Pirates of the Computer.

Zaidwanted wrote:a friend of me plays WOW. he says you need to enter a new code every time to play the game, so hacking will be impossible.
maybe, when u finished making a game, put an special code in it that be example only works at the computer where it's installed for the very first time, but it does not run out.
it will be complicated to make such things, but if it DOES work, piracy is DOOMED!!!

There are already a lot of companies who use activation codes for their games. The problem is that cracking groups will remove the activation easily and after that, it's the same as if they would remove any other copyprotection. Or they could use a fake key from a keygenerator program.
It only works well for online games, because then people can controll who is allowed to the server.

Using a key could be the best solution for singleplayer games too. It's not to hard to make, it's not a pain to the player and it stops some piracy.
I read an article where Reflexive, a small games company, reduced piracy by making certain keygenerators useless. According to them their sales went up by 70%. It also says that out of 1000 pirated downloads they prevented, only 1 became a sale. So maybe both sides of the debate is true. Maybe piracy does cost money even though most people wouldn't buy it anyway.

I just found some intresting numbers. Let me first explain where theese are from.
bay12games is a small company run by Tarn Adams (Toady One) and Zach Adams (Threetoe), they live of donations from people who play their game, Dwarf Fortress,here is some more info about the development team.

What is intresting is the actual income they make,taking the numbers from this post in the official forum they made on average 2.500 dollars per month this year. I don't know if that is before or after tax, I am not sure if it's easy to make a living from it. And even then, they are a very well-known team making uniqe and challangeing games. Doesn't look like a great caréer choice to me.

This is what most people expect today: "release your stuff for free, because we will release your stuff for free anyway", but it's just not viable for most people.

Even free media is pirated heavily, take the Radiohead 'pay-whatever-you-want' album for instance, more people downloaded it from torrents than from the official website.
Please tell me they didn't loose money from advertisments and donations from that. The truth is, The Pirate Bay made money from it instead.

that is because of they put all of those uselsess ads on it!
how'd you think google became multimillionare??

maybe, if u still work on it, why u don't ask them to sponsor you? it could help

Zaidwanted wrote:that is because of they put all of those uselsess ads on it!

Is that why people chose to download it from torrent sites instead? Sorry, but it sounds more like an excuse than a reason to me. I would gladly go through some intrusive ads on a web page to get a free (legal) mp3.
I think most people are just so used to downloading their stuff from torrents sites that they never bothered, or perhaps didn't know about the legal site.

how'd you think google became multimillionare??

They have the most popular search engine on the internet, and lives off ads from it and other sites. I could try to make advertisment-driven games, if that's your point It does make sense, when fewer people pay for media, more money will go to physical products. So advertisments may be a way to get some of that money back.
But there are problems.
1. The ads will have to be intrusive to be effective. If they aren't noticable, they are worthless. We may even end up with advertisments on loadingscreens wich are made to be slower than necessary just so you will se the ad, for instance.

2. Any traditional advertisments can (and I guess they will) be removed. if I put random Macdonalds-logos in my game, someone can take it out, and we will back at square one. The best way will be to make the ads part of the game, let's say Mcdonald's will pay me to make a fastfood industry simulation game.

Don't you think that game would be very biased? I bet they would act just as bad as the greedy publishers are acting today.

Bottom line is, if creators can't keep their works from being distributed by others, people can avoid any payment.
Sadly, I see more and more people doing just that, for no other reason than that they can and they want to save money, or avoid ads. I could give countless examples of how the people around me play countless of games and watch couintless of movies, love them and would never stop and think "thesee guys deserve a sale!". That's why I am bugged by people who act like this debate is a noble battle between the people and the evil companies. I see no noble struggle when I look around in real life, only on the internet where anyone can say anything that fits. In reality, I can see how people act. And I only see freeriders who will use any excuse to get what they want for free. I wish reality looked better, if it did I would gladly join the revolution, Yarr!

If the people don't pay for their entertainment, someone else will have to, and they will do it with their own intrests in mind. Look at goverment TV, for instance (didn't Italy have problems with politicians censoring the media because they owned many TV-channels?) most people will agree that they are boring compered to the commercial channels.

Oh dear, I better finish this post now. I could I go on for ever.

if you really don't think ads will not work, you will have to try to make as many as possible sells before someone puts the game on the internet.
i don't think ads are completely hopeless. you just have to make them attractive enough!
how you will do it, i don't know, but i will like to help

Zaidwanted wrote:if you really don't think ads will not work, you will have to try to make as many as possible sells before someone puts the game on the internet.
i don't think ads are completely hopeless. you just have to make them attractive enough!
how you will do it, i don't know, but i will like to help

Thank you I'm still thinking about ads and how that would work.

if you make a game, try to make as many sponsors as possible, for in trade for some advertisement (duh )
they will give you cash, to develop your game. people can give much money for advertising!

OR if you want to make your game more known, let it develop by a known company, put some early ads about the game, or put some vids on youtube! (ice age 3 went WAY to far, it was everywhere!!! )

enough by now?

This whole thread feels like monolouge but I found something very interesting again and I feel I can't let it slip through this thread
This is about an iPhone game called iCombat wich you can easily get legally for 99 cents, still it has a 75% piracy rate. And even more important:

Mr. Sanchez-Grice blogged about his creation being pirated a year ago. He put something into his code that led someone playing a pirated copy to, after a few levels, get a message encouraging them to pay the 99 cents at his site. Here were his results:

"There was a high clickthrough rate to my site (only way user could avoid would have been to press home button) but once there ZERO users clicked through to purchase a copy. Maybe if I had mentioned a 1 year old baby this would have been higher."

So, 3 out of 4 decided to pirate this game. Out of them, no one decided to pay for it when they were asked for it, this check was made a few levels in the game, so the pirates where obviously intrested. The game was very cheap, not made by a huge evil company, still most people basicly stole his work.

That looks like sad news if you ask me and hope you all understand why I don't want this to become legal. I don't like people downloading the same stuff for free that I pay for as a consumer, freeriding on my money and I don't like the idea of, in the future, having all thesee people freeride while I may be struggeling to pay my bills.
Source: http://blog.copyrightalliance.org/2010/01/phone-app-developers-are-not-the-man/

But I am sure you have some counter-argument, and I would be glad to hear them.

welll, if u think u can't make any money with selling game, don't look at the game itself, but look at the other things that might help you to still make some nice cash! if u make a racing game, give them a code for a unique car when the buy it legal, which only can be used once. some companies already tried that! maybe it could help...

Your problem is the copies have NO 'value' at all. If people could copy cars for practically nothing they would. But they take REAL work and materials to make EACH copy. CDs/files don't! To all intents and purposes.

A solution would be to give away something physical of rarity value, that comes with an official non pirate version.


Make or think of the software/files as just the advertising, the enticement, to have something else the 'free gift' with the official copy. Such that shared copies actually act like costless spreading the advert. The more copied the more 'self broadcasting' the advert. In the way tv adverts work everyone sees them for free, only a few (relatively) actually buy the product advertised, they don't 'buy' the advert despite its cost to make.

JamesStGeorge wrote:Your problem is the copies have NO 'value' at all.

If someone bothers to spend time and space on his hardrive to get a copy I would say it has SOME value for him. If someone downloads a file, that time he spent didn't go to creating the original, I would like compare it with a movie theater. If you sneak in without a ticket, you are not taking anything, but you avoided the payment and are freeriding. You didn't pay the ticket and made the people around you think: "Why the hell am I paying for this if it's that easy to get in for free?"
[quote="JamesStGeorge"]If people could copy cars for practically nothing they would. But they take REAL work and materials to make EACH copy. CDs/files don't! To all intents and purposes.[/qoute]
If people could copy cars their would still be some costs to the master copy. Companies would still need money for research, car prices would drop drasticly (perhaps to the same level as a DVD today, I would guess) but they would still need to bring in money somehow, and putting a donation link on their company website may not be enough. They will have to make money somehow, and copyright, as imperfect as it may be, makes it possible.

When the printing press came, authors began to use this new technology to distribute books and divide the costs between each copy. Instead of 1 person paying a large amount of money for a writer to write a book . A writer could write a book and sell copies cheaply to a lot more people. If people were allowed to print their own copies of the book it obviously undermined his income,, and they could pretend they were the original writers, or edit the work to make it look crappy and trash the original authors repurtation. That's why copyright laws where first put in place.

I am sure pirates had much the same arguments back then, "Your copies isn't wort anything because they are so easy to make.", "You can't limit technology like this!" etc.

The things that has changed since then is that making copies have no cost at all, and the copies can be found easily. This doesn't mean the work put in to make the original copy is worthless. Many still need thesee rights if they are to continue doing what they do. That's why we need a new system before we start demolishing the old system.

JamesStGeorge wrote:
A solution would be to give away something physical of rarity value, that comes with an official non pirate version.


Make or think of the software/files as just the advertising, the enticement, to have something else the 'free gift' with the official copy. Such that shared copies actually act like costless spreading the advert. The more copied the more 'self broadcasting' the advert. In the way tv adverts work everyone sees them for free, only a few (relatively) actually buy the product advertised, they don't 'buy' the advert despite its cost to make.

I want to sell my games mainly online as cheap as possible, we live in the age of the internet and I am sure people want my games and not something physical, but I will keep the idea in mind.
I still don't think piracy is good advertisment, the article I linked to showed that not a single pirate who downloaded the "iCombat" game ended up buying it - even after being politley asked too. I am sure this is an extreme, I thought at least some would, but my point still stands: I see no evidence that Piracy is good advertisment.

i think you make it a little worse then it is, actually. okay, piracy may be hard to stop, but that doesn't mean that you won't make a cent of it! if you are afraid to make only a little amount of the money you shold get, make the developing cheaper. my reason to not join the piracy club, is the feeling that it's just a copy, if i download it. if i buy it legal, i really have the feeling that i have the original, not a fake moron copy, or something like that. you're not hopeless! keep searching for that answer! i even knew films that maked more then 200 mil bucks at the first day... but yes, DVDs are a little harder to get a copy of, because getting the material is a bit harder at the start.

that's enough for now. it's your turn to respond

Ok Zaid, I guess I am overreacting a little, and it's definatly good to hear you are buying legal copies There is still a lot of money to be made in the industries. But I am still worried about how younger people treat the internet like sandbox where they can take whatever they want without giving anything back. Things are not going to get much better as that generation grow up.

But my main problem right now is that I can't program on my main computer... it's the laptop I got from school and it won't let me make my program code compile into a program. I asked for help from my teachers, but they don't know what's wrong.
Combine that with my game addiction and seeing people pirating every day all around me and I loose a lot of intrest. But I havn't given up and I am still intrested about the industry.

A solution will come up sooner or later, I'm sure of it. But that could take decades.

Piratus wrote:it's the laptop I got from school and it won't let me make my program code compile into a program

What compiler you use?

Benke wrote:

Piratus wrote:it's the laptop I got from school and it won't let me make my program code compile into a program

What compiler you use?

I use Code:blocks as mu IDE and I have tryed switching between a lot of the compilers it supports. GNU GCC, Microsoft Visual C++ toolkit 2003, Microsoft Visual C++ toolkit 2005/2008, Borland, Digital Mars, etc.

Piratus wrote:I use Code:blocks as mu IDE and I have tryed switching between a lot of the compilers it supports. GNU GCC, Microsoft Visual C++ toolkit 2003, Microsoft Visual C++ toolkit 2005/2008, Borland, Digital Mars, etc.

Make sure that you have installed any C++ compiler and that paths are configured properly. For example, I downloaded Code::Blocks and MinGW. Then I installed MinGW 1st (during installation it downloaded up to date compiler programs) and then Code::Blocks.

When starting Code::Blocks for 1st time, it may or may not recognize installed C++ compiler. Anyway, you should go to Settings, Compiler and Debugger, Toolchain executables and verify global path where's MinGW installed and names to every executable like compiler, linker, debugger etc.



Then you can try to compile some actual code...

I downloaded the version where the compilers are already included and I have never had any trouble with that version on any other computer I am using. But I will give it a shot, thanks Benke!

Edit: I changed the path to the compiler to the correct one and it workes like a charm. Thanks mate!

Piratus wrote:I changed the path to the compiler to the correct one and it workes like a charm. Thanks mate!

Now make something useful

if i could do that, thet would be awesome
but i don't have any system rights...
however, i still do a very lot of things on school XD

Benke wrote:

Piratus wrote:I changed the path to the compiler to the correct one and it workes like a charm. Thanks mate!

Now make something useful

Now yo uare asking for too much. I just want to make games.
To be honest I'm a long way from actually making anything playable, I made a tic-tac-toe game without graphics and I have just begun learning how to make program grapics with SDL.

Piratus wrote:To be honest I'm a long way from actually making anything playable, I made a tic-tac-toe game without graphics and I have just begun learning how to make program grapics with SDL.

I am not big fan of tactic and strategy and RPG games but I think that Wesnoth is great open source SDL game so you can check it out.

Benke wrote:

Piratus wrote:To be honest I'm a long way from actually making anything playable, I made a tic-tac-toe game without graphics and I have just begun learning how to make program grapics with SDL.

I am not big fan of tactic and strategy and RPG games but I think that Wesnoth is great open source SDL game so you can check it out.

I have heard about it before, but never actually tried it. Looks like a good game.

i give you a appluause if you can make a game with better graphics then duke nukem EP1 (1991, shrapnel city)

Actually, I think I need to refresh my memory on pointers and sturctures before trying any fancy graphical stuff
I remember having a hard time trying to lear SDL last time I tried so I better keep working on the basics for a little longer.

here, a picture:



here it looks kinda nice, but it will look much worse if you play fullscreen! however, i still love old style graphics