Messages

1

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 15, 2007, 06:16:47 am »

That fails to account for people who installed the game on a desktop and a laptop (arguably piracy, but certainly people who are never going to buy the second copy), individuals who had to redownload the patches multiple times due to reinstalls/hardware failure/upgrades, individuals who downloaded the file as 'run' instead of 'save as' and crashed after completion (and individuals who didn't complete the download - did the count include only finished downloads, or did it include people on dialup who attempted to download the patch 100 times?), and on and on and on.

I don't suppose statistical significance means anything to you.

I'll also direct your attention to the key terms "at least" and "more than". Ten times may be an extremely conservative estimate for all you know. But even if it were as low as fractionally more copies the point may still be valid, as the actual figure is irrelevant to the argument.

2

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 14, 2007, 02:21:26 pm »

Yeah, it's not very nice, but we buy things from evil corporations all the time, even though we know they're McDemonspawn. 2K could have built their offices using ground-up baby mortar and everyone would've still bought Bioshock. Inconvenience or notniceness doesn't significantly hurt mainstream games, I mean just look how many people gleefully purchase new video cards when big titles come out.

StarForce/SecuROM suck, but they aren't going to stop anyone spending money, and as long as they're effective and there's nothing better on the market it still makes business sense to use them.

3

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 14, 2007, 02:00:46 pm »

At best a company like 2K got about 2 weeks with Bioshock and it's fancy protection that makes it so I can only install it 5 times before I have to call and give up my first born to the security company for another chance at installing again?  At worst, companies have leaks before the game even hits the stores.  So I guess you can count yourself lucky Big-Blot/Alec; it took a few days and you didn't pay an insane amount of money for protection like Bioshock.

Two weeks is an incredibly long time for a mainstream game to go uncracked. The first week or so is by far the most important for mainstream games, so their investment with the SecuROM bullshit was an excellent one. It inconvenienced a small percentage of users, but the principal objective of releasing a product is to make money.

4

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 14, 2007, 01:40:22 pm »

Copy protection, of ANY kind, is pretty much useless anyway. It will be cracked, no matter what you use. In the end, it's really just a waste of time.

Well, the usual response to that is it buys time. There's probably some merit in that, as any borderline cases who usually pirate but are hyped about your game might bite the bullet and shell out on impulse. The importance of copy protection probably scales with the anticipation level of your game for that reason. If you know what you're doing it may be possible to baffle crackers for a week or more, but that's probably not worth the effort.

Additionally, buyers expect it, so you need at least some generic protection to look professional.

5

General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 14, 2007, 10:19:47 am »

I'm kind of happy my game isn't popular enough to have been pirated yet.

Wait... 

I'm working on my own commercial release, which would've been finished months ago if I wasn't so lazy, and I when I got to the point that I started thinking about copy protection I thought back to crypto class and started coming up with some really elaborate stuff. Then I decided, so what if people steal it? As someone mentioned, people that pirate games aren't generally those who would've bought the game anyway (and I'm convinced a great many can't, keep in mind the world is a lot bigger than the US and there are a lot of people on the wrong side of an unfavourable exchange rate). The counter-argument is that some of those people would've bought the game if they couldn't steal it, but I don't think that's really true with the independent software market. It usually takes a modicum of internet savvy to pirate just as it takes a degree of internet exposure to even know that independent games exist, which I think separates people that have a way of doing things when it comes to aquiring software from those who know it's out there and just want it. (Also, These are often people who are aware that demos aren't necessarily truely indicative of the value of a game.)

So in that sense it can't really hurt all that much. After all it's been a part of the broader industry since the first games on magnetic media. Maybe my opinion is skewed by developing freeware, but it may even help. It's exposure, after all. If a hundred people pirate a game and one of them buys it, that's one sale rather than one hundred non-sales. If half of those pirates are impressed by a title and recommend it to a friend or two, that's potentially a great number of sales rather than one hundred non-sales. All of those people, pirates or not, might pay a little more attention to your future releases. Again, that's just a difference with independent games thanks to the relatively low market penetration. If you steal a Halo or Mario game, there's no positive effect for the developers since there's nobody you could possibly tell who doesn't know about the title and who gives a fraction of a shit.

I can only speak for myself of course, but I'd much rather every non-buyer pirate my games rather than simply not play at all.

(today i got lost on the way to tigsource)