What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy?

I feel your frustration, but honestly- complaining about ‘piracy’ is going to get you NOWHERE. The RIAA, MPAA, et. al. are complete scam organizations, which ONLY pay their lawyers- yet collect ‘dues’ from the artists/etc. they claim to represent.

What needs to be realized- and accepted, is that the old business model is busted! You’re never going to save it- SO, that leaves one option:

INNOVATE!

My suggestion, do what ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX have been doing for over 60 years:
Integrate advertisements, and give the product away for free.

You should also make sure that the game is available for purchase / download on Steam, The Windows Store, and absolutely EVERY OTHER possible outlet available- AND,

Maybe even give “GroupOn” a shot once… At this point, you’ve got nothing to lose- right?

What you DO have is a Tri-Platform game engine- Plus game story, etc… This is a good thing!
My suggestion here though- is to port that shit to XBOX, Playstation, and Wii as quickly as possible! Don’t give up now, when over 5 million people have at least downloaded the game- Go for 10 million! (Hopefully by then there’ll be at least like, 1 million paying customers)

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@Ryan_Muehlberg If innovating means creating crap social or online games then no thank you. I’d rather deal with piracy but overall I believe this culture can change! I believe gamers want single player games and if they realize that if they pay (even just 8$) for it they will get more of it.

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“BEST DRM EVER”:

The game shows advertisements, and contains ‘product placements’, etc. until the user pays for it.
This is how ya take it to da next level :wink:

Acquiring access to something against the EULA for it,I’d consider that theft…
Saying stuff like it’s not theft because “all those” that fetched the torrent would never have seen it if it wasn’t for the makers putting it there,I’d say you guys got no clue about the pirate scene.
Most bigger games are pirated and distributed before their official release,and a whole lot of indie ones are within the first week or two from theirs… (Usually day one if the full game is DRM free.)
In short,the ONLY difference them putting it there did,was that noone bothered with uploading a proper pirated version. (Which would’ve pulled in about the same amount of attention and downloads as this,perhaps more even from having the word spread around without the mention of the ingame pirates “perk”.)

Although in some other games it’s quite understandable that people play a pirated version,I mean in skyrim for example everyone I know irl that bought it,played the pirated version instead because unlike the full version,it WORKED.
(Find it amusing that those thinking that game didn’t have many bugs early on,just proved that they had only played the pirated version.)

Anyways,thanks for the amusing news and have a nice day!
(And,I got a bit curious about that “pirate” version,sounds like some crazy hardmode difficulty… Maybe worth including in full to some extent as a choice for those seeking the challenge?)

Edit: Forgot to add that I dislike DRM in general since they have some influence on the machines performance (hopefully miniscule),and they sometimes bug out and cause a mess on your machine despite you having the authentic,real-deal version and not some copy,besides preventing you from making proper copies incase your original breaks… (See: kids,drunk friends,pets and so on.)

I had no idea that you or your game existed and I do not pirate games, but after reading this, I have a strong incentive to “pirate” your game. In specific:

  1. You just announced that the “cracked” version is legitimate.
  2. You just announced that the “cracked” version is better than the paid one.

Seriously, if you make a game about game development, having piracy be an aspect of it is a great way of making the game more realistic and challenging. Why would I pay you money for an inferior copy of the game when I can get a better version from you for free?

You just announced that the “cracked” version is better than the paid one.

I’m sorry, what makes you think so?

Having piracy as part of a game about game development should make for a more realistic and challenging gameplay experience.

It’s included in the full version aswell they said,although unlike the “crack” you get choices on how to try handle it.

yes and it would be nice to integrate that idea better into the full game. the cracked version however (which isn’t available anymore anyway) forces you to become bankrupt. there is no winning.

There is a rather popular game like that called Tetris. The idea of an unwinnable game is appealing to some people. The idea is to not to win, but to see how long you can last.

@ryao then go ahead, have fun :slight_smile:

Aye,there are alot of games with a mode where you WILL lose sooner or later,the only question is how long you’ll manage before losing.
Which is why I’d suggest implementing something like that as a choice in the full version.
I might be wrong,but considering your own statements it seems like that wouldn’t be too bothersome to implement…

I get it, so this is not about people illegally downloading your game but instead about people perfectly legally downloading it from you and then having agreed to a legal contract that says that running it is illegal… You might have a chance with that but I’d argue that is very sneaky even if you did win the hypothetical case. Anyway, I hope you would have presented your experiment in a different kind of a manner. The data you got is interesting, but the fact that you distributed the copy yourself puts it very much in the grey area and making accusations based on that is not good in my opinion.

I have plenty of other things to do right now, but trying out the “cracked” version definitely made my “things to do before I die” list. :slight_smile:

@AhtiPasseli1 We didn’t do this experiment to go after the pirates. You’re missing the point.

I consider it to be some linear combination of a practical joke and a marketing idea.

Please do clarify what the point is – I also have no idea what this was supposed to achieve if not hunting pirates and/or laughing at them in public.

The best advertising campaign ever?

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Before reading this blog post, I had never heard of Game Dev Tycoon, and as a former “scene” participant, I felt a twinge of guilt when I saw the day one statistics. I immediately purchased the game upon finishing the article, and wish I could afford to give more than $8.

As they previously stated,that download is marked as a crack just like any real pirated versions.
The difference however,was that…
1: They could see the number of people finding and downloading it there.
2: They could track how many that played it a fair bit.
3: Those that downloaded it would encounter alot of pirating ingame without any viable methods of handling it.

I fail to see the problem with this,there would’ve been a torrent named roughly the same with the same description there anyway within the first day even if they didn’t do this themselves,so the differences are pretty much just those above,and as a sort of amusing advert on the news.

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