Congratulations, now almost 4k people think that your game is unplayable and won’t buy it anyway 
Great win for product I suppose. Btw I bet that 90% of that pirates wouldn’t play it if they can’t download it for free. So you should think that piracy just cut only 10% of your potential customers. Don’t overreact piracy, don’t behave like that copyright defenders who are too stupid to look at the real situation.
Okay guys, I´ve read the story about your cracked versions and bought your game just for that great move (and of couse because the ratings of the game are quite well). I can imagine that your sellings are rising quite well now 
I don’t deny that’s good marketing but IMO this will turn against you guys. And calling people ‘thieves’ is just wrong. Remember that you can be called the same because of your ‘Inspiration’. IMO it’s more of ‘plagiarism’ than ‘inspiration’.
well, we did call them pirates but I mean the scene identifies as such. We have no intention of going after anyone so this was more a way for us to tell everyone how little a game is bought in contrast to how many play it.
To be fair, pretty much every game is pirated insanely upon release, it’s the magpie nature of pirates and downloaders. Something new? Grab it! Even if there’s a demo out, some jaded gamers will grab the “ISOdemo” and use that as an indication of a potential buy, since often a demo ends up being radically different to the retail game. That’s not to say GDT is different, from my experience the demo was all-but-identical - with the exception of the possibility of moving into a larger office within the first 5 years, something prohibited in the demo even if you have the capital.
However, I loved the demo and loved the first 8 years of your “experimental release” – so I give you my word; I’ve already uninstalled and will be buying this sometime in the next two weeks. I know it doesn’t excuse my actions, but the truth is; I was always going to buy it anyway
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Well done guys. Piracy is the scourge of indie development.
Your story is a good one and I hope that the publicity that is generated by it generates a lot of sales for you.
The Pirates won’t care, but hopefully you’ll cover your costs, pay the bills and have enough left over to get moving on your next project. If you need any help, just look up The Pixel Bullies and drop me a line.
well done and good luck
Andy Gahan
The Pixel Bullies
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I like how you incorporated piracy into the game itself. Especially as a game about making games, that was funnily appropriate.
One of the great things about this approach is that since we get the modified program to the pirates first, you don’t need to incorporate as much anti-piracy into your app in the short run since you have already achieved your purpose.
I tried a similar approach with my iOS reference app last year.
https://apparentetch.com/2012/02/pirates-guilty-awareness
Like you, I also put a cracked version of my app into the wild with ‘perks’ for pirates.
The pirated app displayed an alert telling users that they should purchase the app to support us whenever it was used, but users could also continue using the app if they choose to do so. You can see the results in the blog post.
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I hate what piracy is doing to game devs and the industry in general. I bought your game to because it looks interesting and to show my support.
I want to say that I have never actually heard about this game until this story showed up on The Escapist, but I just bought it purely based on this stroke of genious… You guys have balls the size of trucks, and I’m happy to be able to support you just a little bit by buying this extremely affordable game…
Now to try out my newly aquired title!
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First of all, using torrents isn’t generally a method of acquiring legitimate software. Second, the torrent was clearly described as cracked. Therefore, everyone who downloaded it this way had every reason to believe that they were, in fact, stealing the game, no matter who put it there.
Now, as a DRM-free game, how long do you think it would have taken for an illegal copy to appear in the wild, even if the developers tried everything in their power to prevent it? In fact, adding DRM would only slow the cracking process down, never prevent it. What’s awkward in this situation is your argument blaming the developers for being creative and proactive about a problem that exists no matter what they would have tried.
I agree with a few others in this thread that there was a bit of a missed opportunity here. If, after 3 (or 5) failures due to piracy, the joke would be explained along with a link to upgrade to the legitimate paid version of the game, not only would the point be driven home harder but those who enjoyed the game up to that point might have been converted into paying customers.
As for the similarity with another game, I haven’t played either game yet. Simply having the same theme or mechanics doesn’t make it a ‘rip off’. At worst, it might be a clone. The coding and art were all done from scratch. Without having played either one, I can’t say for sure but I would imagine each game is recognizably different in many respects and the second game to market made changes and improvements. Every video game ever made takes inspiration from any game that came before it. [Even in the case of Pong, real tennis, for example.]
I do wonder why you seem to be so angry about this, personally. It seems to me that when “some users … get pissed off”, most of them won’t be paying customers anyways. Let them be angry at themselves.
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I bought it, instantly after i read about this game. I love this simulation genre so much, i didn’t even thought about a pirated copy. We need to support games like this and even if i don’t have so much money in the moment, i bought it, because this is an must have.
Shame on all the people that downloaded the pirated version and HAHA.
Greetings from germany.
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There’s A LOT of stuff you’re not taking into account (or accounting for incorrectly at least):
1, You seem to have the assumption that everyone who downloaded the ‘cracked’ copy of the game “would have” bought and paid for it instead. In reality, something like 0% of them would have ever even heard of the game. You can’t equate $0 in sales with ‘losing money’, and you certainly can’t blame ‘piracy’ for the fact that no one knew your game existed. In fact, releasing the game as a torrent MORE THAN LIKELY had the beneficial advertising effect- Free Advertising, no less.
2, When you take a look back at some of the most widely pirated games throughout history, you’ll actually notice that The Most Widely Pirated Games, are also some of the Biggest Selling titles of all time. The more people that are out there PLAYING the game, the more friends/family/acquaintances of theirs will see the game. This GREATLY increases the odds that they might actually BUY the game as well. If no one was playing the game, no one would be talking about it on the internet (or elsewhere), that means no one is going to think of / want to buy the game either. This concept is EXACTLY how “Shareware” used to work- and it was the best model for selling video games I’ve ever seen.
3, The less you charge, the more you will sell. I know of NO situation where this is not true.
And while $8 DOES seem like a pretty reasonable price-point, $4 is twice as appealing!
Both Diablo 2 and the Expansion pack debuted at $50 each. When they were dropped to $30/each, it seemed like almost everyone owned the game- in fact, when the “Battle-Chest” edition (game + expansion pack + something else) came out, with the $30-$35 price tag- 90% of the people who had already bought the game, went and bought another copy!
4, "updating the game engine is a lot like ‘re-inventing the wheel’, and it’s the biggest possible waste of development costs- other than power, network, misc office stuff, etc. Either use some other existing game engine, OR- Immediately attempt to monetize the game’s engine by itself. Have you ever noticed that TONS of games on facebook use the “Farmville” engine?
Let’s examine their marketing strategy- since I’m pretty sure those dorks wound up making A LOT of money
Jesus, was all that bold enlarged text really necessary? Nobody is saying everyone download is a lost sale, because nobody is that narrow-minded or short-sighted, but come on… getting angry at the developers for something you (may or may not) have downloaded without paying? Well that’s just wrong and no amount of splitting hairs or justification will change that. I do agree that more exposure is a good thing, those playing the game - legitimately or otherwise - will tell their friends about it and hopefully bring in more sales.
What I did was wrong and what I will do will make up for that – but I’m not going to rage at the developer for having a little joke with those that acquired the game without paying. I’d much rather have a silly game trigger that does no harm except to my ego, than something like Starforce which can physically damage my machine, or SecuROM telling how many times I’m allowed to install the game I just paid for. Also, $8 is a perfect price, expecting it to be any lower is just incredibly selfish. If people aren’t willing to pay $8 for this, then it’s obviously not a game they’re interested in and should just ignore it.
~edit~
Thank you for mentioning shareware though… now I just feel melancholic for those days. I loved Shareware and one could easily argue that companies such as Epic Megagames and iD Software wouldn’t be where they are today without it. Giving away entire episodes of games, anywhere up to a dozen hours (and sometimes infinite) of gameplay for absolutely free, then encouraging people to share the floppies with their friends. What a glorious time for innovation.
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@Ryan_Muehlberg Nowhere did I claim that all of them would have bought the game. My point is that heaps have downloaded it and lots of played it so much that they saw the piracy messages (which are hours into gameplay). Surely they could have bought the game then…
I wonder how you would feel after releasing a game and seeing this pie chart. I seriously had to contain myself not to despair.
I took the liberty to edit your post to reduce the font size… happens when you put a #in front of a paragraph and I assume that this was by mistake.
Frankly, I believe that developers underestimate piracy.
There are three main kinds:
1.Early adopters who will look to pirate and if they can’t find a working version, they will leave and forget about the game.
2. Late adopters who hear about the game months or years later who stumble upon a working pirated version and just stick to that one because it’s cozy.
3. Hard-core pirates who will patiently wait for a working, cracked version.
You could have reduced piracy of the first kind by implementing very rudimentary DRM à la Uplink. Whether that really helps sales in both the short and the long run, I don’t know.
Fantastic blog post. Reading through on Facepunch the other day, I couldn’t help but assume that the cracked version had something in it, if only for that one guy’s post.
That being said, I’m curious. You mentioned “I also tried to appeal to a particular forum a day earlier after someone who I gave early-access to the Store seemed to have passed on the copy to others”. How do you go about determining if he did hand it out or not?
I know a lot of our posts on FP have our OS’s listed beneath them, but I know a couple of us there in that thread, myself included, bought the copy from the Windows Store and run W8 remotely.
An interesting experiment, but there is a part where this all goes very, very wrong. First, YOU post a version of YOUR game into a torrent site for people to download. Then you call people who downloaded it thieves. That is just plain wrong, its like me going out in the street handing people candy and then calling them thieves for taking it. People who downloaded the game from you did absolutely nothing wrong because you as the copyright holder distributed it, knowingly, to them. Even if they themselves believed it was an illegally distributed copy changes nothing. I’d urge you to edit the blog post to reflect the actual facts of the case and post an apology for those people you called thieves.
not true. we didn’t say hey this is the offical version from greenheartgames. they didn’t know that we prepared this. they downloaded a ‘cracked’ copy knowingly. Plus, our EULA says that you have to pay license fees before you can use the full version so they worked against that.
And my main point isn’t calling anyone a thief but to draw attention to how much piracy affects little guys like us. imagine how you would feel seeing this pie chart.
I love this game! I also liked your idea about a slightly changed torrent version for free, I’d see it as a demo of sorts. As mentioned before in this thread, you probably should have given the opportunity in the torrent-version to convert to the main version, but that’s another story.
I also sincerely think you were not only influenced by Game Dev Story, but this is an (improved, no doubt about it) clone of the original game. There are differences and I’m sure you coded everything from scratch by yourself, but more or less all major features are working almost exactly like in Game Dev Story. I don’t blame you, I played both games and like yours better, especially the more modern design and UI, but I’d think it’d be fair to just recognize the original authors of most of both games concepts (which would be Kairosoft, afaik). To the people comparing this similarity to various egoshooters: I think the resemblance here is fare more obvious then in most other games. Think the original Settlers 2 and the Next Gen Settlers 2. That kind of resemblance.
One thing really made me cry foul, though: In your blog post, dated from today, the 29th of April 2013, you say you released the game yesterday. I, a paying customer, bought this game about a month ago. Something is amiss here, though probably some kind of misunderstanding. Would you care to clarify?
Plus, our EULA says that you have to pay license fees before you can use the full version so they worked against that.
Does the EULA even show up during installation for them? If it does, just sue them. You’re German, aren’t you? I hear suing people there is like saying hello.