Just a desperate attempt to get attention so the bad game would sell few more copies.
Pirates are potential customers, not a threat. I like being careful with my money, I won't give it to someone who doesn't deserve a penny from it.
If the game is good, it will sell. How hard is that to understand.
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"Pirates are potential customers"
I would disagree somewhat. Many pirates have 0 plans on ever buying games because they can get them for free, so why bother paying? Hell, I've seen many pirates call people dumb for buying single player games.
However, there are many people who pirate just to see if they can run it/see if they would actually enjoy playing the game. Though honestly I think this percentage is a lot smaller than the people who pirate just because they don't want to pay for anything.
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Not really. Many pirates like to pirate a game to see if it's going to work on their computer and later purchase the game. I know many people who do this in order to save on bad optimised games or games that are completely garbage or are made by Peter Molyneux.
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Piracy is only acceptable for that plus if you are unable to purchase the game in your country or it is no longer in production.
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Not really, Do you know why this is rampant in android?
First they need to know if they can run the app smoothly, If you bought a game that your device can't run, your absolutely screwed, you can even refund (see 2nd point)
Second google play stupid refund policy (15 min window upon purchasing, really?), if it's finished, you cannot refund it anymore
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I know nothing about the app market. So can't really comment back at that lol.
But that all sounds pretty bullshit. 15 minutes is pretty awful. Should be like an hour at least or something.
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I sometimes will test a game before buying it. That said I rarely buy games at full price...
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The news article says it all. 93.6% piracy rate. If even 1% of the pirates decide to buy the game, that's a massive % increase in sales. The way I see it, companies should be fighting to promote their stuff on torrent sites. If even as little as 10% of pirates have the means to actually buy games, getting them to do so would as much as double sales.
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93.6% TPB downloaded rate, NOT piracy rate. A distinction must be made because it was the devs themselves that released the torrent literally right when their game store opened.
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lol I pirated minecraft, just bought it last night to show my support, and get a skin and to play online. When I pirate, I averagely stop playing because I don't like it, or I end up buying it any ways. So I disagree completely.
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But why? Throwing facts without any actual figures or articles to support them is a great way of discussing. Isn't it?
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I did some heavy research on piracy and its effects on the developers. It is found from many sources that the majority (but not all) people who pirate do not spend more or less money than they would beforehand, but simply the stuff they pirated was simply complimentary. However, they also never intentionally buy what they pirated later, anyways. So if piracy did not exist, it probably would impact the devs very little if at all. It is worth noting that it is a vital point that pirates could become fans too and buy any sequels in the future, or even better, talk about your product and sell it to other people. The topic is still in need on unbiased research, but I know for myself I never bought what I already pirated, but I never spent less money in doing so. However, I pirate because they want too much money for their shitty games I plan to play for a week at most.
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Reddit was ahead of you.
And yeah, people like Notch gets it. Piracy isn't that much of a threat. My friend pirates regularly, but only to test games. If he likes what he plays he will buy it, if not delete it.
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He's right. He said it on twitter I believe during the alpha phase(when it was already very popular) and said if people continued pirating he would stop making updates for the game.
He only "supports" pirates now (I imagine.) is to make him look like a good person, and he knows people are buying it anyways.
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Maybe they looked at pirate sites and saw how many times it was downloaded that day? (No idea. Never pirated before really.)
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It's even in the demo. I just blocked their use-date-stream. Calling for nice customer treatment. I have seen Indie-Games asking me if I want to connect to their Servers for giving them data. But I guess when you want to show how bad pirates are to your 1:1 copied gameidea. Its okay.
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I read this few seconds ago, my friend just send this picture to me. THIS IS EPIC i can't stop laughing
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After one day on sale, Greenheart says, 93.6% of players had downloaded the illegal version rather than buying it legally.
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.
Those "heaps of games/apps" also ask whether or not you want to. I wonder if a pirate could take legal action against them for illegally collecting data.
I have to question the logic behind this and whether it even proves anything. I had never heard of this game before the article and I imagine most scene groups weren't going to be competing over who released this one first. If the game hadn't been available for free, who knows how many people would have bought it. There website is currently down and this link clearly shows they only now posted mirrors to their demo. Assuming the website has been having issues since launch, the only way to test the game would have been through the torrent.
Good on them for not being uptight about piracy, but I really do believe their 93.6% statistic is skewed.
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Getting data that way tends to be in lots of programs, and is mentioned in that text before installing pretty much everything that no one ever reads.
Not like it is something you don't deal with already. Steam does that kind of thing just tracking gameplay stats.
It is also useful in identifying problems that users might have.
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i use to think croteam had the upper hand with his drm but this, man this is more brilliant.
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Adding an extra feature not in the retail version would likely add to piracy instead of decrease it.
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If the devs release a "pirated" free version, is it really pirating to download it?
This seems to be the scenario to me: devs release free to play version of the game via torrent. Then when too many people start downloading the game, they complain that they are losing sales, but conveniently not admitting that it was almost entirely their own fault.
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Someone would have released a pirate version regardless and I doubt the devs made the pirate copy official. The people who want to buy the game wouldn't be googling 'pirate Game Dev Sim' anyway.
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I think this version was released on TPB? Quite a few indie devs have released torrents officially there. Regardless, even if it was not official, I doubt in a court of law someone could ever be found guilty for downloading this version - purely because the devs were the ones that uploaded the torrent and encouraged people to download.
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I would never have learned about this situation without this thread. The last one links to a blog post that is currently down.
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What escapes developers is that these tricks cost them customers. A lot of sales come from people who pirate a game and like it enough to pay for it. And pirates don't differentiate between a pirated and purchased version - if the pirated one is broken, the assumption is that the purchased one is just as broken.
This also ties into rushed, broken releases. While companies can patch a game after release and they'll have already gotten early purchasers' money, the pirates who play before patched torrents are uploaded are highly unlikely to buy the game.
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On the other hand, I bet 99% of the people that know of this game, know of it because of this stunt. I know I never would have heard of it if it weren't for the press they're receiving because of this. And now all the pirates know it's not a bug, since every gaming site under the sun is covering this story.
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What I was thinking about while writing that were the unreported tricks. The ones almost nobody will ever know about, done by developers who are simply mad at pirates and not doing it as a publicity stunt.
Edit: Stuff like this.
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Well, not quite. It's just that the PC gaming market is several times larger than any other, so companies can, and constantly do, make a profit even with 90% piracy. To re-post what I said above: The way I see it, companies should be fighting over ad space on torrent sites. It's where they're guaranteed to reach a large percent of their potential customers.
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I'm sure that so many people would actually take the time and bandwidth to download the game if it was so shitty. Also I'm sure the ratio of pirated copies to actual number of sales is the deciding factor whether or not to develop a game, instead of simply forecasting whether the sales will exceed the cost to produce (which piracy totally affects). [/sarcasm]
Try again, but this time with logic.
The level of piracy for a given title is dominated by popular interest towards the game amplified by traditional market action: Price is negligible, supply is a non-issue, demand skyrockets accordingly. Quality is a determining factor only insomuch as it applies to popular interest in a title. Plenty of awesome games have been pirated to hell and back (Witcher 2, World of Goo, et al.). Others have been complete shlock and yet also are pirated (Crysis 2, anyone?). But I'm pretty sure you'll find it hard to find a torrent of, say, Spaceforce: Rogue Universe, because, well, no one ever heard of it.
As for the lost sales/potential customer issue: Pirates aren't lost sales, but niether are they potential customers. (At least, the vast majority of them.) They're pirating the game because they care to spend time on it, but not actual dosh. No price point, however low but non-zero, will change that. Piracy is not like anything ever seen before in human history. It's not something to be celebrated, but it's not a problem to be solved either. It's simply a symptom of applying traditional business practices to what is actually a post-scarce economy, and everyone is trying to find the best way to profitably harness that fact. Some, like Activision, Ubisoft, EA, etc. are trying to inflict artificial scarcity with always-online schemes (which is fucking backwards). Others are being more sensible by harnessing Kickstarter (eliminating the need for traditional sales to cover costs) or with F2P models (harnessing the true motives behind piracy in their favor: people are willing to spend time before they spend money). What the best strategy actually is has probably not been discovered yet. It probably involves stripping down draconian copyright laws though.
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Pro tip: their numbers are completely made up as usual when it comes to piracy statistics as there is no way to actually tell who really downloaded the game and who didn't.
This game isn't anywhere near interesting enough to be pirated this hard, because, according to you, AAA blockbuster games would have an even higher rate. If 95%+ piracy sounds accurate to you, there'd have to be 120 million CoD players (I think it sold about 6M, didn't it?) which sounds a little, just A LITTLE exaggerated, no? I mean, there's games with 0 entry hurdle that are dafuq popular like LoL or the likes that don't have anywhere near that number, how would a game that eliminates the playerbase of just not wealthy enough to afford a system & buying the game surpass that?
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First off, if you bothered to actually dig into the story you'd find that the devs uploaded the 'pirate' copy in the first place. It's entirely reasonable to think they have the real numbers, and 19 illegitimate downloads for every valid purchase is not entirely unexpected for an indie title, particularily since the game was 'leaked' ahead of its actual release date.
And I don't know how you could come to conclusion that I said that AAA should be pirated more than 96% since I was merely refuting your statement that GDT "must be shit" to have such a huge piracy rate. Again, use logic. Of course piracy rates don't scale the way you just painted. But piracy sure as fuck doesn't scale negatively with quality as you had originally insinuated. And even then, the issue of actual piracy proportions does not correlate very well between indie and AAA to begin with. Let me illustrate why.
Ignoring that CoD is a bad example to begin with since it's a) heavly multiplayer focused* and b) can't truly be classed as AAA, let's use it to draw a comparison. Take, say, Defenders Quest. That game sold a little over 40k copies. Now if we estimate a more conservative 80% piracy rate for that particular game, that means there's about 160k pirated downloads. These numbers are shit compared to millions* of downloads for AAA titles. Taking your 6M CoD sales and assuming a measly 20% piracy rate, that's still one and a half million illegal downloads. It would dwarf DQ's entire playing population, both legit and illegit. What you apparently failed to grasp is that the actual volume of illegal downloads scales with popular interest, not the proportion*.
Multplayer games are not as heavily pirated as single player titles simply because of server side controls. Playing a pirated MP game requires either the dev/pub's network infrastructure to be insecure so that even pirated copies could connect (ex. Borderlands' early days), or there to be an alternate infrastructure entirely to connect to (I think MW1 had one). This is why Diablo 3 is always online, and even part of why Steam was invented* (to regulate the CS population).
**CoD is big. It's not a AAA series, it's an industry juggernaught. It's sales figures often match those of its AAA competitors several times over.
"I mean, there's games with 0 entry hurdle that are dafuq popular like LoL or the likes that don't have anywhere near that number, how would a game that eliminates the playerbase of just not wealthy enough to afford a system & buying the game surpass that?"
What the fuck mutated strain of English is this, and what were you trying to say?
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Entirely axiomatic points leading nowhere but to semireligious belief in whatever they fed you. Nice work, marketing, one more swallower. Since you're not even trying, I won't either. I'll just keep laughing at you for actually believing that someone who uploads a file knows how often it's being downloaded.
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Again drawing conclusions by twisting your opponent's points into a flaming strawman while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge arguments against your flawed reasoning. Congratulations, you're either a troll or a cretin.
It's trivial to track a torrent swarm's number of connections. It's also easy for them to implement a tracking system in the program that will call home if the person is online (which is almost certain). Which, wait a sec, they said they did. "By tracking anonymous usage data, the developer found that 3,104 players opted to pirate the game, while only 214 users paid $7.99 for a legitimate copy." True we have only their word that those are the actual numbers or that this was how they came by them but seriously, are you really going to question whether that bit's an outright fabrication when the whole thing's been turned into a publicity stunt? Do you really think the dev's would have to lie about the number of suckers they caught in their honey trap?
You're saying stupid shit left and right while dissing other peoples' attempts at rational discourse. Sit down before you fall down.
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Nice one.
I think that photo of the thread about some guy talking about the game how he couldn't make a profit etc... was staged. Very good grammar and he's trying to make some points very subtly which suggests that user knowingly made that thread pretending to use the pirated version.
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Good point, someone that ignorant would likely have no punctuation, no capitalization, and 50% of the words would be spelled wrong or have a Z where an S should be!
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Stop right there criminal scum! Nobody pirates games on my watch! I'l confiscate your stolen game. Now you pay the fine or serve your time.
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Imagine if the severity of piracy charges stemmed from the total weight of what was pirated.
If I could go back in time, I would totally screw over today's MPAA/RIAA by proposing such a law during the formative years of the USA. As mp3s have almost zero weight, no time would be served for downloading the entire internet.
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From what I have seen, most of the people that torrent have no interest in purchasing the game they've torrented, and the small percentage that do purchase it later will not make up for the large number of people that have illegally acquired the game. This is likely one of the reasons why a lot of games are getting expensive, they used to not cost $40-$60 new. IMO, their showing the pirates what they are doing to companies may actually help the situation, but is more likely not going to be all that strong. Once pirates hear that there is this corrupted version going around, they will either highlight the ones that are not corrupted, or just avoid that one game completely. It is nice, however, that this is a way to get at those pirates without their customers being part of the collateral damage........hear that EA?
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Angry rant about devs who think they're important and piracy in the form of a wall of text warning:
Again with that "piracy is bad" BS and the developer quietly disclaiming in the end that he "isn't mad at pirates"... Well, if he "isn't mad", why did they go trough the trouble of setting up this whole stunt in the first place? Obviously they found piracy to be a threat, so they DO care about piracy. Like Peroxide pointed out, the whole thing sounds kinda set up. If few people had access or even knew of the game's existence apart from the torrent site, why should they have more sales? When someone sees a game they have never heard of before on a torrent site, I doubt their first thought is "Oh, look, a game a I didn't know about! Let's find where it came from and buy it without knowing anything about it!" NO... Now, I can only talk from personal experience and I don't know exactly what shady people use TPB mostly because I never bothered with it and the torrent site I used to use is a lot better, but my usual routine was like this: Check the site. If there are new stuff check the screenshots and see if the game looks interesting(AAA titles are easy to differentiate from... well, non-AAA titles by their ranking and number of downloads usually). If it does, try it! Now, personally I would instantly jump at something called... say: "Orcs Must Die!" because it sounds like a bag of FUN and the screenshots show it as a bad of FUN and it DID turn out to be a bag of FUN.(And because of that it was one of the first stuff I bought on Steam, completed to 100%(again) and then bought several more copies to share with other people. I don't think the devs will hold it against me for pirating the first one, eh?) Then if I see something called "Game Dev Tycoon" and look for screenshots of it... and what do I see? A freaking office and bedroom in all of them! That's it! Why would something like that make me wanna buy the game with my extremely low budget? So on the off chance that I wanna try it out, because obviously not everyone thinks like me and some people found it to look at least playable or just didn't care if they'll enjoy it or not. Lets assume I try it out. Then what do I get and anyone else who showed interest in it get(lets just talk about other people because I'd avoid it like the plague)? Well, if the answer is a shitty game no-one would want, then obviously they WON'T buy a legit copy. Why would they?! Or maybe they'll get a game that they kinda like but was set up to fail while at some point throwing a semi-critical message for you that you don't even know why it's there. Oh, did you know that most "pirates" "pirate" because that's they only way they'll ever get the game, or are hardly informed with how game companies hate them, or even KNOW they can get games at other places for cheap? Oh, sorry, forgot to mention that. So, why the hell do devs expect more people to buy their obviously non-famous game when MOST of the people who even know about it are the "pirates" who regularly check the torrent site? So, I say they're using that statistic only so far as it serves their own agenda. You know, that's how EVERYONE uses statistics. And they're posting that on ING as some kind of self-advertisement to make them look good, when by all means, it shouldn't. But since people are naive, it works and people believe them! [sarcasm]Yay, goodie!!![/sarcasm]
[/sort of end of ranting]
Seriously, as long as people keep claiming that piracy is bad, I'll keep claiming it's not that bad as they say. Sure, there are people who abuse it. People who pirate cheap indie games... I've heard there were even people who pirated the humble bundle for fucking sake. But ask yourself this: Did the people pirating them KNOW it was harming poor developers? Would the ones who knew have bough the bundle for more than 0.01$ anyway? No, they wouldn't. The uninformed ones will keep being uninformed(as I was) until they get out of piracy(if they do at all). The jerkass ones will remain jerkasses, nothing can change that, regardless of how publishers try to force them to actually buy the game. But neither of them would even BOTHER with games if they didn't have easy access to them. I would have never played games if my sister didn't easily have access to a pirated copy of a game when I was sort-of little and still inexperienced, when we got our first computer and I would have never then had access to more games to get into them. And I guess I wouldn't be here then now, would I?(Also I wouldn't be studying programming since I discovered I'm good at it while wanting to make my own game. Nope, my life would be completely different, probably to the worse seeing as how I suck at everything else.) So, anyone claiming piracy is the bane of all gaming, just SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY.
That is all... for now.
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tldr.
Just kidding :3
I agree.
I used to pirate video games when I was young, mainly because it was free, I had no money, and I liked video games xD.
Then, I realized how hard it can be to code a simple-seeming game in school (a platformer), and then, that made me realize...
Since then, I've been pretty much buying/trading for games, or just hoping for them in giveaways, like SG's :D
It also makes a game more satisfying, in my opinion.
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We all pirated games when we were younger and we all sort of transitioned onto some original gaming platform - be it Steam, Desura, GoG, Origin, uPlay or just good ol' boxes. Those who say they didn't pirate, either lived with really liberate parents or are simply lying. The thing that people don't understand is that many games are sold because of the existence of sharing sites. They expect gamers to believe them blindly? What do they take us for? Idiots? How many times have developers promised something and completely and utterly failed to deliver? How many times have the things we saw in trailers changed drastically? How many times did some Peter Molyneux type appear out of nowhere promising revolution in gaming only to fall on his face? More times than we want to remember! That is the biggest problem! Perhaps, if we were facing some giant ass developer like projekt Red (I apologise if I wrote it bad) then, they can have my money, or (in my case) Blizzard, they can have my money. But to trust, even one cent, to some ass who completely ripped of an older game and in the midst of indie game wave, published his own game hoping to make some quick buck? My answer is - no! Not because he's an ignorant prick. Not because he's dumbass who knows how to do nothing but to steal. I say no because I'm tired of everyone thinking that gaming industry is some sort of get-rich-quickly-easy-scheme thing. Where every douche thinks that if he invests three weeks into making game thinks he's goddamn ProjektRed or Blizzard!
TL;DR
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Of course people pirated the Humble Bundle. A large percentage of pirates, possibly the majority, have no way of paying for stuff online. Bank accounts, let alone debit cards (and let's not even mention credit cards) are uncommon and hard to access throughout most of the world, whereas internet providers are far more widespread.
Other than that, good points.
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Yes, those are the people who can't buy it. I'm talking about the ones who can, but pirate it anyway. Too many people think it's because of some evil greed or whatever and it might as well be the case sometimes, but what annoys me to no end is the fact that those people believe ALL "pirates" are like that and everything "pirate" is evil either due to ignorance or... hell, I don't know why else they'd think that. Probably because the gaming industry has labeled piracy as something irredeemably evil... which again goes down to ignorance of the people who believe it I guess.
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yeap
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