Factorio - One of the highest rated steam games!

Factorio - One of the highest rated steam games!

Chris Katko

Member #1,881

January 2002

I've got an idea. Actual piracy statistics are pretty hard to come by.

So why not "burn" my first game as part as research?

Why not pirate my own game?

That is, upload my own game as a "cracked" copy to torrent sites. Modifying it slightly to show up in my tracking statistics as a clearly pirated copy. I, owning the tracker, could also watch IP addresses come and go.

Then I'll actually have real statistics on how much my game would be pirated if a "cracked / DRM-free" copy were to show up on torrent sites on Day 1/2/3/whatever. This would work regardless of whether people's IP address changes, are on a VPN, or anything.

And honest people are going to buy it anyway on Steam.

[edit]

This article has some interesting statistics:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/09/22/gaming-piracy-separating-fact-from-fiction

Apparently steam does surveys on installed software. Though I can't find it on the webpage now (maybe they stopped doing it / removed public viewing?).

Relevant picture from above article:

{"name":"Steam_2012_Torrents_2.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/2\/f2e5a319789e0a0ab867749a8daddb0a.jpg","w":923,"h":942,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/2\/f2e5a319789e0a0ab867749a8daddb0a"}
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Aside from piracy. this is a great way to see what kind of PC's your community is running! There's some people running Steam in 640x480!!!

[edit 2]

Lastly, I just thought of this and then saw it was already a linked article!

http://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-refunds-what-developers-think-two-months-later

Quote:

[Refunds are] not an offhand way to dismiss unhappy customers. Refunds turn what could be a terrible forum flame post or an embittered user review into – hopefully – a no-harm, no foul situation.

Think about all the irate customers when a game doesn't work. Just giving them back their money is far less harm than potentially turning away hundreds of new customers AND aggravating the community into a flame war.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

bamccaig

Member #7,536

July 2006

You'd be able to track the number of downloads sure, but you wouldn't be sure how many people that was. Of course, I've come to the realization that it's not useful to worry about piracy. Generally people that can afford to are going to support the product by licensing it. Piracy is mostly for people that either can't afford the licensing, or want to sample before they buy, or consciously refuse to support the publisher/artist on whatever grounds (whether it's a moral/ethical objection, or maybe protecting yourself from intrusive DRM software, or something else entirely). The fact is that if people aren't supporting the game it's not because they're pirating it instead. It's probably because either the game sucks or the target audience just isn't able to support it. In practice, you'll probably see quite a few sales if it's a good game, and you won't be able to notice the so called "lost" sales from piracy (relatively few people would buy it only if they can't pirate it, and those are the only possible "lost" sales).

--
I mean the best with what I say. It doesn't always sound that way.

Chris Katko

Member #1,881

January 2002

Yeah, I'm on that side. You can't REALLY do anything about it because FAR SMARTER people consider it a fun challenge to crack your pitiful small brained attempts at DRM. So you waste time AND you risk pissing off your customers.

Steam has become the best DRM around. It's always on. People will never see YOUR product and notice the DRM because it's in a list of tens of thousands of other games that are also using the same DRM provided by steam. So Steam takes the heat, except the PR bonus of selling games cheap has relegated that issue.

Steam might be a reason why I wouldn't crack my own game. But my point above was, since people will already be pirating my game, if I give a special version as the cracked version:

- I can watch the torrent. Most people don't download a game multiple times and most legal owners don't download torrents. I'm not using this to JUDGE or prosecute people so it's not a big deal to be off by 5-10%.

- The games will all call home (like the default version) but will have a subtle flag change built into a variable. Perhaps strings will use an alternate unicode "space" character in usernames instead of another unicode spaces. Something very subtle like that. AND, since there are NO legal check IF statements (since I already know it's pirated) there are no clues that the game is actually different from the one I'm shipping legally.

They "could" get around it by blocking the app with a firewall. But 99% of people aren't going to do that.

Also, if I'm somehow hosting online servers, I could make it so:

- Pirated/cheated editions will only play against pirates.

- Pirated copies will randomly "drop connection" (opps!) on the server-side using a pirate-copy-only unique message. (See flood of forum posts complaining about dropped connections!)

The Game Dev Tycoon Simulator had a hilarious piracy protection.

https://torrentfreak.com/game-pirates-whine-about-piracy-in-game-dev-simulator-130429/

After playing the game, at the mid-point, you start to lose tons of money to software piracy and it's impossible to survive. Hint hint, wink wink.

[edit]

On interesting note is this graph:

{"name":"pirate-stats.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/5\/25e96a357ee5b03ce78271b3c7d9e1e7.png","w":550,"h":407,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/5\/25e96a357ee5b03ce78271b3c7d9e1e7"}

After one day, the majority were pirates. Could that also be because... my God... torrents are a better MARKETING STRATEGY than whatever they used for the legal copy? Showing up on Pirate Bay may be a fast ticket to game exposure.

bamccaig

Member #7,536

July 2006

If the "cracked" versions still call home then they aren't really cracked and the crackers will quickly realize this, rat you out, and crack it.

Append: As you said the crackers are likely smarter than you are. Just last night I watching a QA session with Linus Torvalds and somewhere in the middle he mentioned that quite often the people that impress him are the black hats. They just happen to typically come up with smarter stuff because they have to. They're on top of their game because if they aren't they won't succeed. Whereas everybody else can pretty much get away with stupid ideas.

As for the "after the first day" thing I'd say that's a pretty biased graphic. So the vast majority of first day adopters of the game were allegedly pirates... Well maybe that was the "try before you buy" crowd. Additionally, maybe the licensing crowd had to wait for pay day before they could afford to buy, making it biased towards pirates. A much more informative and interesting graphic would be today's stats (or even a month or 6 after release), but odds are the game has actually been cracked by now to exclude the call home stuff.

--
I mean the best with what I say. It doesn't always sound that way.

Chris Katko

Member #1,881

January 2002

bamccaig said:

If the "cracked" versions still call home then they aren't really cracked and the crackers will quickly realize this, rat you out, and crack it.

So I'll be right where I was anyway except my torrent will be the first and most seeded?

Also, I'm talking about a game that already "calls home" for highscores and/or asking for a list of multiplayer matches. The only difference would be a subtle flag hidden inside another variable. Imagine say, the 6th bit of a velocity vector that is normally masked out and treated like a (sizeof-1) integer.

I see no ethical reason I'm not allowed to know how many people are pirating my game considering it has nothing to do with them actually being able to play it or not. Only the most morally backwards person would take offense the gracious idea of "anyone can pirate it for free, I just want to know how many people are doing it."

bamccaig

Member #7,536

July 2006

The problem is from reading too much into the data you collect. You have to be very careful to interpret data in the wild because often it doesn't mean what you think it does. If you come to any hard conclusions from it then you're probably doing it wrong. If you simply want to gather the data for fun or to see what you find then that's fine. If you start trying to advise law makers or other publishers about piracy from what you've collected then you'd likely be harmful to society and that would be unethical.

--
I mean the best with what I say. It doesn't always sound that way.