Pirating Game Dev Tycoon Dooms Players to be Ruined By Piracy

[Lady Larunai]

Figured i would waste the $8 and buy it if anything i can see how much they copied from Game Dev Story

Do you have any idea when the first version of a "game development sim" came out? Long before Kairosoft who made it in 1997, that's for sure.

I dont know the name of the first ever game dev sim made so i cant say much for it but the half an hour i did manage to play of GDT just made is seem like the same game with a few changes, some i didn't mind others i wasn't a fan of, i probably would have played longer but as it wouldn't work on my mac i had to go find a pc to actually play it on which was a bit of a pain.

It would have been nice if they had gone for something of a different look, i can understand there are a limited options for genre's and such i just feel they could have done better as it really feels like a bad port of the app compared to other simulation games i have played, i dont know, maybe if they hadn't used the same bubble points system, selection setup for the games and maybe gave you some market competitors and something other than following how the console wars actually played out it might have felt different from the app, randomise it maybe create a world where pc's died and the virtual boy reigned supreme or where military strategy games were hated and i didn't know the exact path of the popularity of each console because i had played game dev story..

Maybe i shouldn't have use the word copied but its a pretty fitting word after playing it, i will give it another shot if it works on the mac in the next week but if not i will skip it till next friday.

its not a waste of $8 but i dont feel it was worth all $8

 

[Crazie_Guy]

Wherever you stand on piracy, I think we can all agree this is hilarious and awesome.

 

[Asmundr]

pirating a game made about making games makes the game make pirates.. pirateception! gamecept... pirgamcep... gampires...gam...

Incepinception!

Great, you just made me laugh out loud in class! Lmao roflol xD

 

[Aeshi]

Eh, it's a nice idea, but it isn't really that fitting.

I think it would've worked better if the pirated copy stole your personal information/passwords/credit card details/all three and then made it public on various websites while going "Just copying & sharing, nothing wrong here!"

We'd see if people are still willing to believe information wants to be free when it's their information.

 

[immortalfrieza]

Sorry to have to tell you this blackraven, but you "lost" (if you can call what that these shouting matches filled to the brim with hyperbole and logical fallicies that these anti-piracy people engage in actual debates) before you ever began. Like just about everybody here that argues against piracy, Resonance had this postion that "piracy is a crime therefore it's wrong" hammered into his whole life, decided it was completely correct without any leeway whatsoever, and decided to defend it to the death long before he saw this thread. Any reasonable person would have at least admitted that piracy is an understandable thing to do even if they don't agree with it within a couple posts. You might as well try to reason with a rock for all it'll accomplish.

Try quoting me if you're going to talk shit about me, mate.


talking about this game

1) it has a free demo

2) it's $8

3) the world owes you fuck all

So where's the justification to "try before you buy" or "HURRGH, AAA DEVELOPERS ARE EBIL" in this case?

I was just informing darkraven that his arguing with you is futile. You've made it quite clear pretty much from the moment you showed up on this thread that you only came here to shout your side from the rooftops, not actually debate anything, that you are completely unreasonable, are never are going to change your mind in the slightest no matter how many perfectly reasonable arguments people throw at you, (and there have been plenty) and when they do give perfectly reasonable arguments you won't admit it and just dismiss it out of hand without ever even considering it. However, if you insist...

The fact of the matter is people like convenience, and like it or not, Piracy provides a better, more convenient, and more affordable service all around even without the free factor than the all the legal ways of getting digitally distributable content. This is why piracy exists to begin with and why it will continue to exist for the forseeable future. To give you an analogy, developers and complaining about Piracy costing them sales are like those mom and pop stores complaining about going out of business because some big chain store opened up near them and provided a much cheaper and much better service. No, mom and pop stores/developers, you're not going out of business because that store opened up or losing sales because piracy exists, you're going out or losing sales because you can't or won't measure up, and worst of all, you won't admit that. That, and the fact that if people are pirating a game more than they are buying it, that means the game is crap. A good game would convert most of it's pirates that could afford it into paying customers because those pirates would want to see more games from that developer.

Besides, people are going to pirate a game no matter what, it is the responsiblity of the developer to make sure piracy is impossible and to entice them into purchasing rather than pirating, at least for the length of time it would take to get most of sales it's ever going to get. If a developer can't stop it, they deserve to have a lot of people pirate their games, it doesn't matter what position said developer is in either. It's just a modern version of the law of jungle "You can't keep an animal from killing and eating you in the jungle you deserve to be eaten" which has never truly and never will leave us. It sucks, I know, but that's the way the world is and in all likelyhood always will be.

Oh, and one more thing.

3) the world owes you fuck all

That can easily be turned around. If the world owes me and everybody else "fuck all," I and everybody else owe the world just as much.

Your anaology falls apart when you consider that its ultimately impossiable to compete with a product downloaded for free, and you could use this argument as justifcation for stealing or counterfitting anything. Or at least, why buy books when you can just sit in the shop and read them?

Games cost time, money and effort to make, what do you think happens when devlopers don't get paid for their efforts?

Developers and publishers can compete with free. How can they compete? Easy, they could lower the prices to the absolute minimum needed to cover the development costs and still make a profit, lowering it further once those costs are met, they could make sure their distribution method functions easily and conveniently, they can provide perks to loyal customers that stick by them and purchase their products legally, they could add unobtrusive commericals and other ads so they can make money without having to charge much of anything, and so on, the ways are pretty much endless. Piracy is a competitive force in many industries and always has been, yet not a one of those industries have ever died out due to piracy, in fact it's barely made a blip on their profit margins.

When developers don't get paid for their efforts, they die out, the same as with anyone that creates anything in any other industry. It is not the fault of the pirates that this happens, it's the fault of the developer and publisher. It is the job of the developers to make a game good enough that most people want to buy it rather than just get it for free, and it's the job of the publisher to provide a means of distribution that is affordable and convenient enough that piracy looks like the worse option, and if they can't accomplish this they deserve whatever loss of profit the get. Piracy has exists in some form throughout history and always will exist, it can't be stopped. People can argue about it their entire lives long about whether it's good or not, but this fact cannot be denied. What everybody should be doing is not trying to wipe it out, what they should be doing is working with and around it, capitalizing on it's benefits while minimizing it's detrimental effects, just like anything else that's always been around and always will really.

 

[Lightknight]

Eh, it's a nice idea, but it isn't really that fitting.

I think it would've worked better if the pirated copy stole your personal information/passwords/credit card details/all three and then made it public on various websites while going "Just copying & sharing, nothing wrong here!"

We'd see if people are still willing to believe information wants to be free when it's their information.

That would land the developers in jail for some time.

This isn't just a great idea. It's metro. A game developer made a fake copy of a game about creating games in which the company goes bankrupt due to potential revenue being lost to piracy. We've basically been treated to poetry here without breaking the law.

 

[DarthFennec]

Unless those figures actually translate into sales, at the end of the day it doesn't do the indie devloper much good.

Of course it translates to sales. The only ways I can think of that it wouldn't is if 1. everybody pirated (which is clearly not the case, as this thread wouldn't have spawned a ten page debate if it were), or 2. only pirates are interested in the concept of the game and nobody else is (so it would have to be a game that was specifically designed that only pirates would be interested in it, which is kind of hard to do and is especially hard to do by accident), or 3. it just isn't that good of a game, and it wouldn't have made many sales anyway.

It might have seemed "awesome" when over 90% of people pirated Goo to get that great player base up, but although the game is rated highly this didn't do much for its sales.

Yeah, you see this with movies as well, where something gets a fairly high critical reception, but audiences are mostly uninterested for one reason or another. It's sad when that happens, but it's just how things work. You can usually minimize the probability of that sort of thing during development though, it's mostly about how the game is designed.

 

[cerebreturns]

It's a bit heavy handed but still kind of funny, especially that the pirates then went on the forums and started complaining.

Heavy handed? How? He releases a cracked version on the net that functianoly doesn't work and is designed to teach a lesson (that is lost on almost everyone who suffers from it more then likely). How is that heavy handed? No DRM or anything, heavy handed?


Lots of games do stuff like this, I remember there was an asian porn game that the pirated version would forward a whole bunch of stuff about you playing the game to social media outlets, and then there have been several games in ameica that use a similar thing, ghostbusters and the candlesticks being one.

 

[DarthFennec]

You think a developer should feel grateful people are stealing his game? What world do you live in? Maybe you should feel grateful when someone makes sexist remarks to your girlfriend. After all, if no one openly comments on how great her ass is it must mean she's not very attractive right? That's the sort of logic you're dealing.

Not really. My girlfriend's ass is for me and her to enjoy, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks of it. A game, on the other hand, is written for an audience, and it definitely matters what the audience thinks of it, especially if you plan on making any sales. As a starting indie developer, and as someone who doesn't pirate games, I for one can most certainly say that the prospect of any of my content being pirated is wonderful. There are two reasons for this:

One, pretty much every gamer either has a very strong opinion about piracy, or doesn't even consider it as an option. That means there is a set percentage of people who are pirates, and a set percentage who aren't, and you can't change any of their minds so it's useless to try. Therefore, given that your game is appealing to a randomly mixed subset of pirates and non-pirates (which is generally the case unless you draw attention to piracy, like putting a terrible DRM on it or something), the size of that subset is directly proportional to both the piracy rate and the number of sales. Basically, if the game you made is actually good, a higher piracy rate will tend to mean more sales, and a lower piracy rate will tend to mean fewer sales.

Two, it's not about the money anyway. Writing games is a form of art, it's about creating something and showing it to people and being happy if a lot of people enjoy it. If making sure every single one of those people gives you money is more important to you, then you're making games for the wrong reasons, and that probably means you aren't making very good games.

 

[Jegsimmons]

Pirating Game Dev Tycoon Dooms Players to be Ruined By Piracy

and comes with no DRM means that gamers these days have no excuse for pirating the game.

"If years down the track you wonder why there are no games like these anymore and all you get to play is pay-to-play and social games designed to suck money out of your pockets then the reason will stare back at you in the mirror," warns Klugg, on a website set up [http://www.greenheartgames.com/game-dev-tycoon-free-full-torrent-cracked-download/] to specifically target people looking for a cracked version, asking them nicely to reconsider.

"We are just two guys working our butts off, trying to start our own game studio to create games which are fun to play," says Klugg. Amen to that brother. If you agree with him, and can spare the eight bucks, you can buy the game for Mac, Linux and Windows from the Green Heart Games website. [http://sites.fastspring.com/greenheartgames/product/gamedevtycoon]

Source & Image: Green Heart Games [http://www.greenheartgames.com/game-dev-tycoon-free-full-torrent-cracked-download/]

Permalink

Now thats how you deny pirates the right to play...not legal action, BUT BY FUCKING WITH THEM!!!!

pirate battlefield 4? every time you spawn in the campaign or multiplayer a pirate ship crashes on you instantly killing you, you spawn again hanging by the gallows not being able to play as everyone laughs at your cheap ass!

 

[DarthFennec]

You clearly don't understand the comparison.
Piracy is ultimately disrespectful to the developer.
If one suggests that a game's level of piracy is indicative of quality, and further that a developer should thus be grateful for quality, then what you are actually saying is that you should be happy to be disrespected. Because the more disrespect you receive, the more your item or person is worth.

You seem to be making some of three different, but related, unfounded assumptions here:

One is that "developers feel disrespected by piracy". This is true, many do, and that's the problem. Many developers become so caught up in the offense they take from piracy that they choose to take actions (such as bad DRMs) that may end up losing them sales. My suggestion is that they don't take offense, because that leaves time for them to do more important things, like come up with better, more relevant ways to improve their sales.

Another is that "pirates pirate primarily as a conscious act of disrespect". This is, I'm sorry to say, completely untrue and laughably so. What would be the point? It doesn't affect the sales at all if you pirate a game you don't like. It doesn't affect the pirate in any positive way either, it's just a waste of his time. The only time this does have any kind of validity is in cases with terrible DRM schemes (like Spore), but even then, no disrespect is meant toward the developers/the game itself, but only to the publishers/the way in which it was presented. When this happens, it happens because of a conscious effort to combat piracy, and it can be easily avoided (see previous paragraph).

The last is that "I, Akalabeth, feel disrespected when people pirate". Frankly, this is your own problem and is irrelevant to the conversation. Sorry.

artists are grateful to make a living creating art that can be experienced.

And they make a living by people paying them money for their fucking work!

I understand the need to make a living. If you aren't paid for your art, you'd have to make a living doing something you didn't enjoy, and that means you wouldn't have anywhere near as much time to create content. I totally get that. But then, why would you want to create more content? Isn't the answer to that, because you want more of it to be experienced? Isn't that still the goal, where making a living is just a means? If not, then what is the goal? It's not the money itself, you'd have chosen a higher-paying career path if that was the case. It could be (it probably is, in fact) that you just enjoy the process of creating the content, and that's fantastic, but it's much better if someone else would recognize the effort you put into it and enjoy it with you. Am I wrong?

I think artists should certainly make a living from their art. But I recognize that piracy isn't going away, no matter how much people complain about it, and that the best thing to do is to accept it and move on. After all, even with a high piracy rate, you're still making a living, because there will always be people who are willing to spend money for your work. Is the prospect that you may or may not be making quite as much money as you otherwise might so terrible that you take offense from those who aren't so charitable? Even though those people very likely wouldn't have paid for it anyway, and simply wouldn't have experienced your game at all, if they didn't pirate it? Would you rather have X sales and X experiences than X sales and X + Y experiences? Because I like the second one better, personally.

 

[Entitled]

I don't get why the "It's not stealing because nothing was taken" defense makes sense to some people. Do people really think developers give half a shit about the disk the game is on or something? When I get games on steam have I not bought anything? If it isn't stealing it's at the very least counterfeiting, really good counterfeiting.

The problem with the stealing accusation, is that it's a cop-out. A thought-terminating cliché to use when you run out of all arguments against piracy.

When it is asked "What's wrong with pirating a game instead of buying it?" The obvious answer is "It makes the creators have less money for future development. You should support the arts".

But when someone asks "What's wrong with pirating a game that I wouldn't/couldn't have bought [for various reasons]?", then suddenly everyone starts to scream "It's wrong BECAUSE IT'S THEFT/BECAUSE IT'S NOT YOURS TO TAKE/BECAUSE IT'S THEIR PROPERTY/BECAUSE IT'S ILLEGAL"

Even though they all pretend that there is supposed to be this overarching logical, economical, and practical reason for why file-sharing is bad, yet as soon as you would find examples of cases where these don't apply, everyone who just wants to argue against file-sharing out of tradition, will fall back to circular reasonings and tautologies about how file-sharing is classified by current copyright law as "piracy", hence it violates the publishers "rights" to certain authority over data distribution, therefore it's "taking away stuff from them".

 

[Entitled]

I think artists should certainly make a living from their art. But I recognize that piracy isn't going away, no matter how much people complain about it, and that the best thing to do is to accept it and move on. After all, even with a high piracy rate, you're still making a living, because there will always be people who are willing to spend money for your work.

"There are problems in the world, and there's nothing we can do that will fix them, so why bother trying"

That's your philosophy in a nutshell.
I don't agree.

And sometimes there are problems in the world, that only exist because you decided to declare them problems.

Piracy is a crime that only exist to begin with, because late 20th century governments decided to criminalize personal, non-profit copying of data, under an expansion of older copyright laws.

Not because it's self-evident from Natural Law, or because it's a logical conclusion of property laws, but because when a new technology appears, the public and the industr fight over who gets to control it, and one of them wins.

If in 1984, Universal studios would have won the Betamax lawsuit, then ever since then, we would have a huge problem of people illegally recording TV shows for the purpose of time-shifting, and Universal and co. would be arguing that every re-watched movie can be a theoretical lost sale to them and that's terrible.

Just because publishers decided that they do own a certain aspect of copyright, that doesn't make it so, and even if laws happen to agree with them right now in the case of file-sharing, it wouldn't necessarily be the first time that laws went too far unjustly banning something poentially harmless.

 

[Ilikemilkshake]

It's a bit heavy handed but still kind of funny, especially that the pirates then went on the forums and started complaining.

Heavy handed? How? He releases a cracked version on the net that functianoly doesn't work and is designed to teach a lesson (that is lost on almost everyone who suffers from it more then likely). How is that heavy handed? No DRM or anything, heavy handed?


Lots of games do stuff like this, I remember there was an asian porn game that the pirated version would forward a whole bunch of stuff about you playing the game to social media outlets, and then there have been several games in ameica that use a similar thing, ghostbusters and the candlesticks being one.

I've already said this in another post but I'll say again to clarify. I'm not saying they shouldn't have done this but the way they portray their message is a bit ham fisted. In the cracked version you will with 100% certainty go out of business due to piracy, this isn't what happens in real life. In fact they're actually a prime example of the opposite being the case as they've probably benefited alot from all the exposure that piracy has brought to them...

 

[Entitled]

I would not consider a person who's unable to make enough money to sustain themselves a "declared problem". It's a real problem. And if that problem is the result of people stealing rather than paying to play their game then the problem is self evident.

First of all, some evidence that file-sharing actually leads to less creators making a profit, would be nice instead of the usual "90% appears to be a really freaking large number, so let's just assume that it includes some people who would have bought the game otherwise, and that their numbers are greater than of those who were inspired by the ten times larger fandom to buy it."

Second, even if it would be the case, you don't have a basic human right to get employed at any job that you can think of. We used to have one here in Hungary, until 24 years ago. It was even in the constitution and everything. It was the government's role to provide everyone a job, whether there was demand for it or not.

But in a capitalism, sometimes professions become less profitable over time. Demanding the government to keep around monopolistic regulations and limit the usage of new technologies, just so people can always make at least as much profit from a type of job as now, simply doesn't fly.

Your logic is flawed.
You use the extreme example of a case that did not become precedent to prove that what is precedent is unjustified.

I'm not trying to argue that this proves all copyright to be immoral, just that this is an example that conceptually speaking, giving publishers too much control over their IP *could be* possible, and even such a world, one could parrot the same justifications to it that you are saying right now.

About how IP holders' will must be respected, about how limiting them *at all* might theoretically limit their profitability and make it harder to make a living for them, and how it is a problem for those people.

In such a "what if" world, how would YOU argue against the excesses of copyright?
Because in this our, your arguments in favor of copyright need to be at least as good.

What makes your trust and acceptance of all the current extents of copyright, more than an automatic faith in whatever happens to be tradition and law?

 

[Cecilo]

I almost shed a tear, ALMOST!
But once again this is shitty world.
And would such developer feel better if nobody would even bother to pirate his/her game?
Because if your game is being pirated, you did something right.
If your game isn't pirated then you just produced shit.
Harsh reality, sad reality, disappointing reality, but still reality.

No, I'm sorry but this is not a shitty world, the only thing that's shitty here is your justifications and your perspective.

I'm sorry that you're unable to empathize with someone who's working his ass off to create a game that you feel entitled to steal. You talk to me about charity? You know that charity depends upon giving a shit for someone else? And yet you come up with all sorts of rationalizations why giving a shit for a developer is something you don't need to do? That you feel entitled not to do? Of having not done?

You think a developer should feel grateful people are stealing his game? What world do you live in? Maybe you should feel grateful when someone makes sexist remarks to your girlfriend. After all, if no one openly comments on how great her ass is it must mean she's not very attractive right? That's the sort of logic you're dealing.

Discussion over.

Except he pirated games in his youth, so.. again why should ANYONE care about the fact that he is having HIS game pirated now?

He justified it by saying "Games weren't readily available in my youth" (Paraphrasing), Okay. Well, money is not readily available in this recession, so I guess we are even eh?

Because this is a discussion about piracy in general, not piracy as it relates to this specific developer.

As many people have previously said. This is about pirating an "Eight Dollar Game". He pirated games, so why should I feel bad that he got his game pirated now. Answer is. I shouldn't. The only reason he cares about it now, is that it is his game. I can guarantee you, he did not care about whose job he was killing, or whose family he was stealing from when he did it, so he can take his self righteous "You dirty pirates" Message and shove it.