I think, it's only lent, so don't panic

I wanted to make the same point, but I abandoned it because I'm not sure its so different. You still make that initial investment in the development, but the difference is that once the product is finished, additional costs of production are relatively fixed and massively lesser than other goods. We might be talking about literal pennies per copy versus the cost-to-produce/Selling Price ratio that goods must contend with.

Actually in both cases you do.

You can return the dish to the kitchen if it's terrible. Most times you won't get charged. If you eat the whole plate of it, you don't get your money back though.

As for the second, most theatres in my area at least have a "if you leave in the first 20 minutes of the movie you get a refund" policy.

Doesn't mean I agree with Piracy, but these points aren't necessarily valid either.

Sure, but did you buy them opening day? No? Why not? Because you'd never heard of them.



I'm not saying it does justify.

Imagine 100 people heard of this game through the website, and 50 of them bought it. 900 people heard of this game through a file-sharing site, and 450 of them downloaded it.

In both cases what we're seeing is that half of all people who saw the game, got it.

HOWEVER, only 10% of the people heard about the game via a method which provides a quick way to pay for it. The other 90% heard of it through a site where you cannot pay for it; you have to download, or abort and circle around to the other method. Also established is that people who are on file-sharing sites are normally there with the intention of downloading files without paying for them.

The guy who wrote the blog post is taking these numbers and saying "OMG, 90% of people are pirates!!!" But that conclusion is false. He did bad math, and came to a bad conclusion. What he CAN say is "much more people see our game via PirateBay than see it via GreenHeartGames.com!!!" and he should draw conclusions based on that.

If you want to know what percentage of people will pirate, you need the majority of your sample audience to know, before they log in, where they can pirate the game and where they can buy it legally. He didn't meet this bare requirement.



http://store.steampowered.com/search/?snr=...Game+Dev+Tycoon

You were saying?

You can return the dish, and not get charged, IF (and this is a huge if) one of the following is true:

• It is not what you actually ordered;
• It was not prepared correctly;
• It was not served in a reasonably edible condition (getting a steak twenty minutes late and barely room-temperature, for example);
• There was a health code violation.

If you decide "Hmm, I've never had a flatiron steak; I'll give it a try tonight" .... and it turns out you just don't happen to like it?

It's what you ordered, it was prepared correctly, it was served in perfectly-edible condition, and there were no health code violations (like, half a roach on the plate, or whatever) ...?

You owe the restaurant the full bill. Trying to just skate on that bill, will get you arrested.

Maybe you could negotiate with your server and the manager for a reduced bill, even to $0. But you aren't the one with final say on that.

...

That's not random example, by the by. The weekend before last, at Longhorn Steakhouse ... I decided to try the Flatiron steak, with parmesagn crust. I didn't especially care for it - it was edible, and not BAD, but that's really the best I can say about it. (I do like several of their other cuts.)


Not where I live, not that I've ever learned about. Most of them have a clearly posted "NO REFUNDS" policy. *shrug*

Actually, yes. Yes, I did.

I bought SPAZ, Bastion, And Endless Space the very day they launched.

Why?

Because they looked interesting, I had some money to spare, and being Indie titles, they were quite inexpensively priced.

Even now, SPAZ is $10, Bastion is $15, and Endless Space is $30 (I think it was 20% off for the day of launch, though).

Another one I haven't mentioned before, is "StarDrive", by the very one-man outfit "Zero Sum Games" (currently $30 on steam, but also 10% off at the time of this post). I actually bought that one BEFORE it launched, by the way. Never heard of the company, but the game intrigued me - and buying it during the Beta put it at 40% or 50% off.

Notice how games up to $20 or $25, I'm not worried about "what have I seen this company do before" ...? I'm willing to give the small guys, the NEW guys, a chance if their games are priced in the "impulse buy" range, or even a bit higher.




Then 450 of them did somethign morally reprehensible. They should have googled for the name of the game and company, found the legal place to buy it, and done so. Or if they preferred free demos, gone to the company's forum, and said "hey if you put out a free demo I can try, and it's good, I'll buy your game."

They should not have gone to a file-sharing site to download a game, in the first place.

In both cases what we're seeing is that half of all people who saw the game, got it.


Again, assumes facts not in evidence.

How do you know who heard of the game where?

How do you know that none of those who got the game via torrent, didn't first find the sales outlet?

And flipside, how do you know that none of those who bought the game, didn't see it in their P2P client, and say "oh, lemme check that out .... yeah, eight bucks is cool", and then bought it?

...

No; you want the developer to be at fault, you want to excuse the people who downloaded a pirated copy. And so you are trying to shape the data to fit your conclusions.

When you should instead be doing it completely the other way around.



No, no he's not. He's saying "OMG, for every bought copy, there are fifteen "pirate" copies! And then these freeloading bastards come to my forums and complain about the very action they themselves are immediately guilty of ...!"

It's the hypocrisy that's the point. These people pirated a game - and the ones who went to the forum, cannot NOT know that they were supposed to pay for it - and are complaining that in the game itself, [i]people are pirating games, and thus, noone is BUYING those games, and their little make-believe company goes out of business.



Truly, p[lainly, you didn't read the actual blog and are just talking out your backside right now.

The description file posted for the torrent was this:



Pay especial attention to that bit, "developer website". Everyone who found the torrent, also knew exactly where to go, to get a legal and paid-for copy. Yet several thousand of them chose not to.





Duh, they don't HAVE a game released yet. But, just because your search-fu was weak, doesn't mean they aren't ON steam, at all.

Besides, if you'd been one of those checkign for it via Torrent?

Right there. In the description.

Dude, you need to back down. For the most part, I *agree* with you. But I don't have the time to engage with someone who is going to dig into petty insults from a high horse.

If pointing out the blindingly obvious is "a petty insult" ... well, damn. I don't have any idea what to say, in that case.

It's a matter of tone and you've been called out on it by different people often enough that one might think it 'blindingly obvious' that it might warrant a bit of inward reflection.

Edit: The internet is a place where facial expression and gesture are sorely lacking and you have a habit of making up for it by using italics and bold face. It might be one of the reasons that you come across as a bit rude.

Let's all chill out. Tempers are running high so take a deep breath, read a different thread for a little bit, and come back in an hour when you have a clear head. One line sniping at each other is not going to help, and starts looking a lot like Personal Attacks. Thanks!

Let's also bear in mind that the whole thing is largely a marketing exercise for Greenheart; trying to convert pirates to buying a copy, trying to stir up support and good wishes from people who oppose piracy, but mostly just trying to get people to notice, share, and talk about it.

People pirate stuff. That's never going to change. The special sauce is how publishers and creators react to piracy and the people who do it. People pirate for a variety of reasons, and you can't just lump them all into one bucket.

Hey, I played the free demo on my craptop last night and had a lot of fun!

I have this little crappy floor model craptop that I paid like a hundred and fifty bucks for before heading to Micronesia that can barely run anything. The screen is so small that even when I fiddle with the resolution, there's a small amount of graphic/menu cutoff that occurs when I play the demo.

But this game is really ideal for me because it doesn't require a nice computer or fast internet.

I think later this week when I have the chance I'm going to buy the full version.

By the way, in terms of similar games, has anyone played Gamebiz 2? That was also a good game, similar to this one.

My only critique of this game is that it seems like it's a little bit easy. In the 5 year demo game my character ended up banking like 2 million dollars coding out of his garage. It doesn't seem very realistic.

Maybe your character is based on Notch?

I played a few games of it (it distracted me, less and less is doing that right now.). For every 2M company I made, ten went down the bankruptcy hole. So, yeah, it depends on a lot of things.

Thank you Adam, for the voice of reason.

Oh god, this is too funny: http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/01/...ame-dev-tycoon/

Most people get too het up with emotions regarding piracy. It's just business, and not a part of business that's worth taking personally.

*Looks up at the pirates hanging by their necks until dead* "Nothin' personal. Only bizness."

...

Wrong kind of pirates?

OK, the full game is more challenging for sure. My biggest problem is that after a while in spite of inputs my game starts getting mediocre reviews. I suspect it might be that unless you update graphics AND sound with new engines, your games start to suck no matter what.

LOL in retrospect on using mono sound from the 80s way into the Playstation era.

LOL, I went bankrupt because if your staff don't get vacations they contribute literally nothing to the project and your end product sucks.

I would find that funnier if I weren't already convinced that that is exactly what happens in the boardrooms of game publishers.

Fixed that for you.

EA used to be so cool, too. Their games Strike Fleet and SEAL Team are some of the most awesome military simulations of the era.

So, I was looking at the wiki, and apparently the game penalizes you significantly if you publish repetitious genres of games.

I'm kind of "meh" on that one, as far as realism goes. That's like saying Final Fantasy could never have been a successful franchise due to repetition of genre.

But Square didn't JUST make Final Fantasy all those years to stay afloat. SNES Era had 3 FF games (4, 5, 6) as well as Super Mario RPG, Seiken Densetsu 2 and 3, Live a Live, Chrono Trigger, Bahamut Lagoon, Breath Of Fire, Front Mission, Romancing SaGa 1, 2, 3, Treasure of the Rudras, and Radical Dreamers (I may be missing a few titles, I didn't include Secret of Evermore because I believe it was an NA only title). While those are all RPGs I wouldn't call them repetitious.

I played the demo last night and then ponied up for the full version, and I feel kind of the same way: you as a publisher don't have much of an identity, you can't sculpt it, you can't port already-existing games to other platforms, you can't identify something as a sequel.

Maybe that complexity comes later in the game, but I want that complexity during the building stages of my company.

I don't think this game is as fun as running a real company.

Apparently in this game "sequel" is something you have to research.

Gamebiz had all this stuff, by the way, and IIRC it was freeware or shareware or something. Sequels as well. But it basically had no graphics and was very number crunchy, such that you could nearly spend the whole game developing for Atari 2600 or somesuch due to early-game market saturation and low rate of extinction.

Breath of Fire was Capcom actually!

That said, Final Fantasy was hardly a repetitious set of games, aside from the fact that they were all essentially JRPGS.

Sort of, the first one was published by Square and then Capcom took it in house for BoF 2 - 4 and Dragon Quarter.

It's a honeypot. Honeypots in computing have been used for quite some time to gather information about people and behaviors. There is absolutely nothing flawed with their methodology and infact provided other useful information regarding piracy. The fact that pirates would utilize the official forums to attempt to report bugs or otherwise get their issues resolved shows that they do intend to not only deprive the creators of their rights of distribution but also intend to deprive the creators of monetary value by demanding service for a product they did not acquire through legal channels.

--



A test does not need to be exhaustive to be a test. It was a test with a significant enough sample size that determined initial piracy. Ultimately, that is the only metric about piracy that can ever be conclusively determined. You cannot link legitimate purchases to pirated versions in any way shape or form.

However to answer your question. The probability is likely that total usage of legitimate vs pirate is going to be at best 20/80%.

--



In all cases some party is deprived of rights that they have. With the car the owner is deprived of his right of ownership of the property. With piracy the creator is deprived of his right to choose how to distribute his creation. Rights are not something to be tossed away or ignored whenever they are inconvenient or cause an outcome that we find undesirable.

--



I disagree here. Game producers have to comply with laws regarding the country which the product is sold in. It's more espensive to comply with the laws by having to remove features. Because of that, the people in those countries are actually having a portion of the cost to produce their version subsidized by those in countries that do not require such features to be removed. I also do not condone piracy just to get around other irritating laws of a country. Most countries do not have the same freedom of speech and expression that is present in the United States and even then the US is far from perfect. Free speech zones, anyone?

--

As for great games. You should all play Kerbal Space Program. Newtonian physics simulators!

I don't know what you're talking about, my free speech zone is everywhere.

I suggest you read about them then. Since SCOTUS has interpreted the first to mean that Congress and the government may not make law regarding the content of speech they are able to regulate when, where, and how of free speech.

A honeypot in this sense does indeed skew the data, because it almost certainly accelerated the rate of piracy. Given that it's a small publisher with a niche game that had -- as far as I could tell -- absolutely no buzz before "the piracy experiment," the data is skewed. It may well have not been pirated at all within the first 24 hours if they hadn't seeded that version themselves.



Nor can you link it to lost sales.

We all think we know that piracy causes lost sales; but we also have to acknowledge that piracy leads to sales. I am _very_ comfortable saying this, based on my personal experiences, that of my friends/colleagues, and that of my customers, who wouldn't be my customers if they hadn't first downloaded and then purchased.

(Hence why we open license stuff now, because sanctioning sharing is a heck of a lot easier and more productive than fighting piracy.)

I doubt this skewed the results in a negative manner. Generally, without any sort of DRM measure, a game is pirated and seeded well within 24 hours. DRM is, and has always been about delaying how long it takes for pirates to crack the game and torrent it. If the original game has no DRM included in it or only very weak DRM, then a cracked copy would be out within 24 hours and that's really over estimating. It's not unheard of for a game to be cracked within a couple hours of when it was released. The size of the publisher doesn't matter in this case. The one way their experiment did skew the results was by making piracy seem like less of a problem than it was. Undoubtedly there were two versions being torrented. The version they leaked and a version that was cracked and torrented by pirates and some of the users that would show up as legit are undoubtedly using that version. They people making the game just got their version out first and became the dominant seed. If you read the article you will see that they generated their figures based on anonymous usage data and not sales figures and a part of that anonymous usage data was which version was being used. 214 users with anonymous data that was being sent to their servers were flagged as the legitimate version. That could be purchasers or it could be pirates though they could release sales figures to help narrow that down but that only works if 100% of machines with the legimitate version installed are sending back the anonymous usage data.



You have a product that is unusual in the terms of creative products. It does not correlate well to most video games. Your product has a core element with many added extras. You can open license the rules content for the SR4 rulebook and this is fine. They serve as a loss leader. That gets people access to the rules and the ability to play the game. Then Shadowrun turns revenue on whatever supplements it publishes... Arsenal, Unwired, or any of the setting style books that all a more rich world to play in. It probably also serves as a loss leader for other non-game products like books as people want to know more and more. A lot of video games can't really follow that model. They don't have the assets to turn out enough content at an acceptable price point that would cover the costs of the additional content and the original production costs. Would Borderlands be able to be profitable if it were a free game and charged $10 for each of the DLC? Maybe, but I doubt it. Then you can look at the other end of the spectrum. Kickstarter. Companies are making sure the costs of developing the game are covered up front before ever starting on production. It's basically a throwback to the style of selling art where wealthy patrons would commission a piece. It's just in this case the wealthy patron is a collective.

Like it or not, if you can't monetize your product then you will go out of business unless you're indepentently wealthy and can constantly throw your own money at it or you can convince the government that you're too big to fail and get dirt cheap loans that you'll never have to pay back.

Tell you what, let's compare to the numbers that CDProjeckt Red has when they release Witcher 3 (since all their games are DRM free anyway).

If those numbers are recorded. Sure.

As an aside. I have trouble taking anything you post serious ever since I started watching Soul Eater and was introduced to Excalibur.

LOL, that is completely fair. I actually took it from an old SNES game, truth be told. Total 80s cyberpunk styled game... where's a link when I need it...

I wonder why more companies don't go with the Pathfinder approach to protecting their property. Customize each purchase so you know exactly who to go after if a pirated version does surface. They did this with their books by putting in the name of person that purchased the .pdf on each page. Sure, that's relatively simple to erase before pirating, but it makes people think twice. Especially if they're not sure they got all the identifying markers.

The really nice thing is that when we played pathfinder we could share the pdfs between members of the group playing without difficulty, and since none of us planned on putting them out on the web it did not impede us at all. But if we didn't know and trust each other, we wouldn't have shared them amongst each other, because then it could be one of our names out on the web attached to those torrents.
(I'm really not interested in anyone's opinion of whether sharing a pdf in the group is piracy or is no different than sharing a hard copy of the book, which we also do. There have already been enough arguments in this thread.)

I imagine you could do something similar with any purchased downloaded game to incorporate the personal information of the person buying the game into the game itself. See if pirates are as keen to put out a cracked version of a game when it might contain their name, address, and contact info (or credit card info?). Sure, they'll find ways around it and will try to modify their information so that it's not clear, but it's a relatively easy way to catch some of the pirates and make sure that if you do take legal action, you're at least taking against a real pirate or someone that's somehow connected with them.

Putting in a little extra data is much less intrusive to the user and solves the problem where you can't loan a game to a friend to test out. Which has always been the appeal of a hard copy for me, several of my favorite games were ones I would not have bought if someone had not loaned me the cartridge or disk and said, try this, and many others that on trying I ruled out and didn't purchase. You own that customized copy of the game and can loan it out or install it on however many machines as you want, but doing so involves risks of people distributing it further and your personal info getting out.
In fact, you could do it as a selling point and have the buyer's name alter the game in some small way so that it's "custom" to the person that bought it. Maybe their name appears in a random document that can be found in the game or some level geometry is based on the characters of the buyer's name, or some sound files are altered, etcetera. Nothing major, but just enough that when you play it, it's definitely your game.

This doesn't stop any determined pirate, and once one "cleaned" version is available, well, no amount of watermarking everyone else's download/version of the game does a damned bit of good.

I tend to think that the person who thinks "Cool! This game addresses me by name!" is not the sort of person who's going to be involved in cracking it and uploading it to torrent servers.

(Although it's amusing that the cracked version will probably address everyone as "General Fuckbutter" or something like that. ;D

I thought somehow embedding credit card info would be a great idea, until I thought of what could happen if someone used a stolen credit card number for piracy.

I think that might well be illegal, _and_ the game creator/publisher almost never sees the credit card info itself, anyway.

If you process credit cards you're supposed to be PCI compliant as a requirement by the CC processing company. If you store a credit card number that means it must be encrypted if stored electronicly. That means that if you KEEP a copy of the PDF then it would need to be encrypted on the PDF but if you send it off to the customer and keep no local copies then you can plaster it unencrypted. I'm not aware of any regulations in the US that would matter.

Let me say that, as a customer, I would be very uncomfortable with my thumb drive or my laptop also carrying my credit card information. I feel uncomfortable with having to either leave my credit card information unencrypted, or having to decrypt my books each time I use them. And I feel VERY uncomfortable trusting my credit card information to any Adobe product, Adobe being regularly terrible at anything security.

I'm not saying it's a good idea to put unencrypted CC info of the purchaser on a PDF file... only that I'm not aware of any reason that it would be illegal or disallowed.

Because these are personal data of your customer, which you are not allowed to make public without the customers consent.

This is tricky, but it would require a court to adjudicate to know for sure.

The company is not making personal information public by embedding CC information on a PDF on a product which they give into your ownership and do not retain a copy. If that person then gives a copy of that PDF file to another individual then the purchaser is the one who released his own personal information rather than the company. Now, various countries might have different laws, but that is to the best of my understanding, how it would work in US jurisdiction.

A similar thing happened regarding health records that were released to the public by a lawfirm (medical malpractice) that donated scrap paper. A ton of personal health information was made available. The quirky part is that this information being released did not run afoul of HIPAA regulations since those only cover health related entities of which a lawfirm is not.

Whoa! Wait! Stop the presses? In the health care industry everyone is puckered to the max over HIPAA. But all you have to do is have a non medical third party leak the info, and you have some insulation from being HIPAA'd?

Yes, technically that is correct . .
But usually, you can't leak the information to the 3rd party without getting into trouble either . .

PDFs have laughable security anyhow.

More or less the digital equivalent of a sticky note atop a pile of papers saying "please don't mess with this".




-k

Basically, as long as the entity that releases the information is not a healthcare provider, an insurance company, or some third type of entity, HIPAA doesn't matter to them.

Now, an entity may need to practice HIPAA compliance if they want to do any sort of business with a covered entity that would involve the transfer of personal health information since a covered entity is not permitted to do business with a third party that doesn't perform at the minimum level of security and guardianship that would be required by HIPAA.

That said, an entity does not need to meet any HIPAA requirements if they get the information because a patient told the HIPAA covered provider that the entity has permission to get your records.