My name is Stephen Yong and I won Gamestotal.com , we got like 3 million+ registered members and been around since 2003.
First of all I would like to congratulate you on the great game that you have, and I must admit that I have discovered your game through a piracy site. I frequently visit the piracy most popular to find out what is the top game (studying my competitors), or steam`s top sellers.
I understand the frustration of piracy, however bear in mind that Steve Job managed to greatly reduce MP3 piracy by making it easy for people to pay for music, which I believe should be your concentration. You should concentrate on making it easy for people to pay for your game rather than on piracy and that should improve things.
Regards to piracy, you are selling your game on first Microsoft App store (which doesnt support anything non-Windows 8 very well) now and an unheard of FastSpring. So dont blame people for not buying your game. I sure do not want to go through the such trouble to pay for your game.
On the plus side, being on steam would be great, I believe 60% of all gamers have it installed; or an alternative is to be able to buy it from this website (similar to Torchlight 1 which they were selling on their website too initially).
This thread says that an iOS app for it MAY not be possible due to it using Node-Webkit. The thread shows more about that.
The game will be on Steam, however you will need to support the game, and press “Yes” on Steam Greenlight, showing that you would buy the game if it was on Steam.
Sure, just get on Steam just like that. Thats easy, right :109:
Purchasing this game on this website was very fast and easy. And I was not directed to a third party site, well other than PayPal.
I agree with OP that a key is to be as convenient for the consumer as possible. And it is, if you intent to be an honest guy in the first place. I have helped lots of family members/freinds and coworkers removing viruses that came from torrents.(Most popular one right now seems to be a virus that pretends to be the police taking control of your computer and you have to pay a fine)
also, the piracy thing was a brilliant move. hopefully it opened a few pirates eyes to how piracy feels - but it at least got some good attention for this company’s first game.
My games are all based on shareware concept , in which half of it is free. I find that almost all people pay once they reach half the game, getting them to the half is the hardest part.
I personally dont find pirates bad at all. From running a games company, I this worst:
o other companies publishing and EXACT copy of your game
o other companies claiming to offer to buy your company and running away with your due diligence info (basically all your secrets)
o after spending thousands on R&D, you managed to increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by 10x, and your ad agency company terminated your account and give YOUR improved campaign that you worked so hard on to your competitor
o one of your staff (ex: the janitor) steals all your source code & sells them to your competitor, which launches an exact copy of your game 1 week before your launch date
o other competitors trying to close your company down via under handed techniques such as calling in the feds claiming u r running a kiddie porn site, a pirate/warez site, a gambling site without license or a site that sells male enchan* product. funny as it sounds, i`ve personally experienced this part
to sum it up, this is the fun things you (the developer of this game) should add into the game. it would be cool.
I had the game bought and paid for, downloaded and installed in under … 15 minutes maybe? Don’t remember exactly how long it took to download it, but somewhere around there. While it would be neat to have it on steam, it was just as easy to download it from their site.
not sure what has changed the first time i tried to buy it moved me to microsoft app store. when i try to click on main page, the site (microsoft app) gave me an error. when i try to go in again all i see is buy windows 8 now, and i cant find the game any more. i am using firefox browser, unsure if that may be the cause of the problem
