Best anti-piracy measure ever? (Game Dev Tycoon)

[RogueIce]

Game Dev Tycoon forces those who pirate the game to unwittingly fail from piracy
93.6 per cent of players currently running cracked copy.

By Tom Phillips Published Monday, 29 April 2013

What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy?

That's the question asked by Greenheart Games, the two man indie developer made up of Patrick and Daniel Klug, who included a special surprise within hacked copies of their game.

The duo's motto is "less social, less ville, more game". They launched their first title yesterday - development simulator Game Dev Tycoon for PC, Mac and Linux.


Play the cracked version and you will be plagued by piracy.

The game costs just $7.99 (£5.15) to buy - money which will go straight back to the game's creators.

But after a day on sale, 3104 of the 3318 copies being played were pirated.

Pre-empting the game's eventual appearance on file-sharing sites, Patrick and Daniel Klug uploaded their own cracked copy of the full game. But within the code lay a few extra lines.

Those who play the pirated version are warned that their own attempts at creating games are being hampered by piracy. Profits for each project will be less than those who own and paid for the full game.

Players will eventually see their careers end in bankruptcy.

"As a gamer I laughed out loud: the irony!!!", Patrick Klug wrote today in a blog post that revealed Greenheart's idea. "However, as the developer, who spent over a year creating this game and hasn't drawn a salary yet, I wanted to cry."

Despite repeated warnings that piracy was killing the player's in-game career, many users did not get the hint. Messages began to appear online from owners of the cracked copy, asking for help in avoiding the situation.


'Can I research a DRM or something?'

"I can't progress furher... HELP!" one user wrote. "Guys I reached some point where if I make a decent game with score 9-10 it gets pirated and I can't make any profit.

"It says blah blah our game got pirated stuff like that. Is there some way to avoid that? I mean can I research a DRM or something?"

Said another user: "Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me! Not fair."

Patrick Klug had even appealed to those interested in the game pre-release, stressing the fact that the game came DRM-free, with an installer for all three platforms, with copies for three computers, and a Steam key if their Steam Greenlight campaign is successful.

"There are still individuals who either can't make a legal purchase because of payment-issues or who genuinely cannot afford the game," Klug concluded. "I don't have a quarrel with you.

"To the rest who could afford the game consider this: We are just two guys working our butts off, trying to start our own game studio to create games which are fun to play."

I'm honestly not sure whether to laugh or cry at this.

[Wing Commander MAD]

That is beautiful, just plain beautiful.

[Stark]

It's not new or interesting; indeed other games do the same thing even less meaningfully.

But since the game appears to be a rip of a mobile phone game ...

[Admiral Valdemar]

This is certainly one of the better variations on fucking with the pirate through the game mechanic. It's always more amusing when the suckers actually point out the measure by asking for help or telling the dev their game is buggy.

[Stark]

Until someone can confirm this isn't a hilarious ripoff of Game Dev Story, it's actually funny for entirely unintentional reasons.

And aside from tricking a few people into outing themselves as pirates publically, this is just as useless as all other similar DRM. I bet it was cracked out before the article was even written (assuming anyone bought the game which is unlikely since GDS is on everyone's phone already).

[Simon_Jester]

It may not be effective, but it's sure funny and appropriate.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Wait, this isn't Game Dev Story? Man. I didn't notice they had almost the exact same title for another game. That is hilarious for other reasons.

But you're right. No DRM is really going to stop people from playing a cracked game eventually. It's just nice to see they didn't totally waste their time with their particular implementation when we get the clueless offering themselves up for Internet mocking sessions by posting queries like this.

[Stark]

It appears to be so shameless a rip I had to look up if it was the same developer. Nope; turns out they put an 'hilarious' pirate joke in the game they ... Ripped off a mobile phone game!

And the article doesn't even MENTION Game Dev Story!

GAMING JOURNALISM

[Vendetta]

Apparently it's mechanically different enough from Game Dev Story to be a different game (after all, most videogames nick things from other, similar games, that's what genres are).

Still, this is basically nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with marketing. Chances are most of the internet have never heard of this game if they hadn't done this. For a start it's not on any of the major digital distribution platforms, you can only buy it direct from the makers, which basically is a guarantee of obscurity. If you're doing digital only distribution, and you're not on Steam, you're not going anywhere fast.

Unless you engage in a guerilla marketing campaign designed to grab the attention of every fat person blog by leveraging a contentious subject and all the "mainstream" news sites that use them as "sources".

[weemadando]

It had popped up in my Greenlight queue when I looked in there for the first time in weeks and I went "Oh, Game Dev Story clone, nope." and hadn't had a second thought about it until I saw the news articles a few days later.

Seriously though, why is no one making my HUGE SUCCESS MULTI-MILLION SELLER Game Dev Story series "Savannah Kings" - a simulation RPG about life on the African Plains. IMMA KICKSTARTER THAT SHIZNIT.

[Stark]

I'm 100% certain Kairosoft already reskinned Game Dev Story into Savannah Kings.

[Covenant]

To the developers, "Eh buddy, get in line."

They've got like 3000 pirated customers and 30 real ones, which is to say, they are a no-name nothing game who just got the world's best advertising ever. Clever trick, but I don't really care if they personally succeed or not. If they spent a year cloning someone else's game then that's their fault, not the pirate, and what really turns robbers into buyers is a quality product. It isn't that they hacked YOUR game... they hack EVERY game, even shitty clones. There's such competition among pirates for the "best" upload that even games, like this one (or my company's game) that include ZERO DRM will get claimed as the first upload by some pirate crew. My company didn't even bother worrying about the piracy rate because if we have a 90% piracy rate but still sold 50,000 units then I don't really care. Plus, I sincerely doubt our game has 500,000 players out there. Being able to reach that many players is probably worth the piracy rate, especially when looking forwards to sequels.

Has everyone forgotten the Pirate Bay Anodyne promotion which successfully turned major bank on publishing to the pirate consumers? The real takeaway isn't that 90% of the players are people who stole the game, but that 90% of the community of gamers your product is reaching are people who are willing to pirate it unless you do something. If you want to chide them for it, go ahead, they've heard it before and they're probably 13 so they'll hear it tomorrow when they're late to class. One of the few things this did is actually provide a good demo of the game to the people who DID steal it, and highlight to the pirates that the company is a tiny 2-man group. The smaller and less successful you are the more likely you are to get some sympathy, but you also have no surefire way of making people buy your product.

That said, I do think any opportunity to highlight the poor reasoning behind reasons to pirate helps transition financially stable pirate users into full users, at least for discount titles. This game is 8 bucks, not 60, so the opportunity cost for buying it is already low enough that anyone with access to a credit card (something a highschooler or below, a major demographic in the pirate crowd, may not have) should be able to afford it.

This game, for example, woulda' been better as a freemium or dollar digital download that included a variety of fun little downloadable premium items. But then again they're just copying an existing game so... meh?

In the future my company will probable provide either a "Pay what you will" option for some promotions and/or a "tip jar" in general for people looking to give a little extra just because. If I can get a dollar or two out of a pirate, that's great. With a 90% or 95% piracy rate and a mere dollar per paying customer, you're looking at a very substantial return over what you're currently getting. For a 5 dollar game like mine was, if we assume we sold 50,000 units and got a mere 50% piracy rate, that's like getting 10k new paying customers. If you assume a 10% conversion rate on Pirates to Dollar Buyers, that's still 1k new sales.

The real tragedies are when developers get flooded with support requests from pirates, or pirate usage dramatically increases server usage without increasing income, and the game has to shut down or the paying customers suffer because of it.

[Stark]

What makes it a bigger joke is that decisions based on industry-themed concepts like launch uptake and piracy concerns and aftermarket modifications and second hand sales etc would actually strengthen a game about 'game development'.

But it's only in there as a nag screen. Maybe they even made mechanics around piracy and then broke them to get lols!

I mean Game Dev Story is very simple (and doesn't even do dynamic shit like 'xyz is the next big console, oh no after you bought a development licence it died in the ass and won't reach its sales targets') but its compelling and years old. This even actually looks like zero-budget spreadsheet games from 2001.

[Covenant]

Well, it probably is, if it was made by two guys. For a studio of their size I can't imagine they need to make very much money to see a profit, but if this was their grand idea and they spent a year on it then maybe they should get real jobs and be hobbyists until they can come back with a real game.

But they're bound to see a lot of positive press over this, which translates into interest in the game itself.

Really though, if you look at the way this works, stealing a game is one of the popular low-level miscreant behaviors that people can do and feel like they're getting something for nothing. It is just part of doing business though, nothing you can do can ever solve the problem because the problem is human nature.

I can attest, personally, that the pirates who stole our game lead to surprisingly good sales in Russia though. We had no Russian language support or advertising in that region and yet we had a notable presence there, in part because of file sharing. I was content to leave the Pirate Bay links but I sent a few C&D mails to places with direct downloads to the file, because that's lazy and anti-social.

[Lagmonster]

That is beautiful, just plain beautiful.

It was clever. Doesn't actually even matter if the game sucks or not, or even if the 'piracy' represented in-game bears any resemblance at all to reality, because these two have made a bunch of freeloaders look like assholes. I approve of virtually any instance wherein freeloaders look like assholes.

[Stark]

Too bad it neither stops them nor improves their game, I guess.

[Simon_Jester]

I mean Game Dev Story is very simple (and doesn't even do dynamic shit like 'xyz is the next big console, oh no after you bought a development licence it died in the ass and won't reach its sales targets') but its compelling and years old. This even actually looks like zero-budget spreadsheet games from 2001.

Since huge sophisticated games developed by small armies of programmers are often no better thought out, I fail to see the problem.

Too bad it neither stops them nor improves their game, I guess.

So... you're saying that an intelligent critique which doesn't actually change anything is unsatisfying?

[Tolya]

Game Dev Tycoon... oh yeah, now I remember. I played the demo when it was on Microsoft Marketplace a while back. Looks like something that belongs entirely on an iPad.

Also, it's a ripoff of Kairosoft Game Dev Story. Of course, devs have been ripping each other before, no big deal. Only these guys decided to go lawful good paladin on the gaming market, which kinda makes them look stupid in face of what they produced.

Btw, it's a bland game for about an hour. You can buy much more entertainment on GOG.com for less money.

[Stark]

]Since huge sophisticated games developed by small armies of programmers are often no better thought out, I fail to see the problem.

The problem... With what? Game Dev Story? Game Dev Sto- Tycoon? Simplistic mechanics? Missed opportunities? Use words.

I'm not sure if this makes them look stupid (or crass) more than it reinforces the idea that the perception that PC nerds don't play games on other platforms. Maybe they honestly thought nobody would notice - it's just sad that since they're not on steam they can't actually benefit from the fatty impulse buy halo they probably got from this piece of marketing theatre.

[Tolya]

The original Game Dev Story was a 1996 PC game, so maybe someone will notice. It was later remade for Android.

[Stark]

Aren't all the Kairosoft games on all mobile platforms?