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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

#371

Post by tpetrina »

belorn wrote: post #91
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…

Quick question: Would you have bought games on steam over $1000 if the steam services would had been a bad one? Or to put it in a other way, how much of that $1000 is thanks to steams services, convenience and marketing? Many people claim, including the CEO of steam, that steam is not competing with pirates. People pay for the services, which in turn get partially sent to developers to create more content to be used…

I think that convenience wins over pirating. Just recently I bought Far Cry 3 after finishing the pirated version. What I discovered is that having DRM in the normal, paid version is completely annoying.

I would gladly pay for any service which offers one-click media consumption regardless if it was about games, movies, music, comics or some other.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#372

Post by tpetrina »

bni wrote: post #65
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 go…

Well, Steam is actually more convenient than torrenting. You don't have to search for the correct torrent, test it, trust it, and so on.

Find a game, pay it, download it, play it.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#373

Post by chii »

Houshalter wrote: post #362
anonymoushn wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My NES continued working when it couldn't contact anyone's always-on DRM servers.

So do all console games.

not the xbox 720, if the rumour mill is to be believed :

http://www.google.com/search?q=xbox+720+always+on+drm&pr...

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#374

Post by ekianjo »

shpiel wrote: post #130
ekianjo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and its more or less the same thing as Hollywood claiming piracy or copying destroys their industry. I think in general game developers miss the point about piracy: - its free advertising. Just like radio is for music. - maybe pirates will not buy your game this time but they may buy the next. - simply your game is not attractive enough and most people dont want to spend any money on it. It's not because your g…

This is a false equivalency. Musicians can opt out of having their music played on the radio. If they do choose to have their music played on the radio, there is a genuine attempt made by radio stations to track how often their music is played and make a commensurate royalty payment to the artist. (source I worked on college radio).

Well, OK, but then nothing prevents anyone from copying the radio stream in one way or another and playing it over and over again for free without telling the artists. It still remains "free" in that sense.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#375

Post by Tomis02 »

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…

Starcraft II, seriously? It's got the same gameplay as the original had in the 90s (which already felt old at the time).

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#376

Post by robryan »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #141
StavrosK wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a data point, I haven't pirated a game since Steam came out.

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.

Convenience, more disposable income becoming more knowledgable over time about the game dev business. As a 16 year old I was relatively poor and didnt think as much about the work and investment that went into games.

Also lack of time, I would never think of pirating a book or game because one will keep me going for ages. I listen to music every day though so until the streaming services come in maintaining a legal music collection as prohibitively expensive.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#377

Post by Isofarro »

b0rsuk wrote: post #299
Isofarro wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that's correct. When my brother played Hexen years ago - a DooM engine game with extreme switch hunting - he got stuck halfway through. He got a shitty experience. Maybe he wasn't good enough according to your judgement, but in the end he had a shitty experience nonetheless. It was not necessarily Raven's (developer) fault, but it happened. An ideal game would be hard enough for everyone, yet everyone would be ab…

> An ideal game would be hard enough for everyone, yet everyone would be able to beat it.

That seems to hold very little replayability value. A better prospect is to make the game just a little more difficult that the current player's skill level, and adapt to that, so the game gets progressively more difficult as the player's skill improves, and the rewards/achievements are in line with that path. (It's quite a oft-given piece of advice for players wanting to get better at chess, that they play people a little stronger than themselves, and they gradually adapt and start winning more than losing)

I guess that's what's changed in gaming since the eighties. Back then the challenge and difficulty of games was a feature. Only a small crop of people completed them, the rest of us enjoyed the challenge of trying to get there. Where the journey to improvement is of more value than reaching the credits at the end.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#378

Post by Dylan16807 »

DanBC wrote: post #342
Dylan16807 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tell if you're doing well at simcity, rollercoaster tycoon, and the sims. (I don't know anything about euro truck simulator.) Zerg rush is all about how many zerglings you kill and how much of the page is still alive. In minecraft it's all about what you feel like building and there's no objectively doing well or badly. It's hard to make a thriving sim city, it's trivial to make a giant sculpture in minecraft…

You know there's a whole thing in Minecraft now where you can kill a dragon which triggers an "end screen", right? And to get to that point there is traditional game grind stuff, of collecting stuff to get equipment to get to the place where you get the stuff to get the other stuff? And there are even achievements? And that the player has health and armour? I don't care that you don't like a game, but you're wrong an…

I know that got added. In terms of time spent it's pretty much a side quest. The only thing you need to grind to get there is ender pearls, and you can easily collect them a minute or two into the game if endermen happen to spawn. You don't really need any equipment either. A wooden bow should suffice.

I do like minecraft, but the idea that the end screen represents any kind of progress wrt what you spend 95% of your time doing is ridiculous.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#379

Post by Dylan16807 »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #341
Dylan16807 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tell if you're doing well at simcity, rollercoaster tycoon, and the sims. (I don't know anything about euro truck simulator.) Zerg rush is all about how many zerglings you kill and how much of the page is still alive. In minecraft it's all about what you feel like building and there's no objectively doing well or badly. It's hard to make a thriving sim city, it's trivial to make a giant sculpture in minecraft…

You can tell whether you're doing well at Minecraft if you're still alive, creepers haven't exploded in your face, and you're not starving. :D That said, you can always play Creative mode and/or Peaceful difficulty if that's your style.

>you're still alive, creepers haven't exploded in your face, and you're not starving By that metric if I dig a hole three blocks down and cover up the top I'm doing well. Minecraft just isn't something with important objective progression. It's about doing what you want and having fun. The survival elements are mostly a thin veneer on what creative mode is. The important part of minecraft is not anything that you could call a 'game'.

Re: Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

#380

Post by robryan »

versk wrote: post #153
jeltz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1% is not totally unreasonable. See belorns post about conversion rates in freemium games for an explanation.

Comparing freemium game conversion to Triple AAA piracy is ludicrous, and the argument that a freemium game should convert more because its designed to convert people is the most textbook definition of a specious argument I've ever seen. Successful Free-to-Play games like League of legends are suspected to convert greater than 10 percent of players to paying customers. Of the millions of players who pirated Bioshock…

You also have to take into account those that are pirating anything in sight and might only have a slight interest in playing if they every get around to it or might play for half an hour.

These people count towards the piracy number on hundreds of games yet would only ever buy a small fraction.

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