So localize in English, German, and French (maybe Spanish) and don't bother with an Android version, good to know.
Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times
21–30 of 86 posts
Re: Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times
#22Getting some insight from the pirates would be interesting. If a pirate is detected, pop up a quick radio selection box: Thank you for playing the game. I noticed you pirated it and would like to know why (you can still play the game): * I can't afford the price * My parents wont let me buy games * I want to try the game free first * I believe games should be free * My computer is old and I don't know if it can play…
It's not surprising that Brazil, Russia, and China top the list for pirate users. This game is probably very expensive for users in those countries, if they are even able to easily pay for it.
shrug those are also the countries that tend to account for the most spam delivery attempts, SSH brute force attempts, etc.... on my server. So it may be something beyond just cost..
Re: Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not surprising that Brazil, Russia, and China top the list for pirate users. This game is probably very expensive for users in those countries, if they are even able to easily pay for it.
shrug those are also the countries that tend to account for the most spam delivery attempts, SSH brute force attempts, etc.... on my server. So it may be something beyond just cost..
Yes. The idea of "intellectual property" as such is nonexistent (and widely considered absurd) in those countries' cultures, combined with a pretty high level of technical sophistication among the general populace.
Re: Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times
#24Similar situation happened with Monument Valley, a game that hit #1 on app store and won a 2014 Apple Design award. The devs tweeted that only 5% of Android players paid for the app. On iOS, 40% paid [1]. Later they released some sales numbers that show only 2.4m sales but 10m+ installs, implying that the majority of their installs weren't paid for. [2] [1] Hit mobile game Monument Valley and piracy: ‘Only 5%’ of And…
I'm sorry, but the Monument Valley iOS piracy numbers from Dan Gray quoted in that article are positively nonsense.
> It’s impossible for us to track that data. The only thing we can do is, two bits of data: One, how many purchases we have and, two, how many installs we’ve got. And we just leave people to draw conclusions from that as they wish, because we can’t clarify any further than that.
Once you purchase an app on an iTunes account, you can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into. So the fact that Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases is 100% consistent with zero piracy, and with the fact that as people replace their devices they want to redownload the apps with the greatest replay value. This is not some weird trick that Apple overlooked, either. They clearly want the user to believe that the apps and the data are tied to the account rather than the phone, because new hardware sales are where they make the lion's share of their profit.
(I thought his numbers were bogus, which is what motivated me to read the article. In recent years, jailbreaking iOS devices, which is a prerequisite for pirating apps, has become increasingly bothersome and decreasingly useful. So the thought that there were this many jailbreakers didn't coincide with my model of the world.)
Re: Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times
#25How do they calculate the number of times it's been pirated?
> We take overall amount of activations minus legit sales per platform minus 10% (to offset for people who activated a legit copy on more than 1 device).
An assumption of 10% multiple device activations is begging the original question.
Pirating on Windows, Mac, and Android is pretty easy, but on iOS it requires jailbreaking, which is pretty limiting these days. I doubt his piracy numbers are anywhere near what he's claiming.
Re: Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times
#26Since in these breakdowns they invariably seem to be using stats collection from the games themselves, I would love to see how many of the pirated copies progress past the fist X% of the game, or continue playing beyond 24-48 hours, whatever the devs would consider around the mark for what they would consider releasing a demo for.
Not that I think all the people that pirate are just demoing, but I think without question many more people pirate than are actual sales, and those that stop early lone are the type of people that probably wouldn't have generated many sales anyway, possibly stopping after the demo if there was one or not have bought it at all.
When these discussions are housed in terms of making enough money to continue, and loss of revenue, ignoring that aspect is ignoring a large part of the picture (even if it's still morally valid).
Re: Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times
#27An amusing incongruity from the article: "Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate."
Yet the article is primarily about piracy problems with Portuguese, surely the most westernly language in Europe.
Re: Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times
#28Getting some insight from the pirates would be interesting. If a pirate is detected, pop up a quick radio selection box: Thank you for playing the game. I noticed you pirated it and would like to know why (you can still play the game): * I can't afford the price * My parents wont let me buy games * I want to try the game free first * I believe games should be free * My computer is old and I don't know if it can play…
It's not surprising that Brazil, Russia, and China top the list for pirate users. This game is probably very expensive for users in those countries, if they are even able to easily pay for it.
> if they are even able to easily pay for it
I think this is something a lot of people don't realise but online payment systems in China and Russia are near completely different (and isolated) from ours.
China doesn't do Visa, doesn't do Mastercard, doesn't do AMEX, doesn't do PayPal. Try buying something from a Chinese website like Taobao or Baidu. They use things like Alipay which are linked to their local payment systems.
I don't think Chinese CAN buy independent games like this.
Re: Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times
#29An amusing incongruity from the article: "Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate." Yet the article is primarily about piracy problems with Portuguese, surely the most westernly language in Europe.
Assuming you weren't making a joke, the article clearly states that the piracy is coming from Brazil, not Portugal.
Re: Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not surprising that Brazil, Russia, and China top the list for pirate users. This game is probably very expensive for users in those countries, if they are even able to easily pay for it.
> if they are even able to easily pay for it I think this is something a lot of people don't realise but online payment systems in China and Russia are near completely different (and isolated) from ours. China doesn't do Visa, doesn't do Mastercard, doesn't do AMEX, doesn't do PayPal. Try buying something from a Chinese website like Taobao or Baidu. They use things like Alipay which are linked to their local payment…
China does, however, widely use UnionPay, which is Discover-compatible.