Trials dev tries something new: Ace the demo, get the game for free

Ubisoft surprised a lot of people at E3 last month by simultaneously announcing and publishing Trials of the Blood Dragon, developed by RedLynx and Ubisoft Kiev as a mashup of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and the Trials games.

What's more intriguing, from a developer's point of view, is how the game is now being distributed: starting today, people who download the demo for the game's PC version from Uplay and complete it with 15 or fewer faults before the end of the month will get the full game for free.

It's a novel strategy for RedLynx, though not unprecedented: this is the same studio that intentionally leaked a PC version of its 2008 game Trials 2 that lacked leaderboard support to torrent sites in an effort to turn piracy into a marketing tool.

In that case, the devs said that the lack of leaderboards in the leaked version would hopefully incentivize some pirates to buy the full game; with Blood Dragon, Ubisoft and RedLynx are presumably hoping that people who win a free copy will draw in other players by word of mouth.