I watched an IGN video about your piracy trick and I think it was a pretty smart idea. However, one comment the company made about all we will be left with is pay 2 play and social games sucking every dollar out of us rings TRUE. I absolutely hate these types of games and refuse to play or purchase any pay to play games. Consumers need to wake up because you are paying 2 to 3 or more times for a pay 2 play game than you would if you would just buy the game straight up. Some mobile games want to charge you as high as a 100 dollars for fake money. We best all better support developers like this so they will be around.
Pirates are forcing developers to develop these games. The rates we’ve seen of piracy of games like ours, both before and after our blog post seriously make you think. If I wouldn’t HATE these social/pay 2 play games so much I would have no doubt that our next game would have to to be of that sort. (it won’t!)
What I’m saying is that the reason this trend exists is piracy. Pirates who complain about boring games need to wake up.
Just Btw Patrick, could we get a new Chart on your Pirate / Legally purchased Versions? I think Im not the only one, who would like to know how many ppl still pirate this game^^
Oh and of course, could you give us a hint on how many games you have sold over all? I understand, if you dont wanna tell us the details, just a brief summary
Publishers should realize, that they absolutely CAN NOT hide their stuff well enough to protect it from being pirated.
Instead of investing Billions in more crappy servers and copy protection, they should simply give up, sell their games for 30 bucks and see how awesomely sales will increase!
They don’t have to do this for all games at once… just one. Set a sign and see where it goes.
Pissing off customers like the new SimCity did is just a huge leap in the wrong direction.
Pay to win is equally stupid.
You are right, but I guess sometimes you dont have a choice but to make your game F2P or P2P. Just think of the Star Wars MMO, that was released for lots n lots of bucks and then after just 1 year or so, had to go F2P, so the players stick to it. I can only imagine, what the Dev. thought, when they had to change this. I can hardly imagine, that Game earned half the money it cost to develop.
Of course, the game had to go F2P because nearly every other MMO is F2P too. I totally dislike this delevopling as well. I am a huge fan of the whole Star Trek franchise, so I played Star Trek Online, just for fun, as well. I didnt pay any money there, so I had limited access to their best ships. Once I had been looking to buy a ship, just to support em a bit, but then I saw, what they wanted for it: 16 Euro!! For just 1 lil tiny ship-detail in a game. That leads me to my point that F2P doesnt work the way its done today. You cant expect the Gamers to buy games and stuff inside, that is so high priced. At least, thats my personal opinion
I never thought about piracy causing P2P games. I always thought it was the mobile craze, and people becoming accustomed to “free” apps, but what you are saying makes perfect sense. Perhaps P2P is the future, but I hope not in its current form. Most P2P are not really deep games and some ask for hundreds of dollars to get the full experience. If prices represented the actual value of the game I probably wouldn’t mind it.
I don’t really have enough insight into the industry to know details, but when I hear about microsoft and Sony looking for ways to eliminate the secondary market and the Sim City debacle, I lament for the industry I knew growing up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinner_Box - Us humans are puny minded creatures and can be easily manipulated. How are they best manipulated for money? Social games and Free2Play. Do a google for “psychology games” if you don’t believe me.
MMO’s like WoW. By definition they can’t be pirated, so why are there so few of them? Why do they usually fail? Why are all new MMO’s Free2Play? Because that’s what people want to play. And because then the devs/publishers can exploit item (1) above.
Oh, and the people who pirate music are typically the biggest buyers of music; I’d be surprised if that didn’t carry over to software.
I also find it ironic you complain about the pirates when I doubt you’d have 95% of your sales had you not pulled that (quite inspired) piracy stunt which got you all the media attention.
(Disclaimer - I own a legit copy, I don’t play F2P or social games, I think there are plenty of decent games out there, but there’s also a load of dross; just like there has always been.)
Yeah, I also thought it wasn’t possible to pirate MMOs and that they make the games F2P to get as much players onboard as possible. But MMOs generate running costs, because every login has to be validated and the game servers have to be maintained, because without Servers no MMO.
Games like SimCity could easily outsorce maintenance costs to the community by allowing local savegames and private servers. It would be a great game everyone would want to support. Now the potentially buying pirate thinks: f*** it. I keep emulating the EA Server and play offline because they’re not worth it.
Free to win only leaves you with a bunch of frustrated Kids and overpowered Buyers. Most people will leave these games with a bad taste in their mouths and not very interested in sequels.
Free to Play worked fine for me in Rise of Flight. I had so much fun in the Free part, that I bought the “boxed version” for 30$ which was definitely worth my money and more important my time. All the other Stuff you can buy on top of that however is not. Although I would give them another 80$ or so for a golden Ticket to all the content the game has to offer just to show my appreciation, not because I feel underpowered or bored with what I own now.
(Disclaimer: I would never even think about stealing games, because what isn’t worth my money isn’t worth my time either. Pirates might think exactly the same way and only try before they buy… or they wouldn’t have bought the game in the first place… or they’re just a**h****)