Game Dev Tycoon piracy article

Shamikebab

Shamikebab

Shamikebab

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An interesting story of how this small developer have treated game piracy. Quite a few games have used the 'small, game breaking flaw' in their games for piracy releases but this could be the best yet :D

http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/


Site appears to be having problems, here is a cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.greenheartgames.com%2F2013%2F04%2F29%2Fwhat-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy%2F&aq=f&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.greenheartgames.com%2F2013%2F04%2F29%2Fwhat-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy%2F&aqs=chrome.0.57j58.1173&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
 
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I must admit i too at some point downloaded a game and made that mistake. Im sure everyone here has at least done it once. But now owning an actual game and a box with the manual feels so much better. I know a lot of companies are trying to get rid of this way and go for digital copies only which is a shame.

This has to be the best anti download system ever lol
 
That's pretty funny, reminds me of the days when you had to crack the manual out to get past the first 20 turns on civ and so on.

Pretty depressing so many players just whinged about the cracked version and not really seeing irony like that.
 
P3N9U1N said:
I suspect some people think it's just part of the game :D
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Indeed they will. And they will probably tell their friends: "don't buy that game, it's rubbish, it's impossible to get past a certain point".

It's a clever (and very ironic) way to punish the pirates, but it's too subtle.
 
No easy answers here - are the pirated copies the same as 1:1 lost sales? Probably not? Of the 90% plus who pirated it though, how many played it enough to justify a purchase? Sounds like a significant number if they have forum posts asking them why their cracked copies weren't working.

OTOH, I have never even heard of this game - I would be interested to hear how it has been marketed etc.

At the end of the day, Piracy is certainly one place you can point the finger at for lost revenue, but certainly not the only one.
 
Those people posting those complaints must be as stupid as hell... I liked the one on the Sins of Solar Empire forum recently of a guy complaining that he needs a manual download of the latest patch because he doesn't have steam - Sins being a steam only title. They really are just scumbags through and through.
 
Random Guy said:
OTOH, I have never even heard of this game - I would be interested to hear how it has been marketed etc.
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I think you have just experienced one of the most genius, small scale, near free marketing experiments from a small two man indie team ever attempted. I would not be surprised to see sales of this game shoot through the roof as well as creating a large swell of goodwill towards the developers and providing a solid base of people who have now heard of them, giving their next game an even better chance.
 
Man, I am in stitches.

Good publicity though, I liked the idea of game dev story I gather this is much the same?
 
Article said:
You can use it on up to three of your computers for your own use
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And here lies the problem. That tells me that if I do any upgrades to my computer or if I reinstall windows I would lose one of those installs. Personally I don't upgrade my computer much but there are a lot of people that do. As they have stressed in their own article for the pirating side of the argument, just one person doing this sort of thing isn't such a bad thing, but when you have twenty plus games doing this then it is a major hassle to keep track of every game that has this style of DRM (or whatever the term is for it) and then uninstall it in such a way that lets you reinstall it again without using another of those three installs. I believe Spore did this as well (amongst other things)

/rant

*edit*
just realised there was a free demo so i deleted the edit
 
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Google cache version worked for me, very clever and it puts the message across well. The snapshot of the guy complaining "I made a good game, why are people pirating it?!" made me laugh.

Good on the dev tbh, as he says if people genuinely can't afford the game he doesn't have a quarrel but he's right a lot of the people who pirate the game are probably enjoying it and could easily afford the $8 price tag.
 
Reaper 392 said:
And here lies the problem. That tells me that if I do any upgrades to my computer or if I reinstall windows I would lose one of those installs. Personally I don't upgrade my computer much but there are a lot of people that do. As they have stressed in their own article for the pirating side of the argument, just one person doing this sort of thing isn't such a bad thing, but when you have twenty plus games doing this then it is a major hassle to keep track of every game that has this style of DRM (or whatever the term is for it) and then uninstall it in such a way that lets you reinstall it again without using another of those three installs. I believe Spore did this as well (amongst other things)
Click to expand...

It is DRM Free :|
I would assume the "three of your computers" is a license thing, not DRM. Relying on you just agreeing to only have 3 copies installed at any given time.
 
93% piracy, that's really rather sad. The thing is, you see a lot of people trying to justify pirating big game releases by saying that the publishers/devs will sell so many copies that they'll be making loads of money anyway, which to an extent is true. But when it's a couple of indie devs who have obviously poured their savings, time and effort into making and releasing it, you have to wonder how those same people justify it to themselves.
 
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