151–160 of 297 posts
The more they tape it, pass it around, and talk about it, the more you'll sell.
It your case, you might put a better cracked version on pirate sites with subtle messaging you want shared. Because some of them will tell people that work places that will pay, and some of them will take jobs at places that will pay.
Cheapest mass marketing you'll ever get.
Now nothing. Piracy is the natural order of things, and likely isn't hurting sales at all as counter-intuitive as that seems. You could perhaps offer cheaper versions in lower income countries, but if you try to 'beat' piracy too much, you're just going to lower the overall user experience of your software.
How would lowering your revenue and decreasing the competitiveness of your paying customers (because they now have to pay MORE than their competition who probably already have lower operating costs because they are operating out of a lower income country) make any sense?
I sometimes reverse engineer things for fun or curiosity, though I don't generally use or redistribute it. TBH I don't understand the psychology of licensing/pricing. Some commercial software is excellent and seems worth every penny the vendors ask for (and I am happy to pay for such software). I've seen a few products that cost thousands to license and are just dreadful. I have the impression that such products are sometimes not intended to be marketed as such, but their usage is licensed as part of a consulting deal, effectively borrowing the academic reputation of the person behind it.
Congratulations! Having cracked versions out there indicates that your software is both useful and notable, which is a point where many developers would love to arrive at, maybe, one day. As to what to do about it, there are two basic tracks, neither of which is incompatible with the other: 1. The legal route: notifying distribution sites that they're hosting content in violation of copyright law, requesting takedown…
There was a videogame that got famous because it was pirated, it was a management game about setting up a gaming company. Turns out, the pirated copy had a special feature where the player would feel immense economic pressure from piracy, so a bunch of players asked how to win against this, it was pretty hard and really fun for people who knew what was going on. Point is, you could hide an Easter Egg for pirated vers…
Congratulations! Having cracked versions out there indicates that your software is both useful and notable, which is a point where many developers would love to arrive at, maybe, one day. As to what to do about it, there are two basic tracks, neither of which is incompatible with the other: 1. The legal route: notifying distribution sites that they're hosting content in violation of copyright law, requesting takedown…
Very true. If they were never going to pay anyway, you haven't lost anything if they use a crack. It still irks though!
Nothing. Almost all of the research points to piracy having zero impact on sales for example, https://corsearch.com/content-library/blog/does-piracy-impac... It's been shown time and again in gaming no matter what you do people will crack it and your measures to stop them will have more negative impact on your paying customers than it does on pirates, see Denuvo. Honestly, the best thing is probably working on your c…
This is probably often true, based on the product and its price point, but pirates using it as a blanket truism isn't good. There are a lot of possible situations.
Real life example: movie piracy may not generally affect box office, but an arguably bad movie leaked before release date will create a cloud of gossip that could tank its opening weekend. If previewing a film for reviewers will affect the box office of a bad movie, 100,000 copies being watched two weeks before release certainly will.
With newaudiotechnology.com we eventually switched to using USB sticks as dongles. The reason is that we noticed some paying users were cracking it, too, because our licensing system didn't allow dual boot or having a workstation and a laptop. But our licenses were supposed to be per user and people wanted to carry our software around with them. If setup correctly, the same USB stick is now used both as licensing don…
One trick I’ve learned from the mobile game world is to make sure your localization files are separate resources — don’t compile them in. They way, when your game is first cracked, you’ll get a pretty decent Russian translation immediately that you can, with no moral concerns, “steal” back for your next update — and within only a few weeks you’ll have a pretty rich set of languages floating around for your distributi…
Why CJK text first?