I meant 83% as in how Barney always uses 83% when making up statistics (How I met your mother)
I don’t watch that 
Best stick to Big Bang Theory references if i need to get them 
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Support for Bitcoin please (lol)
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Well, sorry for that then. BTW good luck with your Steam launch!
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So how about those numbers 
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We plan to write a follow-up blog post to our piracy story once the Steam release is done. It is unfortunately not so easy to tell now how many pirates there are since pirates now play the real game and not our fake version. All we can do is compare purchases with users. We know there are a lot more users than customers but it would be incorrect to say that the difference is solely due to piracy. Customers can install the game on multiple machines and the data collection itself can be fuzzy so there are no hard numbers but even so it’s pretty obvious that piracy is still very prevalent. Anyway this is why we published our original story after one day as the numbers were much cleaner back then but we will still be able to highlight stand-out numbers like like this one which I’d shared earlier:
http://forum.greenheartgames.com/t/russian-translation/87/56
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A shame for my country.(
Actually how many people are pirating the game is irrelevant. The relevant question is are you making money?
If the answer is yes, then piracy is not a concern. If the answer is no, then you may have cause to be upset with pirates.
If it were not for piracy, most people would not have heard of this game.
Also it should be mentioned that this game is pretty much an exact copy of Game Dev Story, which is its own type of piracy.
It seems silly and ill-advised to continue this crusade against piracy. Just be happy that your game is selling and you can make a lot of money from it and… LEAVE THEM BE!
Did you bump your head?
Piracy is a huge problem for indie developers.
By saying "well you are making money, so stop complaining. "If people are pirating your game, it’s your own fault"
You are just trying to justify pirating games.
I assume that you did not buy the game, because you think that Greenheart is already making a lot of money with this game.
You are wrong and make it worse, if everyone had the same idea, guess no one will buy any game.
If you like a product, Buy it!
If you don’t like the product, don’t use it!
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You assume wrong. I actually bought 2 copies of the game, even though I could have just installed the same copy on two computers. The reason was that it was only $5 or some small amount of money and I didn’t mind paying.
Not everyone is in the same position as me, many people around the world cannot afford $5 for something so trivial as a video game, but they should not be denied the simple pleasure and joy of playing a game on their computer. It is a powerful medium that can bring us all together and bring us all happiness, and to see it as a business and nothing more is pretty terrible.
I understand that indie game devs often have trouble to make money from their games. That is because most indie games are horrible, and nobody wants to buy them. Sure, we might pirate it to try it out, but bad games don’t have any assumed right to make money.
There are very, very few good games which don’t make any money, and it has nothing to do with piracy.
People need to understand the real business model of video games. It comes from players first, sales second.
I do love Game Dev Story 2, but I can fully understand people wanting to pirate it and do not judge them by that decision for one second.
“If you like a product, Buy it!
If you don’t like the product, don’t use it!”
Good morals, but often times you don’t have the luxury of a demo or trial version of a game, and the only way to try it is to pirate it.
Actually having a lot of people discussing and enjoying the game, recommending it to their friends etc is a more powerful marketing tool than you realise.
If you have the money to buy any system needed to play games, i am sure you can afford buying a $5 game.
And there are plenty of free games out there if for some reason you spent all your money in buying a PC/Console …
Where did you get the idea that this is just bussines for Greenheart ( or any other Indie Dev )?
You can not expect developers not having some profit made from their games.
How else would they be able to continue making new games?
If it were only bad products that are being pirated, it would not be much of an issue, because if company’s just made bad games, they would go bankrupt sooner or later.
But Pirates do not only pirate bad games, they pirate anything, because it’s free and don’t care about the people who put a lot of effort in making a good game.
And you are wrong again.
Most developers ARE making the games because they want to please the players ( and it’s hard to please everyone )
But in order to make games, you need money.
Just because someone needs money in order to continue what they are doing, does not justify “stealing” their product just because you feel it should not important.
I’ll just go an get a rental car, drive it for a few weeks ( i will pay for my own fuel ) return it and will not pay.
I didn’t steal anything and the rental company should just be glad that i had transportation.
Watch this and see if you have the same position about piracy.
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I wonder how many those 0.3% in numbers because percentage looks a little bit… shameful and terrifiing =(
P.S.: I know one who bought a game copy for himself but uses a downloaded from somewhere version with a kind of “translation”. I thought he’s the only one who could do it but some time ago a thread appeared where someone bought his copy and then patched it so it looks like “translated”. Now I am thinking there are quite more than 2 people who did the same thing 
You’re so very wrong on all counts I’m afraid.
It’s completely false that if you have the money to buy a computer, you have the money to buy a game.
Many people in the third world use computers that they get for free, or reclaim from junkyards and repair themselves. You don’t need a $500 graphics card to play Game Dev Tycoon, it can run quite happily on the sort of low-spec, old machines you see across much of Russia, India, China and the Middle-East.
Having access to the internet is increasingly becoming an essential part of functioning in the modern world. the internet is close to being a need, not a luxury. Games will always be a luxury purchase that can be extremely difficult to justify. “Do I eat today, or do I buy Game Dev Tycoon?”. Please accept that there are people different to yourself in the world.
I didn’t say developers cannot expect to see some profit. Of course they can. But if they don’t see any, or see much less than they expected, they should look inwards for reasons, not outwards. Nobody has the right to generate infinite income from selling copies of the same digital item again and again. It’s possible, and you can do it, but please don’t assume that we are beholden as a society and a planet to uphold this Copyright and Intellectual Property model, we aren’t. Physical objects and services will always mean more, and some countries only respect the physical, not the digital.
I didn’t say pirates only pirated bad games. Every game gets pirated, the important thing to note is that only the good ones get bought in significant numbers. It’s an important distinction to make. I have pirated literally thousands of games in my lifetime, 90% of them were terrible and I would never consider paying money for them, the other 10% I enjoyed, and many of those I either went on to buy or recommend to my non-pirate friends, who bought.
Even if I only bought the 10% of games that I enjoyed, I would be bankrupt. Games generally cost $60 each these days, and that is not really something which you can just throw around like you can throw around pirate games. With prices this high, we need all the help we can get to make good choices. Game Dev Tycoon wins here because it’s relatively very cheap, so it’s no problem for most people to buy it.
A good game on a good platform will always be a commercial success, regardless of how many people pirate it. A good game will also be pirated by a very large number of people. That should really be seen as a mark of quality, not “lost” revenue.
I don’t think it’s true at all that people that pirate games don’t “care” about the people that made it. I think it’s true that they don’t wish to pay them. You should not confuse paying for something with caring about it. I care about my wife, I care about my friends, but I don’t pay them any money as a matter of course. for some of us, at least, the reason we choose not to pay is because we don’t see the value in a digital object. It’s my hard drive, my computer, my electricity, my internet connection, my monitor, all of which I bought and paid for.
A factory worker put my specific computer parts together. An engineer worked on my specific phone line, a power company generated the actual electricity that I am personally using. I feel obliged to pay for these things because they are mine, they are physical, and someone did physical work to bring them to me. If I did not pay for my physical goods, their work is wasted.
All the developer did was to write one piece of software, once, to run on my equipment. He doesn’t have to code 1 million games for 1 million players, it’s a one-shot deal, and you buy replicas, not an original. It’s the same amount of work if he sells one or one million. If I did not pay for my digital goods, no work is wasted. He should feel gratitude that someone decided the initial work was good enough to pay for, not upset that some people decided not to pay for it.
Your rental car analogy is wrong. If I take the rental car, they cannot rent that car to anyone else. If I take a copy of software, they can still make more copies for other people.
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I also mentioned, that there are many Free games out there.
I do not see anything there that justifies, you can just won’t pay for a product since the device you are using it on is for free.
People do not need luxury, so stealing something that’s a luxury does not justify it.
If the choice of eating or using a luxury item becomes an issue, they should get another activity to do in their free time.
I work hard to have accces to luxury items.
They might not respect the digital, but i assume they respect law under which those digital products are protected.
I will continue later with my reply, since i need to get some work done
So you do not expect any support for your games?
Game full of bugs, meh just leave them, i just made a one shot deal. No need to go back to coding, just because a few people have a bad experience. Besides that Probably 80% of them pirated the game and i do not owe them anything.
You’re embarrassing yourself now. Please stop.
Piracy isn’t stealing, it’s making an unauthorised copy. There is a huge difference. If I steal your watch from you, you no longer have a watch. If I make a copy of your game, even if you don’t want me to, you still have your game.
Copyright advocates such as EA, the RIAA and MPAA are seeking to blur that disctinction and make the law treat piracy as theft. It very much is in their interests to do so, and very much not in ours.
Sadly, as you say they are making significant inroads towards this goal, and certain laws such as the DMCA reinforce this viewpoint. It is however a viewpoint which is incorrect, unfair and ultimately alienates the consumer or fan from the producer. We should be challenging this view and disobeying their rules, not parroting them.
I’m not trying to “justify” anyone’s actions. To do so implies that I have the ability to morally judge others. What I’m suggesting is that we simply let others be. They aren’t harming us by making copies, they aren’t harming the creator, all they are doing is gaining access to something they want.
You might think that taking a copy of something that you have no rights to is immoral. I might think that producing something once and selling it a million times is immoral. Since there is no universal morality, and nobody is harmed in either scenario, it is pointless to make such an argument.
No, I don’t expect any support for my games.
If I do get it, great! I’m happier with my product and more likely to buy games from that company again. If I don’t get any, that’s sad for me but there is not much I can do about it. I bought a game, not a contract with a software developer. Fixing bugs and adding new content is a bonus, not a requirement.
All of this has no bearing on the fact that bugs in a game need to be fixed once, not a million times. Yes, more users generally mean more bugs will be uncovered, but if you have a million customers you don’t need to write a million bug fixes.
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It’s weird that you think it’s ok for others to pay for a product and secure the continuation of the products,
while others just use it for free.
If everyone shared your opinion, there will be no more games to play.
People like you ruin the industry and ruining it for the other players.
It’s because of people like you companies like EA are making it a complete drag to buy and install their game, and force for example a Always Online feature upon the paying customer.
Allthough EA makes shit games anyways.
The worst thing you are saying that a small start-up company like Greenheart should just let the pirates be.
Assuming they are actually making money with this game.
And who cares that they make a single product and are able to sell it a million times.
After the product is finished, the development team still needs to get payed every month and all other company expenses need to be payed as well
The costs for making a AAA game can go up to 25M ( on average )
Anyways i am done with this discussion, people like you and pirates in general…
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No it’s not. Bank problems are not the #1 problem for game and software companies that are not able to offer their products to their customers on time. #1 problem for game and software companies are … people that won’t buy the game, pirate, copy and use it illegally… Thats the #1 reason that most companies don’t make enough profit so they can’t continue making other games.
True that piracy have certains benefits but that’s a double edge sword. I for one (except this game cause I saw Jesse Cox and Total Biscuit videos on it) pirated games before and bought it after IF IT WAS WORTH IT. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the case for most games I played since it didn’t gave me more that the ones I pirated.
So pirating the game so you can play your game before 6 days is just plain stupid and silly. You should be ashamed for just thinking about it. They hell are you, a boy douche bag that can have everything by the snap of his fingers (except digital copies of legal games since he don’t have a credit card…)
Today, I go on youtube watch let’s plays and reviews of some channels I know and then I decide if its worth it. not even worth my time and effort to pirate anymore since the videos will tell me that anyway.
If you can afford the internet each month in order to Pirate, then you can afford a Game. Both are Luxury Items, you’re argument is invalid.
Also Day 1 Report… 250 Sales, 3,800 Known Pirate Versions; that is >90% Piracy
While other companies might believe that “Piracy is a good tool to get known by”, if that is your marketing strategy and giving people that Greenlight that it is alright at this early stage of your company; then when you have to legally fight a battle down the line involving piracy as an issue then you WILL lose regardless of the Legal Team you have.
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I would also point out, that for ANY new Company, because you do not have installed “Fan base” that will purchase what you sell regardless… then EVERY SINGLE SALE MATTERS. I fail to understand why people believe it is perfectly fine to Take a Movie, Music, Book or even Software Digitally because they can’t afford it … I mean would you also walk down the street see that someone have a Lamborghini and simply get in and drive away?
Why are Digital Goods any different from a Physical Goods?
Either way you are taking something that does not belong to you, so that you can have it.
In the past 30 years playing and developing video games, I have not ONCE found a game based on a recommendation from someone who Pirated the game… in-fact 99% of the time those I know who do Pirate games, don’t tell me they have even played a game until someone else tells me “Hey I played the Demo of this…” or “I bought this the other day”
The one and ONLY time I feel that piracy is justifiable is when it is not possible for you to get software any other way… and I don’t simply mean “Oh I am broke, there for I cannot buy” mentality… I mean because there are no retail options in your territory, or because has become Abandonware.
There is a Demo of this game that has been linked on every YouTube and Publication Website that has covered the game and very clearly available on the Main Page AND via Windows Store. That is more than most Triple A game gets nowadays…
Also anyone who believes that Piracy is a valid marketing tool is a 
idiot, who might want to apply for a job with Electronic Arts of UbiSoft as that was also their thinking in 2000… look where that got them!
As I said above, we’re talking about LUXURY ITEMS. Taking something simply because you want it frankly is piss poor morals, which you know what DOES HURT people; Don’t think it is just Independent Developers that this affects… Large AAA Studios have simply been shutdown because of this as well, it affects EVERYONE.
It is why Publishers WANT Always Online DRM as features of both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, it is why most Publishers make half-arsed PC ports… Seriously why should they care about spending the time and money to bring PC gamers a title that won’t sell enough copies to cover even those small costs, because 75% and above playing that game are doing so with Bit Torrent Pirated versions?
You all cry “We don’t want DRM in our games!!” but then when there isn’t protection you simply half-inch it like there isn’t tomorrow and what is even worse is even though you might not personally pirate … you hear of your friends that do it and instead of explaining to them why it is a bad thing, you’re simply like “Meh! Whatever, it’s free advertising for that company”
Admit it to yourself that you know it’s justification for doing or allowing something to happen that you know full well is broth wrong and ILLEGAL
If the game isn’t worth paying for, then it isn’t worth playing. Simple as.
Still you know what those people aren’t the ones who actually piss me off… no I mean I mean explain to them why what they are doing is helping to destroy the games industry and often kill small developers dead; but no the main fuckers I hate in all of this are the ones who enable it.
The “Hackers” sticking to the man, by releasing cracked versions of games… or the 1 person who legitimately paid but then puts it up on a website for everyone else to play for free. Unless they think the game is so good they are willing to personally pay for each person who downloads that game, why do it?! Are they deliberately trying to sabotage the company?!
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While I do in a way commend Greenheart taking the stance of staying DRM Free for the “integrity” and how much “Gamers hate DRM” … honestly, I’m a Gamer - have been for probably longer than most here have been alive, and to me DRM is not a bad thing. It is merely a weapon against piracy, and like any weapon in the wrong hands well it will often hit the wrong target (I’m looking at EA, UbiSoft and Bethesda here)
But that doesn’t make it a bad thing, simply call it something else like Copy Protection (like it was in the 90s) and honestly no one will bat an eyelid about it unless you do it wrong.
It might not be something you want to do, but well I’m sure you have the figures in-front of you; personally such statistic sheets often make me disappointed in humanity … that so many feel they’re entitled for something for free that you put so much work and effort in to.
Decided myself a long time ago, market might be smaller overall on the Consoles; but honestly I’d rather have 1,000 legitimate fans than 3,000 who have no intention of supporting my work, and that I can value their feedback. It is a shame really as Windows, Mac, AmigaOS and Linux offer far more freedom in terms of platforms and ease of publishing, etc… but the number of honest people out there seems to shrink more and more each year.
This is a good question, and one which is at the heart of the piracy debate. The reason they are different is because a physical item can only be sold to one person, a digital item can be copied infinitely and sold to many people for very little additional, or near-zero, cost per item. That is the key difference between a game and something physical, and the main reason that piracy is not theft.
Let me address your key argument:
Small games companies don’t make as much money as they could, because some people don’t pay for their games.
False. Piracy actually helps a small game become commercially successful. Games which are able to be pirated consistently outsell games which cannot. Look at a game such as Fez, which sold very small numbers on the Xbox 360, where the game could not really be pirated. When it came to PC and could be pirated, it sold a lot more.
Games on disc on the Xbox 360 can be pirated easily, and whenever an XBLA game (which cannot be pirated easily) is released on disc, sales massively increase.
It’s difficult to account for exactly what kind of an impact piracy has on sales, but I firmly believe that it is positive overall. The rule is, the more people pirating a game, the more people buying it.
I suspect the reason people do not tell you that they have pirated a game is because they wish to avoid a lecture.
“that is >90% Piracy”
A common fallacy is to look at the number of pirated copies of something and say:
“Well 1 million people pirated it, that must be 1 million lost sales! Piracy has cost us 1 million sales!!!”
False.
Typically; Some of the people that pirate a game buy it afterward. Some of the people that buy a game it pirate it afterward. A lot of the people who pirated it had no intention of ever buying it, regardless of whether they were able to pirate it or not.
It’s very difficult to quantify what effect piracy has, but there’s absolutely no evidence to show that a game which cannot be pirated sells better than one which can, in fact the opposite appears to be true. Sales of SimCity on PC were far below expectations, sales of Xbox Live Arcade games (which can be pirated but only a small number of people possess the necessary J-Mod Xbox) are often very poor when compared to their counterparts on Steam. Games which employ high levels of DRM do not sell any better than games which do not, and many of them fare much worse.
Consider this: Piracy has been around for as long as games have been around. In the 80s, all you needed to pirate games was a blank cassette, and a deck-to-deck tape recorder, which a lot of people had. In the days of tape games, around 90% of the games people owned were pirated in this way. Yet, it didn’t matter. The games industry exploded and made a lot of people millionaires.
They have always thought that piracy was a negative effect, they have been telling us forever that home taping is killing music, and recording films from the TV is killing the movie industry. It’s simply not the case. People will pay for stuff that they like, even if they can get it for free.
If everyone thought like you, there would be no games
False.
Piracy is not a new thing. People pirate games as much now as they always have done, yet there are still games. The new attitude is yours, that you should never pirate games. This is simply not the case.
Just because I think it’s ok for people to take games for free if they want to doesn’t mean that I don’t pay for the ones that I do like. I do buy some games. People who think like me do actually pay for some games.
If everyone thought like me (and most people do actually, your 90% stat proves that), there will continue to be games as there always have been, because people do pay when they can and they feel that they should.
Just look at something like the Humble Indie Bundle. You can pay what you like and get all of the games in the bundle. Some people do pay 1c, but the vast majority give a fair price for the games, and many people pay much more.
The Humble Bundle shows us that having something available for free (or one cent) does not mean that nobody will pay for it. In fact, it tends to make some people more generous, which offsets those who do not pay.
Piracy is the same idea. You can choose to pay or choose not. Enough people always choose to pay for a good game to make it a commercial success. It has worked for the last 30 years and will continue to do so.
Besides, people don’t all think the same way. Most people don’t even like video games.