make this game, but you did anyway and that’s super cool.
I’d like to talk about the decision to encrypt the ROM in the Steam release and the almost immediate decryption and posting of said ROM. I’m going to argue that the situation is a bummer, but it’s more complicated than just intellectual property theft and that it probably would have been better for both you and your fans if you’d included the ROM in plaintext.
Before diving deeper, let me emphasize that we at Safety Stoat Studios vehemently believe that people who work deserve to be paid. You are responsible for financially supporting yourself, your employees, members of your family and members of your employees’ families. You made a kind of game that is fun and cool rather than a game that is optimized for revenue, which is a gift to the fans at cost to you and your colleagues. We hope that you sell many copies and that everybody who plays the game compensates you fairly for it.
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