Game Dev Tycoon piracy article

First I'd heard of this game, loved Game Dev Story so going to get this. If this was just a marketing campaign it was a good one so all credit to them for that. But I suspect they realised it could serve both a marketing purpose and a moral message, again fair play as far as I'm concerned. Would far prefer to throw a few £ to these guys than £35 to EA for the garbage they churn out (Sim City I'm looking at you).

Oh and for those guys complaining about only 3 installs - that's like $2/install worst case scenario, and they've promised a steam download if they get approved.
 
Is nobody else realizing that basically his entire marketing strategy was through torrent sites. I don't know about you guys but I didn't know this game existed until now. So is there any surprise that you have 93% piracy rate when the only people who know of your game are those who see it on a torrent site.

IMO he's doing more damage to the gaming industry himself than those pirates are because ****ers who love DRM now are going to point to this and say "hey look, the games industry has a 90% piracy rate, lets do more and more intrusive DRM please" and slowly suck the life out of both themselves and their customers.

Don't get me wrong, I think piracy is wrong of course, but this kind of thinking is from the same people who think piracy really is a 1:1 sales loss, when it 100% isn't, and that is what has led us to excessive DRM, clueless developers and MORE piracy. It's like a never ending cycle of piracy breeding stupidity in developers and their attempts to curb it with draconian strategies serves only to drive more to piracy, rather than going the CDProjekt/Humble Bundle route of zero DRM or Pay-what-you can policies.
 
Dureth said:
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.
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Its a good point, but sales spike or no, if the game is ****e then nothing will help them in the long run.
 
People give lots of reasons for pirating games, it seems to me these developers have done everything they can to please the customers, price is low, no DRM, multiple platforms etc and yet is has still been massively pirated.

I just don't see what excuses people can use for pirating this particular game and personally I believe it pretty much shows the majority of people will pirate a game and then make excuses later about why they did.

Its a shame because a lot of the reasons people use, I believe, are valid points i.e. restrictive DRM, online connections only etc and this just goes to show that it is not the true reason in a large majority of cases.
 
Drukk said:
People give lots of reasons for pirating games, it seems to me these developers have done everything they can to please the customers, price is low, no DRM, multiple platforms etc and yet is has still been massively pirated.

I just don't see what excuses people can use for pirating this particular game and personally I believe it pretty much shows the majority of people will pirate a game and then make excuses later about why they did.

Its a shame because a lot of the reasons people use, I believe, are valid points i.e. restrictive DRM, online connections only etc and this just goes to show that it is not the true reason in a large majority of cases.
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As has been said, this is at least in part a marketing scheme. Doesn't stop it being amusing of course.

Look at the player numbers for the piracy figures totals - 260-odd actual players. I don't really think you can draw too many conclusions from a game with sales figures that "high".
 
I very much doubt this game would have been pirated AT ALL if he hadn't put it up himself, because of the lack of exposure, apparent lack of customer base and the existence of a mobile version (the original). So again, like I said, the lack of marketing combined with immediate marketing through torrent sites with a huge userbase = huge pirate ratio, which is not indicative of industry pirate rates but because of this guy will be used as such by the suits.
 
Bought this a 2 months ago off the windows store, really fun game and just like a updated version of Game Dev Story on PC, good to sink some time into when you have nothing else to do
 
Making your game available on 0-Day as a pirate copy does nothing to help solidify the statistics they are generating.

High number yes - As high as it would be if they did not publish the pirate game to every torrent site going themselves? Who knows!
 
I don't think they set out with the aim of accruing accurate statistical data on average piracy rates, they've merely published what they have seen because it was interesting.

They don't claim it to be representative of a regular game/scenario, so i'm not sure why people are treating it as if they have.
 
Munimentum said:
Is nobody else realizing that basically his entire marketing strategy was through torrent sites. I don't know about you guys but I didn't know this game existed until now. So is there any surprise that you have 93% piracy rate when the only people who know of your game are those who see it on a torrent site.
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Yeah I too am not sure what this experiment is trying to prove. So you upload a cracked game to a public torrent site with millions of users and it gets pirated. Go figure.

I think what they're just trying to do is get in front of the piracy train momentarily, so when people hit this problem a handful of them buy the real game instead of waiting for a real scene release to upload.

As for this little trick they've done, it's nothing new.

Dark Star One - blurred screen, inflated prices.
GTA - drunk cam.

Amongst others.

I think the article is quite sensationalist, "piracy bankrupts companies" etc. And I agree, they're promoting the wrong message.
 
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