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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.
You really need to read the article.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
>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
i can't it's /.'ed. which i assume will show up in their game in the next patch.
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.
You skipped the second half of TFS.
The game is a game about game development, right? In the pirated copy, the games you develop will have a chance of getting pirated (!) which goes up as time goes on, eventually causing you to lose as you are then unable to make enough money to continue. It's delicious irony.
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.
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.
It really is down due to traffic. And cloudflare really is playing medical insurance company again. If you're not familiar, it's where you pay and pay and pay for their protection and then that one time when you critically need them, they're useless and refuse to properly do their one single job that they had (they claim there's allegedly no cached version of the page for them to serve up off their servers).
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 :)
Apparently you have read and comprehension problems. That is exactly what the poster you are criticizing said. Additionally he said that it is ironic because they proved the idea is false by pirating their own game (the simulator) and still having profit, as you fail to understand.
I read the article. Most of it just read like a game dev who was pissed because his game wasn't the next angry birds.
They claim 93% piracy after 1 day but I wonder how many of the 3000 (yes that many) downloaders only found out about the game due to being on the torrent site.
I'd be interested in seeing the numbers after a month and more interestingly what the reviews of the game say. Nobody will buy a rubbish game after playing it. Thats why most games companies dont usually offer game demos & hate piracy.
How many of them would have bought the game if it wasn't broken?
What do you think Game Dev Tycoon is about? Railroads?
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
I'm wondering if they've modeled piracy realistically or if they've just gone full derp.
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"
No he didn't. His criticism is spot-on. If that were an accurate simulation of how the PC game market worked, then all these companies complaining about piracy would long since have "lost" and gone bankrupt. In the real world, however, video game companies don't "lose" because of piracy. They "lose" because of bad games, bad marketing, or both. Piracy, if anything, works more like free advertising.
Posting anon because of mod points.
What part about the title "Game Dev Tycoon" leaves you wondering what the subject matter of the game is? Even if that didn't make any synapses flash, the last sentence should have done it: "...players started noticing widespread piracy of their games in the game development simulator."
See that "game development simulator" bit? Combine that with the title and let your brain run wild.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
Where are the statistics about how many game companies have closed due to piracy? They sure don't show up with any of the quick attempts I've been trying with Google.
Can't wait for rockstar tycoon, where piracy takes heavy toll on main characters cocaine habit.
You seriously aren't familiar with the "Tycoon" type of games? Or did I just feed a troll?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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
It is a game. Not the real world. In this pretend world they have in the game if your games get pirated you lose income. Whether that is the case in the real world or not is irrelevant.
The fact that you will LOSE because of that is not obvious from TFS. TFA is /.ed anyway.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I've known plenty of people who would have otherwise bought software if there had been no option to pirate it.
i wish i had mod points for this one. I absolutely agree. Unfortunately they probably just went full derp.
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.
Well I don't think the simulation of piracy is supposed to be 100% accurate. Obviously if that was how it worked in the real world nobody would make games. And I assume that's the lesson they wanted to teach: we're afraid one day this will happen to us, now you see why, maybe you should sympathise a bit and buy our game.
There are flaws with your actual argument too, but I will just say that there's nothing preventing me from seeing a game I like, say, Bioshock Infinite, downloading it, playing it, and then never buying it. Without the pirated copy I could not download it, and I would be forced to buy it (incidentally I haven't done any of that and plan to buy it on Steam when they put it on sale). So I can definitely say it is possible for piracy to do financial harm.
Let's say the majority of pirates would never buy the game anyway, as you claim. If I was a dev, I would not care about this group since if I implement DRM nothing changes. So I am going to ignore them. Whether they really exist or not or how many of them are doesn't matter, it's a moot point.
So now we have one more group: pirates that might help sales. IIRC I read a bit about music pirates actually being good for music sales as they tended to buy more music than other customers. So let's say DRM makes these guys more wary about purchasing music and they prefer to "try before they buy". Devs have to weight how much money they'd gain from those guys based on how much they'd lose from the first group (the group that would buy if there was no pirated version) to determine whether or not they try to implement some form of DRM to delay the release of a cracked copy as long as possible.
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 $8 USD (cheaper than many mobile games).
> Downloading the torrent is like... copyright infringement.
Not if the owner of the game made it available, which in this case they did. The torrent version is a time limited demo.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Apparently you have read and comprehension problems. That is exactly what the poster you are criticizing said.
No it isn't. The poster you are referring to said: "So the game company is admitting that it's a really crappy simulator because if they were willing to "pirate" their own game, surely the real losses from piracy can't be that bad because they are willing to take them". This happens to be a straw man argument unrelated to the summary or the article, since the game company isn't claiming those implied terrible losses in the first place.
The game itself doesn't portray piracy as ruining the industry. But if you are using the leaked "cracked" version then you're in a special simulation where "customers" are unwilling to pay you. This leads people to ask "why is nobody paying for my game even if they want to play it?" and realise the irony of the situation, and hopefully a few appreciate the humour and decide to buy the game.
Really, NO option? Or just didn't like some part of it - price, platform, DRM, etc.
Because if the game was for sale, they could have bought it. They just might not have LIKED everything about that option. That doesn't mean they had NO choice.
Perhaps that is because piracy rates are much lower for consoles. Perhaps you should ask the question "how many developers might have gone bankrupt if console piracy were as common as PC piracy?" But that's pretty difficult to answer, of course. Perhaps another question might be "how many games haven't included a PC release because the developer doesn't believe it can make money due to piracy?"
"Game prices are too high"? Seriously, is US$ 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.
I don't know, I figure that some folks may be willing to give them a nod for making their point in a creative way. Once upon a time, I wore my eyepatch with pride, but that was before I could afford to actually pay for stuff. If I were still so inclined, I have enough of a sense of humor that I probably would go buy the full version.
Indeed. The pirates who don't later pay for a game are either sociopaths or poor. The poor folk might feel bad, but they can't pay for the game, so the studio will never get their money. The sociopaths make up a minority of society, so when most people see their poor friends playing a new game, they'll go buy a copy. And if they copy it from their poor friend, they eventually feel guilty (because they're not sociopaths), and buy a legit copy. Unless they can't stand DRM... There is a growing number of users who eschew any DRM, and the ones like me just avoid the big title games altogether, providing negative word of mouth advertising.
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.
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 ?
Thanks for the translation. TFS was like trying to read a telegraph message.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Actually, on the 'always on', the legitimate players hate it too.. And those of us that have been gaming since the early 80s (hell, the late '70s), we've seen companies come and go, so there's no expectation that they'll still be hosting a game you may just want to play in another 30 or so years (there are still ones that I'll pull out and play after nearly 20 years, just for the nostalgia trip and the fun of rediscovering forgotten stories).
There's network outages, routing problems, straight denial of service attacks (or compromises of the login servers creating mayhem), playing on a train, a plane, or even in a campsite (I actually enjoy camping; gets me to some very strange places, and a laptop is great for the rainy days; usually used for on site photo manipulation of the shots I take out and about).
Online only, for most games, is an artifical single point of failure. It'll mess up a product you paid for with no warning, and possibly irrevocably, all out of your control, with you having absolutely no recourse. That, to me, is an incredibly bad deal. If it's a bad game, then people will be less likely to buy from them again (exacerbated by the online only issues, meaning an even smaller available market, possibly making the difference between surviving as a company and going under). You don't care about the longevity, but you're left with a bad taste.
If it's a great one, then it's not going to be around for the nostalgia trip. When gaming lines are shut down by an active company, then players will be more wary still.
For all the 'big business' groups, thinking that this solves all their piracy woes, they'll be meeting the laws of unintended consequences, where games that don't follow this will have the exposure, thus the following (maybe not immediately, but eventually).. The following generates the sales. The sales bring in the cash, and cash is the lifeblood of a company.
Best analogy of the companies following this route is "Emo". It's very much an "I'll cut myself because I don't like a few people". Not the hard core self harmers who are actually ill, but the ones who'll do it for attention and because they think it'll make them edgy, or gain an advantage, whereas in the long run, it'll likely turn out to be self defeating, pointless and rather embarrassing.
Ahh I miss the grits...Lets see a HOSTS file protect against hot grits in your pants!
Would the "Try before buy" guys not play with the demo instead of the pirated copy?
Besides they will know what happend, and then buy the game if they like it, on not buy it if they don't
It is a game. Not the real world. In this pretend world they have in the game if your games get pirated you lose income. Whether that is the case in the real world or not is irrelevant.
It's being sold as a "game development simulator."
Pretty shitty 'simulator' if it doesn't reflect reality with even half-assed accuracy, wouldn't you think?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
A: That is not possible. In order to crack the game, there need to be a protection to crack. There is none.
B: They can't do that. There is no code which phones home, so they can't remove it.
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!
Perhaps that is because piracy rates are much lower for consoles. Perhaps you should ask the question "how many developers might have gone bankrupt if console piracy were as common as PC piracy?" But that's pretty difficult to answer, of course. 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.
Oh, and FWIW, OP never said jack about consoles, not sure where you pulled that one from...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Sure...because you can't just do a quick search for similar entries in the genre and just imitate that.
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.
it's not a cracked copy. it's a release by the developers that has built in defects.
IT IS NOT A NEW STRATEGY, several other games have done that too.
you know why they did this? for publicity.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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 haven't played this game yet, but if I downloaded the "pirated" version knowing it was a demo of sorts, by reading this /. article or having a short "you've downloaded the torrent demo. It's the full game, but blah blah blah" and I liked the "pirated" version, I'd buy the full game. If I downloaded the "pirated" version and there was no disclaimer, I'd assume the game was broken. No way I'd give up money for that.
This from someone who's kicked in a lot of money for beta's and less than stellar Linux releases (Minecraft, Humblebundles, Steam, extra donations to kickstarter's to be on beta tester list). If the game is available and I try it and like it, I will buy it. If the game is crap, "pirated" or not, it's off my list. There are many other things to spend money on before wasting it on crap games.
Kudos to these guys for trying something "new", but I think they, as with all developers, need to lighten up on the "piracy is killing our business". If you're not making money because piracy is hurting your bottom line so much, don't make games. It's obviously not a viable industry. Instead we constantly read about awesome new game selling millions of copies and turning huge profits and then hear the developer screaming about how piracy is running their business. I'm inclined to believe it's a bunch of horse shit. It also makes me believe when a developer of a less than awesome game starts screaming piracy, they're full of it too and are just on the "We'd make so much more money if it wasn't for piracy" bandwagon despite the fact that their game was just crap.
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.
B: They can't do that. There is no code which phones home, so they can't remove it.
Wrong. From TFA:
Over 93.6% of players stole the game. We know this because our game contains some code to send anonymous-usage data to our server
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
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!
Your argument is flawed. That argument does apply to movies/TV where you can't try before you buy. Games have these wonderful things called DEMOs which allow the user to try before they buy.
That said, the devs are slightly off too: "DRM free" they say, then in the very same sentence "allow install on up to 3 computers"... hardly DRM free if it controls how many installs.
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.
calm down, i couldn't read the article, and i am not the ggp that you originally responded to.
the summary was utter garbage, but i was still able to glean enough information from it to try to make a joke about the next version of the game featuring slashdotting...
if i have to explain the joke it must not be funny.
I've known plenty of people who would have otherwise bought software if there had been no option to pirate it.
what kind of software are we talking about and would they have known of the software?
did they have a genuine need for it, and are we talking about microsoft windows as the sw in which case it's actually plausible that it's true.
just saying, because I don't find it likely that there's too many sw houses which would have had not gone bankrupt if it weren't just for those pesky pirates - the money on the market is limited. what I'm getting to that piracy or no piracy the make it or die trying divider would be at the same place
(and I had a mobile phone title with a piracy rate of something like 1:1000.. then again the same warez sites carried the earlier freeware game I had done too. but I had really no expectation that it would have sold a hundred thousand copies - this was almost 10 years ago now and the point was just selfish self promotion in order to get employed and for that those sw releases worked just fine)
I guess this is the "game" which's concept videos made me almost puke though. what these guys are just doing is guerilla marketing. their fake release is just going to be sitting next to the real release. and you know what? they just made an official torrent release of the games CONTENT DATA, THE DUMB FUCKS. also it's not a new novel thing to do(even madonna did it like 10+ years ago).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Or apparently with the definition of the word "tycoon".
It's being sold as a "game development simulator."
Pretty shitty 'simulator' if it doesn't reflect reality with even half-assed accuracy, wouldn't you think?
"Sold" being the operative word there. The objective is not to accurately simulate the effects of piracy, it's to annoy people who pirate the game and to do it in such a way as to piss off pirates by making the game unplayable, but only after they've already invested/wasted time and effort in/on it.
I can't help but admire their cunning; it's a lot more imaginative than just deleting the save file halfway through the game.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
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.
Thanks for the translation. TFS was like trying to read a telegraph message.
You have to look at the summary encoded. The editors work for the articles. But there's way too much information to actually read the article. You get used to it. I don't even see the summary anymore. It's just first-post this, APK that....
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
He was probably too busy sending out virtual DMCA notices to the virtual torrenters in the game to read the summary.
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.
It's obviously there to make a statement about the real world. That's why they put that in the pirated version--they wanted to tell real-world pirates how damaging piracy is by introducing bad effects within the game from game-world pirates. If game-world piracy is not representative of real-world piracy, this message is inaccurate and can be criticized for being inaccurate.
However the game maker decided to release a pirated copy of their own game, therefore they don't see piracy as a loss at all but rather a means of free advertising and publicity. Therefore the game doesn't simulate real life at all.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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. :)
To be honest though, right now I think the pirated 'demo' sounds like more fun than the real version. A more realistic(?) simulation, if you will. If I bought this game, I'd still pirate it.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Games have these wonderful things called DEMOs which allow the user to try before they buy.
Does every PC game have a playable demo? Or are you including noninteractive trailers as "demos"?
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.
Sadly this does not reflect reality.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Except it's only inaccurate in pirated copies of the game, as a clever "anti-piracy" measure. In a legitimate copy, piracy has a negative effect, but not enough to seriously affect sales of your virtual game.
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!
I'm not arguing either for or against the idea that piracy could put a company out of business. I was merely commenting on the OP troll's assumption that all software pirates can not afford or would not be willing to pay for software that they pirate. The fact that there are plenty of people out there who could otherwise afford to pay for their software, but won't, is a reality that people need to be intellectually honest about.
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.
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.
I dunno, to me it sound like they're severely exaggerating the piracy issues in the "pirated" version beyond what would happen in the real world to try and make a point that's just not there. Based on what I've read the game is literally unplayable after a certain point regardless of how big an empire you build. If that was the case in the real world Blizzard, EA and Ubisoft would have been out of business long ago. Instead, at least in EA and Ubisoft's case recently, they're screwing over paying customers and still making money hand over fist.
let your brain run wild.
I do not think that means what you think it means, for some people.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
$8 / game *214 legitimate copies = $1600.
Woooo what a payday. How many devs, how many days of work? Unless its "one dev" and "2 weeks", its not what you would really call "good profit".
Ah. The site appeared down, so I didn't realize. Well, that's a pity then. Doesn't that mean they don't actually have a point? I understand the guy wants to make money. It is tough being Indie (that is why I keep buying the same game from Jeff Vogel), but wouldn't it have made the point better if it had been an accurate simulation of piracy?
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Maybe you should revisit the flawed assumption that "pirating" and "demoing" are the same thing, and that a pirated copy will be the same as a legit one.
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?
It has absolutely nothing to do with a straw man argument. You just proved that besides being unable to read and comprehend text you have absolutely no clue about logical fallacies either.
The "pirated" version makes you fail unconditionally due to piracy. The company is therefore making a manifest through this version and by doing it implying that piracy ruins any game as an inexorable force, manifest whose whole basis is disproved by their own success.
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.
Max Payne 3 did exactly this, although I'm not sure they advertised the fact. Those caught cheating were forced onto a server with other people who were caught cheating.
Has the term "cracked" recently been redefined?
Technically, this is a malicious Trojan horse. Given the fact that they are willingly distributing it, I'm not even sure that downloading it would be illegal in my country, unlike the actual operation of its hidden functions inserted by its developers.
Ezekiel 23:20
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!
The vast majority do have demos, and in this particular case there is a demo as well.
Which then totally fails at what they claimed to want to achieve; namely, hold a MIRROR up to pirates. Since the game ramps up piracy in the simulator to 100% over time, to ENSURE bankruptcy, it is NOT a "mirror". It's a photoshopped 'fatbooth' type pic in a mirror's frame.
Putting valid piracy statistics rates in from noteworthy logistics firms, and using that instead of a bullshit log scale would have provided an actual mirror. That wasn't what they wanted. They wanted to shut down the pirates, and feel morally superior about it, by performing a false equivilency.
I would play a game dev simulator with piracy as a feature, if the piracy model was accurate. No, a log scale over time is not accurate.
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.
it's not a cracked copy. it's a release by the developers that has built in defects.
IT IS NOT A NEW STRATEGY, several other games have done that too.
you know why they did this? for publicity.
This backfired pretty hard for Westwood with Red Alert 2 if I recall, since the game had something like a 26-digit CD key and would install and start self-destructing your units if you got one character wrong with no warning.
The correct conclusion from the thousands of forum posts asking why things were blowing up was not "stop pirating".
Troll.
There was a spaceship game a few years back (the name escapes me) where the cracked version had some "hidden" issues, e.g. your Galaxy view kept shaking all the time and your warp drive range was a wee bit smaller than needed to progress after about 2h of gameplay (you simply couldn't reach a star which was required for the main quest). The game was still playable but nagging and confined to a small subset of what it could have offered.
That's why it was not immediately obvious that this change would make you lose. Maybe it just made it harder to win.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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 am now waiting for the first person win this 'unbeatable' game. Somebody will figure it out. To figure it out is a whole new level of challenge.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I love how this guy puts the game up himself. Then cries about "93% piracy". Its not even fucking piracy since he himself put it up there for people to download. Thats like if i own a pizza place, decide to do a "FREE SLICE OF PIZZA WITH EVERY SODA" promotion, replace the cheese with plastic as you go further up the slice, and then complain no one bought my slices of pizza, and people are saying they taste like shit.
But it is a message nonetheless, and inaccurate as such, defeating the purpose of the manifest, which was to imply that piracy ruins game companies. All in all they only succeeded in making fools of themselves and sabotaging their own game by antagonizing their potential customers.
Wasn't something similar done with Mirror's Edge?
Where the pirated copy was fine for a few hours then the player got slower and slower to the point they could not longer complete the missions or get away from enemies?
I'm betting the Venn Diagram is pretty tiny when you combine "People Who Read the Gaming Section of Slashdot" with "People Who Have Never Heard of the Tycoon Games" and "People Who Can't Infer Simple Concepts from Context" and "People Who Find It Easier to Bitch In the Message Section Rather than Click on TFA".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Usually a pirated copy will be better than the original one. It will have all the former features and none of its DRM. The few times I bought games with DRM I ended downloading a "pirate" copy of the very same games to be able to play them without annoyances and anywhere I want.
Solve my riddle!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Not anymore. Welcome to the last 10 years.
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"
an accurate simulation of piracy
The problem is that doesn't exist. In the simplest logic, yes piracy should hurt a companies bottom line. In practice, people pirate for a ton of different reasons, one being they don't have the money to pay, so they wouldn't have been customers in the first place and don't impact the bottom line.
Another is try before you buy, which really can go either way. Someone who might have bought the game gets it for free and thinks it's crap and are happy they didn't waste their money, which negatively impacting the bottom line and are the people I think most intrusive DRM's are aimed at. Then there's the try and buy that buy the game because they could try it first, positively impacting the bottom line.
Then there are those that never would have heard of the game had they not been able to download it, that may or may not buy. They wouldn't have hurt the bottom line had they never heard of the game, but impact it positively if they buy it after downloading.
Too many variables to really say either way what impact piracy has. Some people (many authors recently Neil Gaiman as an example) look at it as a form of free advertising and have been able to use torrents to spread their latest work and have made a lot doing so. We hear very little from major developers how piracy could actually be helping their bottom lines and they focus specifically on the group that tries their games and decides not to waste money on stuff they don't like, while completely neglecting the groups that try and do buy or never would have heard of the game in the first place.
You are reading way too much into it. The fact that the "defect" that they put into their cracked game itself has to do with piracy is likely simply a hilarious meta-reference to piracy of games in general. They could easily have just had the game stop working after a certain amount of time, or had a giant pink scorpion show up and devour your in-game studio and its employees, or whatever. If you're discounting this entire experiment on the basis that in your opinion, their cracked, bugged copy of the game is inaccurate, you're the one who is the fool.
I am a boob so I asked the question in the subject line; How do you tell which is which?
Well, boob, the answer is that if you paid, you know you paid, and if you didn't pay, you know you didn't pay.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
U$ 1600,00 in sells in a single day for an obscure and very low tech title is very reasonable. Be honest with yourself, do you really think they would sell more than this if piracy didn't exist?
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
Nope. I am reading exactly what the message implies. If you choose to be a fool and deny reality it is your problem, but do not try to bring people who would rather exert their ability to think to your club.
That's why I put "pirated" in quotes.
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
Copying ideas is not the same thing as copying implementation.
Ideas are cheap. Implementation is expensive.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
If you think that the main point of this stunt was to proclaim about how piracy ruins game studios, have fun! Plonk.
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
No you didn't. You skim-read the summary and then posted something that showed that you hadn't read the article.
What this company did was to play a joke on people who downloaded their game from a torrent. The author deliberately seeded a broken copy and then laughed (and invited us all to laugh) at the idiots who made posts on the forum because they kept being "defeated" by piracy in the broken game that they had pirated. He then even took the trouble to write an article explaining what he did, why he did it and (I guess) to try to drum up some publicity for his game. It was a very funny joke, a couple of morons obligingly fell for the joke and everyone who is a grown-up finds it very entertaining. With any luck, this outfit will make a little bit of money out of this stunt. I'm going to buy a copy as a thank-you for giving me a good laugh.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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.
Yeah, I do see the point. Surely though you could build a 'black box' model. Not for use in analysis of reality, but for use in-game. Simply take existing sales figures from existing game companies and then match them to the internal success/failure variables of the in-game game. There must be sufficient data available to make this a fairly viable approach. You could even factor in more complex stuff like review scores. Just because you can't model the process entirely doesn't mean you can't make a passable simulation of it. You could also to some extent model DRM including it's negative impact. It wouldn't make the game a completely accurate simulation of the real market, but it would make it more interesting than a 'tycoon' game. Though, IANAE( E= Economist....).
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
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 vast majority do have demos, and in this particular case there is a demo as well.
And I am sure people interested in the game would/will download the demo.
So, why did the unknown game studio feel a need to upload completely unknown game to the biggest tracker in the world, and whine when people started downloading it?
They have a demo available, I am sure all interested gamers would have found it. Problem is that noone knows about them or their game, so they went with publicity stunt.
It's a good one, too, I have to admit :)
Im not sure, but Im not going to make an attempt to justify piracy with that line of thought.
The fact is
* There IS a demo
* This game is dirt cheap
* This is an indy studio
* Theyre making very little money
And scores of posters are STILL trying to justify piracy. At the least this dev deserves to have only those who have paid, receive this game.
The game itself doesn't sound like something I"d normally play, but the cracked copy I'll definitely be checking out!
"It's pretty sad when someone can't even work up the reading comprehension to grasp the story from a short summary."
Have you ever tried to read Slashdot summaries?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
It's not their responsibility. I'm just saying if they make a "pirated" version (A.K.A a demo) available and it plays like crap, but people don't know the "pirated" version (A.K.A a demo) is different from the actual game and people don't buy the game because of the crappy "pirated" version (A.K.A a demo), then the developers have really just cut off their noses to spite their faces by making their actual game look like crap.
I can't help but admire their cunning; it's a lot more imaginative than just deleting the save file halfway through the game.
Sure... it's also a lot more likely to generate bad press, as those who both knowingly and unwittingly play the pirated version won't see the "cunning" you speak of; instead, all they see is a game that's no fun to play and can't be won, and will assuredly spread that bad-will around.
Time will tell how this strategy will play out. I find the whole situation pretty damn funny myself.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
3 Library of Congresses worth
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.
heh...it's a damn game. What does a game have to do with messages for the real world? If you get the fake game then it'll suck but considering you paid nothing for it I can't see any reason to bitch about it. In all probability the real game will suck too.
So the game you pay for is better than the free one......damn.
Well, it's possible that without pirates to spread word of mouth, you might have only gotten 100 genuine version users. Who knows.
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/
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.
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- - 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."
Has the term "cracked" recently been redefined?
Why, are you some pirate hacker?!
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
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.
Normally I'd agree, but for an $8 game it's more a clever joke that makes me curious about the studio and its other offerings.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
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".
Are you saying that people who downloaded what is clearly marked as a pirated version from TPB, and then proceeded to complain on the forums about it being "unfair" and asking whether they can "research some kind of DRM", are their potential customers?
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.
$8 / game *214 legitimate copies = $1600
That was the day-of-release active players. I suspect they might have made a couple more sales on the second day....
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
He didn't say jack about platforms at all. I brought it up to counter his fallacy -- that just because companies weren't going out of business, it must be because piracy isn't a financial problem. That train of logic ignores the possibility that the console side of a company's business keeps it going while it hemorhages money on PC piracy. The fact that many console developers exchew the PC altogether tends to lend credence to that possibility.
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
Ha! Best joke I've seen all year. Well played Greenheart Game, well played.
I'm confused by this.
How is it not OK to claim that every pirate is a lost sale (what the industry does), yet it's A-OK to claim that every pirate would not have bought it anyway (what the pirates do)?
You claim that "pirates themselves don't cost developers any money" but this statement is empirically false, because you have no evidence that every person who pirated the game would not have purchased it anyway. Making this claim makes you as bad as the RIAA/MPAA/BSA/ESA.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Oooo, has anyone made a Medical Insurance Tycoon game? Where you make boat loads of money, spend it on hookers, blow and mega yachts, live off the suffering of others, above the law, and wielding the power behind the throne? ... Until the revolution comes, or France invades, and your accounts and assets are seized, you're bankrupted, shoved up against the wall and shot.
Maxis made a national healthcare simulation.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimHealth though it has none of that fun stuff.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Piracy is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is quality. You make a quality product and ask a reasonable price for it and people will buy it.
Just to give you an example, minecraft has no DRM is easily pirated, and it was actually pirated from day 1 and a lot. Still Notch sold millions of copies and the game was a great and very profitable success.
I can give you several more examples. Hundreds of indie games that sold very well, producing results from small but reasonable profits to outstanding profits, like minecraft. All of them DRM free and widely pirated.
Sure it was not. The point was to accomplish whatever AcidPenguin9873 thinks it should. Everybody knows that.
Maybe not these idiots, but the other guys who downloaded it and could like it enough to buy the original version, or their next game, won't. Many won't even know this version was broken on purpose, will just assume this company makes crappy games and won't likely buy from them in the future.
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.
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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.
You are of course implying that a version which is intended for pirates bears any intent to adhere to its design or guarantee performance to those who pirate it. It doesn't.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
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
"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.
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/
CloudFlare is free, i use on several of my big sites.
you CAN pay but i dont see the point as i would invest in a redundant system, its good enough to offset bandwidth and DDoS...
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
No that was the Nvidia drivers.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
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!
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.
"At the least this dev deserves to have only those who have paid, receive this game."
Why? He was the one who fucking distributed the unpaid copy to everyone else in the first place.
It's just a title, and none of it is really clear until one has more information than what was given in the crappy summary.
What more do you need than "game development simulator?" Sure they didn't go into a 100 page dissertation on what the game was and was about, but "game development simulator" should give you enough of an idea of what genre the game is. Just like "FPS" tells you something, or "action movie" gives you an inkling.
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.
There's a "Yo dawg..." meme joke in here somewhere.
Building your website on dynamic content is oh so tempting but it also makes it really easy to get knocked offline if you get a sudden burst of popularity.
Normal web serving of static files scales pretty well to lots of clients requesting the same thing. The files in question will sit in the server's disk cache and copying it from there onto the wire is a trivial process. Furthermore the server will send details of when the file was last modified so clients and proxies can do conditional get requests and only refetch the file if it's changed. If you do run out of bandwidth then you can contract a caching service put it between your server and your clients and it will just work.
Pages generated on demand by webapps OTOH often takes significant CPU work and many database queries on the server to produce. Modification time stamps have to be explicitly implemented in the webapp and even if they are implemented the webapp may still have to perform multiple database queries to work out when the page was last modified. The result is that sites which generate pages on demand often end up running out of CPU long before they run out of bandwidth.
It's possible to cache the pages generated by webapps but it requires support from the webapp and someone with the skill to configure the webapp and cache to work together. Merely shoving a cache running on it's default configuration in front of a webapp will achieve very little. I suspect that is what has happened here.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register