Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times | Hacker News Reader

Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times

tinybuild.com

91 pointspavornyoh82 comments

Open articleView on HN

On a similar note, here's what the devs of Game Dev Tycoon did with pirates of their game.

http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624727

Interesting article that after reading it made me go out and buy the game (so a solid marketing effort too!)

These sorts of things are silly revenge fantasies at best, they are just as easily cracked and removed as any drm features.

That's not the point.

If its shown to be ineffective what is the point exactly?

I think the point is that unless evidence is shown otherwise, there's little reason to believe that a significant portion of the people that pirated it got his purposefully seeded cracked version, as it was prior to it being possibly cracked otherwise, and there's little incentive for some cracking team to crack it if it appears it has already been done.

That is, it's not that it's hard to work around his change, but that many people that could or would have done so may not have known it was needed. Of course, I'm sure that situation didn't persist.

For a dose of reality, I recommend browsing r/piracy. The mental gymnastics people go through to justify their actions is mind boggling.

Maybe, but for the silent majority it's pretty straightforward: 1) we view information as fundamentally different from currency, goods, and services; 2) we don't want to pay for information if we don't have to and we're not going to get caught.

The gymnastics are mostly about just trying to figure out whether we're bad people or not - because everyone else's favorite game is Shame the Pirate - but once you realize you're not a bad person and that you're okay with doing something illegal then it all just sort of fades into the background.

Well you probably are a bad person though. A good person by definition tries to do good by other people.

I prefer people that try to not do bad to other people. Those that do good can be risky.

I think quietly doing good is okay, it's the people who talk about it that are risky.

> but once you realize you're not a bad person and that you're okay with doing something illegal then it all just sort of fades into the background.

Doing illegal things makes you a bad person.

This isn't some fight against tyranny, it's theft (or illegal copying, more specifically).

Good != legal.

Bad != illegal.

A legal system that reflects everyone's moral system 100% of the time has not been invented yet (and is likely impossible).

Hey mate! Helping homeless is illegal in my city, as well as collecting wild berries, tenting in forest. Just because law is not realistic and doesn't protect anyone and was made only for profits from tickets doesn't make it a good law and me a bad person. I have a 100GB seedbox where I seed old books that are unavailable on paper in my country and scientific zip. How bad am I?

The only reason I added that last line is to highlight certain scenarios where laws aren't correct.

Illegally copying content is not one of those scenarios.

Yes, we all understand the linguistic gymnastics are a way of rationalizing an action you know is wrong.

On the contrary, I think the people who know whether an action is right or wrong don't spend a lot of time arguing either way, they just go ahead and do what they think is right. It's the people who don't know whether an action is right or wrong that get all worked up trying to handle their conflicted feelings about it.

This isn't about whats legal though. Its about you taking advantage of someone else's hard work. Its theft in the moral sense, and its that what makes you a bad person.

That said, its still a grey area moralistically.

I do not see a small indie developer and a large corporation in the same light as the corporation is taking advantage of the hard work of its employees to make a profit.

Just read through the Game Dev Tycoon article: http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...

I was on the edge of my seat waiting for him to say something like "We used the pirated version that we released to communicate with all the people who pirated the game and we were able to convert 30% of them into paying customers!"

But it didn't happen... It sounds like he just used it to really subtly hint that the people should have bought the game. Seems like a wasted opportunity. I feel like a popup that said something like this would have converted a bunch of people and turned the pirating problem into a marketing opportunity: "Haha, you are playing a pirated copy of this game, that's why you are losing all your money to game pirates. Its all good, but if you upgrade to the paid version this problem will go away, here is a link to buy the game. Happy gaming!"

If they knew they were using a doctored copy, they would go and pirate an undoctored one.

Anecdote:

This reminds me of the anti-griefer mechanism I put in to heyreddit/reddit roulette back in the day.

If you received a verified report (following a forced match with myself), you would only got matched with other griefers.

No-one realised why the penis-to-chat ratio was so low, but its because eventually all the penis flashers would only be exposing themselves to each other.

Of course, if I had told people that they would have actively tried to get around it :)

Yes, the downside was a manual verification step :(

Cool anecdote, sounds like an elegant way to deal with the griefing problem.

I think there is more to this pirating scenario though. A lot of people probably pirate games because because they aren't sure if they will like them. Once they are at the point where they are losing the game because of the pirated version, they already know they like it. Some of the people who get to this point will want to pay the $8 because they won't want to risk putting more effort into the game and losing progress again because of the pirating. Other people will be more comfortable paying because they no longer have to worry about paying for a game that they won't play.

Even if they convert only 10% of the pirates, they will have increased their sales more than 33%, making them over $800,000 more money.

Yeah, i definitely agree with the premise, but as soon as that alert pops up, people would rate the torrent/whatever and say its a bad copy, and then future pirates would download an alternate seed.

Maybe they could "leak" a few different torrents in future and do some testing! :)

Ah, interesting. I'm not super familiar with torrents and didn't know about that feature. I suppose he could release many versions with their own unique hashes. Would people be less likely to put the effort into creating a cracked version if they felt there were already a lot out there? I always wondered who does software cracking and how hard it is.

I think they are just using the medium effectivelly.

Instead of going and tell them "I know you pirated our game. Please don't do that." they made the game simulate the consequences of piracy to game development studios.

Instead of having the someone tell them they are wrong, the player comes to that conclusion themselves (hopefully).

I agree, I don't think it would be super effective to say "Please don't pirate", like an after school special or something.

What I think they should have done was used it as a marketing opportunity and given the pirates another opportunity to buy they game and get more value after they have already been playing it and know they like it. (Get more value by removing the severe pirating problem within the game so that they can progress farther)

Since in these breakdowns they invariably seem to be using stats collection from the games themselves, I would love to see how many of the pirated copies progress past the fist X% of the game, or continue playing beyond 24-48 hours, whatever the devs would consider around the mark for what they would consider releasing a demo for.

Not that I think all the people that pirate are just demoing, but I think without question many more people pirate than are actual sales, and those that stop early lone are the type of people that probably wouldn't have generated many sales anyway, possibly stopping after the demo if there was one or not have bought it at all.

When these discussions are housed in terms of making enough money to continue, and loss of revenue, ignoring that aspect is ignoring a large part of the picture (even if it's still morally valid).

A lot of people collect games like they are pokemon. My mate has a ton of games on steam that he's not even played.

Plus a lot of those games are being pirated by kids who don't have bank accounts and/or are not mature enough to realise that pirating hurts people. If a friend asks another friend 'do you want a copy of <game>' they just say yes and that's the end of the thought process. The 'does this affect anyone' doesn't enter their heads. (source: teacher)

> A lot of people collect games like they are pokemon. My mate has a ton of games on steam that he's not even played.

I have 558 games on Steam. Almost exclusively from Humble Bundle orders, I've installed and played maybe 30-40, and that's because I've made a concerted effort the last year or so. I have another 100+ on GOG.com, mostly titles from my childhood and teen years I've convinced myself I'll some day have time to pick up and finally complete. I can relate.

> Plus a lot of those games are being pirated by kids who don't have bank accounts and/or are not mature enough to realize that pirating hurts people.

Yes, that was me. The vast majority I never played beyond trying out to see if I liked them (thus my original question). The few that I didn't buy that I did pirate and liked? Well, see the GOG.com note above (but a lot of those are ones I bought twice, or in that case of M&M II or some of the Ultima Series, 3+ times...).

Edit: A portion that was supposed to be offset as a quote wasn't.

I don't know whether that's possible. They calculated the piracy rate by looking at sales versus overall activations. That means they can't tell whether a particular copy is pirated or not, so they can't break out app usage stats into pirate/non-pirate demographics.

Possibly they could approximate this by pushing a version update through the app stores, which most pirates presumably wouldn't receive, and then comparing stats for different version numbers.

It's ok if I pirate music as long as I only listen to it once... to "demo" it.

Are you making the assumption that I'm condoning pirating to demo software? I was purely positing that those people may not have been likely to result in a sale, which may put the numbers in a different light.

That said, if the game doesn't provide a demo, and through marketing is tricking people into purchasing that which they would not have willingly bought it if they knew what it was like, then the situation is reversed and the buyer is the victim. Advertising has it's place, and that place is informational. Any time someone buys something they can't, don't or won't use or need, that's a comparative net loss for the economy.

Getting some insight from the pirates would be interesting. If a pirate is detected, pop up a quick radio selection box:

Thank you for playing the game. I noticed you pirated it and would like to know why (you can still play the game):

* I can't afford the price

* My parents wont let me buy games

* I want to try the game free first

* I believe games should be free

* My computer is old and I don't know if it can play this game

etc..

We did this on our site when someone downvotes our content, and it gave us valuable feedback.

It's not surprising that Brazil, Russia, and China top the list for pirate users. This game is probably very expensive for users in those countries, if they are even able to easily pay for it.

shrug those are also the countries that tend to account for the most spam delivery attempts, SSH brute force attempts, etc.... on my server. So it may be something beyond just cost..

Yes. The idea of "intellectual property" as such is nonexistent (and widely considered absurd) in those countries' cultures, combined with a pretty high level of technical sophistication among the general populace.

Poor economy drives people to crime? Shocking!

> if they are even able to easily pay for it

I think this is something a lot of people don't realise but online payment systems in China and Russia are near completely different (and isolated) from ours.

China doesn't do Visa, doesn't do Mastercard, doesn't do AMEX, doesn't do PayPal. Try buying something from a Chinese website like Taobao or Baidu. They use things like Alipay which are linked to their local payment systems.

I don't think Chinese CAN buy independent games like this.

China does, however, widely use UnionPay, which is Discover-compatible.

Stripe supports Alipay: https://stripe.com/alipay

This game is not expensive here in Brazil. I think the problem is other, maybe it's not easy to pay (not everybody have international credit card), or some people don't want to pay.

> if they are even able to easily pay for it.

Or even get legal access to it. Copyright treaties get in the way of people in certain regions from legally acquiring some content. For example, I've been legally unable to purchase certain music (in some cases download free music) in South Africa - DRM or not. Pandora is a fantastic example of this brain-dead approach.

Furthermore, per-region release dates only further propagate piracy, as everyone outside of America has to sit back and watch everyone else enjoy <thing>. By encouraging the rest of the world to pirate during NA launch, you are decreasing the likelihood of those people buying your game when you eventually stop celebrating long enough to release it in their region.

Piracy seems to thrive with the current measures designed to prevent it.

How do they calculate the number of times it's been pirated?

> We take overall amount of activations minus legit sales per platform minus 10% (to offset for people who activated a legit copy on more than 1 device).

An assumption of 10% multiple device activations is begging the original question.

Pirating on Windows, Mac, and Android is pretty easy, but on iOS it requires jailbreaking, which is pretty limiting these days. I doubt his piracy numbers are anywhere near what he's claiming.

Is a reason given for the 10% figure? (I looked in the article but didn't see anything) I can easily see the figure being much higher (e.g., for PC: laptop+desktop, for iOS: iPhone+iPad)

Whose idea was it to have the 2 initial pie graphs switch colors? It makes it look like there's some sort of inverse relationship between pirating and purchasing on a given platform, when in fact it's roughly the same proportion of pirates and purchasers on mobile and PC.

http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/re...

http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/pi...

Their analysis doesn't match up with the pie graphs either until you look up pricing.

Punch Club costs $9.99 on Steam but only $4.99 on iOS, so the volume of sales in terms of units sold realizes about a 50/50 split between PC and mobile legitimate players, rather than the implied 70/30 indicated by revenue.

NOW their analysis makes sense (more PC pirates than mobile). If the colors of the graph actually matched I would have just assumed their text was wrong!

...unless, of course, the piracy chart is in the same relative terms of cost and instead portrays _lost_ revenue...

I would like to point out that Brazil currently is facing a extremely hard crisis, where people can't afford even food.

Don't expect people to pay for entertainment here right now.

EDIT: why the downvotes? What I said is entirely facts, to help explain the massive amount of piracy in Brazil.

You are exaggerating.

I am?

Where I live at least, and considering my personal situation, it is no exaggeration.

I doubt that most of the population in a 5km radius within me can afford to buy several games, or even only one game.

I know lots of people (including family members) that are having a diet almost entirely based on potatoes, because anything else is too expensive.

EDIT: some hard data, freely available on IBGE site, I got that data in february, so now it might be slightly different:

Average wage on last ten years rose 44%, inflation was 78%, and food prices inflation was 124%

Seriously, they're on the verge of overthrowing the president because of a combination of corruption and the terrible economic situation. Overthrows are waaaay more likely to happen when there's a food shortage; I don't doubt the poster on this one.

Ugh, do I see what I think I see, and there is a pie chart of piracy ratios in different countries (that is, a pie chart of numbers that do not add up to 1)?!

I thought this was going to be a joke: pie + ratio = pirate.

Pie charts are terrible

http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013...

It doesn't help that in the first two (side-by-side) pie charts they swap the colors.

Similar situation happened with Monument Valley, a game that hit #1 on app store and won a 2014 Apple Design award. The devs tweeted that only 5% of Android players paid for the app. On iOS, 40% paid [1]. Later they released some sales numbers that show only 2.4m sales but 10m+ installs, implying that the majority of their installs weren't paid for. [2]

[1] Hit mobile game Monument Valley and piracy: ‘Only 5%’ of Android players paid for it https://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all-ba...

[2] Monument Valley in Numbers http://blog.monumentvalleygame.com/blog/2015/1/15/monument-v...

I'm sorry, but the Monument Valley iOS piracy numbers from Dan Gray quoted in that article are positively nonsense.

> It’s impossible for us to track that data. The only thing we can do is, two bits of data: One, how many purchases we have and, two, how many installs we’ve got. And we just leave people to draw conclusions from that as they wish, because we can’t clarify any further than that.

Once you purchase an app on an iTunes account, you can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into. So the fact that Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases is 100% consistent with zero piracy, and with the fact that as people replace their devices they want to redownload the apps with the greatest replay value. This is not some weird trick that Apple overlooked, either. They clearly want the user to believe that the apps and the data are tied to the account rather than the phone, because new hardware sales are where they make the lion's share of their profit.

(I thought his numbers were bogus, which is what motivated me to read the article. In recent years, jailbreaking iOS devices, which is a prerequisite for pirating apps, has become increasingly bothersome and decreasingly useful. So the thought that there were this many jailbreakers didn't coincide with my model of the world.)

> You can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into ... So Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases

No, it doesn't work like that. Android and iOS installs are separate, if you buy it through one app store it doesn't transfer to the other. Combining the Android and iOS numbers together to reduce that ratio is dishonest. Just looking at Android, the installs to purchases ratio works out to 20 to 1 ... do you seriously believe that can be explained through multiple installs? C'mon.

Read through the OP article as well. He also a encountered significant amount of mobile piracy, specifically on Android. There is widespread mobile piracy going on, arguing about installs-to-purchases ratios does nothing to hide it.

> do you seriously believe that can be explained through multiple installs?

No, I don't. My point was specifically about iOS, because I know how much of a pain it is to keep a jailbroken phone, and I have a good sense of the general population and how many of them do so.

(I develop a rather popular iOS app, and we have telemetry in the app that determines whether the device is jailbroken. We have multiple tests for whether a device is jailbroken. Jailbreak developers could fool all of our tests if they chose to do so. However, since we don't actually do anything with that data, we don't give anyone a reason to spoof them. In our population of users, jailbreakers make up less than 1%.)

The one thing that really doesn't resonate with me is the undertone of bitterness.

First, I bought Punch Club on steam, and enjoyed it.

But I think the assumption that's easy to make is "Look at all the money I would have made if people didn't pirate." It's not that simple. Some people who pirate would never have bought it in the first place.

> undertone of bitterness.

I didn't read this at all.

Just the facts and thoughts on solutions.

I think it depends on what angle you're looking at it from. The article does kind of read as: "hey look, we could have made 5x more sales if we'd been smarter about piracy". Not everyone agrees with this, and I think this argument is unhealthy in general.

I'd wager that if you made piracy completely impossible, most of the current pirates - who tend to hail from regions where the international pricing is prohibitive - would simply opt out of buying it. This may even have a negative effect by limiting the viral advertising indie hits like Punch Club have ("hey, what game is that on your phone", etc).

This is not to defend the act of piracy as such, but I think if someone wants to have a productive "facts and solutions" discussion, they should frame it differently.

This is an idiotic wager. People are only pirating because they want to play the game. Of course some percentage them would of bought it if they couldn't easily get it for free. The marketing effect doesn't make up for thousands of lost sales. Piracy has completely wiped out music sales, the only reason it hasn't wiped out games yet is because of anti-piracy measures.

It sucks that we live in a world where people decide whether to translate a game into a language, making it accessible for a country, based on how many people from that country will steal it.

So from the charts it seems like mobile gamers are actually (slightly) more likely to pirate than PC gamers. Also I would be interested how the Windows:Mac:Linux split actually looks.

It seems that Android users are very likely to pirate while IOS users are not. I think the numbers were something like 12 pirated copies for every Android version sold and 2 to 1 for IOS.

> It seems that Android users are very likely to pirate while IOS users are not.

Yeah because no one actually jailbreaks their device anymore... it's just hard and risky, and on Android all you need is to install the apk file.

An amusing incongruity from the article: "Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate."

Yet the article is primarily about piracy problems with Portuguese, surely the most westernly language in Europe.

Assuming you weren't making a joke, the article clearly states that the piracy is coming from Brazil, not Portugal.

Still, it's ambiguous whether the article recommends that Portugese localisation should still be done despite the piracy from Brazil, or whether other western european languages should be done excluding Portugese.

There's no harm of translating something into Portugese: If you translate there will be some piracy from Brazil, but if you don't translate users from Brazil won't buy your game at all.

He is clearly referring to German and French.

> The most interesting conclusion though is Localization and its impact. Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate.

The tables in the "Top pirated countries on PC, Portuguese Localization Launch Day" section would make much more sense if they were about the % of pirates instead of raw numbers...

I wonder if Google Play allows pricing segmentation per area. I'm seeing a $6.55AUD game, which is higher than most, although if it frees me from any kind of IAP I'd consider it.

Prices can be manually entered per country or calculated from a base price in your account currency. In either case it does not change again until the developer updates it.

So localize in English, German, and French (maybe Spanish) and don't bother with an Android version, good to know.

If you are interested in profit, the number of pirated copies is entirely irrelevant. The only metric that matters in that case is the cost of supplying the game for that demographic and how much money is expected to be made. This is the same whether it's a language or marketplace.

For example, if it costs you $100,000 to supply and Android version, but you expect to make $1,000,000 event after all the (assumed) piracy, it still makes sense to release for Android.

No because having an easily pirated version out there might otherwise cut into sales. I mean it's why a shoe store wouldn't simply give away unsold merchandise because then they're dramatically reduced the demand for shoes.

You should read my statement again. If the choice is whether to sell in a market or not, and you care about making a profit, the bottom line is whether at the end of the day you made more money than it cost to serve that market. Full stop. This is not about allowing or disallowing piracy in a market you are already serving.

In your analogy, it's like a shoe store opening a shop in China even though they strongly suspect if the shoes become popular knock-offs will pop up fairly quickly. The question of whether it's worth opening the store in China is answered by whether in the end they can make a profit.

The only interesting question in this is how many would they sell if 1.5 mil people wouldn't pirate it.

Unfortunately no-one knows hence the silly debacle. I'd bet they'd be amazingly happy if it turned out that each 0.5 mil of pirates translates to 100 k in sales.

If they pirate your game and play it AND if they wouldn't have bought it anyway, you should be happy because they're not giving money to your competitors: they don't have the time for it because they're playing your game. It didn't cost you anything but you're gaining something. Obviously people plays several games at the same time, still this reasoning works and in many markets. If they are happy enough with your pirated games, music, videos, clothes, bags they won't buy your competitors products. If your sales are higher than theirs, pirates are helping you to starve your competitors.

I honestly don't think game developers are interested in starving other game developers.

Url changed from http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/game-dev-reveals-corre..., which points to this.

Thanks Dang :).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com