Indie game developer strikes back at pirates

[hammock]

"Illegal" would probably be a better word if we have to get semantic. Doesn't matter what your personal feelings on the matter might be, the law is against it. End of story.

The irony of that coming from Zaeed Massani :P

OT: Quite the funny joke, shame it decided to take the argument to extreme circumstances though. I now dislike the developer for it.

[Deleted]

Either way. The people that work to make those lose out. Stealing is stealing.

This is ridiculous. If it was actually possible to duplicate cars at zero cost, are you saying that doing so should be illegal so as to protect the income of multinational auto manufacturers? Nonsense. If technology came to exist that duplicating cars was near free it would be outrageous for GM to continue charging $50k per car. Such a tremendous change in the manufacturing game would simply mean that the industry would have to change irrevocably, and that the old model is simply no longer viable.

It is not the market's responsibility to ensure businesses are profitable, it is businesses' responsibility to ensure that they are profitable.

[Deleted]

This is ridiculous. If it was actually possible to duplicate cars at zero cost, are you saying that doing so should be illegal so as to protect the income of multinational auto manufacturers? Nonsense. If technology came to exist that duplicating cars was near free it would be outrageous for GM to continue charging $50k per car. Such a tremendous change in the manufacturing game would simply mean that the industry would have to change irrevocably, and that the old model is simply no longer viable.

It is not the market's responsibility to ensure businesses are profitable, it is businesses' responsibility to ensure that they are profitable.

But in most countries it's illegal to share software like that. I don't really know why businesses should automatically assume that everyone is going to break the law and take their work for free. It's not even a moral thing really, it's just a law. You don't even have to agree with it, but it still exists.

So instead of talking like this is how things are, you can talk like this is how you'd want things to be. And it'll only change when businesses want it to change, not if only consumers do.

[Orange Joe]

This is ridiculous. If it was actually possible to duplicate cars at zero cost, are you saying that doing so should be illegal so as to protect the income of multinational auto manufacturers? Nonsense. If technology came to exist that duplicating cars was near free it would be outrageous for GM to continue charging $50k per car. Such a tremendous change in the manufacturing game would simply mean that the industry would have to change irrevocably, and that the old model is simply no longer viable.

It is not the market's responsibility to ensure businesses are profitable, it is businesses' responsibility to ensure that they are profitable.

Making game has more costs than just printing it on a CD. If you think it is so cheap to make a game have at it. Get back at me once you have made the engine and see the real costs involved.

[Deleted]

While your code of practice is honourable- this is not how business is supposed to work. Customers don't pay for stuff according to a code of honour; they pay because a business offers goods or services at a worthwhile price. That you've been put in the situation where you have to make up your own rules of when and how to pay indicates a failure on the part of the companies you're paying.

Businesses need to change their models as such that 100% piracy isn't a problem, as such that piracy is antithetical to what they do (or amounts to little more than social media buzz). Piracy itself is merely the internet doing distribution better than the companies are themselves. The inescapable implication of the internet is that titles can't really have meaningful pricetags as if they were standalone goods, because they're not; not anymore. That doesn't mean money can't change hands, just that it has to happen somewhere else along the line, perhaps before (crowdfunding, advertising, subscription), or after (freemium, microtransactions), or both. With such a powerful and inexpensive distribution method as the internet, the object should be to get as many titles to whoever wants them as easily as possible. Money can come before or after that.

You're right in a way. If I think about it, I pirate stuff because I don't trust the marketing of companies. I know marketing in general is put to trick you into buying something even if you might not need it, so I want to try the product and be spared of the commercials about it, I want to test if it does what it says it does. It's like testing a car in a way in my view. If I want to buy a car, the vendor can tell me anything, until I see that the things he talks about are at least partially true by taking it for a test drive and testing how much it consumes, etc. I won't buy. Because I don't trust companies, since they've tried to fool me several times until now.

The only way to buy this game was through their website which might resulted in the low sales. For most digital sales, Steam accounts to 50% of all sales.

True. I voted their game to go in Steam though in the meantime, maybe it does and they'll get the needed boost of sales.

[Granyala]

I love the irony of someone who obviously pirated the game trying to research DRM in the game

Yep.. I really had to laugh IRL when I read that line.

[juzalol]

It's quite an original marketing strategy.

You don't put your game on any digital distribution system, don't advertise your game and
put a torrent up which is the only publicity it has had.

Now the game is available on popular torrent sites with millions of users and on their own website
with like 5 daily visitors. 97% of people end up pirating it? That's shocking....

Then release an article about these "shocking" numbers to gain publicity and free advertising for
your game.

That's actually a pretty good plan.

I mean if you go to sell your jewelry only on the darkest alley possible at 2 am the chances are that
97% of your stuff gets stolen. That doesn't mean 97% of people are robbers.

[Deleted]

But in most countries it's illegal to share software like that. I don't really know why businesses should automatically assume that everyone is going to break the law and take their work for free. It's not even a moral thing really, it's just a law. You don't even have to agree with it, but it still exists.

So instead of talking like this is how things are, you can talk like this is how you'd want things to be. And it'll only change when businesses want it to change, not if only consumers do.

You make a fair point. I freely acknowledge that piracy is against the law, and it is illegal to pirate things. Sometime laws are stupid (such as handstands being illegal in missouri), sometimes laws are immoral (such as sodomy being illegal in many places). We all know what the laws are, and I feel that they are absolutely immaterial to the debate of whether piracy is wrong, or should be stopped.

The point I wildly disagree with you on is that businesses must consent to a change in laws. If this were the case, there'd not have been any labour reform since the industrial revolution, slavery would still be in place, CFCs wouldn't be banned, there would be no health and safety regulation, and (ironically) free trade would be nonexistent (domestic industry is invariably pro-tariff). The Catholic Church was the sole publisher in Europe when the printing press was invented- they had it outlawed on the premise that just anyone could publish any kind of heretical books they pleased. It didn't last.

The laws exists to exert justice, not subsidise profits. In this case, yes, big business is buying legislation antithetical to the natural fair functioning of the free market. It's not the first time, and it won't be the last. Such ill-gotten legislation persists only so long as the corruption behind it can sustain it or as far as ordinary people are willing to bear it (usually not long). The 'consumers' as you put it vastly vastly outweigh 'businesses' in terms of representative government; presuming 'representation' equates to votes and not dollars (which by the letter of the law it does, but in practice not always). Elected officials are sworn to act in the interests of their electorate, not their campaign contributors- yet as we know this is not always the case.

To your statement that Piracy is against the law, I respond that the law is criminal (i.e. it violates the premise and function upon which the judiciary is founded and is supposed to serve). Anti-piracy laws have one function, and that is to protect the profit of the few at the expense of the many. It runs contrary to the economic realities, and will by necessity buckle against the tide of history.

Making game has more costs than just printing it on a CD. If you think it is so cheap to make a game have at it. Get back at me once you have made the engine and see the real costs involved.

Static costs, that do not increase over time. Additionally engines can and most frequently are licenced for exactly the reason you say- the vast majority of developers are not megastudios capable of developing thier own engine, so they pay a one time fee to someone like Unity to use their engine. Unity doesn't even makes games, they just sell their engine. The wonder of capitalism.

Anyhow, your fallacious argument aside, you seem to think I am saying companies shouldn't be able to turn a profit from their games. They should; but they need to use a profitable business model with respect to the economic realities the internet presents. When asia started to manufacture things cheaper then western manufacturers could compete with, the industry (successfully) lobbied for large tariffs to be put upon imported goods so that domestic industry could compete. Actually these tariffs were anticompetitive, and amounted to an internationally uncompetitive industry focussed inefficiently on areas subsidised by government tariffs, and higher costs for hundreds of millions of ordinary people so thousands could keep doing business like they used to. We realise now that it is better business, better for consumers, and better for countries if uncompetitive industries are allowed to fail, so that comparative advantage is encouraged through specialisation.

[DingoUnlimited]

Relative to CPI and inflation, taking into account a base year of anywhere from 1980-90, the real price of games have actually gone down some. Some n64 sold for over 60 dollars, so game costs has not really changed with inflation. Just by using a simple inflation calculator online, one can see $60 of 1997 dollars would be worth $85.71 in 2012, and $60 of 2012 dollars would be worth $42.00 in 1997. This is a very simplistic way of looking at things, but inflation is constant and assuming most other variables with the monetary system hold true (like adjusted CPI, etc.), games were just more expensive back in the day.

(please don't rip apart my Econ 101 logic)

[Deleted]

To your statement that Piracy is against the law, I respond that the law is criminal (i.e. it violates the premise and function upon which the judiciary is founded and is supposed to serve). Anti-piracy laws have one function, and that is to protect the profit of the few at the expense of the many. It runs contrary to the economic realities, and will by necessity buckle against the tide of history.

Who's expense? Certainly not the consumers. You seem to have this ideal that all software ever made is some kind of human right and charging money for it should be criminal.

While anti-piracy laws basically only protect the profits of the businesses, you need to remember that with those profits come jobs. So they indirectly also protect the employment of many. And when I said piracy would only be made legal if the software companies would want it to be so, I certainly did not mean that all laws work that way. Nor that they should. I just have a hard time believing that piracy would be made legal before the companies would be ready to make profit on it. It would make no sense and benefit absolutely nobody. Not even the pirates, as they'd no longer have anything to pirate.

Still, I do agree that there are ways to not give two shits about pirating. You've made some good examples of that when it comes to multiplayer games. But for singleplayer it doesn't really work too well. Crowd funding, but that would just make the non-pirates carry the dirty leeches around while they take what they want for free.

[barackopala]

It's quite an original marketing strategy.

You don't put your game on any digital distribution system, don't advertise your game and
put a torrent up which is the only publicity it has had.

Now the game is available on popular torrent sites with millions of users and on their own website
with like 5 daily visitors. 97% of people end up pirating it? That's shocking....

Then release an article about these "shocking" numbers to gain publicity and free advertising for
your game.

That's actually a pretty good plan.

I mean if you go to sell your jewelry only on the darkest alley possible at 2 am the chances are that
97% of your stuff gets stolen. That doesn't mean 97% of people are robbers.

As i said, it's an overglorified strategy to publizice a "demo" of the game.

[Deleted]

Who's expense? Certainly not the consumers. You seem to have this ideal that all software ever made is some kind of human right and charging money for it should be criminal.

The rights are property rights, which are being infringed by the intervention of the government to subsidise and protect a supply cartel. That the commodity in question is videogames is immaterial. It could be drugs, wheat, or autos. Everyone pays when the government legislates to protect the wealthy few.

While anti-piracy laws basically only protect the profits of the businesses, you need to remember that with those profits come jobs. So they indirectly also protect the employment of many.

When you say 'the many' you mean several hundred thousand people who are having their jobs protected at the expense several hundred million consumers who don't work for big media companies. It's not the government's place to protect jobs, that way be dragons- proponents of tariffs too asserted that they protected jobs (they do, incidentally- hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs in the American auto industry so that hundreds of millions of Americans could pay less for better cars).

Also note that even with anti-piracy legislation, the jobs of those who work for big media companies that depend on it still aren't secure- piracy still occurs and threatens these companies operating on an obsolete model.

And when I said piracy would only be made legal if the software companies would want it to be so, I certainly did not mean that all laws work that way. Nor that they should. I just have a hard time believing that piracy would be made legal before the companies would be ready to make profit on it. It would make no sense and benefit absolutely nobody. Not even the pirates, as they'd no longer have anything to pirate.

Pirates don't pirate because they want to pirate. Kind of like how black marketers don't trade on the black market because they want to trade in a black market. They're just meeting a demand with supply. If Piracy wasn't illegal then pirates would become file sharing communities (and indeed be greatly diminished as companies finally stepped up and started doing what the pirates are currently doing for them.

Companies like EA aren't built to be okay with emergent profit models- this is because as large publically traded corporations one of their primary concerns is risk minimisation. Their interests are also tremendously outweighed by the millions of 'criminal' pirates. When a law makes a criminal out of millions of ordinary people, then the law is criminal. That said, I can't actually assert that you're wrong here. I'm not sure I agree, but I honestly don't know. As you say it's not the kind of thing that gets ordinary people rattled or starts mass demonstrations. It could be that anti-piracy laws get struck down by high minded legislators and lobbyists like the EFF. It could be the laws are repealed after the industry has moved to models that embrace filesharing and there's not significant opposition from the private sector from such a thing (if indeed that even is likely to happen). Hard to say.

Still, I do agree that there are ways to not give two shits about pirating. You've made some good examples of that when it comes to multiplayer games. But for singleplayer it doesn't really work too well. Crowd funding, but that would just make the non-pirates carry the dirty leeches around while they take what they want for free.

I have a couple of responses, some of them contradict each other. Ignore that, please (heh, I'm far from decided on all of this- just passionate). So on one hand I say, the decline of single player games with copyright reliant studios might just be a thing- they'll always be around, but no longer be the central player. This happened to theatre, books, point and click RPGs, and countless other things. Times change, and the implications of the internet might just mean media moves away from large, expensive, offline single player titles (an enthusiast scene will always exist, as it does for other 'retired' forms of mass entertainment).

That said, perhaps not. People love single player games. I do. If people love them as much as I think they do, then the demand is strong- it's just the method of supply that needs to step up. There are ways to do so, although online games definitely are simpler to market in the online world. The best option I can think of is patronage. Good single player games are usually made by good studios. Studios who reliably make good titles. Such studios could conceivably offer subscription to their fans. Fans subscribe to the studio and receive all the games they produce free. The company get a stable baseline income with which they can fund games, fans get a personal relationship with their favourite studio (memorabilia, subscrber-dev interviews, beta access, free games, etc).This doesn't even have to be large scale or expensive. An indy studio with say 5000 fans who pay $1 a month could pay 5 people 1000 a month to keep publishing small games (or xpacs).

As for crowdfunding and the freerider problem; I don't see it as necessarily a problem. Backers of crowdfunded works aren't really buying the game. That's one of the things that they buy but not the whole (otherwise nobody would back a game once it reached it's goal- they could just wait til it's made and pirate it for free). Rather it's that relationship I mentioned earlier. Fans of any variety crave to feel connected and involved in the things they love. They love to support their favourite artists, hear about their work, have a say in what does and doesn't get made, engage likeminded communities, and be able to show off their devotion to their favourite thing. This applies to music, comics, and loads of other stuff too. You can't pirate that experience- and after all is said and done, all video games ever really sold was a feeling. Where and how the transaction which makes that possible occurs doesn't really change that.

[Rennadrel]

You're in the minority though, releasing demos has been linked to reduced sales

And yet, how are we to gauge whether or not a game is actually worth buying if we can't try it out first? The majority of reviews are biased and every single one is opinion based, so much like the human asshole, everyone has one and they all generally stink, some worse then others. I for one am more inclined to buy a game if the demo is good, especially at full price, and the demo needs to be extensive, not just the start of a game where there really isn't a lot going on for the first little while, which is what the majority of game demo's are like these days. Give me a demo that is smack dab in the middle of the action and has all the core pieces of the game enabled, that way I can decide whether I will like the game or not.

[N-7]

True. I voted their game to go in Steam though in the meantime, maybe it does and they'll get the needed boost of sales.

I voted them in few days ago because I though that their execution of the game mechanics was kind of cool.

[Mister K]

Please read the in depth article in PC Gamer about the fall of Cavedog (a mid profit level publisher) before rambling utter garbage and tripe.

Thanks.

Didn't Cavedog fail at managing its finances? The poster which you have quoted makes a valid point, too many trashy games out there. The best games iv bought were the ones which costed half the price.

[Halicia]

They released the game on a Torrent site to prove something, that version of the game does not need to be supported.

The devs are not done with the legal version of the game and will be supporting that, though I do not know how long.

THEY released it on torrent sites with the intention that people download and share it. How is that NOT a legal version of the game ?

Back before companies realized they could blackmail reviewers and scam people to prepurchase games, there was something called 'demos' that often got released for free so people could decide whether or not they liked a game before buying it.

[bohapjut]

Back before companies realized they could blackmail reviewers and scam people to prepurchase games, there was something called 'demos' that often got released for free so people could decide whether or not they liked a game before buying it.

Which, from a developer's/publisher's perspective, is a losing game. As much as you may like them demos almost always hurt sales, making it more profitable to not create one

[Kaneiac]

And their employers still drive a Porsche, just not two because of piracy. Sharing is sharing.

And there we have it. That's the mentality of everyone when it comes to any sort of corporation or company.

"They're already so, so, so, rich! I can do whatever I want with their product!"

b-but muh-muh rich fatcats

[Deleted]

Runic's games sell regardless. They have held the top spot on Steam on more than one occasion. These guys had more than a 90% piracy-to-legit rate. That's a lot for someone who doesn't have Runic's resources, or the resources of "AAA"-companies.

is there any evidence that even one person of those 90% would have paid for the game if it wasnt "free"..

[Deleted]

is there any evidence that even one person of those 90% would have paid for the game if it wasnt "free"..

No there is not, there never is.

I personaly pirate most of my games, simply because I do not have the spare money lying around to buy all the stuff I'd like to try out. When I do buy a game, i have to very carefully consider it and usualy they last me a very long time. Being a college student in a central european country, I don't exactly have a lot of money lying around, not to mention the fact that wages in Hungary are way lower compared to Western European countries while game prices remain pretty much the same. Steam knocking off like 5 euro's off the price of a game because I'm in region 2 realy doesn't compensate for that.

Fact of the matter is, I'm not a lost sale, simply because I wouldn't have bought it in the first place, and considering a large demographic who plays video games are college/uni students who are tight on money, I'm sure I'm not alone on this.

For references sake, minimal wage in Hungary is 564-656 forints an hour, which is about 2 euros.