Slashdot Mirror
How the Pirate Bay Can Be an Asset To Game Developers
Underholdning writes "It's been five years since Radiohead brought the pay what you want model to the public with their successful sale of their 'In Rainbows' album. Now, here's a fresh example of how a game developer is making The Pirate Bay work for him by offering his game, McPixel, for free and letting people pay what they want. Currently TPB has more than 5000 applicants wanting to do the same. 'Sosowski isn't worried that promoting a game on a site known for piracy might be more effective at attracting more pirates than actual paying customers. "The game was already available on TPB beforehand, and I believe if someone didn't want to pay, he just didn't ... It is up to people to decide how much they would like to pay for the game, and I have no worries. I am happy that more people can enjoy my game. ... TPB is one of the most visited sites in the Internet, and simply having a game there is a form of advertisement and promotion."'"
I just tried the game and quite frankly it's crap. Yeah yeah, indie and all, but I couldn't pay more than 5 mins and it made no sense. I wouldn't pay anything for it, and it's just flash applet anyway so why download it?
All the guy got from TPB is like $3000 dollars in sales, so not that much. Anyone who develops professionally, even a indie, would need much more for it to be sustainable. You really think this is going to bring EA, Ubisoft or Activision to let people pirate their games? No, they just add online components to their games, therefore making pirating impossible.
...kind of puts the lie to "pirates will pay in their own good time" trope.
I think a large part of pirates are willing to pay for the things they pirate when they really understand that their money is going to exactly who they want it to. I pirate movies all the time to watch on my own. I don't want to pay some corporation in Hollywood to watch a movie. Now, when Louis CK offered his standup DVD, I watched it, decided it was worth 15 bucks, and that's what I paid. The key is for people to know the exact route their money travels. The content has to be good as well, obviously.
Disrupt Everything
I wonder if having the game on TPB is actually benefiting the developer or the pay what you want model is simply harm reduction. No doubt he benefited from having it posted on Slashdot.
It's called donationware, a variant of shareware, and its an old way of getting paid for your work. I think I saw the first example of it back in the mid 80's on the BBS scene.
It's not new, and it's not news.
I seem to recall Nine Inch Nails playing with a very similar idea beforehand. Giving the multitrack files out for fans to make remixes, releasing digital versions of the album for free, etc.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
why on earth would they want to associate themselves with a miscreant brand?
Sos Sosowski is famous?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The real reason the Pirate Bay is hated is because it is a content distribution network. The BitTorrent protocol doesn't care whether it's a linux iso or a copy of the latest popular bluray rip that it transfers; It simply distributes the load to all of its participants. The RIAA, MPAA, and organizations they represent only exist because they have controlled the distribution of content (not its creation).
To hear that an author is distributing content on the 'honor system', is not surprising. All he's doing is leveraging a (free) distribution network, and probably making more money due to reduced overhead than he would if he went with one of the commercial solutions. Not to mention that gaining access to one of those solutions would require he give them a cut of the profits and pay regular fees on top of that. For a small-margins production like this, that would probably leave him with next to nothing.
The free market at work, that's what this is: And that's exactly why he has to die, horribly, painfully, and with many legal injunctions and fees. We can't have people using the internet to create money directly for themselves without any middlemen -- most of the jobs in our economy are middlemen. Burn the heretic.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
A nobody coming from the very bottom will undoubtedly benefit from the publicity of doing something like this, because the rush of publicity and the sympathy money will make up for the low sales to download ratio. AAA developers will receive no sympathy, nor will they benefit from additional publicity on their already famous franchises, which means it won't work for them except to lower their revenue.
So, Pirate Bay make sense for upstarts, and that's about it.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
"It's been five years since Radiohead brought the pay what you want model to the public with their successful sale of their 'In Rainbows' album.
A curious thing about the (arguable) success is it hasn't been tried again. Subsequent albums have not used a similar model. Think about that.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
If anything the poor reviews that people are giving this game is a justification of the article. Many of us developers take a while to figure out how to promote things. Companies like EA have the whole promotion thing tied up in knots so any venue for people with sub zillion dollar marketing budgets is a good thing. I suspect that this is one of the main reasons that the movie and music industries are so fearful of the new digital world and that is that their machine had become so good at promoting anything they lost all incentive to produce things that are good. Taking the marketing machine partially out of the loop (I suspect many illegal downloads are still driven by the marketing machine) must leave them feeling fairly naked.
So kudos to this guy and TPB.
I have a lot of faith in the honor system. The guy behind the popular bakery chain Panera Bread made an interesting and surprisingly successful attempt to open one cafe with the honor principle in mind. Of course, I suspect demographics can have a significant effect on a physically located business, and it is a gambit, but my faith extends beyond the physical well into the realm of the digital where I think it can work just as well. There will surely be abuse, though I think if we are to even have a future, similar concepts will become much more common some day, however remote from today.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
The game uses Adobe AIR, which is a bad cross-platform choice because Adobe discontinued it in June 2011 on the Linux platform. They also ludicrously never released a Linux 64-bit version of Adobe AIR, so trying to install a dead 32-bit package on a 64-bit clean Linux system is such a nightmare that I gave up and never got to see the game on Linux after all. Even the instructions to do so mention Fedora Core 11, which is a 3-year-old distro 6 releases out of date, ho hum.
I literally just purchased $110 (minus $.02) of video games from steam yesterday after browsing titles on TPB to see what was popular. The first one was plastered with "BUY NOW" everywhere as though you could buy it and play it, and then I didn't realize until afterward it was just a preorder. (BF3). Then I bought the GTA collection and had to go through a mountain of arcane technical hassle with windows marketplace (after buying on steam) just to be able to save games in gta4.
Also the collection included two games I've already paid for in the past, but whatever.
Those artifical losses due to piracy numbers can suck it.
that the bastards got TPB blocked in my country... a.holes...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
As stated above:
Sos Sosowski is famous?
Yes, you mean that stunt that the Radiohead manager said they won't repeat again?
"Radiohead abandons ‘pay what you want’ for upcoming album release" - http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/radiohead-abandons-pay-what-you-want-for-upcoming-album-release/
"But Radiohead's manager has also said that the band likely wouldn't try a similar promotion again." - http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9894376-7.html
Sorry, I just had to mention that because I'm tired of people using Radiohead as an example of "pay what you want" which was wildly successful, when it really sounds like it wasn't.
Yeah, I saw the McPixel developer trying to get fans on Reddit too. I saw a YouTube video of the game and it isn't very good. It wasn't worth a free download. But, he seems to be doing a good job of getting out there and marketing, as well as trying to build some fame by telling pirates exactly what they want to hear.
No thanks, McPixel developer. What you're doing by validating the PirateBay is undermining the game development industry while trying to make a few extra bucks. It's fundamentally self-centered. If this ever became "the norm", then the McPixel developer wouldn't get squat as far as free-advertising from sites like Slashdot. (It actually reminds me a little bit of the stunt that S.E.Cupp (an atheist) pulled a few months ago when she went on a news show and told people she'd never vote for an atheist politician because atheists can't be trusted. She's throwing other people (other atheists) under the bus by making those kinds of arguments, but I'm sure it did a good job of getting her extra fame and sales because she's saying the opposite of what you'd expect someone to say - and playing into the hands of conservatives. I can already hear them crowing, "See, even atheists admit they can't be trusted. We need only God-fearing politicians.")
So for everyone who thinks this is a great idea: your employer says "work for us for a couple of months. We'll decide at the end whether we feel like paying your or not".
Sound like a good business model?
What good is a game if it doesn't have pirates?
September 19, talk like a pirate day.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I went to PB on saturady looking for a piece of content I couldn't find elsewhere. I found around a dozen instances, after downloading 8 version, all of which turned out to be infected .exe files I gave up.
Used the same method of distribution (sept 2011) http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/09/14/0517245/indie-devs-upload-their-own-game-to-the-pirate-bay
:}
It's a heck of a lot of fun, the louder it is the better I play
I have the PirateBay edition, it's different as my guy wears a pirate hat.
"No time to Explain" season 2 will cost you $3 (US) now and that's at 70% off http://tinybuildgames.com/
i.e. this: http://slashdot.org/submission/2192453/humble-bundle-introduces-partial-drm
Seriously, there is no valid argument to legitimize TPB.
Bottom line is if a content provider distributes content under some protective license, regardless of how you feel about that license, does not entitle you to steal that content.
I agree that a lot of content providers need to learn how to embrace online distribution; charging ridiculous prices for online content, excessive DRM schemes or restrictions, or treating customers like criminals is NOT the way to embrace the 21st century model for content distribution. But again, this does not entitle a person to steal content.
I may not like the cost of a Porche 911, or am jealous if other people are driving one, but that does not give me the right to steal it. There is no difference between a physical product like a car, or a digital product like a movie, book, music, or TV show when it comes to someone 'rights" to steal it, there is no fundamental right to steal a product when there restrictions on distribution. People invested time, energy and money to produce a product and so it does not give someone a reason to come along and access it or re-distribute it for free because they do not like the conditions for its distribution.
Sure, if you want to use TPB as a distribution network for your content because you do not believe in being compensated for your time and investment then by all means do so. But then I would stop trying to promote TPB as a renegade "piracy" online source of content and set up a legit online promotion tool for those people looking to embrace 21st century content distribution. Stop trying to protest online content distribution and instead focus on setting up a real online content distribution mechanism.
If TPB was run by pragmatists, and not vapid idealists, then there is no reason why TPB (or some incarnation of the principle) could not have created a rival to iTunes, Google Play, or Amazon. But idealists cannot see the forest through the trees and are two busy trying to fight for a right they simply don't have. They are vaguely aware of the fact they can provide an exceptional service "for the rest of us" but are unable to execute it.
If I founded TPB I would end the practice of distributing illegal content (remove all illegal torrents, period) and instead focus on trying to promote an alternative distribution mechanism that focuses on DRM and license free content to rival that of the "paid" services in an effort to educate "traditional" content providers on the merits of this form of distribution.
TPB is never going to win by re-distributing retail content. Lawyers and content creators and providers are going to fight them every step of the way. If someone doesn't want to embrace free distribution then there is no argument on the planet that is going to protect someone from re-distributing their paid content, period. It's not the "good fight", its a dead end. But providing an example of and alternative way to distribute content is the only way to bring enlightenment.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
...that of the millions of people that got the game, under 100 paid anything at all for it.
Even if this works for a few media products, if everyone started doing it I think people would stop paying for the majority of media content, and most producers wouldn't be profitable. Seems to me every time this sort of payment system is mentioned, the ears of the "all digital content should be unregulated" people perk up, and they try to tell us, "See?!" Might be just my imagination though.
This may or may not pay off for him.
But bigger problem is, no one can write a business plan where the sole revenue is a model of 'customer pays me if they feel like it'.
Even small indie games require 1-3 years of effort to produce, Art assets, sound/music etc all need to be created, sometimes this is outsourced at a cost (not cheap, the art for Braid cost $200k), and sometimes the developer needs to buy the correct software (photoshop etc).
Once thats all done, you release your product online (indie games usually sell for the cost of a lunch or less) only to have your hard work downloaded for free all over the place. A gut wrencing depressing feeling I can tell you.
Make whatever arguments you like to make yourself feel better for acquiring someone elses hard work illegally.
The humble indie bundles, which could be legally acqruired for literally 1 cent and paid for through various vendors AND your choice of how much goes to charity or the developers were still available on most torrent websites. How sad.