I accept that people will pirate the games I make but some guy on facebook just said to me that he’d wait until it becomes a torrent. At first I thought he was joking as he was one of the people who’d been following the games progress for over a year. He replied and said he wasn’t joking.
I banned him from the facebook page, still can’t believe some people. Yeah ok they’ll pirate the game, i know that but to say to the developer that you’ll do it. Wow. Nice.
It sucks when people show such disrespect, but look at the bright side: he may show off your game to someone who will decide to pay for it.
If Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop had zero piracy, they never would have become the ubiquitous industry standards that they are. For every 5 paying customers, there are 50 or 500 cracked copies in use, acting as advertisements for more paying customers. That ratio sounds horrible, but think of the size of Microsoft and Adobe-- it must be working for them.
Time ago I received emails requesting support to install pirated versions of my paid games. Pretty funny.
Another guy told me he downloaded the game from Torrent and had troubles updating their pirated version using the official updater (only for customers), he wrote me an email and after tell him (politely) what was the problem he started going crazy and told me he is going to distribute pirated versions of my game to all his friends and uploading the game to an amateur warez site (funny things: he also provide me the link of where he is going to upload the game and their domain was under a blogspot account, easy to takedown if any copyright violation occurred. But he didn’t nothing, just whining).
So I’ll suggest to ignore these kind of people and don’t be angry with them, usually they are kids and don’t understand nothing.
Devil’s advocate … is there something about your game that makes it not good enough that someone would not want to actually buy it? It kind of reminds me of singling out certain movies that simply must be watched in the theater because they’re really good, vs oh I'll watch it later on dvd.
?? Not saying your game sucks at all, … but that seems to be what the guy is thinking?
usually I don’t buy it later no matter how much I liked it
usually I don’t persuade anybody else to buy it
So basicly I would have bought your product, I want to have it but there’s this free version I can get just as easily with no penalties. And for all I know this is the mindset of most people who pirate. I doubt I’m a some sort of weird anomaly.
And people wonder why so many developers go to f2p model with in-store items and advertisements. Honestly I think it’s time to adapt and either create apps to be torrented that are designed as f2p with various monetization models(pay for items, pay for unlocked content, etc), or do some authentication system that requires internet to activate.
I quite seriously doubt that, except in crazy cases where you perhaps get paid $10,000 to make a game any only 2 people play it.
So sure, it’s probably possible, but I doubt that anyone making significant money via F2P models is doing anything of the kind. They’d be making tiny profits off a huge number of players, not the other way around.
I mean, seriously, do the math. At 1c per impression and 1 impression per 10 seconds you need an individual to be playing for thousands of hours to get $5000 from them, and that’s a ridiculously high pay rate and a ridiculously fast impression rate.
Edit 2: Of course you might not be doing ads, you might do microtransactions. Even there, $5000 is way out of the norm for people who pay, and people who pay also aren’t the norm. So even though you’ll get individuals doing that, it’s a doubly unusual occurrence, certainly not something you can consider “per player”.
Our policy at Simian Squared is to not fight piracy, but simply request:
a) They be honest about the reason. If it’s to “Try before you buy” or “Buy if you like it” or “Theft”. Pick one, I don’t care.
b) Go through with their reason for it. Don’t lie. Whatever you do just don’t lie. Stick to the original reason.
And if the reason was theft, then sing it’s praises, advertise the non pirated version. Say a few words. Get your theft redeemed by getting us a few more paying gamers. It boils down to a developer still needing to pay bills and if people want to buy the game in a different way - trading some time, perhaps, then that’s OK too.
I’d prefer it if people just buy our games though, obviously. But punishing and making a huge scene about it isn’t as valuable as educating people or opening a dialogue.
I keep writing long posts about piracy and then deleting them because I realize I’m condoning piracy in a community where that’s against the rules, but since you started this I’ll just make it short-
I think a) is a fantastic way to handle it. Would totally pirate your stuff if it wasn’t iOS only, especially the Synthesizer.
I have my issues with b), since oftentimes I will pirate something as “Buy if you like it”, but it turns into “Theft” because I end up disliking it and uninstall and forget about it.
I don’t think Buy it if you like it is theft unless you complete it. Because if it turns out you’ve played it so long that you completed it, it’s probably worth the price of admission. But if it gets uninstalled and unfinished, well no loss. You checked it out. I realise a lot of people will just not care, but it’s nice to have a tip from people who do.
My personal reason for having pirated games is because I get bored with them after an hour.
I guess if I was more ethical I’d be satisfied with playing a demo, but I like to see the full game for an hour, and paying full price doesn’t seem right.
Why is completing the game the benchmark, though? If “try it before you buy it” is the excuse then I’d say the second play session is the trigger point. If you like it enough to go back to it instead of moving on to the next freebie then clearly it’s doing something right for you, especially when the average game costs less than a cup of coffee. It’s not the end of a game that counts, it’s the entertainment you have on your way there.
I’m a fan of the concept of purchases being a trade of value for equal value. A game should be priced so that the customer gets a level of enjoyment in proportion to what they pay. Now obviously this is too intangible and subjective, but approximations are possible.
If completing a game takes 20 hours, but you only get 2 hours of playtime out of it because you only like it enough to pay for 2 hours, then a fair price for that customer would be 10 percent of the price someone who plays the game to completion would pay. I can see a problem though, if you suck at the game and take a long time to make progress, you would be unfairly charged more. Maybe instead of hours it could be pay-per-level, since some people might play the game more quickly or slowly, while consuming the same content. I’m not talking about something sneaky like “you paid 60 bucks at the store for this game, but to play beyond the first level you need to pay 10 dollars for each additional level”. I’m thinking that a $60 game with 6 levels could be sold in 6 installments.
Yeah with that I can agree. “Trying to completion” is a very liberal approach already, I usually do 10 hours or three separate days, whichever comes first. But that’s one of the nice things about piracy, I can test something on my own terms without being limited to the first three polished levels that introduce all the fun features, or limited to a week when I want to get just two hours of testing over a month in.
The “get a tip” part goes both ways- a professional developer (one who does this as his work) needs paying customers to pay his bills, But a user needs the developer to create updates and new software too. By paying for a product, I prefer to think I’m not as much reimbursing a dev for already done work, as much as I am motivating him to make more stuff for me in the future. I am pretty sure pirates care about having the most recent version as well, and reminding them that there won’t be any without paying customers could be an effective way to “convert” them. I see such attempts quite rarely though.
So if I buy a loaf of bread and then only eat a couple of slices, Tip Top should refund me most of the three dollars I paid for it? Sounds like you’re trying really hard to justify not paying for things you benefit from. And that’s without even considering that most of us here would easily understand that the cost of a game isn’t really related to how many levels are in it. And then there’s stuff to consider like games that aren’t divided into levels, or which don’t have ends, and so on.
