Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

greenheartgames.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 395 posts

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#71

Post by LordIllidan »

bobsy wrote: post #62
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.

I have the same problem - I think it's down to impulse buys.. I have a lot of games on Steam I've never got down to playing as I've no time!

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#72

Post by serf »

Cute. You may make sales due to the novelty of the idea getting blogged about, but you'll lose sales and PR due to the majority of your player base having played/used a faulty product.

There are still gamers who think that 'Batman: Arkham Asylum' had legitimately broken mechanics, due to a similar action the developers of that game did ( http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/94524-Arkham-Asylu... ).

I'm all for punishing pirates , but the unfortunate aspect of this is that you're punishing pirates & all of the possible legitimate customers that the pirate exposes to the game.

These people are potential customers , independent siblings, children who can beg their parents to buy the game, whatever, that are witnessing and at worst case experiencing a broken product, and having whatever faith they had in whatever company reduced.

I do like what it does to make you think twice about data legitimacy on the ether though. It's nice to be reminded that most of us don't know where that data is coming from.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#73

Post by LordIllidan »

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…

Try the Total War series.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#75

Post by CJefferson »

lelandbatey wrote: post #43
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…

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…

The important figure (for developers) is not what proportion of pirates would buy the game, but what proportion of possible buyers will pirate instead.

My experience with my social group is that this second group is quite high. I know (for example) people who have bought many xbox 360 games (as these are hard to pirate) and have never bought a PC game, despite playing similar number of games on each.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#76

Post by vy8vWJlco »

eropple wrote: post #68
vy8vWJlco wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

"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."

In your own words, you say copying is human nature. It sounds like the "pay-before-evaluate" model is hoping to change that. I'd say expecting human nature to change is unrealistic. Isn't it easier to just exploit human nature? I mean, isn't that good capitalism?

(Everyone's rationalizations are self-serving, including your own, otherwise thinking would be a liability...)

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#78

Post by bvdbijl »

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,…

one explanation might be that the posts were deleted because piracy isn't tolerated on those forums

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#79

Post by logicallee »

citricsquid wrote: post #69
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...

I'm sorry if I'm incredulous.

I DO believe that the screenshots show the formating of the forum. It's just that those particular posts were completely fabricated. (e.g. rewriting the source code of a comment in the html source and then taking a screenshot of it.)

Just to confirm that Google does index those posts, I picked a random one that wasn't too recent, and could find it without any problem:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22While+we+were+inspired+by...

If you find (and don't fabricate) these posts, could you reply with a screenshot and link? Neither link actually brings up anything.

You also offer no explanation why "literally ONE MINUTE" after putting his torrents up, his uTorrent screenshot shows a torrent added the day before.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#80

Post by eropple »

belorn wrote: post #70
eropple wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This line of thinking is what happens when you take barely overlapping populations and attempt to extrapolate between them. For a more related data-point that you can get from public data (because the 20-25% comment was inside baseball from folks I know personally), the average conversion rate across all titles on XBLA hovers around 18%. When you take into account the general demographics on XBLA versus something like Steam (where the folks I was referring to previously generally roll), a small bump from there doesn't strike me as overly conservative.

You can't really compare what amounts to a SaaS conversion rate to a purchase of a completely realized product with significant media presence (like, even indie games get a ton of eyeballs and an implicit seal-of-quality when they hit Steam or XBLA). It just doesn't shake out that way.

Post reply on HN