Disturbing Facts

Atrocities · #1 March 16th, 2002, 05:24 PM

I have copied this from the Stars Supernova Forum regarding their look for a publisher. This is about copy protection and such.

quote:
"It's not really copy protection, it's just cool - if you saw one, you'd want it. It's shiny gloss black on matt card. Basically, we don't believe we can defeat piracy - you just can't stop it. However, we want the customers to actually enjoy holding the product. We take a lot of care over production, and we hope that people - like yourself - appreciate the benefit. Consequently, rather than simply copying the game people will want to purchase it. In case your interested, let me tell you a couple of facts. We have sold around 2000 copies of Uplink, however there have been 12000 downloads of the patch. So, for every one copy we sell, 6 are being played.

I do find this a little disappointing, as the money we charge goes straight to us: the developer. There is no middleman (bar the internet charges) and �15 is dirt cheap for a game the standard of Uplink. I'm not slating piracy - half my CDs are copied, but equally I believe there is a difference between ripping of a massive corporation, who have hardly contributed at all to the actual art, and stealing from the artists themselves."

My god, 2000 sold and 10,000 pirated! That is just unreal.... or is it?? How many pirated Version of SEIV Gold are now in circulation? I'll venture a guess of something on the order of 3 to 1. 3 copies to 1 original disk. And the Gold Version JUST came out.

Suicide Junkie · #2 March 16th, 2002, 06:10 PM

Of course that is a worst case 10K.
I know that I've downloaded the Patches multiple times. Once when it comes out, and again when I tried reinstalling to fix a problem. Then again, when I had to go BACK a Version in order to play a savegame.
Now, I just keep all the patches I need in a 100MB (for Beta) superzip.

I'm not saying that its insignificant, but it is probably not quite as bad as it seems.

PvK · #3 March 16th, 2002, 08:00 PM

Ya or one for work and one for the office. If they're having trouble downloading the whole thing, they might do it more than once. Download failures, etc.

Phoenix-D · #4 March 16th, 2002, 09:30 PM

"I'm not slating piracy - half my CDs are copied, but equally I believe there is a difference between ripping of a massive corporation, who have hardly contributed at all to the actual art, and stealing from the artists themselves.""

Pot, here's kettle.

"YOU'RE BLACK!"

WTF *is* uplink, anyway?

Phoenix-D

ZeroAdunn · #5 March 16th, 2002, 10:46 PM

Ya that was a little odd. This guy seems to think he's robin hood or something. Steeling is steeling, either do it or don't, there's no in between.

Tim Brooks · #6 March 18th, 2002, 02:42 AM

quote:
How many pirated Version of SEIV Gold are now in circulation?

It's hard to track this. We believe that SEIV Original was pirated at 20 to 1. That is based on numbers we could track and then figuring we were only finding a small percentage.

It really hurts. Just think of what Malfador and Shrapnel would be able to bring to you, if we had just 20% of those pirated in sales.