Game Dev Tycoon - "Can I research a DRM or something?"

[20 Eyes]

This game looks like a 1:1 ripoff of Kairosoft's Game Dev Story, only without the charming graphics. They barely even changed the title. I would pirate this too before spending any money on it.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Did I miss anything, or how are they able to tell how many copies are being played at a time and how many of them are pirated? Is it online?

 

[Tigranes]

So it's the same as Game Dev Story? Meh, that means good enough for a while but no 'mechanics' whatsoever.

Nino Arndt's Gamebiz is still the best, even if it has a truly horrendous UI.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Genuine version: 214 users

Cracked version: at least 3104 users

Over 93.6% of players stole the game. We know this because our game contains some code to send anonymous-usage data to our server. Nothing unusual or harmful. Heaps of games/apps do this and we use it to better understand how the game is played. It’s absolutely anonymous and you are covered by our privacy policy. Anyway, the cracked version has a separate ID so I can separate the data. I’m sure some of the players have firewalls and some will play offline therefore the actual number of players for the cracked version is likely much higher.

http://www.greenheartgames.com.nyud...lator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/

 

[Zed]

the game should be freeware.
it has flash graphics ffs.

What does the graphics matter if the game itself offers enough substance to justify the price? Don't say this does as I haven't played it, but the whole "flash graphicks r free" feud shit tends to be fucking stupid.

because flash graphics is cheap.
it uses the same game design found in game like the movies, but with none of the production values. a production without value is worth nothing.

 

[Wilian]

the game should be freeware.
it has flash graphics ffs.

What does the graphics matter if the game itself offers enough substance to justify the price? Don't say this does as I haven't played it, but the whole "flash graphicks r free" feud shit tends to be fucking stupid.

because flash graphics is cheap.

And the game is just sum of it's graphics duh, I should'da remembered that.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Yep. This is why books have no value whatsoever. Don't forget it also needs William Shatner to do voiceovers (because that other guy is a sissy fag).

 

[cvv]

Codexers calling game "shit" and "shovelware" without even playing it, without even watching an LP, just because it's an indie game with cheap graphics? What the fuck? Are you retarded guise or are we on Beware forum whining about slightly off Shephard's lipsync?

Game's no GOTY but after watching some LPs it's a perfectly all right game for its genre and price. Maybe you think to be a cool Codexer is to reflexively hate everything and everyone. In that case grats to the mother of all missed points

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Codexers calling game "shit" and "shovelware" without even playing it, without even watching an LP, just because it's an indie game with cheap graphics? What the fuck? Are you retarded guise or are we on Beware forum whining about slightly off Shephard's lipsync?

Game's no GOTY but after watching some LPs it's a perfectly all right game for its genre and price. Maybe you think to be a cool Codexer is to reflexively hate everything and everyone. In that case grats to the mother of all missed points

Are you a budding shovelware developer?

 

[circ]

Well judging by that one graphic and constant attention on piracy from the developer it looks like an advertising stunt advocating DRM.

 

[cvv]

Are you a budding shovelware developer?

You know maybe you should learn your slang first before you make a fool of yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shovelware

 

[cvv]

Well judging by that one graphic and constant attention on piracy from the developer it looks like an advertising stunt advocating DRM.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Are you a budding shovelware developer?

You know maybe you should learn your slang first before you make a fool of yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shovelware

Shovelware is a derogatory computer jargon term that refers to software noted more for the quantity of what is included than for the quality or usefulness.

And?

 

[Mangoose]

"There are still individuals who either can't make a legal purchase because of payment-issues or who genuinely cannot afford the game," Klug concluded. "I don't have a quarrel with you.

"To the rest who could afford the game consider this: We are just two guys working our butts off, trying to start our own game studio to create games which are fun to play."

What about people who want a goddamn demo before paying for a game, resorting to piracy as the only resort?

 

[jcd]

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[cvv]

"There are still individuals who either can't make a legal purchase because of payment-issues or who genuinely cannot afford the game," Klug concluded. "I don't have a quarrel with you.

"To the rest who could afford the game consider this: We are just two guys working our butts off, trying to start our own game studio to create games which are fun to play."

What about people who want a goddamn demo before paying for a game, resorting to piracy as the only resort?

I'm not a saint here, used to pirate all the time in my foolish (and poor) youth, and I guess nobody's blaming poor students or ppl who just want to try the game out (although there's always Youtube and various LPs and gamplay videos).

The issue is with people who can easily afford a 7 bucks game but still opt to torrent it. I absolutely loathe the idea they should be persecuted by police or some such disgusting shit but they should be blamed a shamed as much as possible.

 

[RK47]

Codexers calling game "shit" and "shovelware" without even playing it, without even watching an LP, just because it's an indie game with cheap graphics? What the fuck? Are you retarded guise or are we on Beware forum whining about slightly off Shephard's lipsync?

Game's no GOTY but after watching some LPs it's a perfectly all right game for its genre and price. Maybe you think to be a cool Codexer is to reflexively hate everything and everyone. In that case grats to the mother of all missed points

Yeah it's pretty sad man. I used to pirate stuff myself, but ever since I got an income and have access to cheaper online retail like Steam, I've bought some indies and they're pretty decent fun too. AAA games are harder to justify buying at release price, but look at Hitman Absolution, barely half a year and it's already $9.99

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

The graph posted by Jaesun reminded me of World of Goo. And they had a demo version.

http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/

90%

yes, that’s the approximate piracy rate for the pc version of world of goo. we casually mentioned that number recently and the news seemed to propagate far and wide, so we’d like to follow up with some more details, for those interested.

First, and most importantly, how we came up with this number: the game allows players to have their high scores reported to our server (it’s an optional checkbox). we record each score and the IP from which it came. we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources by the total number of unique IPs in our database, and came up with about 0.1. that’s how we came up with 90%.



it’s just an estimate though… there are factors that we couldn’t account for that would make the actual piracy rate lower than our estimate:

• some people install the game on more than one machine
• most people have dynamic IP addresses that change from time to time

there are also factors that would make the actual piracy rate higher than our estimate:

• more than one installation behind the same router/firewall (would be common in an office environment)
• not everyone opts to have their scores submitted

for simplicity’s sake, we just assumed those would balance out. so take take the 90% as a rough estimate.
this is in line with a previous estimate by russell carroll (director of marketing at reflexive) for the game ricochet infinity. russell estimated a 92% piracy rate and i found his analysis quite interesting (check it out here if you’re curious). one thing that really jumped out at me was his estimate that preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale. this supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game aren’t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying.
in our case, we might have even converted more than 1 in a 1000 pirates into legit purchases. either way, ricochet shipped with DRM, world of goo shipped without it, and there seems to be no difference in the outcomes. we can’t draw any conclusions based on two data points, but i’m hoping that others will release information about piracy rates so that everyone could see if DRM is the waste of time and money that we think it is.
————————

UPDATE (and nerd alert): a lot of smart people have been questioning the accuracy of our 90% estimate, and with good reason, it’s a very rough estimate and the measurements are flawed. so we did some more digging to see if we might have missed the mark by a significant amount. here’s what we found:

1. based on the number of unique IPs and unique player IDs, we found that on average, there are 1.3 unique IP addresses per player (there is 1 player id for each profile created on any installation that submits scores to our server)
   76% of players have contacted the server from 1 IP
   13% from 2 IPs
   5% from 3 IPs
   3% from 4 IPs
   1% from 5 IPs
   1% from 6 IPs
   1% from more than 6
   this tells us that the dynamic IP issue is a relatively small factor in this calculation
2. we also looked at how many players IDs were created (rather than used) from each IP address. given that the vast majority of player IDs are associated with only a single IP, this is a fairly accurate measure of how many profiles the average user created. on average, a player has 1.15 profiles per installation.

when we take the total number of player IDs (which is smaller than the number of unique IPs from which leaderboard entries came) and divide it by 1.15 (the average number of profiles per installation) the number of estimated unique installations drops by about 35% as compared to the estimate based on unique IPs. let us further say that the average user installs the game on 1.25 computers with different IPs (i.e. not behind the same router), which i think is a high estimate. that lowers the estimated unique installations by another 20%. after factoring both of these in, the piracy rate would still be 82%, and we should keep in mind that this number doesn’t include those who never opted to submit scores to the leaderboard (it’s an option that’s off by default). so while it’s possible that the actual piracy rate is lower than 90%, it’s unlikely that it’s significantly lower. 2d boy hopes this satisfies the more rigorous number crunchers out there

oh, and yes, these numbers are exclusive of the demo… those scores are submitted to a different server entirely.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

^ yeah, and world of goo had their sales significantly increased when they introduced CD keys.

Anyways, pirates gonna be entitled as usual. 90% piracy rate? Developer sucks for making me pirate this game and play it 7 times.

And then took a shit on them.

That's like saying DA2 took a shit on DA:O. Might be true but you know, nothing of vaue was lost.


Actually, it's more like saying DA:O took a shit on WoW. Only WoW can only maybe mirror D2 in the extreme it brought upon the entire genre.

Heck, it probably can't.

 

[CyberWhale]

This is probably the best marketing ploy I have ever seen in my entire pathetic life. These guys have just given the whole world the proof that piracy doesn't affect sales at all and manipulated the facts in such a way that everyone (including both sheepsters and video game "journalists" alike) is now attacking piracy and is simultaneously giving them a bunch of free coverage.

This is hilarious. Best DRM ever created IMO.
The irony, oh the irony.

OH YES. THE IRONY. Just not in the way that you and other intellectually limited people think.

I'm still convinced that if a game company or console manufacturer successfully develops a 100% crack proof DRM you wouldn't obtain an expansion of the market but only less people playing games.

Publicity stunt.

Anyway, this is non-news. Shitty game, from shitty studio pulled a publicity stunt and the retarded game "journalists" (this term should be at least triple quoted imo) are coming buckets over it.

Pirating games is wrong, but pirating ideas and design for personal profit is good and should be supported.

https://itunes.apple.com/fi/app/game-dev-story/id396085661?mt=8

RIGHT?

I still can't wrap my head around this. Kotick should fucking hire this guy.

 

[cvv]

I smell another future entry for SCO's lustrous ignore list.

 

[Zewp]

This game is unrealistic. I kept pumping out sequels for Call of Duty and then I went bankrupt.

That's not how the gaming industry works.

 

[dnf]

Did you try to bribe put ads in gaming sites?

 

[Keshik]

Did I miss anything, or how are they able to tell how many copies are being played at a time and how many of them are pirated? Is it online?

It sent 'anonymous' data back to them, I believe. Not sure if the proper game does that (then the dev saying the game is DRM free is a bit rich).

 

[evdk]

It sent 'anonymous' data back to them, I believe. Not sure if the proper game does that (then the dev saying the game is DRM free is a bit rich).

Proper game does that too, he mentioned that the TPB version just has a different id.