Aquaria hit the P2P

[PieEaterBeast]

<.< I just registered to post that you shouldn't consider the game hitting torrent a bad thing by any means. Just looking at the stats, the torrent of the game is popular and many would be completely unaware of an indie game like this. The fact that it's gotten a response on p2p means that people have become interested and want to give it a shot, which is great. Tis how I first found out about it myself, and just checked for more info. Likely buying too.

[Alec]

Likely buying too.

Key word "Likely".

Oh well, it was worth a shot.

submits resume to EA

[Crizzle]

Likely buying too.

submits resume to EA

Noooooo! Not that disgusting corporate beast! There is still hope...although I don't know what the sales stats are like at the moment I'm still confident that the game can do well with the right kind of advertising/exposure, etc.

[Ian]

Likely buying too.

Key word "Likely".

Oh well, it was worth a shot.

submits resume to EA

Didn't they already offer you a job?

[Alec]

Well, it'd be easy for anyone to get a job at EA.

Seriously.

Hence the joke.

[Don Andy]

Hah, on Blackcats, most people already bought or are going to buy it xD
Sadly, the pre-cracked version was already snatched about 200 times, but on the other hand also got over a 1000 views. I hope the other 800 actually bought the game

[Alan Friesen]

You know, one of the things I love about Bit Blot is their willingness to even tolerate a discussion about the fact that their game has been cracked and released.  I can count on one hand the number of devs/publishing houses that would do likewise.  In my mind, it's a real sign of maturity that they're willing to do so, and a real confidence in their product.  A confidence, I might add, that's well-founded. 

What a breath of fresh air!

[rinkuhero]

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

Wait... 

[Radix]

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)

[Don Andy]

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.

[Mull]

Chris Delay from Introversion posted some interesting thoughts on it awhile ago;

"...there were at least ten times as many pirate copies of Uplink and Darwinia as there were legitimate sales. How do we know? Patches available on our website which only work on the full games have been downloaded more than ten times the sales totals of their games. Now hard-line corporate types will tell you this means they've lost 10 x sales x price million dollars based on this, but thats just nonsense. Would all 10 of those 11 users have ever bought the game? No, of course not. But 1 out of 10 of them might, and that would have doubled our sales and made us very happy devs indeed. "

http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=1046

[Radix]

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.

[PsyPhi]

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.

More importantly, a waste of money too.  The best kind of protection against the laymen is a simple cd-check (as the game boots check a file on the disc to make sure the disc is in).  Obviously this game doesn't need the disc (downloadable) so that wouldn't work for it.  Don't think anything could be done to stop it short of requiring people to buy it on disc.

But seriously, any amount of time spent developing some sort of protection, or worse paying another company for their (ultimately failed piece of security)  just doesn't seem worth the dividends invested, especially given the speed that things get pirated.  Even DRM is failing the record industry right now.  Just no hope against the will of hundreds of thousands of pirates (if not millions).  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.

Hopefully this game will sell like Bioshock though :p.  I really look forward to seeing it launch on PSN or XBLA, even though I own neither PS3 nor X360.  That would be one service that couldn't be as easily pirated (mod chipped people could do it easily, but less machines are chipped than PC's can play pirated games .  Plus I just want to see how it would be accepted on those platforms, I hope it would sell well.

I really want this game to come to Steam though.  I just feel better buying digital-download-only games through there.  So I'm still holding onto the hope that I will be able to get it there,  but the demo was fantastic (and honsetly, about 2 hours is crazy!  I hadn't played a demo that long in years.  They're usually just 20 minutes long at best).

[Radix]

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.

[Don Andy]

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.

The thing is, especially the HEAVY copy protections, like StarForce, cause even more trouble for the legit players than the pirates. In many cases, where companies (big ones) just decided to go without copy protection completely were met with a greater support in the pirate community than those with heavy protection.
I mean, copy protection like StarForce basically assumes that everyone is a criminal. That's not exactly appreciated by most people.