'Something I highly doubt the person leaking it would have thought about.' In retrospect the piracy wasn't exactly a big hit to our project but that's not how it felt at the time.' Mishra said. 'It really felt like a punch in the gut that someone in the indie coverage scene would do this, and the timing was beyond awful for me as it shortly after my mum passed away a one-two punch that makes you feel like your world is collapsing. There were also personal considerations that made the leaked version so hard to deal with for the designer. 'It was simply not ready for public consumption, as it was full of bugs with tutorial/difficulty curve issues, things that we know a previewer can understand while still seeing the core of the game.'

'The thing is we don't see piracy itself as a problem for us specifically since our biggest adversary is exposure, and not any perceived market saturation, but leaking a preview build really hurt us,' Sanatana Mishra, designer of Assault Android Cactus, told Polygon. The word 'cactus' is Australian slang for something being broken. Getting people excited would prove difficult in the early days, even the name is hard to parse.

It’s a fun game, well-designed and colorful, but it’s being released into a crowded marketplace. Fixing the piratesĪssault Android Cactus is a three-dimensional twin-stick shooter where you control a selection of female cyborgs who have to blow away every damned thing they see while the levels often shift and swell around them, and the music adjusting to the on-screen action. There may be only one solution: Provide the pirates with a better version of the game. So of course that’s the build of the game that leaked, and now they're stuck with a community of pirates who are spreading the word that the game is buggy, unfun and not worth the money. Witch Beam software sent out an early build of their game Assault Android Cactus to a number of people in the press and gaming community, with the idea that people who knew how games were made would understand the problems that are inherent to an unfinished version of the game. The problem of how to introduce players to your game has become as tricky, if not more so, than the creation of the game itself.

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