In FC4’s case I’m pretty sure it was unintentional (although still funny). I know some devs in the past have done things like that intentionally: One of the Serious Sam games had something where if it detected a pirated copy it would spawn an unbeatable boss that would stalk you until your player died. GameDev Tycoon developers “leaked” a copy of their game on torrent sites that played exactly the same except the game-titles you made in it would always tank due to piracy (haha, get it?).
The day one patch fixed it IRC so it wasn’t actually a way to catch pirates at all.
If you go to the store and get a copy, it won’t have a FOV slider either. It’s just a lazy excuse and if it was intentional then it’s the worst ploy I’ve ever seen since it hurts paying customers that have no internet.
I really have no clue why all these sites keep reporting it like this…they should be condemning them for this intentional or not.
In theory it wouldn’t be hard to do. You could follow the way game dev tycoon did and simply create a second version.
Or you could program both ways, and have the defect able to be turned off with a simple switch. Then the 1st day patch would simply flip that switch.
The only catch is that you might some publicity from this, but it may or not be worth alienating players, at least that very first day. In general, the ones who suffer from DRM most are the ones who actually pay. Like Dabeh just said, what about the ones with no way to get that very first patch?
Don’t forget, the same way pirates get the bad versions, they will very soon get the good versions, patched and all too.
That’s just insane. The linked article about Game Dev Tycoon. 1 day after release about 200 paid users and over 3,000 users playing a pirated copy. I knew there were a lot of pirates but that is just nuts. Makes you wonder where are all of these pirates? With those kind of numbers it seems likely there are some right here among us.
You could release a second version onto torrent trackers that plays as normal but that guilt trips them more as they progress. E.g.:
“I download games to see if I like them or not; if I do then I buy a copy” - A Gamer
And then to continue, they have to click “I agree”.
It was worse. There was a game which pirated version was very very difficult and when you beat the final boss the game crashes. Whole data is corrupted afterwards.
Or there was another game where in the pirated version the character is locked in a cell and can’t do anything. There is a guy outside who starts a long speech how pirating games are bad and stuff.
It’s worth noting that things like these usually only catch the early adopters who pirate on the day of release. Then shortly affter, the crackers will figure it out, and release a properly cracked version that runs fully without any silly nonsense.
Not that i’d have any experience in that kind of thing
Stuff like the Alan Wake one though, is the kind of harmless thing crackers are likely to leave in.
I guess getting pirated and having someone start playing your pirated game, is just the first step. The second step should be, how will your game take advantage of the fact that more people are now inside the game, where you have some control over how you can present things, and how can you turn those people into possibly contributing to your community, or paying for something, etc… this is partly why ‘free to play’ has some appeal because it kind of says that anyone (pirates included) can get access into the game itself, and then its up to the game to convince them that they need to spend some money on some add-ons or microtransactions or whatever. So will your game take advantage of that and try to monetize the pirates, or will it just get all judgey and treat them like the enemy and shut them out? People are people, and people will pirate. More people will pirate than will buy. So how will you live with that and how can you use it?
My other thought is, why bother trying to fight piracy? I mean, if as in the above examples they are 10x or more people pirating than buying, then are you going to keep digging in your heels, making a big noise about it, being a victim, trying to still stop people from pirating with all these controls and annoyances etc, which probably don’t work hardly at all, or are you going to WELCOME them and stop calling them pirates and treat them like real people? For the game I’m working on I’m seriously considering ways I can release a pirate version alongside the main version, and make that pirate version special in some way, to appeal to that particular audience.
It was NOT a “brilliant way to catch pirates”, but a futile attempt to cover one of their many f***-ups.
@Dabeh already mentioned it. It’s the lack of a day one patch.
There’s NOTHING to win…
It will get cracked regardless. The only thing you could get out of this, would be some laughs. But would they really last, even though you’ll read the inevitable messages about how your game finally got cracked? I don’t think so.
…but a whole lot to lose.
Firstly you’ll waste time implementing “features” that will neither work for long nor benefit the paying customer. Secondly, if you screw up (and this happens A LOT), you can get into the situation where the pirated version is objectively better than a bought copy.
Intrusive DRM technologies like SecuROM or any form of always-online-DRM happen to hurt the paying customer way more, than those who pirate the game.
I mean, there’s two options:
You buy the game and the expensive season-pass (of which you cannot know whether it will be worth it or not) on launch day, hope that it will (more or less) work, won’t require you to download huge day-one patches and pray to the gods that the stars are in the correct alignment so that your internet connection and their servers work reliably while, at the same time, not many other people feel like playing (on launch day).
or…
You pirate the game and just play it.
Ubisoft…
If I were you, I wouldn’t give half a fuck about what someone at Ubisoft says. It’s not like they have a solid track-record of incredibly poor ports, extremely intrusive DRM and games that don’t live up to their massive amount of marketing-fueled hype.
Oh wait. They totally have.
From the top of my head: Watch_Dogs, AssCreed Unity and FC4. And all of them in this very year.
Besides that, do you really want to value the word of people who claim that “30 FPS is better” for games, because it’s “more cinematic”?
Bottom line:
Don’t bother. The best thing you can do to make people buy your game, is to make them want to buy it. Frustrating them just happens to be a fairly inefficient way of doing this.
I agree with the people saying don’t spend time trying to fight piracy. Basically, although the numbers are dramatic (Game Dev Tycoon for example showing 1 legal user out of every 16 total users) I believe those 15 users were never potential customers to begin with. And I know some will find this offensive but the odds are very high most of these pirates are people sitting in China, India and so forth where they just don’t have the same views as most of us about this kind of thing. I am not saying those people are all bad. I am not trying to start a race war or so forth. I am just saying the facts are the facts. Of course there are good people and bad people everywhere. And there are pirates here in the USA as well. But some places seem to have a completely different view about things than other places do. It almost seems to be part of the culture. And that is why I am sure the majority of people doing this are in different places. Maybe even places where $8 is still a lot of money. If any such places still exist considering the beating our dollar has taken in last decade. Anyway, because I believe this to be true I think trying to fight it is a waste of time. Those people were never a potential customer to begin with so you have not lost anything. If I believed the bulk of the pirates were here in the usa where we have very strict anti piracy laws I would be more inclined to focus on the issue. Collect IPs and send a nice report over the FBI for example.
TLDR : the pirates are beyond your reach and they were never a potential customer to begin with.
The best way to mitigate pirates is to make an awesome game and accept that some copies will be pirated.
There is no stopping it.
No method to stop pirating has worked and has made gaming worse for the ones who bought it. I’m talking about you DRM!! EA’s Sim City 5 and anything Ubisoft created are good examples.
And it’s not only on PC, there are console torrents also for those with modded boxes.
So much effort goes into protecting the game from getting pirated. Millions of dollars have gone into it only for it to be cracked weeks if not days later.
If you make a game that gets pirated then you made an awesome game and take it as that. If companies that are 500X bigger than you cannot stop pirating then you cannot stop pirating.
If you could stop it… then patent and sell that ASAP and become a millionaire.
I agree about focussing on making your game great. Making it great can also make it more pirated. lol
It’s also a good point about the international scene, some much poorer countries probably have a much higher incentive to pirate because prices are way out of their budget and that really does change how they make such decisions or what it means to them.
