Slashdot Mirror
Cracked Game Released To Get Back At Pirates
John Wagger writes "When Greenheart Games released their very first game, Game Dev Tycoon (for Mac, Windows and Linux) yesterday, they did something unusual and as far as I know unique. They released a cracked version of the game, minutes after opening their Store. The pirated copy was completely same as the real copy, except that after a few hours into the game, players started noticing widespread piracy of their games in the game development simulator."
The ratio of pirate copies vs bought copies may be obscured by platform.
Looking at past Humble Bundle stats (games _without_ DRM management) it shows that even though piracy is still as abundant, the same amount of people are still willing to pay. Even more interesting, though Windows buyers ouranked 75% of others, Linux users payed the most on average. ... and that site link in TFA just went down.
So the game company is admitting that it's a really crappy simulator because if they were willing to "pirate" their own game, surely the real losses from piracy can't be that bad because they are willing to take them.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
>they did something unusual and as far as I know unique
If I rememeber correctly, the devellopers of Serious Sam 3: BFE did something very simlar a while back. An invincible monster would appear in the later levels of the game.
That is the mother of all trolls. Definitely pirate troll level: British admiral hat and solid gold scabbard
People posting for help trying to progress.
I'm going to buy this game just because they have illustrated their point SO well.
but what happens when the in-game pirates start playing their pirated pirated copies of Game Dev Tycoon? And the next generation? And the next? This game was mislabelled. It's not a game at all, it's an infinite pirate creation device.
The real irony of course is that the game itself is a rip off of Game Dev Story by Kairosoft for IOS/Android.
Generally when you market your wares like this on slashdot, you'd want your servers to be able to handle the load. Come on people, it's not that hard anymore to make a site that can handle the load. As for the game, this is a nice bit of marketing, in that they now have people who are going to go out and look for the pirated version, and then possibly like it enough to get the real version.
Web cams only, something like...
Dialog Box: "The boss is angry about our games being pirated! Go see him quick! [Click here to see the boss.]"
*click*
Webcam turns on showing the person sitting at the keyboard playing the pirated game.
The secret to this is, slap together some nonsense game title in minutes and then download the pirated version of Game Dev Tycoon. Laugh as you earned a free game just for letting people download your non-working junk code!
Wish I had mod points :)
A game which is best on the market will profit mostly by killing the piracy because it really is worth buying. A bulk of people (particularly outside of US and rich western countries) want to save money if possible and will play the pirate version if they can get it. If not they will play something else unless that game is top notch, so they surrender and buy it.
Easy to defeat piracy can also be effective if there are annoyances which force people into buying. What puts people off is DRM/protection which screws legitimate users. Even when it's a rare case, everybody's vocal about it and wants to kill it, harming the reputation (and btw. pirates-I mean end-users who are willing to pirate it, also join this because they hate protection which prevents them from playing the game). See how Starforce ended up, and basically it was one of the rare protection systems that served the purpose - some interesting games were never cracked.
These days there is instant-on stuff which is effective if done properly. Diablo3 is a good example on how to make an unpirateable game. Of course pirates hate it and complain loudly about always-on stuff...no wonder. (well these days almost anybody is connected)
PS: I'm not against piracy - for people without money it's the only reasonable way to play. I did it a lot as a student (and hated SF...). However I see the market logic behind it. It's a business like any other, and those people have to eat something. Rampant piracy definitely cotributed to the decline of the PC as a gaming device, and brought us too many bad console ports, afterthoughts made to squeeze last possible $$$.
Do you get an extra bonus when you release a sequel because now your game has international appeal even though you did not market it in other territories? Do they account for the people who want to support the artist and go out and buy it if they like it? Does the uncracked version of the game deal with Ubisoft-style DRM boycotts and low ratings on amazon and general negative feedback from your userbase?
Here's the world's worst barely formatted copy-paste job for those of you who can't access the site because it got slashdotted (and cloudflare dropped the ball)
When we released our very first game, Game Dev Tycoon (for Mac, Windows and Linux) yesterday, we did something unusual and as far as I know unique. We released a cracked version of the game ourselves, minutes after opening our Store.
I uploaded the torrent to the number one torrent sharing site, gave it a description imitating the scene and asked a few friends to help seed it.
A minute after we uploaded it, my torrent client looked like this:
Soon my upload speed was maxed out (and as of the time of writing still is) and my friends and I had connections from all over the world and for all three platforms! How does piracy feel?
The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers. So, as players spend a few hours playing and growing their own game dev company, they will start to see the following message, styled like any other in-game message:
Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally. If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.
Slowly their in-game funds dwindle, and new games they create have a high chance to be pirated until their virtual game development company goes bankrupt.
Some of the responses I found online (identities obscured to protect the guilty):
Is there some way to avoid that? I mean can I research DRM or something
And another user:
Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me!
As a gamer I laughed out loud: the IRONY!!!
However, as the developer, who spent over a year creating this game and hasn’t drawn a salary yet, I wanted to cry. Surely, for most of these players, the 8 dollars wouldn’t hurt them but it makes a huge difference to our future! Trying to appeal to pirates
I know that some people just don’t even think about buying games. They will immediately search for a cracked version. For this reason, when we released the game, we also published a page which targets people who search for a cracked/illegal version. Unfortunately, due to my lack in search-engine-optimization skills, that page has had no impact yet, but I hope it will convince some to buy the game in the future.
[]if years down the track you wonder why there are no games like these anymore and all you get to play is pay-to-play and social games designed to suck money out of your pockets then the reason will stare back at you in the mirror.
I do think it’s important to try to communicate what piracy means to game developers to our consumers. I also tried to appeal to a particular forum a day earlier after someone who I gave early-access to the Store seemed to have passed on the copy to others:
We’re just a start-up and really need your support. The game is only 7.99USD, DRM free
Clearly, my post hadn’t worked too well since on the same forum someone posted the earlier screenshot (“Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me!) just a bit after I made my appeal and this was followed by many others complaining about piracy.
I still hope that it made a difference to someone.
Anyway, how many really did buy and how many did pirate our game during this first day? The awesome/depressing results
Today, one day after release, our usage stats look like this:
Genuine version: 214 users
Cracked version: at least 3104 users
Over 93.6% of players stole the game. We know this because our game
If the owner/publisher released the game for free also, then it is perfectly fine to copy since it is an authorized release? Sounds like it's free to me.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
What does this mean? I don't understand what the company did? Can someone explain - I am not a gamer - I used to play Doom Death Match 17 years back, though.
Has the term "cracked" recently been redefined?
Can't wait for rockstar tycoon, where piracy takes heavy toll on main characters cocaine habit.
So the "pirated" version is not only cost-free and DRM-free, but also frees you from the trouble of distributing your own games? Add to that that the copyright owner uploaded it himself, thus IMHO implicitly allowing the free download of that version, making it not really piracy to download it (just like if I put a box of sweets on the street and put up a sign "take some, its free", I'll probably not manage to successfully sue anyone taking some of it for theft -- note that IANAL, however, and this is not legal advice).
I guess they will get a lot of "pirate" downloads by people who would otherwise not have done that. :-)
Clever, but it just means that they've lost a segment of the market; the segment that plays a game in pirated form before buying it. Good luck winning that audience back at the expense of trying to make people who will NEVER pay feel bad.
Can you lower the cost and sell games DRM-free to de-incentivize the virtual pirates?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Side note, but CloudFlare rarely helps much with Slashdotting. Most of the time what kills a site is generating dynamic HTML out of a database without sufficient caching, and CloudFlare by default doesn't do anything about that, because it has no idea when it's safe to cache dynamically generated pages. By default it just proxies media files, so it can help things if bandwidth was the bottleneck for a server being hammered, but bandwidth usually isn't the bottleneck.
If you generate static HTML pages (or pages that are static for a period of time), you can mark them cacheable in CloudFlare. But if you're doing that you probably won't go down anyway, because serving up static HTML is not server-intensive.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It would have been good publicity appearing on Slashdot... pity your servers couldn't handle it
Not only are you now all talking about a game that you otherwise never have heard about, the presence of a "cracked" version gives the authors a built-in answer to any bad reviews that might be published.
"The game is too hard? Noooo... that's just the cracked version which seems that way. It crashes ten minutes in? We put that there to deter pirates, and that would never happen in the real version. There's no replayability and it's even less fun than Cat Litter Simulator 2013 in hardcore campaign mode? Sounds like that reviewer was too cheap to buy the game and must haven playing a pirated copy. When you give us money, it will be much better. I promise!"
Cheers to the Klug brothers for thinking of everything.
"Do we need DRM?
Whether or not to use DRM isn’t clear at all to a new start-up. The main argument against it is that all it does is to inconvenience genuine customers. Fact is that any game can be cracked, so all you do is spend time on something that in the end just annoys your real customers while only slightly delaying the inevitable. The only way to protect yourself is to create an online game. I guess that’s why so many studios focus on these types of games and it’s probably a driving force to eradicate traditional single player games."
I've got a question/suggestion. For the "pirate" version, why not offer them the option of buying a DRM system for their game? Give them a few options, from cheap (e.g., just a serial number/key), to draconian (always-on internet restrictions requiring server maintenance), and make them budget for all that and deal with the repercussions (more support costs for DRM failure and compatibility issues for genuine customers). Then let them try to figure out the economics of it.
Then buy your own DRM system based on the results of your experiment :-)
Just kidding. I'm hoping the economics of it make more sense without any DRM.
Let's imagine there was a perfect copy protection for the game. Would it affect the sales negatively or positively? Would the people who didn't buy it buy it anyway? Would less people hear about the game? What if you take into account advertising costs?
I don't know the answers to these questions, but you can't just say "piracy == bankruptcy" and expect me to believe that. Also, IIRC there have been studies (posted here on ./ too) in both extremes, so I guess you can "prove" both to be true.
If you know enough about "the scene" to sound like the scene, you're obviously also a pirate.
Normally I'd say RTFA, but since it has been slashdotted, I'll give your ignorance a pass and just correct your errors as I encounter them.
Game prices are too high
This game was $8 USD.
People don't want to spend any amount of money without knowing what they will get in return
They offer a free demo to give you an idea, and also offer a pirated version of the game which gives several hours of unadultered gameplay before they introduce their "bug."
So many completed games simply stop being played and it's no longer useful. Is it really worth the $50+ ? Especially since you can't resell it any longer?
Again, this game was $8 USD. Additionally, the game is DRM-free, available on all platforms, and is being ported to Steam as well. This is an indy company with very consumer-oriented and forward-thinking ideas who simply conducted a fun little experiment on sales versus pirated copies.
Every single legitimate argument pirates spout cannot be applied to this situation. The game was DRM free, ported to all major OSes, offered a playable demo on their website, and very reasonably priced at $8 USD (cheaper than many mobile games).
Their simulation may well be flawed, especially if it ignores the effects of word of mouth on sales.
That said, looking at the details posted by someone that saw the site before it went down, the real company seems neither greedy nor stupid. The game only costs $8 (no drm and multiplatform) and they offer a demo. That addresses several of the common complaints from gamers. Even with the cracked version, you can buy the game after the cracked version causes you to lose and it will let you use your save game from before the forced economic crash (saving the hours spent playing).
I don't have an interest in the game as it simply doesn't appeal to me, but I can't find fault with how the company is handling things.
"Game prices are too high"? Seriously, is US$ 8 too expensive for you? We're not talking about an US$ 50 game here.
"People don't want to spend any amount of money without knowing what they will get in return."? There are demo versions available.
They're there in their room. You're on your own.
So certainly they will want to try it before they buy it. But if they like it and their friends like it, they will likely buy it if they can afford it.
Just like how only people who truly need it will take welfare. It has nothing to do with the fact that many people feel that they deserve to get "free" stuff just for being born.
A someone will crack the original so people can play it to the end
B remove all the code so it does not phone home.
C allow people to choose if the game has a long play life and make their own choice if its worth the money.
they cannot release a game they cracked themselves when all they have done is nobble it a little , they can release a version that spoils everyones fun who got it from their source therefore putting people who like this sort of game off buying the original.
all they have done is point out that its got extra hidden code to grab stats on who was using their version
No wonder people pirate when the game is advertised at â6.49 but they don't mention until you come to pay that this is without sales tax! It actually costs â7.85.
The price of this game is $8.
There is also a free demo. Why pirate a game to 'try' if there's a decent demo?
This game is only $8. It's not a $60 Call of Duty clone. I personally think any game under $10 is easily enough considered "affordable" and pirates have no excuse for not purchasing it.
This should be the perfect release: solid title legacy, cheap, no drm, demoversions, free advertising trough pirate networks, complete with slashdot coverage and everything. Kudos. Would probably buy if i was into the Tycoon series.
Can I light a sig ?
Is it really worth the $50+ ?
This game costs $8, not $50+. So, does that change your opinion?
Ahh I miss the grits...Lets see a HOSTS file protect against hot grits in your pants!
The game is question has a real demo.
The original CD-ROM version of Rayman 2 included various copy protection tricks in a good crazy Ubisoft fashion. As an extra annoyance for playing a pirated copy, they included a huge pirate head popping in front of you at some point of game, so you couldn't properly see or control your character anymore. A funny thing was that an unpatched game did that trick for legit customers too... thankly a patch was released soon. These days a version with DRM stripped away is available from GOG (it requires NX to be disabled to run properly so it possibly still does some funky things with memory).
You pirated the article, think of the developers!
The game is DRM free, you can use it on up to three of your computers for your own use,
If it was actually DRM free, wouldn't there be no limit to the number of computers you can install it on? Unless the 3 computers thing is just a suggestion. If they have a server monitoring how many installs you have for a particular serial number, and prevents you from installing on more, that's not DRM free.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
I'm not sure where to start...
"Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy..."
Except that it isn't. You gave it to them. Regardless of you framing it as a "cracked" version it was still legal. Absolutely no one cracked and pirated your game. You simply released a free game. If you had done this without "tricking" people, if you had monitored usage of a version that had actually been cracked, then maybe it would be meaningful and maybe the conclusions you draw from it would be interesting. But considering that you did this "punk'd" style then it's pretty meaningless. Those "pirates" wouldn't have your game if it weren't for you. You can't donate to charities and then call them thieves.
It's also rather arrogant to assume that your game would have been pirated in the first place. There's no way for you to prove that if you hadn't released a "cracked" version that someone would have started torrenting it. For all we know, you could have just released your game and 214 people would have bought and downloaded it and no one would have pirated it and that would have been the end of it. Instead you concocted a convoluted, albeit clever, publicity stunt and played the victim of circumstances that you yourself created.
"Anyway, the cracked version has a separate ID so I can separate the data. I’m sure some of the players have firewalls and some will play offline therefore the actual number of players for the cracked version is likely much higher."
That is very speculative and flimsy at best. If you have torrent statistics then you know how many people downloaded it. What does it matter how many people send or don't send anonymous usage statistics? Unless you are comparing number of units sold versus number of units downloaded (from your own damn torrent) then it's a meaningless comparison. People who bought it could just as easily be using a firewall or playing offline.
I certainly get that you want people to pay for this game. I respect that. But I don't think this really proves anything at all. I think you've succeeded in clever publicity, not in proving any point.
The game was "cracked" by the game developers themselves. And released by them. This is not a cracked game, this is a crippled for-free release.
It actually is similar in spirit to shareware: enjoy the beginning, but then the fun ends.
Just consider a fraction of them your future customers, if they like your game, and if your name sticks to their mind at some point in the future they will buy your next game. Rest of them, just plain free loaders, if they talk about their game you might get some publicity. You have to stop thinking those 93% of them would have bought the game if it was not possible to get the cracked version
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In Sundog: Frozen Legacy (Apple II, 1984), we had a fairly robust, multi-level copy protection method. However, many of the 'cracking' tools out at the time would actually produce a runnable copy of the game -- it was just that the game wouldn't pass its final internal DRM check. In the game, including in 'cracked' versions, you started out on the surface of a given planet (Jondd); you could drive around the planet's surface, walk around the cities, go into stores, buy and sell goods, etc. But when you attempted to lift off into space, if that final DRM check failed, you'd get the message "Clearance to lift denied due to pirate activity" and you would be unable to take off and travel to any other world or system. (Note that you'd never see that message in a legitimate copy of the game.)
Now, the game actually had space pirates who would attack your ship, so a lot of people didn't realize just what the message meant. We would get occasional phone calls from customers asking what they were doing wrong and how they could get clearance. We'd listen for a minute, then say, "Well, just mail us your Sundog floppy disk, and we'll send out a new one for free." Heh. On the other hand, we had at least one person call us up on the phone and say, "Yeah, I get it" and then order a legit copy.
Note that for those customers who did buy an actual copy of the game, if they sent in $10 along with their registration card, they'd get another Sundog floppy disk -- that is, a second complete copy of the game, which they could keep as a backup or give away (or, frankly, sell). Also, if anyone actually did have a legit Sundog floppy that died or was otherwise damaged, we'd exchange it for a new one for free.
Sundog (Apple II) was on Hardcore Computing's "Top 10 Wanted" list (for a cracked version) for quite some time. It was eventually cracked, but I believe it took a year or two. You can find runnable Apple II disk images (for Apple II emulators) online.
I really don't know what copy protection was in place for the Atari ST port of Sundog, since that happened after I left FTL Games. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/
Like you said, all the images still work
http://www.greenheartgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/image.png
http://www.greenheartgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/downloadingcrackedv.png
http://www.greenheartgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/priate-message.png
http://www.greenheartgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/steam.png
http://www.greenheartgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/itruinsme.png
http://www.greenheartgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/appeal.png
http://www.greenheartgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/1day.png
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The more it's pirated, the more popular it becomes, the more popular it becomes, the more skus you move. But then I guess we lose the pirating is the ultimate evil of the universe message.
You're talking about a really clever game thats under 10 dollars. Go fuck your entitled self. Games used to cost so much more 20 years ago, they haven't even matched inflation.
Yo dawg, I heard you like pirating games. So we pirated your game inside the game you pirated; so you can be pirated while you pirate.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
If they wanted that simulation to be realistic, the introduction of in-game DRM would just delay the fully cracked version by a random number of hours between 4 and 48 and in the end they would still go out of business with the only difference being that they lost more money because they had to pay the DRM vendor as well.
The only truly effective DRM is to release a game that no one cares about or wants to play. I think that is the most clever aspect of this publicity stunt faux-game. The best way to avoid free riders is to create something that no one wants to ride.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
While I will pirate any game without a demo for a try, this is almost like the company released the greatest demo of all time. But really 8 bucks new = no reason to pirate. Unless you don't live in the first world obviously.
"It's way too expensive when I don't know if it's even a good game or not." This is why you play the demo.
They're there in their room. You're on your own.
>On the other hand, we had at least one person call us up on the phone and say, "Yeah, I get it" and then order a legit copy.
That as a lot of effort just to sell 1 more copy of the game. Just for interest's sakes, how high did your sales spike after the failed cracks were discovered? Or, even back then, did piracy make almost not a lick of difference to your income?
Sell a "Piracy Protection pack" as DLC for $8
game itself is a rip off of Game Dev Story
Any more than GNU/Linux is a ripoff of UNIX, or Mega Man is a ripoff of Contra with a life bar?
I loved Sundog, had actually bought the apple II version, and was so immeasurably frustrated trying to make a backup of the disk when I was 15. Now, it all makes sense. Can't post proof, of course, but I still have it in storage with my apple IIe. :)
Exactly what I had in mind. Then they'd get complaints on the forums like "I spent millions up-front on a DRM system the vendor *said* was unbreakable, but it got broken within 2 days and I'm even deeper in the hole than I would have been if I'd released it without any DRM or if rolled my own simpler scheme and just trusted the buyers not to share keys." Heck, give them the option of shipping with an expensive hardware dongle or console lock-in, and see how that plays out too.
I know it's meant as an interesting and short-lived stunt, but think they could have a lot more fun with this yet.
Perhaps another question might be "how many games haven't included a PC release because the developer doesn't believe it can make money due to piracy?"
Or, "How many Flying Spaghetti Monsters can we fit in a TARDIS?," which makes about as much sense and has an equal amount of relevance as the speculative, subjective queries you've posted.
You claim that these questions are unreal. Epic Games focused on consoles because of widespread infringement on PCs.
APK naked and petrified.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
In Sundog: Frozen Legacy (Apple II, 1984), we had a fairly robust, multi-level copy protection method. However, many of the 'cracking' tools out at the time would actually produce a runnable copy of the game -- it was just that the game wouldn't pass its final internal DRM check. In the game, including in 'cracked' versions, you started out on the surface of a given planet (Jondd); you could drive around the planet's surface, walk around the cities, go into stores, buy and sell goods, etc. But when you attempted to lift off into space, if that final DRM check failed, you'd get the message "Clearance to lift denied due to pirate activity" and you would be unable to take off and travel to any other world or system. (Note that you'd never see that message in a legitimate copy of the game.)
Now, the game actually had space pirates who would attack your ship, so a lot of people didn't realize just what the message meant. We would get occasional phone calls from customers asking what they were doing wrong and how they could get clearance. We'd listen for a minute, then say, "Well, just mail us your Sundog floppy disk, and we'll send out a new one for free." Heh. On the other hand, we had at least one person call us up on the phone and say, "Yeah, I get it" and then order a legit copy.
Note that for those customers who did buy an actual copy of the game, if they sent in $10 along with their registration card, they'd get another Sundog floppy disk -- that is, a second complete copy of the game, which they could keep as a backup or give away (or, frankly, sell). Also, if anyone actually did have a legit Sundog floppy that died or was otherwise damaged, we'd exchange it for a new one for free.
Sundog (Apple II) was on Hardcore Computing's "Top 10 Wanted" list (for a cracked version) for quite some time. It was eventually cracked, but I believe it took a year or two. You can find runnable Apple II disk images (for Apple II emulators) online.
I really don't know what copy protection was in place for the Atari ST port of Sundog, since that happened after I left FTL Games. ..bruce..
don't be so modest, what you guys did was an order of magnitude more technical and better than what these guys did, your system never relied on you distributing the game files.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
As long as the demo is representative of gameplay. And this means that tutorials ARE NOT representative of your gameplay (unless your game is a tutorial, but then you're doing something wrong).
Please note I have not obtained by legal means or otherwise the game, and thus I am not referring to their demo.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
Perhaps another question might be "how many games haven't included a PC release because the developer doesn't believe it can make money due to piracy?"
You could answer this by counting every Xbox 360 game that is also available for PlayStation 3 but not available for PC, such as Mortal Kombat (2011). Because Xbox 360's API is reportedly so similar to DirectX on Windows, I imagine that a port of an Xbox 360 game to PC would be far cheaper to make than a port to libgcm, the graphics API of PlayStation 3.
When you have DRM in a game that fails by any method other than notifying the user and refusing to run, you create problem for legit customers. I know that DRM companies would like to try and convince people that their DRM never, ever, fails on a legit copy, but it happens all the time. DRM is not perfect, it has issues. Two games I can remember that failed to function on my system were Neverwinter Nights and Civilization 4 Beyond the Sword. Both gave me a "Insert the game disc to play," error even though I had the disc in. It was an issue with the DRM that took multiple patches to fix in NWN's case and one in BTS's case.
While that was very annoying, at least I knew what was going on. I took the game back to get a new disc, just in case that was the issue (sometimes there's a production problem) and when that didn't fix it, called the publisher. When a fix came out, they let me know.
However when it is a feature that just breaks the game, you don't know why it is happening and you get mad. It is then worse if you get moron fanboys jumping down your throat claiming you "must have pirated it" when you didn't and the devs saying that it only happens on pirated copies. It also can take way longer for a fix to happen because it takes longer for devs to acknowledge and fix the problems.
So I am not a fan of what SS3 did. This game is a much better method in that the code isn't DRM, rather they released a different version on the torrent sites themselves. So it can only affect someone who downloaded a copy since it is not present in the legit version.
I am ok with DRM in games but ONLY if it is non-intrusive, if it doesn't mess with my experience. If it breaks my game, I'll get real angry, real fast.
Yup, so why do they get to demand their stuff should be "safe" from copying?
Really? you cant afford $7.99 for a game? Do you live in a cardboard box next to a dumpster?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
n.t
Wow. Sounds like some sort of button has been pressed to get a response like that.
I speak, of course, in generalities. And because of the generalities, people's behavior and habits have been formed in response. Think of it like this. When the great depression was over, people still saved money and were careful with it.. more careful than we are now. People don't make too many exceptions in their behaviors simply because the threat or problem is [temporarily] resolved.
Also... a demo version doesn't always mean it's even close to the actual experience. The "Torque" obd2 android app proves that.. the "lite" version is not even in the same ballpark as the paid version.
So regardless of the price, if someone wants to try it, they need to have the full version.
Since the pirated version adds piracy to the gameplay, doesn't that make it a more realistic version and therefore a better version of the game?
1. Pirate game design ("abstract game development through cute bubbles"). Throw some antipiracy message in a special version and release it in the Bay (isn't that illegal for you? or legal for them?)
2. Make up complains by supposed pirate kiddies (probably should use worse grammar and less catchy phrases next time).
3. Spoonfeed the story until you get Slashdotted. Profit!?!?
Hard to believe a kiddie pirate (and also target audience of their game) could articulate a whole coherent paragraph, less so one full of gold PR nuggets. Also strange that you can't find the nuggets in the web other than in copies of the story.
This small company doesn't seem to be any part of it, but the real problem is the extreme distaste directed toward companies like Electronic Arts. I feel good about paying for a game like yours, or the last game I bought, Firaxis's Civilization but if I buy something from Electronic Arts I feel like somehow I'm letting the man win. While Firaxis has a parent company (that has a parent company) the difference between them and EA is that they don't seem to buy up franchise after endless franchise ala Clear Channel, gut them of their valuable innards and then spit out crap. Maxis used to be a great company but doesn't seem to exist anymore other than in name and rights to the games, and that's really annoying. It seems like they have a chokehold on the industry with their aggressive acquisitions. I don't want to pay for games made by EA because I feel like I'm just fueling the acquisition machine to ruin more of the gaming industry. People pirate games all the time, but EA seems to pirate games too in a much bigger, badder way. I think this is a step in the right direction, and a funny and ironic idea. Hopefully your game sells well, but you might do better if you figured out an elegant way to let customers know that you aren't a part of the faceless gaming juggernaut.
It's pretty sad when someone can't even work up the reading comprehension to grasp the story from a short summary.
In total, if you play the cracked version of the game, the simulator will ramp up the rate of piracy for your simulated company's games, so you will lose. It stacks the odds against you.
Anyone have a link to a hacked .exe that fixes this behavior?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"Game prices are too high"? Seriously, is US$ 8 too expensive for you? We're not talking about an US$ 50 game here.
"People don't want to spend any amount of money without knowing what they will get in return."? There are demo versions available.
The real issue is every game developer is tackling this problem from the perspective that all gamers only ever buy their titles and no others. $8 doesn't seem like much until you look at how many titles a so-called "hardcore" gamer will play within a single month's time. Also, when you look at how many big-name titles are $60+ (can't forget the $40 "season pass" bs) that are played along side smaller titles such as this. Very few people in general are willing to spend that kind of money on something that will be useful and/or entertaining for a maximum of 3 months. "That kind of money" being much more than $8 one time.
Not to mention that this cracked version is mostly just propaganda to begin with. The best "fix" for pirates is to pour ALL of your focus on the legal/faithful/paying users, in order to encourage them to keep giving you money in exchange for better services/products. Not by publicly humiliating or degrading them when they're not willing to pay full price for a half-finished tech demo. (This is speaking about most mainstream titles. I'm not big into the sim/tycoon style games, personally) Granted this is more the fundamental problem of getting developers out of the greedy death-grip of publishers...
haha and thus NOW YOU fucktards know not to deal with these scum sucking jerks
Starflight (released in the 80s) did something similar. The DRM key was a coloured A3 sized star map (paper poster) of the stars in the game. No colour photocopiers in those days, so photocopying didn't work so well. (I tried.)
Each time you took off, you had to consult the star map, and if you got it wrong, then as you traveled through space you'd eventually be stopped by alien spaceships that looked remarkably like police cars. If you failed their test, then they'd blast you to smithereens, as they were unbeatable.
Actually, Starflight and Starflight 2 are games that I'd really like to see modern remakes of.
Heck, if I buy the game, I'd like to turn on the "real world economy" option and simulate what happens to my bottom line when I do and do not use DRM. Bonus points if it had a "REAL real-world economy" option that used real-world data to drive the simulation.
I don't have time to play this game but I almost want to go out and buy it to show support.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I agree with the publisher, but I'm afraid we're going to have to go far down the rabbit hole before the majority give up their pirate ways.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Is this some kind of sick attempt to blur the lines between DRM and DLC,
between not opting to buy more content springboarded on the demo version of the game
and
being an actual thief of the game guilty of some crime?
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
8 bucks for the game.... 20,000 plus games made a year (complete guess, just feel like total game spam) Maybe more like 2000 made a year. From 5 bucks to 100 bucks.
16,000 a year using the smallest numbers if you were to (own it all).
1000 new movies a year, and 24 bucks a pop on blue ray.
24,000 a year for hi def movies.
1000 new cd's a year and like 15 bucks a cd
15,000 a year.
Seems like a giant ass scam to me to keep people broke. 8 bucks a month for netfix, 96 a year about, no need to buy any movies at all then.
Pandora, no need to spend any money on music. But maybe if you are rich and have lots of money after internet/food/rent/transportation/(saving for retirement) yeah thats right entertainment should come lower on the list then saving for old age.
America's track record is for serverly underpaying people. So basically business steals the productivity of their workers, and they are poor because its calculated just how much to pay them so they can bearly get by. People get bored, and are going to go get some entertainment, and when they are broke free is free regardless of if there should be a charge or value. They can either go listen to a band not charging for a cover, hang out at the park, or maybe download something and play the maybe an infection game... there is another version of that same game that can come with a pretty hefty bill.
So the gamers you want to pay just 8 bucks on, well everybody wants just 8 bucks. I got over 200 games on steam, I've played like 20 of them. If I am unwilling to spend money on a game, won't pirate either. Doesn't mean I won't wait until a 75% off sales first. Maybe companies have it right, if they actually paid a lot people would just go buy frivolous shit, and all of a sudden wow, people are really buying this game, they must have a lot of money, then game companies just start charging more. Nintendo, and sony are not big fans of the smart phone game market because those games go a lot cheaper, and make people question why they are spending 50-60 on other games.
Pick a price, and piracy should be part of that equation. If the final value is less then it would take to make the game, then don't make the game if its about money, its just more clutter anyway. If its about passion, then make it. Not every artist that paints makes money off of their work, why should that be any different for game developer's since games are art.
Oh, I get it. The article doesn't make any sense because I must be using the pirated version of Slashdot.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
anonymous usage ... separate [unique] ID
o'rly?
Anyway, how many really did buy and how many did pirate our game during this first day? The awesome/depressing results
Today, one day after release, our usage stats look like this:
Genuine version: 214 users
Cracked version: at least 3104 users
And where's the option in the pirated version to work at a gas station while maintaining a support forum, generating a wider and wider userbase until you're popular enough to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development and release of your third game which will also be freely available to everyone? Notice that this method can actually add value for your paying customers (you can easily personalize copies for the highest donors, put their avatars in their copy of the game, etc.) instead of merely subtracting value for pirates.
Essentially you squandered an opportunity to create 12x more devoted fans than you can using a 20 years old distribution method that should have died with physical game cartridges. The non-ironic thing is that your failure to understand this is the very reason pirates playing your game can't use different business models in order to progress.
Again, this game was $8 USD. Additionally, the game is DRM-free, available on all platforms, and is being ported to Steam as well. This is an indy company with very consumer-oriented and forward-thinking ideas who simply conducted a fun little experiment on sales versus pirated copies.
Every single legitimate argument pirates spout cannot be applied to this situation. The game was DRM free, ported to all major OSes, offered a playable demo on their website, and very reasonably priced at $8 USD (cheaper than many mobile games).
... and noone has ever heard of that game.
You are missing the main point. People are downloading the 'pirated' copy because it's there, not because they really wanted to get a pirated copy of Game Dev Tycoon.
Interesting question is - if they haven't released the pirated copy, how many people would have downloaded it (assuming anyone would even bothering cracking it)?
The trouble is that they dont want to make it so the 'pirate' version is the one people want, because it has extra gameplay. So if they are going to have much more fun with the idea, it would have to go in the paid version...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
...Is the cracked version, I think I would only want to play that version instead of some kiddie version that doesn't include rampant piracy.
If I'm going to be a tycoon, I better figure out how to make lots of money despite the piracy.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I believe on the Atari ST version it didn't tell you explicitly like this, it just periodically "crashed" to a solid red screen and you had to reload from your last save, losing your progress and being docked ten points, just as if you had "died".
People are never as simple as their stereotypes. This applies equally to Christians, Muslims, and Emacs-lovers.
And lets face it, very few websites need to be 'dynamic.' Most of the time, it's cheaper and easier, in CPU, memory, database access, disk space, pretty much everything, to simply regenerate the static HTML every time some new content is added.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
You throw money their way? What's that like, mailing a couple dollars? I'm use to the old fashion way of paying the developers i guess. I doubt you pay at all though. Unless you're forced to because you want to multi-play with friends who are legit. It's faster to read a review or just watch a "let's play" on youtube to make your purchase decision than to pirate the game.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
The game itself doesn't sound like something I"d normally play, but the cracked copy I'll definitely be checking out!
Nice trill, Shrill. This game was posted to the public by the developers, there are not pirate copies of it, just a different version they are pretending are pirated that have the gimmick coded. That means one thing, and one thing only: they gave this version of the game away. No one hacked it, cracked, it, or posted a copy of it. That is solely down to the company in question. There is not a single copyright violation here. You cannot let people downloaded something for free and then turn around and call them pirates. Everything else you spout is bollocks, so obviously work for them. Har fucking har, your game is shit and tanked. A pathetic 3000 downloads, even when you post it for free and still no one wants it. Hmmm, nice try == fail!
Har fucking har, your game is shit and tanked. A pathetic 3000 downloads, even when you post it for free and still no one wants it. Hmmm, nice try == fail!
The game was released yesterday, a Sunday, and already you can tell us with authority that it "tanked"?
Seriously dude, your attitude just sucks. I hope you are not this stupid, abrasive, and unpleasant in real life; and if you are, maybe you should try to do something about it. Like maybe listen more and talk less or something.
I have not looked at it, but I can't help but wonder if their little simulations also included the fact that the pirated games increase in popularity which in turn generates more revenue.
Also, did they include the fact that pirated games do not actually remove inventory on the store shelves? As a result, that expense should be removed from it as well.
Finally, did they include the fact that much of the real world piracy is a response to something the company did that was unethical in the eyes of the consumers? After all, if they caused it themselves they can't put all of the blame on the pirates.
Because you had never heard of it until you saw it on whatever pirate games source you use? And would never have heard of it let alone bought it if it wasn't there for downloading?
In fact you probably still don't know how much it costs or that there is a demo after playing the pirate version for a little while and finding it's not your cup of tea. You do count on the pirated the game side of the ledger though.
Well, it's possible that without pirates to spread word of mouth, you might have only gotten 100 genuine version users. Who knows.
I loved that game, and played the heck out of it on the Atari ST. I keep looking to see if someone has remade it.
Dungeon Master was pretty amazing, too. I recently noticed that one of the "believed good" cracked images floating around still has some of the secondary protection in it. (And I have really no regrets about "pirating" the game, given that I've bought at least one copy of every DM game I've ever been able to find, and two of a couple of them. I even have the Sega CD version of DM2.)
(DM also wins points for the ludicrously over-careful design; I was once informed that the fact that you had to fall through a pit to get the rope that would let you drop into pits without taking damage was, in fact, discussed internally, and allowed on the grounds that you could have chosen to start with a character who had a rope.)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
It's the old motto: If you can't make it good enough, at least make them talk about it. Publicity sells.
the pirated version
It's not a pirated version. It is a 100% legal free version of the game released by the developers.... it's essentially a glorified demo release.
doesn't that make it a more realistic version and therefore a better version of the game?
If you buy the paid version of the game, you play in a reasonably accurate historical model of the universe where game development is&was a challenging, competitive, and generally profitable business. Any pirated copies merely aren't mentioned because, duh, they aren't (and shouldn't be) listed in profit or expense calculations.
The free version is less realistic. #1 Only you are affected by piracy, any competitors in the industry are immune. Extremely unrealistic. #2 It exists in a fantasy universe where each download equals a lost sale.... where anyone with a hobby of downloading tons of random free stuff could have and would have actually bought all that free stuff they found. Also extremely unrealistic. And those two points lead into #3: Profits and expenses deliberately mis-scaled into an unrealistic no-win scenario. Not only does that all make it very unrealistic, it obviously makes it a "worse version" of the game. But duh... of course any demo version is a "worse version" of a game.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
You pirated the article, think of the developers!
Information wants to be paid!
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
So certainly they will want to try it before they buy it. But if they like it and their friends like it, they will likely buy it if they can afford it.
Just like how only people who truly need it will take welfare. It has nothing to do with the fact that many people feel that they deserve to get "free" stuff just for being born.
Spoken like a person who has never known the shame of needing a little help just to make ends meet. I don't know if that really describes you, but if you believe most people getting living or food assistance are just entitled moochers, you are mistaken.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
So this is an 8$ game that, even being pirated under the best conditions, managed to reach 3300 users. Suppose that they had all registered, that would be what 30.000 USD. Would they have broken even? Isn't this a tiny sum of money for a game?
Like in many other genres, being more realistic actually makes the game less fun (imagine your favorite FPS with instant death on hit and no saves!). Indeed, if you read what the users of the TPB version of the game have posted on the forums, it's basically complaints that it's "unfair" and "impossible to win".
Heh, this reminds me of the various difficulty levels in many games going up to things like "Insanity", might actually make some gamers deliberately play the unregistered/pirated version.
"You've only beaten it on 'hardcore'? Hah! I've made it to level 7 on unregistered!'
I don't read AC A human right
For one, we are discussing software piracy, not the necessity of social programs. In one instance I do not believe there can be a valid argument for. My conclusion stands firm. If you are the type of person who thinks all software pirates are just poor down trodden souls who would only pay if they could, then you are the type of person naive enough to think that all people on welfare truly need it. Fyi I'm from the poor segment of society and I can assure you there are plenty of people taking advantage of the system.
Game designs are not protected by copyright
The Tetris Company successfully sued the developer of another game with the same rules. Is Emacs next?
Are you kidding me? They release an indie game with absolutely no advertising. They put it up on a pirate website themselves with a known-bad copy. A few hours after going on sale, they're laughing at pirates and saying they have a huge piracy rate. This IS their advertising strategy, and it's as bad as they come.
When Hotline Miami released, it was available on multiple stores, was receiving a lot of coverage by major sites like Rock Paper Shotgun, and when a pirate version was released? They supported it as if it was official, because they didn't want pirates to get a bad copy of the game. They treated it like advertising, handled it well, and made significant profit with over 130,000 legitimate copies sold, and multiple ports and sequels in the works.
Hotline Miami got significant positive coverage because it was a good game, and they handled things right. This is a dismal thing which they admit is a poor clone of another game, and instead of going to bat for it, they shoot themselves in the foot and have the gall to whine for sympathy when they put it on a pirate site themselves, made it a known bad copy, AND procede to then laugh in peoples' faces after a few hours, when they do absolutely nothing else to promote themselves, or their game? Let alone produce something reasonably innovative or fun?
Let me know when some actual, live, half-way sane indie game developers show up. I'll be sure to shake their hand, instead. I'll hug and buy beer instead if it's ZUN. :P
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
Not even a little bit. This was obviously the intention all along. The ones who got ripped off were the suckers who paid for this tripe. An un-winnable un-fun game meant to propagate a political message and not to have their users have a great time. Stay away from Greenheart Games.
Real innovators would have learned to make file sharing be part of the experience and a rewarding business. Pathetic junk.
Ha! Best joke I've seen all year. Well played Greenheart Game, well played.
it surely is not up to me to know which version is which, so by releasing the fake-cracked version, they are saying it's okay to download any version on the torrent networks. well, played guys. well, played.
...
Interesting question is - if they haven't released the pirated copy, how many people would have downloaded it (assuming anyone would even bothering cracking it)?
It has no DRM so it is not possible to crack.
If the developers really want to mess with the pirates, now they will start seeding dozens broken copies with various titles like "Game Dev Tycoon - FULL VERSION", so that the pirates can't tell the real one from the broken one.
Mother. Fucker.
I mailed that floppy in three goddamned times before I gave up and just assumed I was too dumb and was missing something; I never even thought about copy protection until reading this. Please tell whoever screwed up the Atari ST version that 8-year-old-me hates them.
That this studio did this pretty much tells me that I made a huge mistake in supporting them back when I first bought this game for my Android phone. I won't do it again.
I've been in the industry since the mid-80s. I owned the largest (and first) third-party quality assurance testing company in the games industry. I've written about and spoken about the "impact" of piracy professionally for nearly 30 years now and the story has NEVER changed. Piracy of the type discussed is a fallacy and anyone that believes otherwise fails to take into consideration the most basic elements of their position:
1. The assumption that, denied access, "pirates" will pay for copies. Most people who believe this also believe it's a 1-to-1 relationship. Every person who downloads it illegally, if they couldn't, would choose to buy the game. That's ludicrous and flat-out WRONG. No one has EVER proved that those who don't pay, would pay. Many people, given access, do download games and it's been proven that huge numbers of those who do, do so simply because they can. Many think they'll take a look and see if the game is worth investing in. In other words, for many it's a form of MARKETING. Smart companies recognize this and move to leverage it.
2. "We lost X dollars to piracy". Bull. Virtually all of us had parents who told us, "Never count your money before it's in the bank." You cannot steal something from someone that they don't have in the first place. The various industry groups who talk about theft miss this key point. When people break into your bank account and steal your money then it's theft. Until that happens it's not theft no matter how you try to rationalize it. Piracy is, and always will remain, a cost of doing business. You accepted it when you got into the business and now you want to complain? Get over it. If you can't pay the price then you made the mistake yourself and you're in the wrong business.
3. Piracy is always bad. Countless real world examples exist of companies and individuals heavily benefitting from so-called piracy. As Neil Gaiman so famously pointed out, think about your favorite book. Did you buy it? For the vast majority of people the answer to that is no. They borrowed the book from a friend, were given it as a gift, read it from the library, "pirated" it, etc. However, later a huge number of those people did buy another book from the writer or told friends they need to read it and many of those did buy it. In my first example of this (which I've recounted many times), the top football sim in the late 80s was a game called NFL Challenge. It cost $129 at the time. It was pretty amazing packaging but it was out of reach of most people (in part due to horrific licensing of the then totally confused NFL who didn't understand the reach of PC games). The game was heavily copy protected. It sold 250,000 copies year in, year out (which in those days made it a huge success). Then one year they put out a data disk which cost just $19.95 (and most of that was profit due to much reduced percentages on licensing only the NFLPA license). They sold exponentially more copies of the data disk than the game which told them they had a "piracy issue". At first they were aghast. Then they realized this was fantastic. They made a higher profit from the data disk which more people could afford and, as a result, they dropped the copy protection from the game and started carefully suggesting that it was okay to acquire it by any means. They then changed their business model to putting out lots of data disks. Hmm..... Lastly you stated that this was just a "fun experiment". Again, wrong. From their own release, "we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers." This belies their own position on this and clearly shows this wasn't just a "fun experim
It won't even start for me, and they got ripped off by other crooks at cloudfare (useless garbage).
They certainly deserve it.
"We know this because our game contains some code to send anonymous-usage data to our server. Nothing unusual or harmful. Heaps of games/apps do this and we use it to better understand how the game is played. It’s absolutely anonymous and you are covered by our privacy policy. "
Yes, you want our sympathy because you're indie, but yet you have no qualms in playing big brother and monitoring your users without explictly stating that you do so. Yeah, a "privacy policy" makes it okay.
Sorry, in my book you guys are assholes just like EA by merely doing that. Not that you deserve having your game "pirated", but you're still assholes. Not mutually exclusive.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
You used never to describe a situation of failing a check .. sad to say never is a long time and i am willing to bet that right now with original install /play media we could make that game fail the internal DRM check (which in 1984 for apple2 meant bad sectors on floppy period which even at the time was shitty idea techwise for myriad reasons not the least of which was copy II plus.. )
What you should be thinking about today is not how clever that copy protection scheme was? but rather how many of the legit customers did you screw around with and drive into piracy even deeper? or at least to ignore your company in future? better still what where the stats on replaced "play" floppy sent out for your perfect copy protection scheme? Bet that number is higher than 0
actually, this brings up an issue that's common with all simulations that have an economic or political model - including the sims, sim city, civilisation (and clones), and so on.
they serve as a form of propaganda for particular sets of economic, political, and cultural rules, that players internalise as they play the game.
if you program the economic rules so that piracy will ruin your businness then that is exactly what will happen in the game. it says little about the real world....and it's only really obvious in a situation like this where it is a deliberately released piece of overt propaganda.
a slightly less obvious but more troubling one is the rule in Civ (etc) that democracies aren't allowed to declare war, or that military units can force workers to be content in communism. or that corruption is universal under communism but non-existent under democracy.
http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Government
on the one hand, these are just the rules of the game. on the other hand, they're political propaganda about the pros and cons of particular economic models.
it's not limited to computer games, either - the earliest version of the game that was ripped off to become monopoly was actually propaganda about the evils of landlords and capitalism....at least that was the author's intention. the rules, however, taught players that monopolies were a good thing because that's how you won the game.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2986/was-monopoly-originally-meant-to-teach-people-about-the-evils-of-capitalism
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/09/how_monopoly_turns_us_into_uncreative_capitalist_vultures_partner/
Focus people. Focus.
Think of the sunrise. Relax. Try a lotus position.
The rest of your day will get better. Try not to comment any further.
A more realistic way to look at this story, by the devs, would have been:
We created a pirated version of our new game and released it on TPB. Within hours we had 3000 downloads, and 10% of those downloads converted into actual sales of our game! We didn't have to do a thing to advertise, just having it on TPB let gamers discover it and run our trialware version, deciding if they liked it or not. If they played the game long enough they found out they couldn't win, so they visited our forums and found out it would only cost them $8 for a full version with none of the trialware limitations.
Piracy is awesome!
As someone who might purchase this, I'd be willing to pay more for the so-called cracked version as it adds a very interesting feature to the game. This one may bite them in the ass as people learn about the free version that includes more official content - so why pay for it?
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Ah, I was thinking of exactly this when I read the story. A big kudos to you guys.
Author of Enyo: Up and Running from O'Reilly Media
Do you hold the institution that stole from, threatened, and blocked trade of a knock off tetris clone to the same standard as the company that paid said institution to do that?
The executive and judicial branches are accountable to the Congress, as they enforce statutes enacted by the Congress. The Congress is in theory accountable to the people. A privately held corporation is accountable to nobody. So I blame Mr. Pajitnov, and I also blame the people for listening to the copyright-industry-owned mainstream media instead of doing their own research, but blaming the "sheeple" in Slashdot comments has drawn flamebait moderations.
Besides, in this case, I find blame less important than irrelevance. Would the game of tennis have become as popular as it is today if The Tennis Company had tried to enforce copyright in the dimensions of a tennis ball, tennis racket, and tennis court? I had hopes for a certain falling block game becoming a sport, but once it became clear that the publisher would keep it from happening, I moved on.
Sometimes there's a good reason to move goalposts. Case in point: The game of HORSE is a training tool for the sport of basketball. HORSE is all about moving goalposts.
The Operation Flashpoint / ArmA series started doing this about 12 years ago using a system called FADE. If the game detected an illegitimate disc, rather than just kicking you out or throwing an error message, it would would screw with you. Over time, it would reduce the accuracy of your weapon, randomly switch your controls around, and eventually turn you into a bird.
Very cleverly done, in my opinion, because a crack designer would have a helluva time testing his work. He couldn't just boot up the game and see if it functioned, he would have to spend hours and hours playing to see if the game would wig out. And it wouldn't always do it, either.
I had several friends who pirated the game and started playing, only for FADE to eventually kick in. By that time they'd gotten hooked on the game, and were inspired to go out and buy a legit copy. Mission accomplished, developers!
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
There is no real good way, short of a time machine, to do a control test for this.
Also given the "special" function in the pirated version, even if I had purchased the game I would go DL it and play that version as well, cause it's funny. The numbers are gonna be skewed no matter what you do.
That's exactly what I was going to say. What sort of game development simulator worth it's (imaginary) weight doesn't simulate piracy? Clearly the pirates got a more accurate (though cynical) version of the game.
Videogames do not help worldwide farming efforts, nor do they build shelters or do shit. They entertain and sometimes educate, but nonetheless they are creative intangible.
I am currently a software developer, and also an indie game dev in an a somewhat prosperous north american city. But I wasn't all that until a couple of years ago.
Before four years ago I lived barely off the streets, only carrying an extremely outdated laptop, some clothes thats pretty much it. To feed myself I had to falsify credentials and identities for street paperworks brokers and help into streamlining low and mid criminal business activities of relatives within the same economical situation as mine.
I don't mind telling that here, even if it might get me to be liable of a lot of ugly stuff that I did, because for the 7 years time-span that I was somewhat forced into this situation (not really a career that I've envisioned as a kid), it wasn't something I choose, but rather my life trajectory init'd in a certain way and I successfully triumphed over that, and real living is not like in movies.
Now I am back to being a citizen and I know one thing from all that I lived as a kids born in the eighties within a secluded trailer park, moving to the big city and going through these years of societal experiments through my somewhat special path I navigated:
For Mankind, aesthetics of the processes and states changes but the processes and states themselve do not, or at least not so rapidly. (Do not bitch about not getting paid for stuff that should be free anyway, be humble and proud of the simple fact that you have people giving their time to parse the intangibles that you output).
The world is fucked up, (but kinda has always been, but collectively we're getting better slowly..), and excepted for about 20 out of 100 p.cent of humans, people cannot really afford to pay for creative intangible. People needs to eat, to sleep and shelter themselves. My old story is an extreme point of view, but the REAL worldwide norm is a paycheck away from it.
I can attest to this, if it wasn't for the fact that I extracted entertainement and knowledge from pirated materials freely, I'd today be dead or hooked on intraveinous opiates.
Whenever somebody pirates my games or steals the real-world works I do lets say like CRUD business applications, I just wish they take the money that would have cost and they feed himself better and get the energy to change the world for real good.
And if the cultural and educational references within these stolen creative intangible gets motivates them to be creative and use the full swing of their own willpower, then I'll die happy.
Anyway, ppl on /. sorry for this unusual comment, which some may think this is like bullshit or attention-grabbing from my part, or sounds extreme, but I see people complaining here for the 8$ bucks the indie dev was charging, which is cheap and all, so people just should all buy it and feel guilty otherwise, but REAL life is REAL life.
When Pirates steals 1/3 of your REAL (tangible and not speculative-fiduciary) food supply, then bitch about it. Otherwise let the freeloaders freeloads, as for the couple of assholes which could afford it, there's at least 4-5 person for them who just CANNOT afford it, because they don't even have and will never have real or online liquidity, and you just made their life better incidentally for their mind and spirit (That's to say when your intangible creative product is good).
Now back to me as in my current state of citizen. aka the now normal (ever shriking middle class ) dude who may be able in certain times to pay for this and that. Be sure that I'll torrent-check your stuff before buying it, and I'll pay if it's good, otherwise, you haven't feed me, you haven't gave me a shelter, and you haven't done shit.
-My 2 cents... (sorry)
P.S.: My Animosity wasn't really tageted at this particular piece of News (Kudo to the game developers), but more in the general worldwide theatre of current piracy and anarcho-capitalism state of affairs.
More realistic? Yes.
Better? No: you can't win, it isn't fun.
Good != realistic
Hello.
I am a gamer. And by that I mean gamer to the soul. I spend around 100€ per month to games alone, add couple online subs and you get 130€ per month.
That doesn't ruin my personal economy anyway, I do have a day job that pays me enough to keep me on my hobbies, beer and (other)healthy food.
I have old xbox, xbox360, PS2, Nintendo Wii, Asus G74sx gaming laptop for lanpartys and custom built gaming rig filled with Asus ROG parts and bits that cost me nearly 2500€.
8€ for a good game is nothing, it's nothing. A nice cold pint of exported beer on my local pub cost more.
I don't support piracy and never will. If you can't afford something then you dont't need it. If you need it, then you sort you s*it out so you can afford it.
Games have the best value of entertainment. Let's take Skyrim for example. I bought it first to my xbox360. Cost was 59.90€. I played it about 120hours on xbox.
Then I bought it for PC from Steam, it was on sale, 29.90€ and now I have been playing it for 140hours.
Cheap entertainment if you divide the time and cost. And I still have lots of playing to do in Skyrim as I haven't even completed the game yet...
Of course there are those games that lack the entertainment part like Aliens: Colonial marines did. I even preordered 4 copys of it from steam, had a nice 4 player alien bashing lanparty in my mind. We had fun in my Aliens lanparty but the fun game from total crappiness of the game so it was a win after all. (beer and food to the lanparty cost more thatn 4 copys of the game btw...)
Sometimes you make a mistake and buy a pig in a bag but hey, that is life. I have gone to a restaurant and had the worst dinner in my life, complete crap and still had to pay for it more that your average blockbuster video game costs.
Kudos for Greenheart games for giving gamepirates the "Bazinga"
ps: Just bought the GameDev Tycoon and looks like fun. And sorry for the small wall of text that did not critically hit you in the face
The game was DRM free
No, it wasn't. That's the whole point of the article; copies of the game that (in their opinion!) were pirated were deliberately crippled. That's the whole point of Digital Rights Management.
Not really, since piracy doesn't seem to have made the games industry collapse.
Mines in "The Settlers" produced pigs instead of coal (?) if the game detected it was pirated.
I'm jerking off so hard to the image of APK naked and petrified. Hot.
So they should have released the game and AT THE LEAST waited 24 hours to see what was going on.
Instead they release what is essentially a free copy of their game and then complain that more people people gave it a try than saw the legit version and bought it.
There's a "Yo dawg..." meme joke in here somewhere.
This actually is quite interesting. The pirating in-game would add a new challenge that would be inaccessible with a non-pirated version... should players who bought the game but are looking for more of a challenge pirate it?
Agreed
Wait...
This doesn't make sense to me.
1. They released a cracked version of their game, Isn't that impossible? Since they are the creators, this isn't a cracked game but an alternate version released.
2. This isn't copyright infringement (or as they erroneously call piracy). They are the copyright holders and creators, so what they did is publish their alternate version on TPB. There isn't an issue about other people distributing it either, as this is how the torrent protocol works. They released it and should know this, so it's fine.
Downloading the game off of TPB is perfectly legal.
This isn't about copyright infringement, it's a publicity stunt. No one has ever heard of their studio or game, at least not many. Mission accomplished though, they've hit the news!