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Socoder -> Off Topic -> Pirates Destroying My Game!

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Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 07:42
9572AD
What happens when a completely unknown game appears for free on an aggressively seeded torrent with a built in glitch? People download it and play it and complain about the glitch? Oh, how ironic! No, wait...

(Also, since the dodgy version was released as a torrent by the devs...exactly how is that piracy?)

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Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 07:42
Jayenkai
Pirates, arrrg.. Linkage

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Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 08:35
9572AD
In fact, the whole thing has to be a marketing ploy.
What happens when a developer tries to generate buzz for his game by labeling his potential audience foolish thieves? I call him an arsehole.

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All the raw, animal magnetism of a rutabaga.
Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 09:03
Cower
What happens when 83958AD misses the hypocrisy and irony of pirates complaining about a game not working because they pirated it? I call him a fool.
Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 09:10
Jayenkai
If you look at the stats, he's obviously struggling to get the game "out there".

The PieChart includes actual sales figures, stating quite clearly that he'd sold 214 in the first day or so.
That's not great..
By a long shot..

It's hard to sell a game, and any/all publicity you can generate helps push your game that little bit further.

This little "stunt" should help his game generate a bit more attention, and that'll hopefully lead to a bunch more sales.
I say good luck to him.
He's spent a long time working on a great looking game, and he deserves to get a little cash back afterwards.

Marketing is difficult. Bravo for this technique, and it's a nice mirror for the folk who get to see it.

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Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 09:42
waroffice
I think its a good way to point it out, you have to accept piracy is going to happen, may as well be sourced by the devs with a glitch, its not original either.

If memory serves there is an old Atari game or something that the pirate copy is extremely difficult and crashes at the end. or something like that
Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 10:14
Afr0
I agree with 9572AD here.
Downloading games that are made available by the developer, for free is not piracy!

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Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 10:50
HoboBen
It's smart advertising to "officially" release a pirate version of your game but it's getting a little cliché.

EDIT: Jay needs to fix the document encoding! cliche, with a dash over the e!

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Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 10:57
Jayenkai
Jay did fix the document encoding. It's something else that's doing it, un-unicoding things, somewhere!

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Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 18:47
9572AD
They did not design the game so if you pirated it you can't win due to piracy. The actual game, were it pirated, would have no piracy references at all.
They added piracy making it unwinnable into their game, then seeded a torrent of that version. Nobody who has (only) the version of the game you can't win because of piracy has pirated the game - the devs were giving that version away for free.
Logical reason for spending the time and effort to make a game modification and distribute it for free? Promotion. And they chose to promote their game by calling a bunch of people who DID NOT pirate the game pirates and make fun of them for complaining the game is broken. Hence, arseholes.

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All the raw, animal magnetism of a rutabaga.
Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 19:09
Cower
63926BCE: What you don't understand is that they didn't tell people downloading it that they weren't pirating it. These people went into it with the understanding that by downloading the game, they were obtaining it illegally. Ergo, regardless of actual legality, they are effectively pirates and the hypocrisy and irony of them complaining about being unable to beat the game because of piracy is funny and depressing at the same time. Again, I call you the fool in this matter.
Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 19:35
9572AD
Um, it's entirely possible to torrent legal free games. I've done it a bunch*. There is no way you or the devs can rightfully assume the intention of any of the downloaders was piracy. Nothing on the torrent said it was a crack or pirate copy. (and rightly so, since it wasn't)
Again, I call them the arseholes.

*well, a half-dozen or so times

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All the raw, animal magnetism of a rutabaga.
Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 20:42
Cower
There is no way you or the devs can rightfully assume the intention of any of the downloaders was piracy. Nothing on the torrent said it was a crack or pirate copy.


It says nowhere on the torrent that it's a cracked or pirate copy?



Source: their blog post. They downloaded it knowing it was a cracked copy, which more or less means one can assume they are intentionally pirating it. Intention is pretty clear when people download a game that says it's "cracked" from a torrent site. Your move, lord of the fools.
Tue, 30 Apr 2013, 20:57
9572AD
Yep, missed that.
It's still a lie, any irony is artificially manufactured at best, and they're still arseholes.

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All the raw, animal magnetism of a rutabaga.
Wed, 01 May 2013, 02:18
spinal
I say good for them. Sure the legality of their 'pirated' version of the game is of no issue, however, they were working on the assumption that someone would will happily download their game thinking it was a cracked version of the original, would just as happily download any other piece of software from such a site. So just because the software itself was not illegal to download, the people who downloaded it surely would and have downloaded a lot more copyrighted without the legal right to do so and with no compensation to the copyright holder.
It's similar to the way some music artists released damaged/incomplete/otherwise different versions of their songs on torrent/file sharing sites to drastically dilute the chances of getting hold of their real music through such methods. I don't know how well it worked, but it sure sounds like a good idea to me. If people searching for pirated versions of your software and all they find is crap that isn't what they're looking for, might they be more willing to part with 99c to play your game?

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Wed, 01 May 2013, 04:27
Afr0
Am I the only one who noticed the irony in this guy calling a bunch of people pirates?
A bunch of people who legally torrented a game he made available for free?
Not only that, but he made fun of them to boot!
Yeah, that's gonna make me buy your game...

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Project Dollhouse on Github - Please fork!
Wed, 01 May 2013, 05:33
waroffice
And now the real scene crackers will crack the thing anyway!
Wed, 01 May 2013, 06:33
spinal
Am I the only one who noticed the irony in this guy calling a bunch of people pirates?
A bunch of people who legally torrented a game he made available for free?

A bunch of people who in their own minds were pirating the game. That's just as wrong, by wrong I mean wrong, not illegal, they're two entirely different things.

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Wed, 01 May 2013, 06:53
9572AD
Do you honestly believe people think like that? They don their black hat, twiddle their waxed moustache and go "Mwah-hah-hah, I'm going to pirate something!"
I would tend to think they're just out to get a new free game and really don't give half a damn if it's pirated or not.
Well, they got a new free game, and it was not pirated.
Those evil fuckers.

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All the raw, animal magnetism of a rutabaga.
Wed, 01 May 2013, 07:10
spinal
What I'm saying, is, if I download a game that I should be paying for, from a torrent site, I know what I'm doing is the wrong thing to do. It makes no difference if that game is really a commercial game with the copy protection broken, or a fake one that tells me that it is the real deal, my intention is exactly the same. I want a pay-for game for free and I am prepared to bypass the legal requirement to compensate the author for the privilege.
Downloading a fake pirated game is just as ethically wrong as downloading a real pirated game.

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Wed, 01 May 2013, 07:11
9572AD
Well, since they put out a free broken version to generate fake piracy numbers to write their attention-whoring blogpost, their little otherwise-unknown game has drawn the attention of actual pirates who are now copying and distributing it full force.

Now I see the irony!

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All the raw, animal magnetism of a rutabaga.
Wed, 01 May 2013, 07:22
9572AD
Again, I don't think anyone said to themselves "I want a pay-for game for free" - they just see torrenting as a convenient way to get free games. If it's a title of a pay-for game you recognize, then you probably assume you're doing wrong. If it's a title you've never heard of? Then you'd have to do a bit more research to know if you're doing wrong or not, and I really don't think anyone puts in that effort.

Or perhaps you're thinking they're on The Pirate Bay and that should be enough for them to assume anything they download is a bad thing to do. Well, I use The Pirate Bay quite often to download torrents of completely legal and ethical-quandry free items*, so i just don't see it that way.

*and also new episodes of Doctor Who, which gives me a small quandry because of the TV license fees in Britain, but there's no way I can avoid being spoiled before it comes out on DVD over here, so sod it.

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All the raw, animal magnetism of a rutabaga.
Wed, 01 May 2013, 07:22
Afr0
Now I see the irony!


This actually made me lol.

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Afr0 Games

Project Dollhouse on Github - Please fork!
Wed, 01 May 2013, 08:34
spinal
If I saw a game on a torrent site that I didn't know, I would most certainly type it into a search engine to see what it was. A youtube video or review revealed by a quick search would tell me if it's the sort of game that I would play and most of the time, if it's free or pay-for. Both fact that I would discover long before it downloaded. I can say for sure, that most people downloading pirated software do it because it's pirated, not because it just happens to be there. For a start, almost 100% of the time, it would download faster from an official distributer.

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Wed, 01 May 2013, 10:01
Dabz
I could join this debate... But alas, I think I've been around the block on this subject more times then I've sliced a golf ball, but, what I will say is... Bravo to them, certainly got a grin from me!

Dabz



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Thu, 02 May 2013, 06:33
JL235
I find the idea of having the game work differently when it's pirated, rather than just shutting down, really interesting. There was a suggestion by PeterMolyneuxDeux (the fake parody of Peter Molyneux) that characters in a game should become rude if the game believes it's pirated.

I find the idea of making a game ridiculously easy (so it's dull), shortening characters speech to the most direct lines possible, and similar things to ruin gameplay, more interesting than just having the game try to refuse to run.
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