Copying.
122
October 25, 2002 05:09 AM
The short answer is no its not ''cost-effective'' people do it because they love it. If you are worried about money before you write the first line of code, you aren''t really keen enough to get it finished. so I''d give up now.
217
October 25, 2002 08:57 PM
I think it is simple:
One, you didn''t lost money from piracy. You lost the possibility of sales. The people who pirate game might not buy the game anyway. I have been guilty of piracy before I knew better. I can honestly say that I wouldn''t have bought the games that I did have a copy of simply because I don''t have the money to do so.
Some games I did end up buying. Others I ignored and stopped playing/installing.
Saying that you lost money is just marketing hype that the big corporations use. There is no way to determine exactly how much you "lost" in sales because of piracy, because you can''t just assume that every pirated copy is being used by someone who would have bought the game otherwise. Some people pirate because it is easy to do. They wouldn''t be able to afford the games if they bought them, so they won''t buy them if piracy were more difficult. The numbers that big companies keep throwing out are labeled incorrectly. They aren''t losses. They are potential losses. It didn''t cost them anything for someone to burn a copy of a game to their own CD-R. It only cost them the possibility of the sale of the legit game to that customer, a sale that is not guaranteed.
Two, just look up copy protection and shareware through Google.com and find out what you can from this site before it suffers any monetary setbacks. You might also want to look into Gamasutra.com and such.
One, you didn''t lost money from piracy. You lost the possibility of sales. The people who pirate game might not buy the game anyway. I have been guilty of piracy before I knew better. I can honestly say that I wouldn''t have bought the games that I did have a copy of simply because I don''t have the money to do so.
Some games I did end up buying. Others I ignored and stopped playing/installing.
Saying that you lost money is just marketing hype that the big corporations use. There is no way to determine exactly how much you "lost" in sales because of piracy, because you can''t just assume that every pirated copy is being used by someone who would have bought the game otherwise. Some people pirate because it is easy to do. They wouldn''t be able to afford the games if they bought them, so they won''t buy them if piracy were more difficult. The numbers that big companies keep throwing out are labeled incorrectly. They aren''t losses. They are potential losses. It didn''t cost them anything for someone to burn a copy of a game to their own CD-R. It only cost them the possibility of the sale of the legit game to that customer, a sale that is not guaranteed.
Two, just look up copy protection and shareware through Google.com and find out what you can from this site before it suffers any monetary setbacks. You might also want to look into Gamasutra.com and such.
-------------------------GBGames' Blog: An Indie Game Developer's Somewhat Interesting ThoughtsStaff Reviewer for Game Tunnel
October 26, 2002 11:46 PM
I tend to agree with cliffski. I used to get pirate games becuase I lived in a country which is not even on the marketing map for these companies. And I definitely would NOT have bought any of them. But to come over to your problem. If the game is that good, put it up on the internet. If it''s not then it''s debatable whether people would be willing to pay enough for it in the first place for it to be eventually worth your while. But still, I think the exposure of having a few games out there on the market would be great, if you later decide to try and enter an established game company
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