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Indie Game Developer Shares Free Keys on The Pirate Bay (torrentfreak.com)
Jacob Janerka, developer of the popular indie adventure game 'Paradigm,' recently spotted a cracked copy of his title on The Pirate Bay. But, instead of being filled with anger and rage while running to the nearest anti-piracy outfit, Janerka decided to reach out to the pirates. Not to school or scold them, but to offer a few free keys. From a report: "Hey everyone, I'm Jacob, the creator of Paradigm. I know some of you legitimately can't afford the game and I'm glad you get to still play it :D," Janerka's comment on TPB reads. Having downloaded many pirated games himself in the past, Janerka knows that some people simply don't have the means to buy all the games they want to play. So he's certainly not going to condemn others for doing the same now, although it would be nice if some bought it later. "If you like the game, please tell your friends and maybe even consider buying it later," he added.
Nothing insightful to contribute, just wanted to say that I hope it works out for him. People like this are the ones that make the world a more amicable, and slightly better, place.
If you're wondering what the opposite of a DMCA-wielding media conglomerate looks like - this guy is it.
Pleading with pirates begging them not to pillage your town. Good luck with that.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
and people do mac os piracy as the hardware choice sucks.
Look at the 5K imac pro that can't be easy upgraded so you are stuck paying apple apples prices for ram / storage. Also at the end of year that 5K cost may be a very bad ripoff when intel does big price cuts to keep up with amd.
Stop redefining words. Nothing whatsoever was stolen.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
But now that he's giving it away, I am forced by principle to pirate it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
How much did each key cost the developer to produce? This is how much money the developer was deprived of each time the game was pirated.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Doom was one of the most successful games ever. It was shareware available for free to download. Yet it put John Carmack on the map, and made his company id software a lot of money. In the dawn of the computer age everyone had unpaid copies of "adventure", "flight simulator" and other games. Yet the games industry managed to make millionaires and megacorporations.
"Piracy" is merely a way to outsource your distribution and marketing at zero actual cost - the cost being "potential" revenue. However you can still make money. There are plenty of people willing to pay for something they downloaded for free if it's a quality product. Most people are honest. Dishonest people will always be dishonest no matter what hoops you pretend you are making them jump through.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Try it, bring in pizza for the office 3 Fridays in a row, hell, just 2 and you'll see your cow orkers will be expecting free pizza on the next Friday.
Or you might be shocked when next week your co-worker brings in a couple dozen doughnuts.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Total nonsense. So all the hours spent developing the game initially are free? No opportunity cost? It'd be much more accurate to say, "how many keys did the developer expect to sell? Divide that across (total number of hours to develop the game) x (dollars per hour that the developer values his time) and now you've got something meaningful.
You apparently believe that someone who spends hours and hours crafting something should do it just for the love of it, and they obviously have nothing better to do with their time.
Doom was shareware. Yes people cracked the real thing and distributed it too, but I personally found and first played the game through a legitimate channel whereby I could try a few levels and if I liked it pay for the right to play the rest. Shoplifting happens all the time and stores still make lots of money. Yeah, Blizzard won't actually miss one copy of, or even a thousand copies of their latest game that they're charging $60 for, but mom n pop shop up the road it makes a difference to them. Just because they can survive the piracy doesn't make it okay. It is irrelevant to the morality of the act of theft whether or not the person being stolen from can afford it.
Fe should give his game away FREE and make money by selling tshirts and support contracts.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
Piracy didn't always involve attacking. It did involve a threat to attack. Because they were going to want to keep the pirated ship, and get the booty, they didn't necessarily want to attack the ship as that might damage and sink it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The persons pirating don't have a license to play the game so technically they "stole" a license.
Lets go back in time shall we? Suppose it is 199x and a new SNES game came out. Should I be allowed to shoplift the game or a SNES because I claim "I can't afford it"
The game is an indie game, it only cots $14.99 on Steam and is on sale for $11.99
http://store.steampowered.com/...
It even costs LESS in Russia and the rest of the piracy havens.
> As many on here will tell you, if you're making more than it costs to produce the game, you're a greedy bastard.
No, we don't even have that many retarded people. You expect them to break even? If they make more than 0 profit, they're greedy bastards?
You might find a more amicable audience at a site called Reddit. I highly suggest you visit there. You'll like it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Does anybody know how to get ahold of this guy? I would like to purchase at least one of the 3 keys he has given away if the game isnt too pricey. But I doubt ill ever actually play the game myself. I want do commend him for his actions though!
Here's another thing, The game only costs $14.99, full price and is currently on sale for $11.99.
http://store.steampowered.com/...
That is NOT exorbitant for an Indie game.
All he's done is enable thieves and legitimized their theft.
Agreed.
Whoosh. Theft increases the price for the rest of us. They build it in as cost of doing business.
Paradigm doesn't even seem to be my style of game play, but that's not the point.
They build it in as cost of doing business.
Build what in? They aren't losses. They're just non-sales. Unless you're only talking about shoplifting, but the stores/insurers cover those losses - not the publisher.
You give something away for free and you quickly create the exception that it should be free.
I am confident that you are surrounded by counter examples to your argument as you read this. Look around and think about it for a minute, how much of what you are using everyday is offered gratis, but manages to support a business while remaining free for you?
So a better way to run his business would be to do what exactly?
He finds his work being traded illicitly online, and you would have him tangle with paying attorneys fees, and screwing around with rights management with all of the evils that go along with it? Maybe Sue his player-base? You must be a IP lawyer.
His work was already out there, he just put a smiley on it, and reminded people that he's not some mega-corp. He even mentions his own piracy and is giving back.
And now he's got the free publicity that is the software piracy counter culture on one of the biggest site in the scene, as well as all of us discussing on unrelated sites.
If you think this wont drive sales, I would like to point out the the grateful dead's policy on bootlegs in the 60s and 70s, Metallica's monumental rise to fame in the 80s via hand traded dubs and demos, the entire PC gaming shareware market in the 90s, and even the modern trend of free for personal use $$ for production fremium models of today.
Being a pirate, he knows first hand how silly it is to have to deal with sign ins, keys, and validation for a legit purchased software while watching the pirates skate fully functional by nothing more than a doubleclicked installer.
IP of all kinds is OFTEN given away for free, people are still buying it, and I doubt he came to this decision lightly.
I can personally guarantee that this dev got at least one sale out of this that he would not have had before.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Hey, I bought Snow Leopard at retail (I think it was under $14.99), and the Mac App store gave me free upgrades from there.
That's overhead, not the marginal cost to the developer of producing a saleable unit.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
While its stupid to think everyone who pirates a game would have bought it, its pretty much equally as stupid to think no one would have.
I'm surrounded by engineers that make 130-200k and who torrent everything day in day out. Sure, they most likely would not buy EVERYTHING They torrent, but that silly episode of Game of Thrones they just HAD to watch? You could charge 500 bucks for it and they would have bought it.
I don't even want to play the game, but i just bought it because of this.
If by "stealing" you mean, "having another exact copy of something that somebody else has", then sure, I would love it if everybody "steals" and were "stolen from". If it were possible that somebody could have my car, and I get to keep it, too, I would want as many people as wanted it to have a copy. My car, like games, are capital. A system where there is more capital is a system where we're all better off. The reason why most of us don't want people taking things from us is not because we don't want other people to have stuff, but because we don't want to lose our stuff. Gaining Intellectual Property doesn't take anything away from the person who had it. It just adds to the people who have it.
But, isn't that taking the potential away from another person to make money? Yes, it is. However, there are lots of things that take away a person's ability to make money. If everybody makes horse carts and I make a car, I reduce the ability of horse cart manufacturers to make money. But what if they're really good at it and really really like to make money from it? I don't think that most people would consider that a good enough reason to not make cars. If your business model or current occupation doesn't give you profit that you want, then it's not up to other people to help you make it work. Just find another industry. Remove the artificial barriers and let people decide if and how they would like to support your work. So, reducing the ability for somebody to make money off a product by itself is not good reason to restrict an action. Creating artificial barriers to access something for the sole sake of creating a market is a bad idea and reduces overall capital. If a product is good, then there will be a natural model for it to make money.
So, what about the incentive to create good works of art or games, etc.? I believe that thinking is a more recent invention. There has been literature, works of art, games, and many other types of intellectual exchange long before there was a government restricting access to it. People sometimes make these things for fun, or as a hobby, or by commission from somebody who just wants them to exist. However, not everything that is free as in liberty is free as in beer. There's lots of FOSS out there which is made by people who do get paid for their work. Sometimes, the software is made by people who just want it to exist and be shared. Sometimes, it's to share support. Another example is convenience. I just bought a book the other day from a book store that contained nothing but works in the public domain. I knew that I could just as easily go home, take a copy of the table of contents, and download the whole thing myself and print it out if I wanted and be completely within my legal rights. But the book was there, and at a good price, and I liked it. They made a profit, and no copyright law would have been required.
Sure, there's content out there that may be better because the extra funding that copyright laws provide. Also, I think that maybe having some protections for inventors to allow them to recoup cost of development can help provide an incentive. However, I would rather have both those good things gone than to have to endure the current copyright situation where Disney holds copyrights on things generations after the creator it is dead (which they copied originally from the public domain). However, even in the most proper use of copyrights, you aren't exactly taking away a thing. It may be illegal, and that may make it wrong by definition, but it certainly is not harmful in the same sense as stealing a car, and may instead actually benefit society as a whole.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
Is there a legal way to buy and download a DRM-free copy of Game of Thrones?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
It's that simple, and Jacob knows it. He's setting the example for the greedy to pretend to take to heart.
Or maybe we just hang around a different type of people.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You call Gen. Y'ers a bunch of entitled thieves and at the same time, you think that it's wrong that working full-time jobs should pay them enough to afford food, housing, healthcare and security. You end with a note that unless you protect the fruits of your labor with government-backed force, you'll never get paid.
Does being so hypocritical cause you to bleed out of your ears?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The persons pirating don't have a license to play the game so technically they "stole" a license.
Not this again. We wouldn't have a thing called "copyright infringement" if playing a game without a license were theft. Theft is when you deprive someone of a thing.
Lets go back in time shall we? Suppose it is 199x and a new SNES game came out. Should I be allowed to shoplift the game or a SNES because I claim "I can't afford it"
Putting aside the issue of should you be allowed to, that's obviously theft, because you're depriving them of the thing. Once you take it, they can't sell it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No one "cracked" Doom. It didn't have any kind of copy protection.
But people did distribute the data files (it's been so long I can't even remember what they were.. PAKs? Yep) without permission, of course. I'd estimate that maybe 1/4 of the people I knew who had Doom had actually paid for it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Let's see what the major dictionaries say for steal:
Merriam-Webster: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
Well the word "appropriate" suggests depriving the victim of the thing, but its behind an "or" and "take" is a somewhat vague term in the context of intellectual property.
Oxford: Take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it.
Again "take" is somewhat vague, but having no intention to return the thing suggests a thing that is returnable, which doesn't really apply to things you can copy.
Cambridge: to take something without the permission or knowledge of the owner and keep it
This one is entirely fixed on that term "take." That said, Cambridge' definition of the word "take" (unlike the other two) is more specific in that it in fact removes the thing.
All of these definitions start by assuming physical items, and they get somewhat vague and open to interpretation when you try to apply them to copyable goods. That is, you can't strictly say that copyright infringement isn't "stealing," because someone else might interpret those vague terms differently in such a way that it actually is a valid definition.
And that's ignoring the fact that language changes. Or are you using a live rodent move a cursor around a wooden desktop? I'm guessing not. Most likely you're using a computer mouse to move your cursor around a virtual "desktop."
If "stealing" or "piracy" start getting used in a new context that they didn't historically have well.. that's how things go and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Even dictionary maintainers have stopped trying to dictate language and are now more focused on recording language as its actually used in the real world.
Doom was successful because its 3D environment was leaps and bounds above its competition at the time. And they were building off their reputation from Wolfenstein which was also fairly advanced for its time and also was very successful (and Commander Keen before that wasn't exactly an unknown name either!)
id only started falling down a bit around the Quake 2 time when other companies had somewhat caught up and 3D gaming stopped making the huge leaps-and-bounds advances that JC was always at the forefront of. Obviously there's been lots of incremental improvements in the two decades since, but getting better-looking 3D worlds is nowhere near as important a change as jumping from 2D to 3D -- which id led the way on, at least in terms of mainstream gaming -- over the course of only 5ish years.
There was loads of shareware games back then. It was a very popular method of distribution (for both games and apps) in the days when a major form of advertisement was getting included on a magazine's included disk. But the percentage of super successful games is probably not much different than the percentage of super successful games in other eras when other modes of distribution dominated.
It is still not stealing, it is copyright infringement. Or maybe breach of license.
Stealing actual software would be if one makes an unlicensed copy and destroys the original.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
WADs
Yeah I guess it's been a while, so they just gave people the real version of the game versus having to crack it. But that doesn't change that it was a shareware version that id distributed free of charge to hook people in, NOT the full version as was insinuated by the post that prompted my reply.
Dunbal was acting like that building in that cost doesn't impact business. If you have to build in a 2% or whatever overhead to account for thieves, that erodes your chance at making money. Both because you're assuming that people will steal it, and less people will buy it at the higher amount.
When you make a movie, create a game, record a song with the intent to sell, there are real costs to do so. Those are offset by the sales of those things. While I am sure there are cases of people creating any one of those things with the intent to lose money, for the most part they intend to make money. So whether the budget is $10,000 or $500,000,000, they do so with the projection and the intent that they'll make more than they put in. If they need to sell 5000 units to make their money back, then someone getting the entertainment value out of it without paying for it does negatively affect the bottom line. Yes, there are always those who argue that they wouldn't have paid for it anyway, they just wouldn't have seen/played/listened to it if they had to pay for it. But that still does count as taking something without paying...aka stealing. Just because it's easy and doesn't result in the physical transfer of property from the owner to you doesn't make it morally okay. But it's not worth the content producers time to seek prosecution of most cases. And that still doesn't mean it's right.
1. Create game
2. Pirate crack game
3. Give pirates a few legit copies
4. Story gets picked up on Slashdot
5. Free advertising!
6. Profit?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The people that don't buy are still not part of the formula - you only have to reach a certain number of people that do buy. That's it.
Yes they are still part of it. Out of X number of potential customers Y of them will buy it, and Z won't. It matters that some percentage of Z take it without paying for it. Yes, you can still reach your goals with Y, but maybe you won't. Or are you thinking a company or person should be okay as long as the sell enough to pay for the cost of making whatever it is? $100,000,000 in profit means a sequel may be made, $1 in profit probably means it won't. Quit pretending like piracy isn't stealing, we all know it is.
I'm not saying piracy isn't stealing. Just that they were not lost customers. They are mostly people that would probably never have bought anyway.
Lost potential customers. Once they steal it, they aren't gonna buy it..most likely. I have no statistics to reference for what percentage of pirates would have considered buying what they stole, but I'm willing to bet it's enough that it would make a difference to the bottom line.