Realising a cracked Version of the game for popularity

I am far away from realising any stuff but the big goal is to have so many players playing your game as possible.

So why dont release a cracked version by your self even if you have more illigal Players then legal it is better then no one

Or what do you think about it

 

Why do that? Why not release the game for free, then?

 

Pretty much what @Schneider21 said. Well, either that or simply do what developers did before all this free 2 play nonsense (most of them are S***ty cash-grabs): Release a free demo version of your game.

 

It is a pseodo for free release you still try to sell it and hope that your game get popular even if you cant get new costumers the normal way

Edit: and if your game is popular it will be cracked any way

 

I have seen this done as a counter piracy measure before. A playable, but fundamentally broken or different version of the game is released via torrent. In theory this discourages further hacking as the game is already released. Of course there is the potential for this to bite you hard if the game becomes really popular and hackers decide you've played them.

You'll note that companies like Unity Technologies are releasing products via torrent now in an effort to control illegal torrents. If you can't beat them, join them.

Major downside is you may end up supporting high numbers of users that don't pay for your product. This can get expensive fast if you need server space. Especially if you can't identify paid users from free ones.

 

I've actually toyed with this idea before. And it does have merit.

Stopping hacking and pirating by conventional means is a losing battle. It has been for quite some time. Releasing your own "cracked" version of the game before pirates do is a way to keep your hand in that scene. If they are going to be acquiring and using a free version of your game, why not have it be a version that you have some measure of control over? Even if you don't opt to "gimp" the cracked version in any meaningful way, you could put network hooks in it to retrieve analytic data from the pirates playing it. That's far better than nothing.

A clever developer could even tie the pirated/not-pirated versions into the design of a type of over-arching meta-game. If it's a multiplayer title, subtly provide a slight advantage for paying players, and make pirate players identifiable to paying players, but not to each other. Provide paying players with achievements for winning a given number of times against pirate players. And rather than only punish the pirates, provide them with their own custom achievement if they buy the game after having first pirated it. (I'm thinking something along the lines of a "privateer" achievement)

There are plenty of ways of handling a strategy like this without trying to browbeat or shortchange any of the parties involved.

 

Game dev tycoon did it. In the pirated version they increase the rate of your game being pirated until it destroys your company profits before the end game.

Pretty hilarious when users complained about it and got called out too.

A few other games did similar stuff.. basically introduce pirate-only bugs or mini features.

 

This is an interesting experiment on the same thing.

http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013...lator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/

 

Nope. This will only piss everyone off and someone will have a proper torrent released later.

 

Well, obviously it won't piss paying customers off, so "everyone" is a bit of a stretch. Also, there is nothing stopping the developer from releasing another "proper" torrent later. Perhaps with a different tweak?

One of the disadvantages of the pirating community is that they don't have a lot unity, and their quasi-anonymity works against them when it comes to this sort of approach. If a developer wants to crank out their own versions of torrents, they can, and the vast majority of leech users won't know the difference.

And as I pointed out, not all changes to the pirated version have to actually hamper the experience for the player.

Another disadvantage of the pirating community is that the developer is under no obligation to support them. There is some expectation of customer service between a company and its customers. The same does not hold true for a company and software pirates. When software pirates complain about their version of a game, the company doesn't have to DO anything.

 

Except it's not uncommon; you can find a number of articles written about games that do this sort of thing, and people seem to find it pretty entertaining.

--Eric

 

making it free will diminish the need for it to be hacked..

If I ever finish my game, it will be free, however if you want access to multiplayer, you will need to pay a small amount. You will need to login, so ill have control over who has a valid account. In my mind this will work fine, in reality... (ill probably never finish the game - lol)

 

I'm sure there was a discussion that went somewhere along the lines of

My ISP provider throttles torrents, so I've never experienced superior download speeds

 

I expect the discussion really was only about download speeds (and bandwidth). Humble Bundle does this, where they do have http downloads, but request that you use the torrents instead to help with their bandwidth costs. Nothing to do with piracy or malware.

--Eric

 

I think the idea described here has merit too. The thing is that if your game is any good(and very possibly even if it isn't), it will be pirated, torrented, cracked, etc... So, I've always been against fighting, rather using it to your advantage. For example, the creator of a guide about how to get into the HTML5 market(mostly about how to get HTML5 mobile games sponsored, what types to make, and issues with HTML5 in mobile hardware, etc...) actually released a separate but equal version of the book on pirate sites. This book actually states though that it is equal(I own the book so I know that at the time it was truly equal), and that it was done in hopes of the pirates actually buying the book if they liked it.

I have heard that some people who pirate things are actually doing it in order to test drive the software, etc... and then actually buy it if they use it. They supposedly feel that the trial versions aren't long enough, or are lacking in features in order to actually fully test software. I don't know how true that is, but considering your game is going to get pirated anyway, maybe it is worth looking at that side as free advertisement. After all, as has been said in many posts here(and every other gamedev type forum), you can't stop pirates and crackers, so maybe it is just better not to fight it, rather thrive with it.

 

Totally not true. It's about as valid as the file share sites that say "we had no idea 99.9 % of traffic was copyrighted material". It's an excuse when you get caught. Most game trials via piracy end after 80 hours if gameplay when the user decides they are over the game.

I totally agree with the idea of attempting to thrive with the culture rather then fight it. Finding a way to profit off the essentially free distribution channels is a good idea.

 

Maybe a few percent. Many people will download it with that intention, play the whole game, and forget it.

 

If your game is crap releasing a cracked version ain't going to make it better or more playable.
Some pirates might download it (the collector mentality) but since it is crap they will never play it, so you will just ended up with nobody playing your game anyway.

Focus on making your game fun is more important than thinking up these nonsense!


Either that or make your game so horrifically bad to get some notoriety...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rigs:_Over_the_Road_Racing

 

My favorite is the batman one, from the first arkham game. There's a spot in the vents where, upon entering, gravity & grounding code are disabled. You float away and even if you manage to touch the ground, you remain floating and you are stuck in the 'in-air' pose.

I pirated far cry 3 so I could test the level editor before buying. It didn't work. I played some of the campaign to see what items would be available in the level editor. I was interested in making a huge obstacle course for the wingsuit. I bought the full game.

The editor was working fine in the pirated version it seemed, it was just a buggy POS that didn't do anything. And even if you could get it to work, I heard the wingsuit was not even available... I would have rather spent the money on ~50 sandwiches and thrown them off of a tall building.

 

I agree, but if you take the advice of the poster right after this one, and make an actually good game, that few percent may exist at least. And that may be worth the slight effort of putting your own game up for torrenting. That few percent that actually would buy if they got a good play out of it, might not buy if they don't. You never know, and as was said, it depends on the game quality too.

 

This! Here's a good article on that.
Gigi

 

As much as I agree with the premise of the article I don't think it's necessarily relevant in this context. To me what this thread is basically about is "can we use piiracy-based distribution channels for some kind of benefit for our commercial games?" I don't think that "don't make commercial games" is really a solution to that.

 

Haha, it sounds so funny when you put it that way.

Then if you consider it a valid strategy at all, are you in favor of releasing a pirate-version like game dev tycoon did?

 

Of course it is. Also devs who support file sharers and don't go copyright monopoly route on them, often get paid for their kindness in sales.

What links Notch, Sosowski, Alex Poyski and developer of Hotline Miami, Cactus? They got out big and also they support free culture.

http://torrentfreak.com/games-developer-gives-customer-support-to-pirate-bay-downloaders-121026/
https://twitter.com/notch/status/157261795139125248
http://indiegamemag.com/pixel-piracy-devs-would-like-you-to-pirate-their-pixels/
http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/mcpixel-embraced-piracy-lived-to-tell-the-tale/1100-4366/

 

^this, interesting....

 

The thing about this is (and it's really just my personal point of view): What's the point?
As @Zeblote said, a properly cracked version will be up in no time anyway. Playing such pranks at the expense of pirates might seem like a good idea, but who's the fool at the end of the day? The pirate who simply waits a day or two for a proper version, or the developer who spent some extra-hours specifically for people he already knew weren't going to pay him in the first place?

I just find it hard to justify such things. They're going to have the last laugh anyway, while I basically wasted some of my time, which is a very scarce resource for me.

@RichardKain :
Not necessarily. It all depends on how exactly you "break your game". If you add some form of DRM that detects whether the game is pirated or not, there's a chance that the system falsely detects a paying customer as pirate and hampers their experience. This stuff actually happens. See no further than always-on DRM, if you want an example of DRM hurting the paying customer way more than the pirate.

• Too many players log in after launch and the servers collapse. Nobody can play. The pirates don't care.
• Your ISP has bandwidth caps and the forced update takes forever to load. You can't play. The pirates don't care.
• You live in a region with poor connectivity and always loose the connection to the auth-servers. The pirates don't care.
• Your ISP has do do maintenance and you have no Internet. The pirates don't care.
• The developer has problems with his servers. The pirates don't care.
• The publisher shuts down the servers without providing a patch, thus killing the game forever. The pirates don't care.

And this is just always-on DRM. I mean, we had DRM that was so persistent that it couldn't be removed without third-party tools because uninstalling the game wasn't enough. Limited number of installations, anyone?

There is a reason why "DRM-free" is a selling point, something that speaks in favor of your game.

 

I think it depends on too many things to give a yes/no answer.

For starters, in the niche case of Game Dev Tycoon I think it's awesome that it got pirates to directly examine how their own, specific and unique behaviour directly effects the lives of others, through the eyes of those others. How jaw droppingly awesome is it that they found and took an opportunity to make people think "I wish people would stop doing this thing that I'm doing right now". Freakin' phenomenal.

But applying that to myself, if that was me... if I felt like I'd been fooled by someone, would my first reaction be to take it as a learning opportunity or to feel stung and dig in stubbornly about what I was doing? Personally, I know that the former is a learned behaviour that kicks in only after the latter. And how many people in the world have learned that behaviour?

Precious few, in my experience.

Doubly so because, in this case, the first step to fixing the behaviour is admitting to themselves that they're doing something wrong. I mean, ouch.

So, how many pirates do I think changed their ways as a result of playing Game Dev Tycoon? I've no idea, but my gut feel is that it's few to none.

Moving on, would I consider it? Yes, but (referring to one of my favorite books yet again) I'd take some advice from How to Win Friends and Influence People. Instead of anything that makes them feel negative (they'll almost certainly be less interested in helping you out), I'd try and frame things so that they feel positive about doing things that are to my advantage. So, I don't know, maybe release a perfectly normal version of the game where the only difference is a message at the start saying that without enough paid sales of this game we won't get to make another, so if you can't buy it could you at least do us a solid and tell your mates or post on Facebook if you like it? Instead of slapping them in the face we're then just re-directing behaviours and activities they're already doing anyway to something that's mutually beneficial.

 

It does, but can you provide a recent concrete example?

Every time I've asked someone for an example of this they refer to the release of Assassin's Creed II on UPlay, nearly six years ago, which was one of the service's first major titles.

I agree that always-online DRM is a pain in the bum, but my personal approach has been to treat it like any other product I buy - if it doesn't cause problems then it's not an issue, and if it does cause problems then I'll have a refund, thanks. I've had no problems so far (despite being in Australia with a mediocre connection), and scored a free game from a major publisher as they went through teething issues even though I wasn't personally effected. So on the whole I really can't complain, and standard consumer rights in my part of the world are on my side if I ever do have a legitimate complaint.

 

It happened with Sim City, which is especially annoying considering the lies about "it has to be online because it computes stuff on the servers, you guys, seriously!" were indeed lies.

--Eric

 

How about simply releasing a really good game for popularity?

 

Nah, too simple. Everyone is trying that these days.

 

@Eric5h5 already gave you one that's more recent: SimCity.
What about Diablo 3 and its disastrous launch? Didn't their most recent WoW expansion also have massive problems during launch because the servers couldn't handle the amount of players? Those are online games and they have those kind of problems. Especially in the case of WoW, nobody can tell me that Blizzard couldn't have expected this.

However, the biggest thing is that we almost got always-on DRM on console-level.

I think that's because they were the first ones who pulled this crap. A pirated version of AC2 was the objectively better game on account of actually working in a reliable fashion.

Well, I don't share this view. It's basically the "I know it's bad, but hope all goes well and cry foul when it doesn't" point of view. If more people thought like you do, Microsoft would have never done a 180 when it comes to the Xbone DRM and we'd be stuck with always-on on console-level.

Always-on DRM for singleplayer games is never okay, period. The sheer fact that you can drop 60 bucks on a game and the publisher gets to say how long you can play until they don't feel like paying for the servers anymore, is about as anti-consumer as it gets.

Besides that, getting a refund doesn't actually solve the problem because you're still not being able to play a game you wanted to for no good reason.

 

Unity has always-on DRM doesn't it? and it will only get worse when 5.1 comes out and you have to constantly sign in Something I don't like or agree with but if it makes business sense and reduces piracy then that's perhaps a good thing. Although I have to properly scratch my head at this move given that personal is freely available.

 

It doesn't, unity works offline.

 

The point is, you'll have to have *some* internet access in future to use it.

 

SimCity seems valid. Diablo 3 (for better or worse) and WoW are online games, though, so complaining about always-on DRM seems silly.

Yeah... that's exactly how I described it, too. On the scale of things in this world I might want to spend time or energy fighting against the specifics of how my video games load up don't even make the list. Plus, as long as it's not actually causing a problem there's no reason for anyone to listen to my complaints even if I were to make them.

Also, it's genuinely becoming less of an issue as time goes by just because of how the world is moving along on its own. Even aside from the fact that internet access is constantly getting more ubiquitous, there's the point that so many games are taking such good advantage of it anyway. For me, Diablo 3 was improved from Diablo 2 largely because of online features, The Crew is a great game that could have been just another racer with multiplayer but is way cooler for it's MMO-ness, and games like Dark Souls (et al) and Watch Dogs have really cool and fundamental gameplay elements that only work as always-online features.

 

Hah, yea I can see this being as the epitome of this strategy. Maybe Cities: skyline can have a version of their game where occasionally a horde of pirates ransacks the whole area and steals like 80% of your money, burns down most of the houses and kills most of the people. A bit extreme, perhaps.

The rest of your answer was a pretty solid warning. I can't imagine how those guys felt when they posted the 'bugs' in a public forum and were then all called on it.

It does?! It is!? Is that only for the pro version? If it isn't...

Well, that'd be the end of my interest in Unity.x. I'll still haunt the forums from time to time regardless, but I support DRM under no circumstances. Even if it's for a software that can publish drm free software, lol.

 

I'm puzzled as to why no one replied or noticed above post.

 

Only for the registration, which is expected, and has always been the case. It's not necessary to be online to use 5.1.

Unity has always had DRM since day 1. You get to install your license on 2 machines at a time, which is enforced by the software's DRM.

--Eric

 

It was noticed, but the idea of some masked altruism with the mantra of "free culture" while in a type of indirect way also abusing that culture is farcical.

let's face the truth of the matter... what we have is "if you can't beat them, join them"... while large publishers and developers have the power and financing to possibly combat it, I and many other don't. So it is a battle choice, adapt or die kind of survival I suppose.

 

@Eric5h5 I meant to start & operate unity beyond the installation. I can open Unity5 while offline and work on my projects. 1 time authentication during installation? That's not bothersome at all and could be done with 2G service. I was more worried about 'Digital Rights Management' being enforced a la EA / blizzard / Ubisoft with wares to monitor their wares and have a stroke if the internet cuts out for a moment.

 

This is why I like online games - pirate the client all you want doesn't matter to me

 

Unless they manage to write custom server, as it happened with Ultima Online, WoW, Tibia and many others.

 

If your game is so popular someone writes a custom server for it you have a very very good problem. Or should I say your problem is what to do with all the cash you just made over the last year.

 

I never got addicted to WoW because I got to play through all of the content in a week thanks to private servers. 1 server started me off with this little orb thing that when clicked would bring me to the ideal leveling location for my character (class & level) and the exp rate would be such that you actually got most of the drops offered by a particular creature from killing them to experience more of the game. You wouldn't spend much more or any less than ~8-15 minutes in a single area so the grind was minimal. I got each class up to level 300 (there was custom content & some crazy exp scaling once you entered the custom level caps and stuff).

Saw the entire game with all content up through the death knight's expansion (with some custom monsters & locations) and burned out after playing a few hours a day for 7 days. I'm glad I didn't have to invest the time or money it would take to experience less than I did, heh.

I haven't played any private servers or mmos in a long time. I don't know why I liked them so much ~4 years ago. Maybe private servers are the cure for mmo addiction?

 

Of course this is based on the concept that "experience" specifically means "see unique content". It could be that you burned out on the game so quickly because you weren't benefitting from the carefully crafted pacing that gets so many other people so deeply engrossed.

You may have been playing with the same client, but you weren't playing the same game.

 

You did it for the backdoor approach, right?

 

I've always thought the big goal was making money to make the game better/make other better games to get more players. Skipping the first 2 parts might become problematic.

 

I see that happen to my friends a lot in minecraft when they cheat something in to skip a particular stage of progression. Then again, minecraft cost me like $12 when I bought it and that's it. WoW and other subscription games have cost my friends considerably more.

I prefer LP's and Twitch.tv now for most of my gaming interests. My TV has been unplugged for almost 2 years now because of Twitch