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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

#241

Post by Loughla »

edude03 wrote: post #229
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…

I think this is a disingenuous argument that comes up all the time. I was once a teen who was a heavy pirate and although I said it was because I couldn't afford games (I didn't have a job in highschool) I had a $400 modded Xbox, I had a 1800 gaming computer I had a few real games. I managed to afford these things by getting money and gifts from family and working odds jobs here and there. Really the only reason I wa…

That has been my experience as well. Once I reached the age of obligation to work, I noticed that my midnight pirating/release week pirating has dropped to zero. Subsequently, losing the 'I must have it right now, and deserve to have it no matter what' attitude has actually saved me money and frustration (with over-hyped games -- Diablo 3, I'm looking at you).

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#243

Post by micheljansen »

Isofarro wrote: post #228
micheljansen wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The difference is the $8 purchase price. That's the optimum. And the players are not completely stuck, they are at the local optimal of their current gaming model - a plateau. That doesn't stop them from taking a different path towards a different optimisation strategy and find one where the localised high point is better than this one.

Did you read the original post? The players that get stuck are not playing the same game as the players who paid $8. They are playing a version that is deliberately frustrating and almost impossible to play due to rampant piracy in the game. The normal version does not have this frustration built in and is probably a lot more optimised towards an optimal challenge / reward balance.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#244

Post by jeltz »

kefka wrote: post #230
everyone wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, pirates sure aren't making you money. You care about paying customers. Makes sense to me.

He called them "free advertising", so he does believe they are making him money. And as an indie developer that could very well be the case.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#245

Post by jack_trades »

jusben1369 wrote: post #224

Brilliant. Really enjoyed this. Also enjoying this lively thread. There's an awful lot of strange rationalization going on in the comment. For those of you who point out "Hey a lot of those pirated people aren't going to pay anyways!" here's a sobering fact. If just 7% of those pirated copies were paid this developer would have DOUBLED first day sales. Could be the difference between getting to work on their dream, h…

I want to respectfully disparage your statement. Doubling zero is zero. Doubling a small amount is likely still a small amount. They need to sell somewhere like 10k units to make this effort worth repeating, let alone a profit model. That means they better get working on getting this in the hands of 150k pirates.

7% of freeloaders is no small or easy task and compare time and energy trying to convert the sinful vs. pandering to the pious. Stop trying to fix culture or people and make a good product that makes life better and/or easier for paying customers.

This thread would be a fine place to enumerate the devs and studios that had success converting pirates to payers. That's a short list.

Given their platform, you would think progressive crippling of game play hits the correct balance of try before you buy and allowing for player investment to the point where they could be nudged in. Or, why not sell in-game DRM for $8?

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#246

Post by tinco »

winthrowe wrote: post #199
tinco wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also another important figure that is routinely ignored: The number of honest customers who get screwed because game companies can not profitably release a big game anymore, so they won't. The CEO of Square Enix was fired because he produced the latest iteration of Tomb Raider, and it arguably is the best iteration of Tomb Raider ever, and plainly didn't make any money. Also your argument about 20 years ago…

You're almost a decade off; 20 years ago Doom was released and the hottest game I knew of. The North American release of the NES was 28 years ago now.

I think the N64 also had this walled garden system :)

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#247

Post by sanjiallblue »

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…

It should also be noted that there's pretty much zero evidence that piracy actually hurts the sale of a game. Any research done by third-parties on the subject has shown that piracy generally helps the sales of the products being pirated due to:

A) Raising awareness of the product and giving the product exposure to a larger group of fans raising awareness of the product and studio responsible for the production.

B) Converting a minority of pirate-based customers with limited financial resources into paying customers for current and future projects.

C) Establishing in the player community's mind that the media being pirated is a worthwhile competitor to other forms of entertainment.

D) Finally, the most important factor: The majority of pirates pirate material because they are the highest-paying and most discerning group of purchasers of media (Source: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Another-Study-Pirates-Are...).

So fighting against piracy is a losing battle. DRM punishes paying customers and sure, some games might suffer as a result of piracy. It's just that if more people are pirating your game than buying it, then nine times out of ten, your product probably wasn't worth purchasing to being with, which is a cold reality that the data supports that indie studios really don't want to hear. No one wants to be told their baby sucks, especially when they see what they perceive to be a "large number" of people playing it.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#248

Post by srl »

benpbenp wrote: post #214
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…

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%…

As far as I remember (SimCity 3000), you start out with taxes at like 7%, and you can get away with 9% when your city is small, but when you grow, you have to /lower/ taxes (down to 1-2%, eventually) to keep things stable. Which makes sense from a game design perspective (there are enough hard things when you're starting out, without having to deal with obscenely low taxes), but doesn't have much to do with real life.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#249

Post by saalweachter »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #164
StavrosK wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a combination of convenience, sales, rise in disposable income, and the fact that I don't have time to play more expensive big-name titles (plus, I like indie games more). The other day I saw a trailer about a game I found visually stunning (Anno 2100? I forget the number), and I checked the price on Steam. It was too expensive for something I'd play once or twice, and I thought of pirating it, but then couldn't…

I find myself reluctant to buy games that are not in sales, even if the normal price would be reasonable to me. I wonder if there were less sales whether I would spend more on games, spend the same on less games or simply pirate more.

Eh, sales are just classic market segmentation. By periodically dropping the price of the game towards some minimally profitable number, they can divide the market based on how much you're willing to pay. People willing to pay the "full price" will do so in the first day/week/month, and then people who are willing to pay less and less will do so more and more months later.

To put it another way, they never planned to sell 10 million units at $60. They planned to sell 1 million units at $60, 2 million units at $30, 3 million units at $20, and 4 million units at $10. Price drops are the only effective and legal way to do that.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#250

Post by shawndumas »

citricsquid wrote: post #27
onli wrote: post #14

The 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…

Yes, I just bought the game out of a sense of good 'karma'...
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