Slightly unrelated to the original point of the article: has anyone heard of Kairosoft and Game Dev Story [0]? It's ironic the OP wrote an article about irony. Having said that, it looks like they have elements not seen in GDS, but the premise is similar enough.
Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy
21–30 of 395 posts
Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy
#22I haven’t bought any game released after 2004[0] – simply because in my opinion, gameplay has suffered a lot lately. I can recall spending years building stuff in Pharao when I was a kid and recently had a lot of fun (months!) playing Patrician II/III, bought from GOG. Where are these games nowadays? [0] The latest game I bought on Steam was Counter Strike: Source, mostly because it was on sale and bundled up with so…
Minecraft. Skyrim. Civilization IV/V. Avernum. Starcraft II. Crusader Kings II. Dungeons of Dredmor. Portal and Portal II. Torchlight. XCOM. The Witcher and The Witcher II. FTL.
That list is just off the top of my head, without looking at my Steam library; all of those games, XCOM and maybe Portal excluded if you don't dig the user content, can easily take up multiple months of gameplay. Deep, involving games are more easily available than they ever have been. Claims that they're not are good-old-days nostalgia.
Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy
#23While I think this is a very clever idea, it's also somewhat dishonest. In the game world, pirates cause studios to go bankrupt. In the real world, the causal link is not as clear. People arguing that piracy is ruining gamedev routinely ignore the fact that those who pirate don't necessarily have the means to buy many games; their choice is purely between pirating and not playing. Of those 90% or more who pirate the…
> People arguing that piracy is ruining gamedev routinely ignore the fact that those who pirate don't necessarily have the means to buy many games
And people who defend pirates routinely ignore that pirated products are also pirated by people who will take what they want for free if they can, because they can. Don't pretend to a higher level of intellectual honesty or moral strength. Your position can lay claim to neither.
Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy
#24I don't even play games much these days, but I am about to buy a copy of this because the comedy alone was worth eight dollars (and because it runs on Linux!). Maybe it's just funnier to me because I know a few guys who work at an indie game studio.
Edit: Not just lauding them on HN, "about to buy" has become "have just bought".
Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy
#25I do find myself wondering about audience, here. The product was given pretty good exposure to a "market" of non-paying users. If it were pushed it to markets which give you similar exposure in front of paying users, perhaps you would have a different result? Not to say getting that exposure is easy, but is this also a case of remembering who your customers are?
I'm a paying gamer - I don't think I've seen this game for sale until now. I'll check out the demo over lunch :)
Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy
#26I haven’t bought any game released after 2004[0] – simply because in my opinion, gameplay has suffered a lot lately. I can recall spending years building stuff in Pharao when I was a kid and recently had a lot of fun (months!) playing Patrician II/III, bought from GOG. Where are these games nowadays? [0] The latest game I bought on Steam was Counter Strike: Source, mostly because it was on sale and bundled up with so…
Have you tried Minecraft? There are players racking up thousands of hours with it.
I'm surprised to see this suggestion here. While minecraft has a lot going for it, I don't know if I would call any of it 'gameplay'. You wander/dig around and find shiny rocks, and while there are monsters the combat system is pretty awful and quickly abandoned. The fun is in building and in mods, rather than anything in the basic survival mode. Heck, it barely qualifies as a game by having any goals, and it didn't even have that for a year.
Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy
#27The irony is great. But I fear it is possible that wasn't such a good idea. Given the graphs, there were 4k people interested in the game. Over 90% of them now have the impression that the game is unplayable long-term because of the message-box. Maybe many of them get the hint, but those who don't might generate bad pr and prevent others from buying it. But well, maybe that article combined with answers to the compla…
This article is going to be covered by all major gaming press by the end of the day, it will have hundreds of thousands of page views and probably result in thousands of sales just from "that's so funny I'm going to buy it just to support you!" so while in isolation you might be right that it would reduce sales the marketing value of this post is going to be many orders of magnitude more than the negative experience reports.
Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy
#28I haven’t bought any game released after 2004[0] – simply because in my opinion, gameplay has suffered a lot lately. I can recall spending years building stuff in Pharao when I was a kid and recently had a lot of fun (months!) playing Patrician II/III, bought from GOG. Where are these games nowadays? [0] The latest game I bought on Steam was Counter Strike: Source, mostly because it was on sale and bundled up with so…
I'm sorry, but I hear this from a lot of people and it's just not true. My dad won't play games made after, say, '96 because that's when things stopped being interesting. I think it's just a matter of how emotionally open you are to investing time in playing new games. Games cut from the same mold as those in 2004 wouldn't sell well today, and there are some good reasons why. FPSs in 2004 had just gotten away from the stupid jumping puzzles ubiquitous in the previous decade, for example.
When I was young, I had poor taste in many things. I wouldn't waste time on most video games today, but I still remember liking everything when I was a kid.
We're also in the middle of an indie game explosion, with a renewed focus on solid gameplay. You won't see it if you only look at AAA titles.
Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy
#29The painful sting of Serious Sam 3's anti-piracy protection
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/07/the-painful-sting-of-serio...
Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy
#30I haven’t bought any game released after 2004[0] – simply because in my opinion, gameplay has suffered a lot lately. I can recall spending years building stuff in Pharao when I was a kid and recently had a lot of fun (months!) playing Patrician II/III, bought from GOG. Where are these games nowadays? [0] The latest game I bought on Steam was Counter Strike: Source, mostly because it was on sale and bundled up with so…
Minecraft. Skyrim. Civilization IV/V. Avernum. Starcraft II. Crusader Kings II. Dungeons of Dredmor. Portal and Portal II. Torchlight. XCOM. The Witcher and The Witcher II. FTL. That list is just off the top of my head, without looking at my Steam library; all of those games, XCOM and maybe Portal excluded if you don't dig the user content, can easily take up multiple months of gameplay. Deep, involving games are mor…
Back in the day, everything was better, including the future!