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Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

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Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#61

Post by masklinn »

eropple wrote: post #22
claudius wrote: post #8

I 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…

I'll add Bastion, King's Bounty, Binding of Isaac, Torchlight II, Realm of the Mad God, Trine 1 and 2, Atom Zombie Smasher, Eufloria, Limbo, Super Meat Boy, Osmos, Recettear, Bioshock

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#62

Post by bobsy »

tpetrina wrote: post #2

This is just pure gold. When I was younger, I always pirated stuff because I didn't have the money nor the means. But today, my Steam collection is worth over a 1000 dollars and I buy more games I could play. It hurts me when people my age (27) don't consider buying stuff they like. I mean, you are paying the creators of the stuff you like so that they can create more of it. No one wants to work for free, why should…

As your steam collection cannot be resold doesn't it now have zero monetary value?

I stopped buying games when I realized I don't actually play the games I buy. Some are still in their cellophane wrapper.. I recently signed up to Playstation+. Surprised I didn't do it sooner. £40 a year. Access to 10+ games a month to download and keep while subscription is active. Not going to buy another game for a long while.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#63

Post by krichman »

kenkam wrote: post #21

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. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Dev_Story

The screenshot is basically a direct copy of Game Dev Story down to the perspective.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#64

Post by Dylan16807 »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #55
Dylan16807 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"What a terrible game! I actually have to use my imagination and make my own fun, what is this?" Minecraft is a sandbox game. The zombies are just props. Just like any other good sandbox game it leaves a lot of the direction up to the player.

"sandbox game" really stretches the meaning of the term game. I'm not saying that minecraft is bad, I'm saying that what it has is not "gameplay".

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#65

Post by bni »

tpetrina wrote: post #2

This is just pure gold. When I was younger, I always pirated stuff because I didn't have the money nor the means. But today, my Steam collection is worth over a 1000 dollars and I buy more games I could play. It hurts me when people my age (27) don't consider buying stuff they like. I mean, you are paying the creators of the stuff you like so that they can create more of it. No one wants to work for free, why should…

I think many people, regardless of age, pirate becouse of laziness.

Such a simple thing as having to fetch your credit card from your wallet, installing and registering on a game download service (such as GoG, Steam). If you are used to torrenting, if that is you normal way to get stuff like TV shows and movies, there is less _resistance_ to download the cracked version of a game.

I dont justify this, or think its good, just pointing it out.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#67

Post by krichman »

algorias wrote: post #15

While 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…

Instead of making high quality games in the game, the pirates should make crap knockoffs of already popular games and then spend most of their effort on publicity stunts; that seems to be a better strategy.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#68

Post by eropple »

vy8vWJlco wrote: post #57
eropple wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ne…

Are people who go outside and drink from a stream (through a filter/firewall, of course), stealing? What about people who take in the scenery, or people who breath? Is nature a starving artist? I'm not for dumping toxic waste in the river, or stealing property, but the Internet is my environment, and copying data is not only cheap, that's what I pay my ISP to be able to do. IMHO, that makes copying as moral as breath…

> there is no way to downvote a game producer after you have paid for something you didn't know in advance that you would like

I'm not going to fisk your post, which is largely self-serving rationalization. But I am going to touch on this.

The choice is not "pirate it" or "pay for it". You can also--shocker incoming--not pirate it and not pay for it. Don't like that a publisher doesn't have a demo? Don't buy it. Don't like that the demo's not long enough? Don't buy it.

But that's hard, and you can just take it for free. So, under the guise of "evaluating", that's what you do. And, yeah, I'm assuming some bad faith here, because the next person who actually compensates creators, without exception and at the price they ask for the content they pirate and use will be the first.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#69

Post by citricsquid »

logicallee wrote: post #45

update2, someone replied with a screenshot but non-working link to the comment. attempting to verify. so far could not verify links directly. will attempt to update if I am still within this comment's edit window, otherwise see responses below for the current status. ---- EDIT: it also makes it seem likely to me that the screenshots of users posting on forums were fabricated. they seem a little too good (too ironic,…

The two screenshots are from 2 different forums, the first is Steam community forum and the second is Facepunch. The Facepunch post is here: http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?p=40453336#post40453336 and the Steam one is probably somewhere in here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/discussion...

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#70

Post by belorn »

eropple wrote: post #52
lelandbatey wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really a claim of moral honesty as it is just one bit of factual data. A large majority of pirates won't buy the game. Ever. If they can't get a pirated copy, then they just won't play, but it's not as if they'll buy it instead. It's a sad but true fact. I only bring this up because there's often an underlying assumption that every pirate is a lost sale, when in reality there maybe 1% of pirates that would h…

Yeah, I get you--I apologize to poster^3, I'm used to hearing that line out of people more interested in rationalization than anything else. That said, in my experience the assumption that each pirate is a lost sale went out the window about a decade ago. And the idea that it's only "1%" of pirates who'd have bought the game, on the other hand, is ridiculous on its face. There's about 10,000 seeds and leeches of the…

20% sound ridiculous high, and I would ask where in the world of sanity that people got that number.

If we look at freemium to paid conversion rates, 20% seems out-of-this world large. Almost no one has that high. Looking around, 1% or 2.5% is said to be the average for games[1][2][3].

Why would a pirate be 10 times more likely to be incited to buy a game, rather than those who play a game designed from the ground up to encourage high conversion rates? It sound to me that logic demand that games with features designed for high conversion rates will do better than games that don't.

Ie, to sum up, the conversation rate for pirate->paying should be far less than 2.5% in average, and nowhere near 20%.

[1]: http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2009/11/04/running-a-freem...

[2]: http://www.gamesbrief.com/2011/11/conversion-rate/

[3]: http://www.gamesbrief.com/2013/03/arpdaus-conversion-rates-a...

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