MRY
Wormwood Studios
The average player spent like $3 on it. It doesn't make me particularly happy that a nice guy like you spent four times as much.
Really now? You are not selling your game a bit short?
Don't listen to him. His game is worth $50
Well, whenever I see links posted to piracy links, I just advise people to use good digital hygiene. Honestly, whatever Primordia is worth, avoiding a virus is almost certainly worth $10, which seems like the main reason not to pirate it. The original Russian translators were an adjunct to a Russian piracy group, and I said the same thing to them while sharing the link to their translation. :DI won't be surprised if one day MRY will start advocating for piracy of his games.
I think Croteam's move is less an anti-piracy measure than it is a piece of performance art designed to attract paying customers to the game; of course they know pirates will work around it, and I can't imagine that they think that it will deter piracy. They probably don't even hope that it will cause a single pirate to buy the game, though I suppose some small number of them might in a touche kind of hat-tip. Rather, the audience is people who have already paid, who will feel better about having paid because they can laugh at pirates, and people who haven't bought the game but will hear about it, and/or about the developer, in a way that will make the game and/or developer seem clever. This seeming cleverness could attract customers to the game.
In my view, current technology does not offer a feasible way to stop piracy of traditional single-player games, so I don't think it's worth pretending otherwise if you're a developer. You have to accept piracy and work within a reality in which people can get your game for free almost as easily as they can buy it. That said, I think it's mistaken to believe that piracy harms no one. Pirates also need to accept reality, and reality is that widespread piracy causes major developers to implement DRM that harms the gaming experience in various ways. Even assuming piracy imposes no other costs, it worsens games in that regard. Moreover, the perception -- whether fair or not -- that piracy suppresses sales is probably a significant cause of various trends that have worsened games, specifically increased movement toward: (1) consoles; (2) games with inescapable online integration or at least an online-experience priority; (3) F2P with microtransactions; (4) "early access," crowdfunding, pre-ordering, and other ways of locking in money before piracy can conceivably suppress sales; and (5) using post-release patching (which is to say, premature release) to encourage legal purchasing. It's impossible for me to quantify the effect, and maybe I'm spinning a just-so story, but it certainly seems to me that the two are related. As someone who grew up in the age of standalone, well-made single-player game, it's distressing to see that type of game being relegated to a niche. Of course no individual act of piracy is responsible for this state of affairs, just like no individual purchase is responsible for a developer's financial well-being, and at least in certain circumstances it's hard to be annoyed at someone for pirating a game. Holding all else constant, as between someone pirating Primordia and not playing it at all, I'd much rather they pirate it.
As I get older, I'm slowly coming to the view that the market is the best system for pricing goods but that an individual participant in the market should not give controlling moral weight to the market. In other words, that customers are willing to pay a certain price does not necessarily mean that you shouldn't sell it cheaper, if you can; that sellers are willing to sell at a certain price does not necessarily mean you should offer not a penny more. I wish more developers would stop charging for their games when they can afford to give them away (esp., with older games), and I wish more gamers would not pirate games when they can afford to buy them.
Well, piracy is no more inevitable than DRM;* both are the result of people making decisions, not immutable laws of nature. (* DRM might be easier to stop because there are fewer decision makers, and those decision makers can more easily be held accountable, of course.) All I'm saying is that pirates who say, "We aren't hurting anything!" are factually wrong even if you accept the premise that they would never have bought the game.In other words, piracy is inevitable but they are too stubborn to accept that reality
When successful companies engage in some behavior that seems obviously foolish -- or when large numbers of people make choices that are seem plainly wrong -- I tend to try to second-guess my own assumptions. (For example, if you think, "Disney's decision with respect to Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars is dumb even to me, the company clearly doesn't know how to manage a brand!" -- and who hasn't thought that at some point? -- it's a useful corrective to remember that Disney has long successfully managed brands, while we never have.) So, for example, it seems to me quite possible that companies have gone through an analysis like: (1) DRM makes things worse for our paying customers; (2) DRM also makes things harder for pirates; (3) we've run the numbers and only a small but vocal minority of paying customers will actually stop buying because of DRM; (4) by contrast, a relatively large number of stupid people will be unable to pirate the game. I mean, I haven't run any such numbers or wouldn't even know where such numbers would come from, but it seems possible.Makes me wonder how they even manage to stay in business with such poor decision making.
As someone who scrupulously buys products -- since I don't watch/read/play all that much any more, it's not too expensive -- the thing that amazes me most is not gaming DRM but the unskippable shit on DVDs. BBC repays my courtesy in buying their product with a semi-unskippable set of ads, an unskippable FBI warning, an unskippable "commentaries are not our official policy" warning, an unskippable logo sequence, and then slow-ass menus. This is true for basically every company. (Disney is in some ways the most outrageous, announcing that their DVDs are "equipped with fast play" that can be "bypassed by pressing menu"; "fast play" actually means that if you press nothing, you watch a long series of ads, while pressing menu puts you through an unskippable series of warnings.)
Galactic Civilizations 2 is a decent example, but despite what they claimed, it did have a form of DRM, namely the release of a piece of shit game that required dozens of week-one patches that could only be downloaded with a valid purchase. Of course the patches were themselves ultimately cracked, etc., but as far as a I know, no developer has set it up so that pirates enjoy a game no worse than bona fide customers.At this point I'm waiting for a big developer/publisher to release a good game with no DRM whatoever and enjoy massive success, just to see the faces of all the "b-but it's a necessary evil!" people.
For myself, I've always tried to help Primordia pirates when I see them on Twitter, etc., mostly for the performance-art reason.
avoiding a virus is almost certainly worth $10, which seems like the main reason not to pirate it.
I haven't kept up-to-date on whether piracy has stopped being a virus vector. Why else would random spambots on Twitter offer hot links to Primordia if not to send malware?
I replayed it a couple of weeks ago. Quite enjoyed it still, though if we're gonna compare, Primordia is much "tighter". Technobabylon is bigger (which is a nice thing on its own I guess) but it doesn't pack the same punch.
Still a very good advenure game.