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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

The irony is great. But I fear it is possible that wasn't such a good idea. Given the graphs, there were 4k people interested in the game. Over 90% of them now have the impression that the game is unplayable long-term because of the message-box. Maybe many of them get the hint, but those who don't might generate bad pr and prevent others from buying it.

But well, maybe that article combined with answers to the complaining players will spread the word wide enough. At least that now makes the game known.

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This article is going to be covered by all major gaming press by the end of the day, it will have hundreds of thousands of page views and probably result in thousands of sales just from "that's so funny I'm going to buy it just to support you!" so while in isolation you might be right that it would reduce sales the marketing value of this post is going to be many orders of magnitude more than the negative experience reports.

Sad but true. This could have been an excellent case to see the impact that those who pirate games have in creating buzz and influence those that do pay rather than pirate.

The trouble is to get social research people to observe this without media influencing the result.

Guilty as charged. Going to install it and give it a whirl after I finish my exam tonight. It'll be a good break from Dota I guess!

Yes, I just bought the game out of a sense of good 'karma'...

My thoughts exactly. The pie chart towards the end should scare off anyone willing to try this: if 93.6% of users who played the game on the first day after release got a shitty experience, it means that at least 93.6% of feedback is going to be negative (or more, because people are more likely to provide feedback when they are unhappy than when they are satisfied).

Still think it's a great idea, and I love the irony (especially since it's a game dev simulator), but if I were them I would have put a timed delay on the pirate punishment.

> if 93.6% of users who played the game on the first day after release got a shitty experience,

It isn't a shitty experience though. They were playing the game, getting immersed into it, trying to win, and they got stuck. Stuck enough, and interested enough in succeeding, that they asked on forums how to deal with the in-game piracy issue.

That isn't a sign of someone having a shitty experience. What is interesting now is what players of the pirated version of the game will do with the knowledge that their success is being hampered because they pirated the game originally instead of buying it.

I hope a nice chunk will opt to buy the game, it's obviously immersed them enough to have provided entertainment value, and hopefully there's sufficiently extra gameplay and opportunities in the non-pirated version to justify the "add-on" purchase.

Or, they'll crack the game to remove the pirated limitation. Or they'll walk away from the game. Or they'll find a genuinely pirated version of the real game.

I hope they see the funny side, and appreciate it, and give kudos to the game development company. It's not a £40 boxed game.

> They were playing the game, getting immersed into it, trying to win, and they got stuck.

Stuck without any reason. Looks like shitty experience to me.

By that definition, any game you play that you can't master on day one is a shitty experience. That's an exceedingly hard customer expectation to meet: a customer who doesn't like difficult challenges or learning curves.

There is a difference between offering a challenge and letting players get completely stuck. There is an optimum (the mythical "flow").

The difference is the $8 purchase price. That's the optimum.

And the players are not completely stuck, they are at the local optimal of their current gaming model - a plateau. That doesn't stop them from taking a different path towards a different optimisation strategy and find one where the localised high point is better than this one.

Did you read the original post? The players that get stuck are not playing the same game as the players who paid $8. They are playing a version that is deliberately frustrating and almost impossible to play due to rampant piracy in the game. The normal version does not have this frustration built in and is probably a lot more optimised towards an optimal challenge / reward balance.

And that's correct. When my brother played Hexen years ago - a DooM engine game with extreme switch hunting - he got stuck halfway through. He got a shitty experience. Maybe he wasn't good enough according to your judgement, but in the end he had a shitty experience nonetheless. It was not necessarily Raven's (developer) fault, but it happened. An ideal game would be hard enough for everyone, yet everyone would be able to beat it.

The difference here is the developer makes the game a shitty experience by design. That's the definition of shooting himself in the foot.

> An ideal game would be hard enough for everyone, yet everyone would be able to beat it.

That seems to hold very little replayability value. A better prospect is to make the game just a little more difficult that the current player's skill level, and adapt to that, so the game gets progressively more difficult as the player's skill improves, and the rewards/achievements are in line with that path. (It's quite a oft-given piece of advice for players wanting to get better at chess, that they play people a little stronger than themselves, and they gradually adapt and start winning more than losing)

I guess that's what's changed in gaming since the eighties. Back then the challenge and difficulty of games was a feature. Only a small crop of people completed them, the rest of us enjoyed the challenge of trying to get there. Where the journey to improvement is of more value than reaching the credits at the end.

Exactly. Why would I buy this game if all I read is reports of people getting stuck after 1 day?

Man, that Mega Man 2 sure sucks, huh?

Yeah the idea is pretty funny, is great to see people complaining about piracy heh.

But I do wonder if they were a little too subtle with the in game message. Agree some of those people just appeared to assume the game was broken, and probably struggled to make the link (while as obvious as it might appear).

I agree. Many of these first day players will be tweeting, blogging, facebooking, or whatever other cool social thing do to is. A majority of the people who played on the first day had a bad experience. That won't look good for the game.

You are actually arguing that the developers should have made an effort to have their game appeal to those who take a copy of it without permission?

I think he means "They should've made it more obvious that the bad gameplay experience was 'cause of piracy, not 'cause it was a terrible game."

Irrespective of whether you think pirates should be "punished", a situation where these people tell their friends "Nah, I played that game. It was shit, you just lost for no reason" isn't in the best interests of the publisher.

The poster you are responding to is clearly not a programmer.

Of course I am. See my submissions.

I think he means a developer who is actually reliant on the financial outcomes of his work, like the OP. If you work for somebody else in exchange for a salary, yeah, of course you don't care about throwing good money after bad — it's not your money. (Obviously I don't know whether this is the case, but the difference seems significant to me.)

That is exactly what I mean. If you draw a salary from an employer then you are in an entirely different situation than if you're relying on your output to directly pay your bills.

If you've never been in a situation where you have to sell that output to customers then you know less than a shit about what piracy can do to cripple a small business and should shut your fucking mouth about which market to serve. I'll take care of those that put the food on my table, thank very much, and you can give throat-fucking forced blowjobs to any random stranger if you want.

Ah. Nice to see when unethical die-hard piraacy enemies behave like assholes. Fortifies my prejudices. Fuck yourself, motherfucker.

Do we really have to go to these stretches of logic to defend pirates?

No wonder PC gaming is dead

Not what I wrote at all. Check it again: I am offering the thought that it might have been better to be more obvious in the message (or a subsequent one). Simply degrading the game-experience might lead to bad pr, nothing the developer wanted, because good mouth-to-mouth propaganda is the only (financial) upside of piracy for the developer. Not that it matters in that case anyway, as was pointed out (even by me a bit), given the coverage the game should get now.

Garry's Mod took a similar tactic and they're doing just fine:

http://torrentfreak.com/garrys-mod-creator-trolls-pirates-wi...

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