Pirates playing a game dev simulator complain about piracy

That may well be considered giving permission. However, since they are interested in the social aspect, not the legal aspect, that doesn't matter. The social assumption is that a game you get from a torrent is pirated.

> Can the devs then be sued for knowingly tricking people into committing a copyright violation?

(Ignoring for the nonce that in America you can sue anyone for anything) no. No one got "tricked." No one went out to buy a copy of this game and ended up on the torrent by accident.

Also, you created a game that has pulled in $1600 in revenue so far and you're thinking that $24k worth of revenue is just not coming in because you can measure the freeloaders. Those freeloaders aren't your customers and likely never will be.

Focus on why 214 people bought the game and make them so happy that they will support you and the extended marketing of the game.

Had you not spent the hours developing, testing, etc. these features and trying to trick worthless freeloaders into exposing themselves for the sake of rhetorical blog posts, you could have improved your bottom line. You COULD have added features important to paying customers.

Also, the sad freeloaders posts stink of fabrication. They may well not be, but my cynicism puts together a picture of a hacker-news-abuse viral marketing scheme. Every link in the chain has an unsoiled feel to it. The game is about a game dev company, not FPS gore. The freeloaders write in full sentences and precisely nail talking points as if they came from a game industry association. The dev has taken great care to handle freeloaders gently in the post. exposing everything. Even if this were a marketing scam, the backlash would be ho-hum because everything is just so meek.

AND... of course there's an actionable pitch and link thrown right in there. You were supposed to hold back and wait for the crowd to demand links.

This game always had a very limited audience. RPG of a gaming software development company? Plan the scale and scope of your project accordingly.

I thought he simply said they would spend the same amount. So they would consume less games and so have less "cultural" experiences if they couldn't pirate some games:

So, like, if they'd pirated Gears 1 and bought Republic 2 [made up names] then next period they might have bought Gears 2, but then would have pirated Republic 3 and ArmsRace 1.

With stronger anti-piracy measures Gears 1 comes out at the same time as Republic 2 but they can only buy one so they get Republic 2. Next period they get Republic 3 because they don't want to risk the new ArmsRace 1.

In both scenarios they bought 2 games - ie spent/bought the same amount. In the second they played 3 more games than in period 1. The makers of Gears benefited from piracy by winning a convert to their franchise (but notably the industry didn't gain in this scenario).

If you try to build a dynamical system as the model, things get weird very fast. Even in simple ones you can build as toys, there is a lot of system-internal behavior: there are feedback loops, oscillations, attractors. Minor changes can have significant counterintuitive effects, if they dampen or excite various resonances in the system (which we're assuming here is a stand-in for "economics of a city"). That kind of Sim City I'd be very interested in. :)

But would it be a fun game? Quite possibly not: players really tend not to find complex and chaotic simulations very fun, when the knobs affect the outcome in ways that are too indirect. Chris Crawford found that in a few of the games he made: a lot of players found Balance of the Planet, which tried to model all sorts of complex ecological effects, frustrating at best.

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 was pirating was because I needed games right away, I was entitled to have them on release day. I simply couldn't wait to get money to buy it. Unfortunately now that I'm a bit older I realize that a lot people have this mind set. Its not that they can't afford it, its that they need it right away.