Game Dev Tycoon hacks pirates' version of game
Game developers and publishers have been fighting piracy for some time. It seems games are cracked and posted on torrent almost as soon as they are released. One developer fought back with a killer scorpion, but another has decided to give pirates a taste of their own medicine.
Piracy has long plagued game developers and publishers. Games are typically cracked and posted on torrent sites almost as soon as they are released (and sometimes even before!). Immortal scorpions are one trick, but the developer of Game Dev Tycoon has decided to give pirates a taste of their own medicine.
Greenheart Games released Game Dev Tycoon yesterday on PC for $7.99. At the same time, the developer uploaded a cracked copy of the game to The Pirate Bay, a popular torrent site, but with a minor variation: the cracked version allow pirates to crack players games and bankrupt their companies, Greenheart's Patrick Klug said in a blog post (via NeoGAF). The resulting posts on the torrent site were fascinating.
"Is there some way to avoid [piracy]? I mean can I research DRM or something?" lamented one poster. "Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me! ... Not fair," wrote another.
Klug told Shacknews that The Pirate Bay took the game down rather quickly, but not before 3,104 people had grabbed it. "We brainstormed how we should deal with piracy and the idea came up that, since we make a game dev simulator, we could hold a mirror in front of pirates and 'show' them what piracy does to the industry. We had no idea that so many would steal our game on the first day. When I saw that pie chart the first time I was shocked."
Klug didn't answer our question if the move was a publicity stunt, but the resulting commotion has offered so much attention for the game that the company's site has been up and down for most of the morning.
If you are interested in trying an uncracked version, which is similar to Kairosoft's 2010 iOS and Android title Game Dev Story, you can check out the game's Steam Greenlight page
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Shacknews
replyJohn Keefer posted a new article, Game Dev Tycoon hacks pirates' version of game.
Game developers and publishers have been fighting piracy for some time. It seems games are cracked and posted on torrent almost as soon as they are released. One developer fought back with a killer scorpion, but another has decided to give pirates a taste of their own medicine.-
This story motivated me to go to their greenlight page and click "yes." Delicious pirate tears.
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Excellent. I love clever ways to anger pirates.
Like the 'unkillable scorpion' in Serious Sam: BFE or the 'smudged up windows' of that one military helicopter simulator... which I forgot the name of. -
An amusing implementation, but I would think that doing this without informing the player as to why it is happening would cause significant trouble in terms of increased customer service requests and poor word of mouth.
On the other hand... I hadn't even heard of this thing before and now I have.
So I guess it evens out? :P -
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This is hilarious considering they stole the gameplay and idea wholesale from another company for this game.
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Imitation is the highest form of flattery, after all.
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How similar is this to Game Dev Story?
http://armorgames.com/play/14554/game-corp-
No idea but AG gave us Kingdom Rush, which is awesome.
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This isn't imitation, it's theft. More thefty than piracy.
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In the blog post the developer laments at the ratio of pirated versions to paid versions. Not to diminish the piracy rate thing, but it's one thing to complain about piracy of a version someone else put up, but what did you expect by putting it up yourself?
No disrespect to the developer, but I'm willing to bet that the game wouldn't have hit the torrent sites right away, simply because it wouldn't be popular enough to be pirated right off the bat. By performing this little stunt, he's done himself a huge amount of publicity and marketing for more or less free, so kudos to him on pulling that off, but don't act outraged that people are pirating the game you put on the torrent sites yourself.-
They were shocked, BEFORE they released their own pirated copy...
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I don't see the difference between the dev putting it up and somebody else. It was going to be there anyways. Pretty much every game is up there almost instantly. If anybody out there wants it, somebody it willing to put it up.
And I don't think he was outraged at all that people pirated it, I think he surprised by HOW MANY actually did and how quickly.-
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no no no no no no no
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Wow.
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you failed the verbal section of the SAT didn't you?
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I'm, ummm, yup. *Exits sub thread*
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I understood nothing, until there was you
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You guys are weird on the comments.
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You guys are weird on the comments.
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It's bullshit. Who had even heard of the game before this? This is an example of an obscure game getting some attention though being pirated, my guess is they'll sell way more now than before pirates got hold of their game.
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I agree, games getting publicity is total bullshit.
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Games that are, as best I can tell, a carbon copy of an even cheaper iOS game from years ago? Fuck this stupid game.
Piracy sucks, and this would be an interesting stunt from a real developer. But when your game is a cheap ripoff of a game that was already barely a game, it's hard for me to care.
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Don't copy that floppy!
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wow the most amazing thing is that 3000 people bothered downloading that shovelware
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This game is an outright rip of Game Dev story. It's worse than pirating the game, they took the entire game, slapped a new art style on it and then are using a BS piracy angle to give themselves press.
They don't deserve a single sale. They deserve to be sued like EA did to Zynga.-
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It wasn't a new take though. The game is the same.
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Game Dev Story isn't coming to pc, I don't think ever, which is a shame. I'll take what I can get.
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It's out on PC now, and has been for some time. http://www.giantbomb.com/game-dev-story/3030-32908/forums/want-to-play-a-pc-version-464174/
It's one thing to pirate a game. It's quite another to make an exact rip of the game and sell it yourself. You are now a direct competitor. At that point it's beyond simple infringement.
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Considering Zynga settled with EA rather than have it go to trial, I'd think there'd be a case for copyright infringment. But that's taking it too seriously, as the internet is doing and tends to do. We have a small game that nobody ever heard of suddenly being the center of a piracy controversy and surprise! Getting lots of publicity and sales out of it. The only thing they could have done more to rile up the internet is to talk about the objectivication of video game women by having a breast-size slider in the games and see how that affects sales vs. internet message board thread sizes.
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Pirate games are not pretty cool that cause economy very bad. -.-
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