I’ve started designing a game in my spare time for fun
It will be for PC to start with and will be an ongoing WIP. I’d like to eventually make the beta WIP available for sale. I was thinking about making it $5(or less)to start with. When/if I get enough interest I’ll raise the funds for Unity Pro
Buyers will get free updates through the lifespan of the project too.
Now if the gameplay and graphics eventually became worth it’s salt, what would deter a player downloading it rather than buying it?
I asked this question today in my local pub and one of my friends admitted that he would rather dl a torrent of the current project rather than have to go to my site and have to mess around hitting the PayPal button, even if it was $1 :lol:
Seeing as this WIP will be funded by those that might like following my work, what could I offer to paying customers that would not be available to downloaders?
To be honest, I dont think there is anything that can prevent it from eventually happening.
There are a few reasons people pirate:
They cant afford it even at a low price point (such as young individuals with no access to funds of their own).
They think its overpriced for what they see is its actual worth. (so to spite the developer, they will pirate it, even though they may be able to afford it)
Access to the pirated version is easier or faster than the purchase route.
Hackers looking for a challenge. (Mostly for bragging rights and notoriety).
There are a few things that may stop someone from pirating:
Fear of serious legal action against them
Fear of virus/trojan/malware infection from said pirated copy
They believe in what you’re doing, they know the time and effort invested in it, and therefore willing to offer support by purchasing.
Number 3 mostly tends to work for smaller developers, and is probably you’re best line of defense. People will support a cause or a struggle. So if you show them your struggles, your headaches, and your strive to bring your best to them, less will try to screw you over.
The more counter-measures and defenses you put in, the more it becomes a lightning rod for hackers/crackers to take a shot at it, and in the end it will be a battle that cannot be won with 100% certainty.
Just out of curiosity, is there a reason why a developer couldn’t implement a simple licensing scheme in Unity indie? It seems that you could save a license file using the .net framework, and then read it using UnityScript, C#, or Boo.
what would deter a player from uploading it is a better question in my opinion. i would personalize the copies. display the customer name on the start-up screen or something like that. if your game is good someone eventually will find a way to remove this name but it will give you some time.
and if your game is an ongoing project then of course customers will get upgrades a bit faster. it always will take some time until it will be available as torrent.
This is often cited as a major cause of piracy by all the major players, including Steam.
In Australia, for instance, it isn’t the case, it would take me half a day to download a game (bandwidth in this country is still a bit of a joke), but for other countries you could have it downloaded faster than you could go out and buy it.
When I was younger, I pirated plenty of games and music. However, as soon as I came into money, I’d go buy those games anyway. Same with music.
Nowdays, I make enough money to buy all the stuff I want
A lot of people are like this, a lot are not.
The thing to remember is that some pirates never would have bought your product anyway, and some pirates will go and buy it as soon as they can.
If you sell 10,000 copies of a game, but 50,000 are pirated… Do you think that if you made the game impossible to pirate that you would have 50,000 more sales? I highly doubt it.
Food for thought, Microsoft’s biggest competitor is not Linux, is not apple. It’s Microsoft. Over 30% (I think it was a hilarious number like 40 something percent) of Windows installs are pirated, which means that there’s more pirated windows installs around than there are OSX, Linux others combined
I remember reading an article about a developer who put something into their code, similar to how Unity iPhone will verify if the binary has been altered, and then, if hacked, it would download child porn and alert the gov. Could be an urban myth.
I wouldn’t recommend doing something like that, since if you get caught, you’ll be the one going to jail. But it would be easy to create a simple keygen system or an online activation system, then just throw up a message saying the game is pirated.
You can NOT stop anybody from pirating your game. Simple reasons, pirates love freebies, and it hurts there ego to buy one where in they can always get it for free. Possibilities are endless(<–Remember this always).
Here is my suggestion:
why dont you make the game or develop it with all of your efforts for free, BUT, in your game, there are free items and purchasable items(premium items). premium items can only be accessed or displayed on the menu when the user is online and will be deleted on the menu when offline… its like, Eternity Warriors, Monster Shooter, etc., and for me its much easier to control piracy with this manner.
And if somebody will try to hack into the registry for HEX possibilities, well, in your coding instead of putting the real value or an item value, put some fake ones and have some algorithm for the real value to make it look like it doesnt exist in your game(that is only my theory, i never have tried this yet but i am open to doing so. ^_^). With this, they will bump their head on the wall for how troublesome you are, Algorithms are hard to interpret especially for strangers. I am also trying to develop a game right now and i am actually making my theory into a fact.
exactly!!.. if a game of mine ever gets to torrents, and people seed it so much it’s actually hurting sales, I’m already rich and have my beach house, yo! :-p
My thoughts exactly, same with if my youtube videos were copied to another channel.
Here’s a far-out theory: What if the game had a small base download - but instead of unlockable content for a price, you could just “unlock” the game from within the game through the same type of system? ridicolous notion I’m aware
Just torrent it yourself put it up freely but add a little virus friend along with it to teach them a lesson. Make sure to still have up for sale and to have it on a popular torrent site so many idiots try to download it. Use a different name too, act like you hacked it and everything.
unfortunately after one person downloads it they leave a comment saying it has a virus, then proceed to remove the virus and put it up and then you have achieved exactly what you were trying to avoid.
I actually believe that you could just sift through all the websites and ask them to remove the torrents? If they dont then you can threaten them with legal action for giving people a means to steal your game.
ridicolous notion I’m aware