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Xenonauts and piracy


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Instead of DRM, there should be made those tricks that were made for example Witcher 2, Seriours Sam 3 or Game Dev Tycoon. Where in Witcher 2, there were replaced textures for Tris or immortal chickens (or children can't remember). In SS3 there was immortal scorpion enemy and in Game Dev Tycoon, you bankrupt suddenly.

I know that this game check will be removed by pirates eventually, but it will make harder for them to play. Imagine for example in Xenonauts. You're about to finish your first or second month and then you get pop-up: "Sir The Aliens decided to bomb the planet. Game Over".

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Silencer, I do remember Starforce. Yikes! thanks for reminding me on that and ruining my afternoon! (joking)

More: in Settlers 3 (pirated) your smiths produced pigs instead of swords :)

More: in Euro Truck Simulator 2 (pirated) your mighty truck suddenly turned up in girlish pink colour! Machism ZOMGWTF-ed! :)

More: in Euro Truck Simulator 2 (pirated) your trailer would suddenly dissapear, ruining your current 'haul' etc.

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I miss the days of Demos, that was where I made most of my decisions on what games to get as Commercial Review sites and game mags like PC Gamer so easily skewer towards butt-kissing of big game companies. I remember back when everyone was all over Daikatana, calling it the second coming. Saw the same of Master of Orion 3.

I bought Xenonauts due to two factors. 25% of it was the recommendation of a friend. 75% of it however was due to Chris, the maker of the game, personally responding to a thread of mine and offering a refund if the game didn't work on my antiquated OS. I saw that as great customer service, and I felt it should be rewarded with my pledge of financial support. So I bought Xenonauts, and proud of it.

Regarding Piracy..I'm a little mixed on that. I am guilty of pirating games from some companies that, due to experience with them, I simply don't trust (Like any game by Paradox, who has a habit of releasing games at 40-50 bucks, then patches at 20 bucks a pop) or to test if a game will simply work (I pirated Game Dev Tycoon, saw it worked, then immediately bought a legit version) or to get my hands on games that are hard to get (Outpost 2, Birth of the Federation, Metal Fatigue - Basiclly any game that qualifies as Abandonware at this point, but the company refuses to release as such and refuses to sell on Gog.com).

I feel that piracy, least from my stance, is a symptom of a cynical mistrust of some big name developers, and is a product of that period of game design just after the rise of small independents that gave us great games (Sir-tech, Blizzard before Activision, Triumph Studios, Interplay) and during the time big companies like EA gobbled up the small companies and game design was dictated by people who had no clue about games and just wanted to see profit margins. This lead to lots of shovelware and a general mistrust of games that came out. As shown by DRM fiacos like the latest Simcity.

With the rise of Indies, we are hopefully getting back to that golden age of game developing and hopefully, indie developers can restore general faith in game production and cause a decrease in piracy.

Also more people releasing demos would be good as well. I remember playing the demo of Jagged Alliance 2 to death.

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Instead of DRM, there should be made those tricks that were made for example Witcher 2, Seriours Sam 3 or Game Dev Tycoon. Where in Witcher 2, there were replaced textures for Tris or immortal chickens (or children can't remember). In SS3 there was immortal scorpion enemy and in Game Dev Tycoon, you bankrupt suddenly.

I know that this game check will be removed by pirates eventually, but it will make harder for them to play. Imagine for example in Xenonauts. You're about to finish your first or second month and then you get pop-up: "Sir The Aliens decided to bomb the planet. Game Over".

Saw this post, just had to reply: YES! Those were genius tricks, and an anti-piracy version of Xenonauts should have..about 2-3 months in, all the other nations you don't have bases in, start attacking you cause they think *YOU* are working with the aliens. You get enemy fighter jets hunting down your squadrons, and 24 man assault teams hitting your base every single day.

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Saw this post, just had to reply: YES! Those were genius tricks, and an anti-piracy version of Xenonauts should have..about 2-3 months in, all the other nations you don't have bases in, start attacking you cause they think *YOU* are working with the aliens. You get enemy fighter jets hunting down your squadrons, and 24 man assault teams hitting your base every single day.

That sort of thing is a terrible idea. If someone is playing a pirate game and doesn't realise why the game is doing it to them, they'll just think we made a really badly balanced game and tell everyone how bad the game is. There's been a number of quite high profile cases of it backfiring on developers.

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That sort of thing is a terrible idea. If someone is playing a pirate game and doesn't realise why the game is doing it to them, they'll just think we made a really badly balanced game and tell everyone how bad the game is. There's been a number of quite high profile cases of it backfiring on developers.

When the 24-strong Andron punitive squad hits, you can always make them say: Chris England sent us to squash your pitiful base because you are playing a pirated game :)

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That sort of thing is a terrible idea. If someone is playing a pirate game and doesn't realise why the game is doing it to them, they'll just think we made a really badly balanced game and tell everyone how bad the game is. There's been a number of quite high profile cases of it backfiring on developers.

No Chris. In case of Witcher, there were multiple posts on the forums, that there is a bug. And everybody else laughed at them: "HAHAHA, take that you pirate scum". It's all about making it look like a bug.

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And there were hundreds of people saying "this game is buggy crap, don't bother buying it" to other people who had no idea that those bugs were only there because it was a pirate copy of the game. It's an expensive price to pay to be able to laugh at some pirates.

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No Chris. In case of Witcher, there were multiple posts on the forums, that there is a bug. And everybody else laughed at them: "HAHAHA, take that you pirate scum". It's all about making it look like a bug.

Sure and 1-2 maybe 3 weeks later pirates were like "MUHAHAHAHA who is the boss now ".The only thing they achieved is buying a little time for sales to kick in and that's about it before scene groups fix that.

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No Chris. In case of Witcher, there were multiple posts on the forums, that there is a bug. And everybody else laughed at them: "HAHAHA, take that you pirate scum". It's all about making it look like a bug.

It may be satisfying to teach those pirates a lesson, but I guess from the game studio's view it's rather silly. Because if the aim is to have more loyal customers instead of pirates punishing potential customers (=pirates) could rather have the opposite effect, at least for the particular game or game studio.

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It's rather ficky or grey when it comes to judging pirates. The are a few people that are unable to purchase Xenonauts through conventional means (Different Country, not being able to purchase digitally). But of course, most people have excuses to justify their actions (I'm too poor, this game sucks etc.) But we can't look upon them as criminals, we don't have a ponce seeking missile to spoil the fun of a particular sinister pirate.

If someone has the mindset and generally played a game to decide whether to buy it(wishful thinking I know, but give them the benefit of the doubt), he might be turned off to the idea of pirating, but also for the fact that he might look the game as buggy or problematic, and even the effect might want him to get a 'clean' pirated version from some well known pirate distributor and have an extra excuse to use it to reinforce his idea that the game is consumer unfriendly in the first place and refuse to purchase the game.

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One thing i would like to point out: Somebody takes the time to crack those games and make the pirate copies. Most of the time it isnt a trivial thing.

Now think about 2 things:

1-Why a highly trained specialist would waste his time on doing something liek this for free? In other words, where do the money comes from ?(I do beleive in some passionate fanatics, but i dont believe on the scale where every game is pirated)

2- What bad stuff can happen when you install executables of unkown orginis on your computer?Not many things are free, and i dont beleive you can install a pirate game without paying by installing whatever somebody put inside those executables.

When i was a poor student i also used to pirate games so , altough i admit its wrong , i wont take a morale highground. But really if you got a choice, installing pirate games to try before buying seems like a damn risky move to me. Most of the times you can get demos or watch playtroughs on youtube. Without compromising your computer.

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Sounds like you were a poor student several years too recently.

First, no, cracking DRM doesn't take a lot of time. Go see how long it takes for a major game to be cracked. A day maybe, most of the time, or two. Cracking the protection is no longer quite trivial as 10-15 years ago, where all you needed was a debugger and a bit of trial-and-error, but a competent programmer with reverse engineering knowledge can do it in a day. Witness how always-on DRM and other crap that Ubisoft puts out has been getting cracked within a day in the last years.

Second, there are reputable cracker groups that were already big in the 80s. Those guys are serious about their reputation. No less serious that major publishers, perhaps more. Which is the reason why their genuine releases will not have viruses or such. I may not have pirated any games in a long time, but I am absolutely serious when I say that even now I would trust - quality wise - a RLD release above releases by most major game publishers.

Personally, these days I make things easy for myself by just not buying from companies that go overboard with DRM. I do not buy games with Ubisoft's ridiculous DRM schemes. I do not buy single-player games that require a constant online connection. I do not allow any Sony software near my computer.

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Sounds like you were a poor student several years too recently.

First, no, cracking DRM doesn't take a lot of time. Go see how long it takes for a major game to be cracked. A day maybe, most of the time, or two. Cracking the protection is no longer quite trivial as 10-15 years ago, where all you needed was a debugger and a bit of trial-and-error, but a competent programmer with reverse engineering knowledge can do it in a day. Witness how always-on DRM and other crap that Ubisoft puts out has been getting cracked within a day in the last years.

Second, there are reputable cracker groups that were already big in the 80s. Those guys are serious about their reputation. No less serious that major publishers, perhaps more. Which is the reason why their genuine releases will not have viruses or such. I may not have pirated any games in a long time, but I am absolutely serious when I say that even now I would trust - quality wise - a RLD release above releases by most major game publishers.

Personally, these days I make things easy for myself by just not buying from companies that go overboard with DRM. I do not buy games with Ubisoft's ridiculous DRM schemes. I do not buy single-player games that require a constant online connection. I do not allow any Sony software near my computer.

I dont know if you are replying to my post but in case you do:

Sounds like you were a poor student several years too recently.

Dont even know what this sentence means.

1-I never said it takes alot of time, i said it it isnt trivial and takes highly trained specialists.

2- You still havent answered to my biggest point meaning who pays them/what do they get out of it or are they doing it just pro publico bono?

Edited by FireStorm1010
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Like I said, it just sounds like you missed the earlier era of warez :)

Why does somebody have to pay these people? Again, this is not rocket science. Cracking games isn't usually trivial, but neither is it very complicated for most games. And people do things because they feel up to it. Why do people edit Wikipedia for free? Why do people make mods for Xenonauts? Why do people spend time making youtube videos? Why do people translate open source software?

The Internet has shown, time and time again, that people will do lots of things for free if they enjoy that. In the case of pirate groups, those guys clearly enjoy the thrill of overcoming copy protection quickly, and of becoming quite famous in certain circles (in the pre-torrent era, it was hard not to know who RLD or RZR were). Overwhelmingly, that's it, no more complex motives, they just get a thrill and an ego boost out of it.

Competent programmers with a marked absence of ethics do other things, these days there is a LOT of money in the malware business, and in the exploit business. Now that's an industry where the products are complicated and where there is very real money to be found. If you find a 0day in a major Web browser, you could easily sell it for a typical programmer's yearly salary.

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Like I said, it just sounds like you missed the earlier era of warez :)

Why does somebody have to pay these people? Again, this is not rocket science. Cracking games isn't usually trivial, but neither is it very complicated for most games. And people do things because they feel up to it. Why do people edit Wikipedia for free? Why do people make mods for Xenonauts? Why do people spend time making youtube videos? Why do people translate open source software?

The Internet has shown, time and time again, that people will do lots of things for free if they enjoy that. In the case of pirate groups, those guys clearly enjoy the thrill of overcoming copy protection quickly, and of becoming quite famous in certain circles (in the pre-torrent era, it was hard not to know who RLD or RZR were). Overwhelmingly, that's it, no more complex motives, they just get a thrill and an ego boost out of it.

Competent programmers with a marked absence of ethics do other things, these days there is a LOT of money in the malware business, and in the exploit business. Now that's an industry where the products are complicated and where there is very real money to be found. If you find a 0day in a major Web browser, you could easily sell it for a typical programmer's yearly salary.

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There's recent evidence that shows that piracy can increase sales. Rather than lament it maybe developers should embrace it?

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/13/does-online-piracy-help-boost-sales.aspx

https://torrentfreak.com/what-piracy-removing-drm-boosts-music-sales-by-10-percent-131130/

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sales-study-finds-120517/

and so on.

===

Personally I don't do it for indie games. But they must be available DRM free, and there must be a Demo. Xenonauts fails the latter but I've been following it for the last couple years so I was fairly sure it'd be ok.

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I'm going to be honest here and admit that originally, yes, I did pirate the game (i even created this account and came looking for such a thread to say so). does this mean i'm not going to buy the game? of course not, infact the next thing i'm going to do is purchase it on steam.

I admit now that i've not read through all of the thread however the theme seems to be that everyone is of the opinion that piracy harms sales. well I am sorry to burst your bubble but research shows this not to be the case, infact it goes so far to suggest that it increases sales of both the pirated game/novel/movies and other products made by the same person.

I assume most people have a favorite author right? and most of you will have been lent one of there books by a friend, or borrowed it from the library first. and now you buy all there books, pre-order hard copies for day 1 release.

piracy is exposure

exposure creates fans

fans become 'true fans'

and 'true fans' spend money.

the modern marketplace is saturated, for your product to thrive it must get exposure. putting up a torrent of a game is no different than saying to a friend 'I loved this game, why not give it a try' and lending them the disc, the only difference is you're lending it to a lot of friends at once, all over the world, and many of these 'friends' would have never discovered the game otherwise.

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I'm going to be honest here and admit that originally, yes, I did pirate the game (i even created this account and came looking for such a thread to say so). does this mean i'm not going to buy the game? of course not, infact the next thing i'm going to do is purchase it on steam.

I admit now that i've not read through all of the thread however the theme seems to be that everyone is of the opinion that piracy harms sales. well I am sorry to burst your bubble but research shows this not to be the case, infact it goes so far to suggest that it increases sales of both the pirated game/novel/movies and other products made by the same person.

I assume most people have a favorite author right? and most of you will have been lent one of there books by a friend, or borrowed it from the library first. and now you buy all there books, pre-order hard copies for day 1 release.

piracy is exposure

exposure creates fans

fans become 'true fans'

and 'true fans' spend money.

the modern marketplace is saturated, for your product to thrive it must get exposure. putting up a torrent of a game is no different than saying to a friend 'I loved this game, why not give it a try' and lending them the disc, the only difference is you're lending it to a lot of friends at once, all over the world, and many of these 'friends' would have never discovered the game otherwise.

Well there is always the argument that some people would make that is: People who pirate games are heartless scumbags, so the solution is to punish the good loyal customers by giving them more restrictive material... Yeah!(which is frankly, stupid and dumb)

But another perspective could be this: Hey, guess what? There is evidence that piracy increase sales! So piracy is good!

A fan of the game would buy it, such as you, but someone who isn't would think: wow, another justification to deflect my moral deductions that has been going on the debate about piracy. I should still pirate then!

You see, the only true sales that you would get out of this is paying customers who know about this game. There will still be people pirating games and still never pay for the game, and that's probably what game developers are fretting about, that extra "lost sales" that they would have gotten in the first place if not for pirating. But you're right, piracy does create exposure, and that exposure makes up for that "lost sales." And that would eventually balance it out from the piracy itself.

Maybe because that piracy can be judged as something people can just come and go and take whatever they want, the hard work put out from publishers only to just swipe a copy away from them, then putting up picket signs saying "I'm too poor", "dis game ish buggi", "piracy does help sales" and best of all "THAT COMPANY IS FORKING EVIL" kind of excuse that somehow irks people out of it, it does make pirates (Not all of 'em) look like pricks, even when most mainstream game developers like to rip people off like they are Eurocorp from Syndicate.

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Piracy does increase sales in some ways, but it also harms sales in some ways. I used to pirate games when I was still student and I know that there were games I'd have bought if there were no way of me getting them free. So yes, sometimes piracy will increase sales, but sometimes it will decrease sales. It's impossible to test exactly how much either way, so nobody actually knows what the net financial effect of piracy is.

But the majority of pirates are people who will pirate a game and who will never buy it....and also never would have bought it. We are not gaining / losing money on them in any way, but they are freeloading on the dev team's work and the community's money. How you feel about them depends on how you feel about people borrowing things (because it's not exactly taking) without asking.

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How you feel about them depends on how you feel about people borrowing things (because it's not exactly taking) without asking.

That is the biggie if you ask me.

If this person would never buy the game anyway (no loss sale) how do you as a dev feel about someone enjoying the product you worked hard to produce?

If your only goal was to make money, I imagine you would be thoroughly annoyed;

If your only goal was for people to enjoy your product, I would imagine you would be pleased someone seemed to be enjoying your game.

It is obviously going to be somewhere in the middle depending on one's world view.

@ Chris

I bought two copies. One for me and one for someone who would never have gotten a copy (he never heard of it and is a Mac user) who now loves your game. Hope that extra sale softens one of the free loaders.

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