The party of people who pirate and don’t think about it – maybe you’re teaching them something, it’s hard to say. But some of them would have!Īnd this is why I’m so mixed on this. Most pirates probably weren’t going to buy it anyways. Other studios and I have had benefits from piracy, you don’t necessarily go bankrupt with piracy. I suppose it’s a VERY strong way of conveying the feeling of getting pirated – by playing the pirated version, you can never reach the goal of making enough money to stay alive. In my experience, some people didn’t have the money to pay at the time, but later paid. You’re genuinely pissing off the former and latter party, which are possible fans. In this group of people, there exist people who don’t have the money to buy the game, simply want to try before buying (And won’t buy otherwise), and people who just never pay – with some overlap between the groups. When you do this, you are shutting off anyone playing the pirated copy from playing your game. It’s sort of clever how the DRM is implemented, but the lesson being taught isn’t entirely accurate – piracy might hurt sales, but it doesn’t guarantee bankruptcy in all cases – hurt profits in larger studios, possibly. It’s a bit harsh, especially since it makes you prematurely lose the game, so hours spent might go down the drain. This strategy roughly says, as conveyed through the gameplay: “Piracy hurts sales and doesn’t let us make any money, and makes us go bankrupt”. Not going into whether this was a marketing stunt (I don’t think it was, for the record – their blog post comes off as this DRM was more of an emotional response)) (I will note this has really done wonders, press-wise for them. Game Dev Tycoon, released recently, has an interesting DRM strategy with regards to piracy – playing the pirated copy will make you lose after a while, because too many people pirate your game, and you go bankrupt. If Greenheart's anti-piracy measure made you smile, check out eight other hilarious examples of creative video game anti-piracy measures.I want to talk a bit about piracy. He entreaties them to spend the 8 dollars and see what the game really should be like. Nonetheless, creator Patrick Klug isn't mad at pirates, and doesn't believe in DRM. "If years down the track you wonder why there are no games like these anymore and all you get to play is pay-to-play and social games designed to suck money out of your pockets then the reason will stare back at you in the mirror," the developer says. After one day on sale, Greenheart says, 93.6% of players had downloaded the illegal version rather than buying it legally. Back in 2001, Operation Flashpoint's developers decided to make the game degrade slowly as pirates played, with enemies becoming ever stronger and guns ever weaker until the game eventually became unplayable. Rocksteady released a cracked version of Batman: Arkham Asylum onto the Internet that was complete except for one tiny detail: Batman's cape-glide ability didn't work. This isn't the first time that developers have tried to make a point with anti-piracy messages. There are plenty more over on Greenheart's site. The most brilliant thing about this is the responses that Greenheart has found online from players who didn't pay for the game. "Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers." After a few hours of building up your virtual game studio, this message appears: From then on, everything pirate players make in-game has a huge chance of being pirated, and it becomes almost impossible for them to make a profit. "The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail," explains Greenheart on its website. As an experiment, the developer decided to release a cracked version of Game Dev Tycoon onto torrent sites along with the genuine version, pre-empting piracy.
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