Hypocrite developer! Deliver a new path, instead of sticking to an old one

Game Dev Tycoon ideas
#1

Let me start this post with this little note: I don’t have this game, neither pirated nor un-pirated, what interests me is the debate it has the potential to start.

There is no doubt a piracy problem in the world of movies, games and music that is clearly stated by the numbers greenheart has put forth, what is interesting is why is there a piracy problem?

Bad game play
Pretty graphics, bad story
Safe paths / No experiments
Too expensive

Personally I tend to pirate games I feel could deliver something, and if it’s good enough I buy it; however the trend in the world of PC gaming has been a mess of bad ports from consoles, to extremely bad games with pretty graphics insulting both my intelligence and my lust for games.

The list of A games that are shockingly bad is endless, and now indie developers come forth trying to claim a pot of the gold as well, but as a consumer how do I know what to buy? What doesn’t suck? Most review sites have been bought and paid for (see debate from Dragon Age 2, and the metacritic reviews).

For arguments sake I’ll list some of the games I’ve considered buying but found so shockingly bad that i stopped playing them mid way through: Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Crysis 2, Crysis 3, Hitman Absolution… the list goes on and on with bad stories and crappy game play.

The pretty shooters are the worst, their pretty graphics set aside, their story and game play are redundant and does nothing but alienate older groups of gamers.

Coming in right behind the pretty shooters are the games that promise a new and shockingly cool experience only to deliver something like Hitman Absolution that is a dumb’ed down version of the older Hitman games, sure it’s pretty and flashy but it offers nothing towards strategy and thinking.

The last part is something that indie developers have tried to do something about, the price… it is shockingly high, and it’s high due to a twofold reasoning, first off they cling to the old times where they could charge nearly whatever they wanted and their new argument is that because of piracy they need the high prices.

What is the new path we should take? I would like to hear your ideas, and arguments before delivering my own ideas.

Now for something completely different, hypocrisy:

"I’m not mad at you. When I was younger, downloading illegal copies was practically normal but this was mostly because global game distribution was in its infancy. To be fair, there are still individuals who either can’t make a legal purchase because of payment-issues or who genuinely cannot afford the game. I don’t have a quarrel with you. To the rest who could afford the game consider this:

quoted from Patrick

It sounds to me like you did the same thing most people do and you try to justify it with the times, which sounds wrong to me since I’ve been a part of this gaming community since the late 1980’s and it is still practically normal to commit piracy because all the big AAA developers have been neglecting the PC scene.

It brings me to why? Why would you try to justify it? Could it be because you now want some of the money that industry has to deliver? It certainly seems so, fact is that you developers have left us no alternative, aside from Kick Starter projects, to which I’ve donated more than $1.000.

That’s my two cents for now.
/Simon

#2

As you have said, you haven’t played this game, so who are you to judge? That said the gameplay is actually pretty good, although the learning curve is very steep. This is not a game that is out there to shock you, or make you think about hard choices. It’s a game to entertain; a humourous look at the industry the developers are working in.

Yeah, the graphics of GDT are quite pretty. @PatrickKlug and @DanielKlug chose well when they hired their art team. As for the story… it’s a Tycoon Sim, what story were you expecting? Fluffy unicorns battling Godzilla for the fate of the universe?

This is GHG’s first game. It launched initially on a new and unproven platform (Windows 8). They committed 2 years to this game, and wanted to get at least one good game under their belt before they really started to experiment. Instead of trying to create the Next Big Thing�, they decided to create a simple, safe game… and to do it WELL.

8 Bucks? Too Expensive? Really? How much would you pay for, say, a hamburger at a popular fast food chain?

2 Likes
#3

There are many things I would like to tell you in response to your opinion but sadly I don’t have the time at the moment. If you still feel so strongly about this in a few weeks time, let me know.

1 Like
#4

I believe, when Simon says things like this:

he doesn’t talk about Game Dev Tycoon, but rather about the reasons for piracy in general. These are the main reasons why people would piratise.

I think his main point with this post was not to criticise GDT, but rather the debate around it, als he says here:

He’s not saying the game is any bad, he says, the debate is a little hypocritical.

At first he talks about his experience with big budget games, that are all for one or the other reason disappointing or not worth the money, so one goes of pirating the games. Then you come around an indie game, not having the money and manpower a big budget game has, so why should it be any better?

Then he says, that most game devs pirated games when they were younger (which I can second from my experience) but as soon as they are on the other end of the “digital food chain” they go crazy about the devilish pirates, forgetting about their own past.
I am a (though new and unsuccessful) game developer and I nearly fell into the same trap. I admit, up until like 3 years ago I did pirate games, but then decided that it is dishonest to do so. Now I published a small game of my own and thought about adding DRM and about how I could stop the pirates, until I realized how hypocritical that is.

Instead of thinking about how to get rid of people who don’t want to pay but do want to play, I try to come up with concepts that include them in the process, by e.g. making them pay by forcing them to click on ads, if they want to continue playing.

#5

I disagree. There is no excuse for pirating games. If you don’t like something about the game you’ll send a bigger message by refusing to even play it rather then pirating and thus stating that you still enjoy the game enough to play it no matter how you acquired it.
There is also the fact that every person has different preferences. Unlike TC I greatly enjoyed Mass Effect series despite the endings fall out. There is really no way to determine whether or not something is really bad as there will always be people who enjoy something you don’t.
Hypocrisy is a driving engine of humanity. And that’s all I’ll say on the Dev’s pirated games in youth topic.
That’s a nice way to annoy people who wan something free, but adding adds won’t stop the pirates from hacking them out of the game.
Dev’s solution was actually the best out there. They brought the reasonable pirates over to their side.

#6

People are seriously replying to this.
Amazing.

Massive trap thread to me.

#7

What can I say. It’s a slow time period. Just browsing the forums. Waiting. Waiting and waiting some more till Steam finally passes the game.

#8

If you guys are interested, there’s been some excellent research done on game piracy. Here is an exhaustive and very long (but very good) article (it has a menu so it’s skim-able, don’t worry):

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

Most of the reasons people give for pirating video games is crap. The article actually discusses the reasons given by the OP above. Personally, I used to pirate games because I was too cheap or too poor to afford the huge catalog of what I wanted to play. But when you had friends who brought entire spindles of cracked games from Hong Kong, or had a college network T3 line, it was easy. Nowadays, I just buy select games, instead of playing everything.

1 Like
#9

One of the most oft-repeated statements you’ll see in the piracy
debate goes something like this: “These companies need to stop using
old business models and adapt”. This statement and variations of it
are mindlessly parroted over and over again by those who want to imply
that piracy is purely the fault of the “greedy corporations”, and thus
any problems stemming from it are solely their responsibility to
resolve. Whenever I read this sort of thing, I remember the old adage:
Be careful what you wish for, because it just might come true. Indeed
what these people are wishing for is already coming true - companies
big and small are adapting and changing their business models, in
large part due to piracy, and have been for quite a while.
Unfortunately however, it’s not quite the way in which the armchair
experts had hoped.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_7.html

But here’s the part PC gamers really need to consider: are these
changes going to make PC gaming better or worse?

#10

@PatrickKlug:
What I meant by that is piracy is there, has been for a while and will still be there for quite bit aswell. I am not saying it is good or ok, piracy is bad and I know that.
But: no matter how much developers and publishers complain about that, it won’t change the fact, that it is there! It’s like if you want to stop people abusing drugs or burglering by just complaining about it. It doesn’t work like that.
Also DRM doesn’t help, since there is a ton of hackers who can crack about any game in a matter of a few weeks.

On the other hand, there are very popular games who have no problem at all with piracy, like Tribes: Ascend or World of Tanks. I play both of these games (they are free to play) without paying and I love them!
They don’t seem to loose that much money due to their business model either, considering how World of Tanks can even afford adverts in the installers of the Nvidea drivers.

Their approach seems to be like “let everyone (including those who’d pirate it otherwise) play, and reward those who pay by letting them get equipment quicker”. And it seems to work.
It’s actually a bit like your thing with the pirates but official, not through the backdoor.

#11

I get what you are saying but this argument also underlines my point. Free to play business models clearly work better in todays world but not all games are suited for that and not all gamers want it. Personally I don’t like free-to-play and hate that the industry is largely forced to adept free to play because of piracy.

#12

You are deffinitly right with what you say.
See, when talking about piracy it’s mostly about “pirates are evil” and “if they only stopped pirating the world would be much better”. While this is deffinitely true, it doesn’t help anything.
Pirates managed to justify their doing since decades and just complaining about that won’t change a thing about that.

This debate should be more about what works and less about what would be nice.

Immagine you own a realy nice house and a lot of valuable stuff and live in the most criminal area imaginable. People will eventually start breaking into your house and stealing your stuff. You start putting up alarms and such, but they always get around it, so you put up better alarms and again, they get around it. This continues for about 30 years! No new alarm works.
Might be the time to think about something else, isn’t it?
Just complaining and doing the same stuff that doesn’t work won’t change a thing.

#13

Piracy is stealing and therefore illegal.
You could setup a discussion on why you want to steal something, but it’ll never be a legalization for the action.

Personally I don’t get why so many people don’t steal material stuff in stores (some do, but most don’t), but as soon as the product is digital, they feel entitled to steal it and defend their self-proclaimed ‘right’.

Would you really ‘steal’ a car, and after a test drive return to the car dealer and say ‘I like it, here’s the money’.

In my opinion, the only reason why people steal software, movies and music is because they can and they dare to.

#14

me personaly i will admit it right here right now. i pirate games why i do it is cause of most of what i have bought has turned out to be a huge pile of crap they shut down the servers they stop making patches or have poor models of how things should be done. ea is a prime example of a bad company.
Bethesda and bi interactive along with mojang are great company’s.
and i have never felt bad about buying there games.
also if people made more demos we would be better off.
that said look at my steam library and dare to tell me i dont buy games supourt the industry or give a crap. look in my home at are consoles and games for it.
now with that said if i pirate some thing and i like it i will buy it. if i don’t its gone off my computer in less then a day.
now i might add i might not buy it that minute but i do buy it.
and when it comes down to it i belive most of us are good people and would love to buy more games and not pirate them but with the way things are. i don’t see it happening even my cop buddy’s pirate games !

#15

Justifying piracy by failed expectations is still an unsuccessful argument. What you are basically saying is that the price that the economic market has set you don’t accept. This is a reason not to buy the game, but not a reason to steal the game. You don’t steal a Starbucks latte because it’s too expensive.

Mojang is a great example of making an excellent product and selling it at a good price. And people still pirate the hell out of Minecraft. Personally, I bought two Minecraft licenses, I liked it that much. And I’m probably going to do that for Game Dev Tycoon too, so that I can have a copy for the PC and the Mac. And if it gets on the iPad, then one more. Hell, it’s $8. That’s a burger where I live.

#16

The only reason you can pirate a game / movie / any other type of program on the internet is because there is no security guard watching over you while you serf the net.

Try doing that with a physical product. You can window shop to your hearts content, and brows what you would like to buy but, if you want it you need to buy it. You cannot take it with you to test it or see if you like it then bring it back.

If the internet was just as protected a lot more of you would come up with excuses as to why you need to resort to pirating.

But it’s not.

#17

@SpaceSpace: That’s not true, you actually can. Amazon, Ikea and a lot of other companys let you buy stuff and if you don’t like it, you can return it within a few month’s time. But that’s not working for games, so you have to do it another way.

#18

Local game shops allow that. In UK, CEX gives you 48 hours to bring almost any product including games to bring back no matter the reason. So long as you don’t damage it yourself taht is.

#20

CEX is a second-hand store (Consumer Electronics eXchange - get it? :wink:) so they’ll take almost anything you bring them, but yes, many stores allow you to return goods if you purchased the wrong one, or if the item is faulty.

That said, none of them will take Digital goods without question (with the exception of Audible afaik). And GAME UK does not take pre-owned PC games as they consider them too easy to pirate, and thus will only sell new copies. Returns of faulty game disks are not affected by this policy, btw.

#21

This wasn’t an attack on their game, this was a start to the discussion on how we could potentially move forward, I’m surprised I expressed myself so poorly you didn’t catch that, so I’ll try to express myself better next time.

/Simon