Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy • Hacker News Board

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#211

Post by Cakez0r » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 1:30 PM UTC

rrouse wrote: post #162

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…

My favorite are the people who pirate the game at release and then buy it when it's in the bargain bin for $5, as if that undoes the initial act of piracy: "See? I bought it!"

Well that at least shows the pirate was willing to part with some cash to buy the product. I know games are incredibly expensive to produce, but perhaps cheap sales at volume could bring in more cash than a few sales at a higher price point. Especially if you have DLC available to cater to players who're willing to pay a little more. I guess that's dancing on the edge of a free-to-play model though, which seems to be widely despised...

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#212

Post by micheljansen » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 1:32 PM UTC

Isofarro wrote: post #202

Gonzih wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

By that definition, any game you play that you can't master on day one is a shitty experience. That's an exceedingly hard customer expectation to meet: a customer who doesn't like difficult challenges or learning curves.

There is a difference between offering a challenge and letting players get completely stuck. There is an optimum (the mythical "flow").

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#213

Post by Poyeyo » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 1:35 PM UTC

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…

Totally indisputable in the year 2000.

But less and less true everyday.

Today, we have Steam, the Indie Bundles, etc.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#214

Post by benpbenp » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 1:37 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #135

mjn wrote: 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…

I would be interested to hear more detail on this as well. Keeping in mind we are talking about taxation on the municipal level, doesn't it make sense that a tiny, not-so-special town will have difficulty getting away with higher taxes?

You say "it was nothing like what I knew from Norway." Does that mean in Norway you can have one crappy town charging 20% municipal taxes next to another crappy town charging only 10% municipal taxes, and this will have no effect on which town people want to live in?

I am not too familiar with the exact dynamics of the game, but I would think that as your SimCity becomes more awesome, higher taxes can be levied because people want to live there for other reasons. Is this not the case? I hope these social economists weren't just arguing, "taxes are high in Oslo, and there is no shortage of people who want to live there!"

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#215

Post by mjn » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 1:38 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #210

mjn wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty interesting; I knew there was some criticism of SimCity's simplified tax model in the U.S. some years ago (a simple inverse relationship between tax rates and business growth), but the Norwegian analysis sounds quite interesting. Any idea where I might dig up a reference to the article? I think in SimCity's case it was probably not intentional, at least originally. The first version of the game seems to…

>I knew there was some criticism of SimCity's simplified tax model in the U.S. some years ago (a simple inverse relationship between tax rates and business growth) Isn't that pretty much accurate? I'm not aware of any serious theory postulating that raising taxes will have any non-negative effect on economic growth in and of itself. Where it breaks down is once you account for what the tax dollars buy. If government…

There may be some kind of relationship, but it's almost certainly not a linear one. I don't think I could summarize the research on the subject (there is a lot, and it's not my area), but it seems to strongly depend on the business, stickiness of various quantities, the specific tax rates, and other factors.

Part of the problem is that economies are basically nonlinear dynamical systems, and nonlinear systems tend to have lots of strange feedback loops and attractors, where varying some inputs rarely has a simple (or often, even predictable) effect on system dynamics. An analogy might be fluid flow: high-level generalizations you might make about fluid flow are typically right only in specific flow regimes, and wrong in others (due to effects such as switching between laminar and turbulent flow). For example, if you can assume flow is always laminar, then increasing the pressure-drop across a length of pipe increases the flow rate. But increasing the pressure-drop can also induce turbulence, which may decrease the flow rate. I think most macroeconomic generalizations that assume things like "lower taxes are better for business" ignore system-dynamic effects like regime-switching.

The main point, though, is that SimCity just posits a very simple relationship, rather than attempting to build a realistic model of the economy grounded in scientifically valid empirical data. This can have some propagandistic effects of basically defining a certain causal relationship as true, which may or may not be true in reality, but happens in the game's virtual world as defined. In practice, SimCity probably just did that for ease of coding and playing. An incredibly complex city simulation where your actions had unpredictable, very indirect effects, and random chance or exogenous factors or just hard-to-explain stuff overrode your policy decisions on a regular basis, might not be very fun to play, compared to an ultra-simplified world with predictable rules. But it's interesting to think of rhetorical effects as well.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#216

Post by danielweber » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 1:41 PM UTC

admax88q wrote: post #204

Isofarro wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. A 30-day money back, no questions asked, guarantee would offer this. Then you can take a risk on a game, evaluate it to your heart's content, and if you didn't like it then request a refund. That would be a useful downvote indicator. For the recent SimCity, a stream of refunds would show as…

This is actually a technique that retail stores discovered a while ago. They used to make it very difficult to return products, and rarely would you get your money back. But then they realized that if you make returns simple and painless people stop second guessing their purchase since there's less risk if the product doesn't work out later. So more people are buying the product and those that do return it are not le…

Retail moves in cycles over how easy to make returns.

They make returns easy, and their customers are happy, but so are scam artists, ranging from people who "bought" the TV for the super bowl or the dress for the party and now are returning it, to people who bought the item somewhere else and are trying to return it to your store where they insist they bought it.

So then stores start making returns harder, dissatisfying the scam artists and their real customers. And then someone starts the cycle again, thinking they have a better handle on it.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#217

Post by daralthus » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 1:43 PM UTC

Clearly, this is marketing at it's best.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#218

Post by homosaur » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 1:47 PM UTC

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…

"Of those 90% or more who pirate the game, it's probably less than 10% who can be persuaded to actually buy it."

True, and also one had even heard of this thing yet, which is a big reason why the major distro was all pirate. Some of these folks who pirate grab any and everything new to try. There's also a large population who refuse to purchase anything that's not on Steam. I'd like to see the numbers on this with current users in a few months once the Steam version comes out.

This is a good marketing ploy though, and a unique solution considering the content of the game. I'm guessing they will sell a lot of copies due to this publicity. I've never heard of it before this, but it looks like an improved version of Game Dev Story, which I really enjoyed on mobile.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#219

Post by everyone » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 1:50 PM UTC

rubinelli wrote: post #114

chii wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so in other words, they pirated PC games, and used their limited resources to buy the games they couldn't pirate. Thus, the total amount of money they spent had been the same whether they pirated or not (just distributed differently, to different platforms). Had they not been able to pirate PC games, they might've spent a few more coins on PC games, and a few less coins on the xbox games - the industry wouldn't have…

Yeah, they rewarded the companies that hose their customers with crippling DRM and release the same old FPS and sport game with prettier graphics year after year, and penalized those that trust their fans and are trying to push the envelope in gameplay and storytelling. That's a fantastic result. (EDIT: sorry for the rant, but this stuff really gets under my skin. If you are too cheap to spend 8 bucks on an indie gam…

I dont buy games with DRM and I make a point of buying ones without it (for instance on GOG).. My rational is that if the games publisher doesn't trust me then I dont trust them! I also make games and I personally dont mind about piracy.. Its free advertising imo

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#220

Post by raverbashing » Mon, Apr 29, 2013, 1:51 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #182

vidarh wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think Sim City only is concerned with municipal rates.

Well, in Ireland if you don't earn "too much" (less than +/- 32k€ per year) your (governmental) tax rate is 20%