WARNING Easter Bonus pirated?

Hi,

I saw that Easter Bonus has been "made available" to download for free on the web. I won't say where/how but Grey Alien contact me and I'll let you know. I assume it's the Easter Bonus I have seen here...

Dunno if this is the full version but you might want to check it out.

<edit> Just downloaded it - it is your game and has a keygen! I have deleted it from my hard disk.

Um, you realize that this is likely one in thousands, if not much larger, of pirated copies of Easter Bonus?

What good is it to fight it? The good people will buy it, the bad people will pirate it, and those bad people will always find a way to pirate it.

Better to just live in blissful ignorance.

Maybe. In fact in a strange way it's almost an honour to be pirated - it means your software is that good however I think Grey would like to know all the same...

This is the risk you run when you put your game on a portal that uses a flakey security system. It's a shame but the fact is that it happens to every game and at least people like it enough to crack it. The portal in question is aware of the issue but it's not going to fix anything soon.

Yeah Xmas Bonus got pirated too. I asked the site to remove it AND THEY DID! But it's on a couple of others too. It had more downloads than I made sales :-(. Thanks for the heads up. I'll email you.

Grey,

I'd send them an invoice for the conversion rate based on the downloads and inform their ISP. B*****ds.

IPete2.

It stinks, but it is inevitable if your game gets on a portal. At least people like it enough to pirate it.

If only that were the reason for the majority of piracy.

People who download warez will typically download hundreds of games and whether or not they like them is rarely a consideration. Many FTP sites allow pirates to download stuff based on how much they upload first, which is why everything gets pirated so quickly and why you'll see your game everywhere.

Having your games pirated is certainly not an indication of popularity. Most people who download pirate copies of your game probably never even intended to ever play it.

It reminds me Easter is coming....
however I don't know the exact date..

...er tomorrow.

Oh, thanks Pete :D

lol.

Hey GfK. Well I like to fool myself. In the old C64, Amiga days, people pirated games because they wanted them (mostly)

Well, no, not really. :) Most BBS's back then were based on an upload/download ratio as well. Many groups had "runners" whose sole job was to "run" games from BBS to BBS to build up credit. They didn't care what it was as long as it earned them download credits.

well I never knew that, I guess I was thinking of the average home user.

Charging $19.99 for a game that had so little time and effort put into it, and is priced $10 over comparable (and more advanced and polished) games in the store certainly does not help your chances of not being pirated!

100% correct!

Ouch!

Kuron, quit badgering Grey about the price of his game. You do realize that he is going through a publisher and portals who take a large piece of the profits, don't you? You'll get about half the full price in return if you're lucky. You wouldn't expect him to charge $10 and receive only $5 per sale, would you?

Eikon, I am not badgering, I am making a legitimate point. People act like Portals are a good thing. Some are some aren't.

Many are run by people with no experience in the industry, using shoddy protection methods and getting minimal exposure for your game. Many are providing inferior products with jacked up prices.

Based on his own statements of sales on his previous game (222 sold), it is not even worth bothering with selling a game if that is all the revenue you will get. Wouldn't it make more sense to have your game published via a legitimate company that deals with indie programmers and have it on store shelves in every major department store in the USA selling for $9.99 and selling thousands of copies? You may only get 40%-50% of the sales, but you would make a lot more money and get a lot more exposure to your target audience. Too many indie developers have no knowledge of business and marketing.

Then you have the other extreme. There is a guy over at CW bragging because his game is being published by a "publisher". Unfortunately, the only place here in the USA where that publisher has games on store shelves is the Dollar Store.

If my game was on store shelves in ever major department store (WalMart/Kmart/Target) in the USA and was being directly exposed to millions of customers in each of the several thousand locations, I would jump at the chance to get $4 or $5 for each $9.99 game sold. You would make a ton of money. Most of the authors I know who routinely target this audience with their games are making low six-figures off of their games.

That's a pretty good royalty rate. A typical console rate would be about $3-4 per copy of a $40-50 game.

Eikon: half would be nice. Typically portals offer around 35% then the publisher takes a cut etc.

222 copies may not seem "worth" it, but to be honest just ONE sale was worth it to achieve a dream: making a commercial game and selling it! I'm not sure if it would be worth putting on shelves all over the US for $9.99, does anyone have any sales figures to back this up? I'm sure that 50% of boxed titles is NOT the going rate (retailers probably want at least 50%, publisher wants >50%, leaves developer with around 10-20%). I figure that most games probably make nothing.

re: "little time and effort put into it" well, it was 170 hours to convert Xmas Bonus, plus the artist hours, must be >100, and musician hours (quite a lot), and the original time making the engine which would be 300 hours plus. So maybe 600+ hours in total? (4 solid months) For that much effort, I really did want to sell it otherwise I could have stopped at 200 hours and just had a little demo game.

As others have pointed out, I'm not charging $19.99, the major portals are. It's $14.95 on Cloverleaf, and was a 50% off around Christmas plus Big Fish Games let people buy games as part of mega packs for < $9.99. Besides I think it holds it head up well against quite a lot of other portal games and $19.99 is the going rate. If Real Arcade took it, gamepass members could have got it for $19.99, but they didn't b*stards.

"more advanced and polished", well I'd argue with advanced. I've played pretty much all the match-3s out there and plenty aren't as advanced as mine, but none are so much more "advanced" that they stand out from the crowd. Plus some of the more advanced ones are missing other vital features. (This is assuming that by "advanced" you mean with more features/gameplay elements etc.) As for polished, well that's in the eye of the beholder, I haven't used fancy 3D effects etc because the game is supposed to have a retro-style pixel art look. Maybe people just see this as "unpolished", shame. Sure there was more bit's n bobs that could have been done, but they wouldn't have made much different to the overall feel unless I totally overhalled the graphics and theme (which I'm doing with my next game).

[edit: Kuron, have you signed up to my newsletter? It will contain special offers at some point).

Grey, don't waste your breath.

@Kuron, actually the number of sales don't matter, it's the exposure that's the key. Grey has not mentioned it but I know that Xmas Bonus has actually got him other paid work! So, it don't matter if he made $20 on Xmas Bonus, it served it's purpose and so did I!

I was using the rate Eikon supplied.

Real rates would be less, but profits would be huge. I will never understand inexperienced developers and their sheer arrogance in thinking they can afford to ignore and exclude millions of people directly in their target audience.

Grey has the talent to produce a game that would sell well on store shelves.

You're an idiot.

Perhaps. You are the expert on idiots not me, so you would know best.

However, the statement is true and applies to all genres of software. Examples: You will always see more pirated versions of MS & Borland programming languages floating around than the just as good and more affordable languages. You will always see more pirated versions of 3DS MAX floating around than the just as good and more affordable 3D modeling programs.

All software titles get pirated, but the overpriced software titles get pirated the most. Back in the 80's when you would go to meetings with a box full of floppies and go from computer to computer grabbing what you wanted, what people grabbed the most were the overpriced titles. The same applies today with the piracy groups having moved online. It is the way it has always been and likely the way it will always be.

You got away with that one Rob :D I wonder who else saw it :)

I fully believe the argument that people who pirate games/music/apps would never have bought the product in the first place, so no sale is actually lost. I will have my product go out later this summer and have already anticipated it to be pirated, so I will just try to make lots of goodies (updates, extras and add-ons) available only to registered users to encourage purchasing the product rather than just pirating it. Other than that I will have no copy protection on the full version because NOTHING is 100% effective and if you can't have 100% protection, you might as well have none.

Indie: damn, missed that was tidying the garden :-). Also good point about me being approached for other work, that's true. Xmas and Easter Bonus are good portfolio items, if nothing else.

Tachyon: I agree that the Easter Bonus pirates would probably never have bought my game anyway.

Kuron: The thing is that (mainly) men buying shoot 'em ups etc in stores is NOT my target market. My target market is women over 35 that download puzzle games. If selling stores is the correct way to go, I'm surprised that more developers on this forum (and others) aren't going on about it all the time. I pretty sure the % you can expect is really small, like 10%, whereas on the web you could sell it yourself and get around 90% (after costs), which is why lots of people do it. Who knows though, I might look into it more for next Xmas and Easter. That's the other thing, I had very tight deadlines to do these games and get them out on time - to get them on CD and in stores would ahve taken way to long.

..well, if that can make you a little bit more comfortable Grey, I also find few days ago, crack for Giles...obviously this is really not possible to stop if someone really wanna crack/pirate it..huhh

Yeah, what would make it worse is that if you were to port Easter Bonus to a game console, like a GBA or PSP, or even the GameCube, PS2, XBox, whatever, you would face some emulation pirates out there, which wouldn't be all that super great, either. Sort of like, if I were finished with Operation: Plasmorg right now, I would port it into a GBA, let's say. Now, with the GBA code and .gba file, I would have to keep that in lock and key. However, if I wind up sending those GBA files to a big publisher to get the license and release of my game, then I wouldn't want that middleman trying to snatch the GBA code in the middle, or hack into a ROM and emulate it, let's say it that way. To me, emulation of console games is far worse than PC game piracy, regardless how old that game is. It's even worse to try doing anything with today's cart or CD/DVD-based games. I can see that Nintendo's finally cracking down after all these years.

yeah emulation of consoles and home computers (and arcade machines) is piracy on massive level ... but ... I like those old games a lot :-) Piracy of something that's brand new affects the author a bit more though than a 20 year old game that noone is selling anyway.

Why not use lenslok technology!? :P

Generally in stores, the people buying puzzle games are women 30+. The only difference is by being on store shelves you get massive exposure to millions of people in your target audience while they are in a buying mood. The major department stores here in the US are WalMart, Target & KMart. Each chain has thousands of stores around the country. Each store pretty much carries the same games by indie developers and there are only 3 or 4 publishers who are getting these games made by indie developers on the store shelves. Most of these games are puzzle games.

If you can find my old post about marketing games, I list some of the publishers you should contact that deal with indie developers. It will also give tips on how to research your market. With the many forum purges, it may not be around.

You are assuming you would get the same number of sales and the same exposure as you would in a store. On store shelves you would be exposed to millions of people in your target audience, while they are in a buying mood. You get less of a percentage in profits, but you get more sales and make more money.

its not the correct way to go, it is a way to go and a way that would generate far more profit than what you are getting now. I am not surprised, I have seen only a small handfull of games (yours included) released in the Blitz community that had ANY commercial potential.

Like I said, I may look into this more. The Internet has millions of potential customers visiting game sites too. When I said other forums, I really meant Indiegamer.com where lots of pro game developers hang out.

>However, if I wind up sending those GBA files to a big
>publisher to get the license and release of my game, then
>I wouldn't want that middleman trying to snatch the GBA
>code in the middle, or hack into a ROM and emulate it,
>let's say it that way.

In the old days, the pirates were people working for the publisher. I don't know the business, but I would imagine that this is still the case. In that case, there is really nothing you can do to stop it, except make extras that keep people happy.


Andy

What? :/ Please explain what you mean because, to me, that statement makes no sense.

I guess he means naughty people at the publisher's nicked copies of the game and spread them round.

Most pirate groups had an insider at the packaging plant/publisher who would lift a copy of the gold master and supply the "original" to the cracker in the group to work on and get released before anyone else.