He's complaining that he's seeing lots of downloads on pirate sites... thats a reasonable thing to be peeved with after spending 7 years of your life on a game regardless of sales.

If you've ever worked on anything thats been priated, its really not a very nice feeling people stealing your work. So I'm not surprised he's complaining.

You must also remember perhaps he has another project in mind and knows how much he needs to make to support that next project/vision... so what he's earning right now might not be enough.

and the developers were complaining about their 40€ indie game is being pirated?

Rol your not making sense. He can see his game getting pirated to hell without knowing his sale figures, why can't he panick about it. 

Plus you still didn't address what I said. If he truly wanted to deceive people into buying his game by telling people pirating could effect future projects why did he in the following days say it was selling really well and openly tell people he can now make another game on the same scale. Doesn't that go against his 'master plan'?

Because the naive ones caved in and bought the game under the panic situation during those days. Maybe it is because of them why now he can tell how healthy Witness numbers are.

Future game development being at risk could mean any number of things. 

For one,and if I were him; look at the two platfos my game is released on. 1M copies sold on PS4. Pirated 0 times. 100k sold on PC, pirated 3M times. simple fix, don't release my next game on PC till I have milked every console sale I can get then release for a quarter of the price on PC 11-18 months later. 

Just to clarify, in the above situation; PC development/release is what is at risk. And rightfully so if more people are pirating on PC than are actually buying. 

All that aside, I don't even get what the issue is. It doesn't matter what or how he said what he said. If I were him, I would be unhappy to see that a single person pirated my game after putting years of my life into its development. Why is it bad that he talks about how his game is being pirated. I think this is entitlement taking to a conetely different level. 

First we want to pay little to nothing for games, then we wanna hate on devs for telling us we shouldn't pirate their game..........

OK we will have to agree to disagree. I think your opinions lack serious logic but it's still your opinion. 

let me add that people who were/felt coerced into buying the game on Steam can simply get it refunded now that sales figures actually look promising, unless ofcourse they already played it for more than 2 hours, which would indicate they actually bought the game to play it and not to "safe Blow"

"well if it's not a ploy then he is an attention whore" .. ¬_¬

my view is that he simply is a normal person with normal anxieties when faced with the result of years and years of work and investment, a little pessimism is a natural part of that

right now it looks like the game can sell several hundred thousend units at a decent price per unit, but the risk of falling completely short of your projections is very very real in games development

Congrats to the Witness it'd nice to see it doing so well.

And about the piracy issue, while I'm not of the opinion that piracy alone is somehow ruining the industry or even that it only has adverse effects, he still has every right to be pissed when his and his teams hard work is essentially being stolen.

Some of my favorite musicians have taken to a route where, either they offer they albums for free in an attempt to combat piracy or just not do anything about it besides raise awareness about it, not condemming the pirates either way. Instead they try and live off tour ticket sales and physical/special edition record sales, going off the assumption that brand awareness generated by the piracy will ultimately drive their sales.

Problem with gaming is, you don't have anything like that to fall back on. There is no 'original' to sell. You pour years of hard work into something and either it pays off, or not.
To then see it being pirated by the masses in a matter of hours must be frustrating, if not potentialy terrifying to say the the least.

For all of Blows reputation about being ungrateful and bitchy, going off of his tweets he was actually really reasonable and well spoken about this. It is a developers right to speak out about the pitfalls of his industry, and he did it in a non-condemming rational way.
If anything I don't get the people bitching about him in this case.

Everyone who paid $40 for this game is an idiot. I only paid $39,99 for this great puzzler.

I've seen many people take their anxieties to social media, but then again I've seen many do it in gaming forums. I follow one guy on twitter who continues to post selfies and go from depression to loving himself in a small number of posts...

Personally I am perhaps getting a bit too old and dont really get that at all (putting everything about ones life online)... but this isnt really in that level is it? He's stating that he's concerned that if the game doesnt sell well he wont be able to make a game of the same scope, thats not the same as posting on twitter or forums that he's depressed, overly stressed....

so if we say he's making a cry for attention, could we then say anyone who posts anything online, what about appearing on TV in an interview on the news or documentary?... we could all live as hermits and never say anything to anyone... I think you are grasping now...