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Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

greenheartgames.com

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Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly. The pie chart towards the end should scare off anyone willing to try this: if 93.6% of users who played the game on the first day after release got a shitty experience, it means that at least 93.6% of feedback is going to be negative (or more, because people are more likely to provide feedback when they are unhappy than when they are satisfied). Still think it's a great idea, and I love the irony…

> if 93.6% of users who played the game on the first day after release got a shitty experience, It isn't a shitty experience though. They were playing the game, getting immersed into it, trying to win, and they got stuck. Stuck enough, and interested enough in succeeding, that they asked on forums how to deal with the in-game piracy issue. That isn't a sign of someone having a shitty experience. What is interesting n…

> They were playing the game, getting immersed into it, trying to win, and they got stuck.

Stuck without any reason. Looks like shitty experience to me.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#182
post #135
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a common approach to using gameplay for rhetorical purposes; the fact that you can code causal processes as you want is one of the main ways you can get videogames to push a point. As a more overt example, in the game Bacteria Salad [1], created after one of the E.coli scares, profits trade off directly against food safety: bigger farms are more profitable but also spread contamination more quickly. This may o…

Sim City is another good example of this. Even as a child when I first played the original, I remember reacting to the tax model in the game and how it affects net migration, as it was nothing like what I knew from Norway (and indeed, it bears little resemblance to how things works in most of Europe). A newspaper in Norway recently had to social economists play the most recent Sim City game to review the economic mod…

Even in European countries that are much more laissez-faire than Norway has tax rates much higher than in SimCity. A friend here in Ireland¹ noticed that the income tax rate can only go up to 20% in the original, and at that rate, the population were very annoyed.

[1] Barack Obama refered to Ireland as a tax haven recently http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/obama-forced-to-retract...

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#183
post #99
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…

game quality is increasing, you're just getting older. same thing happens to me; i just can't play like i used to anymore. when you're younger it's easier to lose yourself in the game, no matter how bad (and actually boring) it is.

But I’m still able to lose myself in, say, Patrician II or Pharao or FreeCiv. Maybe I don’t like modern graphics? :P

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#184

This is pretty amusing but it sounds like the piracy model in the game is pretty unrealistic. A high level of piracy is typical, and while it can hurt games it doesn't destroy them.

You have numbers/references to support your assumption that piracy never destroys games/game developers?

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#185
post #167

Anyone has a link to download a liberated proper copy of the game? The one on ThePirateBay appears to be the malicious trojanized fake version described in the article.

Really? You are going to ask this here?

You can get a proper copy of the game from the developers themselves for eight dollars.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#187
post #165

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…

The fallacy with this argument is that if everyone behaved if you did there would be no games. If this stuff is "free" it's the tragedy of the commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons - except in this case it's developer resources that are "common" and will be depleted as there wouldn't be money to pay for them. I think at this point everyone understands that there's piracy out there and it's not g…

Well, it doesn't necessarily have to kill the game industry - so long as enough people pay after they pirate, developers will still get paid.

Now, what would kill the game industry is if everyone followed eropple's suggestion and solved the problem of not being able to evaluate games before buying them by just not playing any games in the first place. If everyone both stopped pirating and buying them, there is zero chance they'd decide to pay up after playing for a while, zero chance their friends would recommend the game, zero sales, and shortly thereafer zero games. Unlike piracy, that's genuinely unsustainable.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, why do you think that is? Is it due to convenience , availability of cheap games in sales , extra features in steam or did a rise in your disposable income just happen to coincide with the launch of steam? For me it was mainly 2 and 4.

I'm trying to imagine a world in which there isn't a guilt inducing shortcut folder on my desktop: "Games I haven't played since I bought them in a steam sale" Maybe if I was a student again...

if you were a student again, you'd probably don't have the money.

or a credit card. a lot of great games on steam are dirt cheap - back when i was a kid that played a lot - because i had the time and motivation - 2-8 euros a game would have been affordable. but games were always full priced - 50 euros maybe?, there weren't really any cheap bargain buckets yet.

of course back then i had neither internet and even if i had, no credit card. piracy was the only option mainly because the games weren't affordable nor obtainable.

nowadays i don't have a single pirated program or game on my pc, but neither do i have the patience to play games.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#190
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if 93.6% of users who played the game on the first day after release got a shitty experience, It isn't a shitty experience though. They were playing the game, getting immersed into it, trying to win, and they got stuck. Stuck enough, and interested enough in succeeding, that they asked on forums how to deal with the in-game piracy issue. That isn't a sign of someone having a shitty experience. What is interesting n…

> They were playing the game, getting immersed into it, trying to win, and they got stuck. Stuck without any reason. Looks like shitty experience to me.

Exactly. Why would I buy this game if all I read is reports of people getting stuck after 1 day?
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