Space Empires V Pirated!

[Tim_Ward]

I'm struggling to see how pirating SEV helps increase sales. The logic works for music because some people do indeed download a few tracks from an album, decide they like it then go and buy it. That doesn't really work with a game... you either have SEV or you don't.

If we really want these torrents removed the best thing to do would be this:

http://www.mininova.org/faq

What to do if I want you to remove certain copyrighted files from your site?
Please note that we do not host any illegal content on this site. The torrent (metadata) files do not contain data that might be copyrighted in any way.
However, we offer a service to remove torrents from our site if the copyright holder of the software requests so. These removal requests are only valid if:
You are, or your company is, the copyright holder of this software (no generic anti-piracy groups).
You provide the exact links to the torrents, no complete (sub)categories or search queries.
You provide the complete name(s) of the content in question.
You provide complete contact information (including the name and phone number of the contact person), not a general anti-piracy mail address.
If your request complies with all of these rules, send a mail to copyright@mininova.org. Please keep the correspondence polite.
We remove postings as soon as we can, usually within 24 hours. Keep in mind that mails not applying to the above rules will be ignored.

Obviously, either Malfador or Strategy first would have to do it; preferable Strategy first, Aaron has better things to do

[Intimidator]

Don't understand me wrong , I'm not PRO-Pirate.
But through pirating I got to know SEIV 1.49, so simply said : without pirating I would NEVER BOUGHT SEIV-gold and SEV. And I would neither infected 4 friends, 1 brother and 2 nephews with the Space Empire Virus (they all bought SEIV and the most of them are going to buy SEV (or already did))

So, I know it's NO excuse but it's an simple example on HOW pirating can help a game to get known (see it as an extended demo)

[Azselendor]

Pirating software increases sales like this.

1.) Download Torrent
2.) Pirate tells others about the game and Torrent
3.) ....
4.) PROFIT!

No offense, but I think people who buy software after pirating it is maybe 0.01% of all software pirates.

Now while the dummy-torrent plan is deceptive, it's basically a ploy to sour the milk for would-be pirates and discourage them from attempting to pirate it.


On the other hand, we can have a bit more fun with the dummy torrent and load it up with advertising materials, the demo, and such and distribute that in its place of the actual game. This wouldn't discourage piracy of it, but expose the game's demo to more and more people.

[Phoenix-D]

No, if your a programmer the real fun is including the actual game..with critical bits missing. Say, it installs and runs fine, but dies with a "Don't pirate me" message a third of the way through.

[Azselendor]

when my friend did it, he encoded all of the nice little moon shots we included as a multi-part RAR file and we seeded 10-15 bad torrents each using popular names of other piraters.

[DeadMilkman]

And of course something else that would work even better.

Seed up torrents that contain whatever (it would be best if they contained the demo or something that could be mis-identified as SEV without containing junk files) , then when they are at around 95-98%, disconnect them. That way the entire torrent will never be downloaded, and it takes a long time for people to usually realize they have a dead torrent when it gets up to that kind of level.

This bypasses the problem of the downloaders discovering that they have a bad torrent, and spreading the news.

[Atrocities]

I have no problems with people who download avaiable software that they eventually buy. My problem is with the person or persons posting Space Empires V and Dominions 3 to these sites. Those are the POS's that I dislike.

Alow me to clarify. I don't blame the pirating of space empires v or Dominions 3 on the people who chose to download the software, I blame it on the person(s) who uploaded it in the first place.

I don't want to sound calus, but I ONLY care about space empires V and Dominions 3 and that was the whole purpose behind my posts here. Whoever posted those two games to the BT sites is the pirate and that person should be held responsible for all the sales lost to both game publishers.

I would hope that any one who downloads these games would choose to buy them in order to support future games.

[DeadMilkman]

Tim_Ward, unfortunately that wont really help, because torrents are not only usually posted to multiple sites, but there are torrent sites which index other sites torrents as well.... basically they spread.

What I do is put up torrents of each patch as they come out. And when there is a good stable version of the demo I intend to put up multiple torrents of that. A slightly different form of marketing you might say

As to the suggestion of seeding bad torrents, yes it will work, but the word usually gets spread pretty quickly if a torrent is bad. So it would be necessary to seed a new torrent occasionally, make sure it is the EXACT same size as a real SEV upload would be. And the file name would have to be something like spaceempires5.iso,or as a rar file. If you are just seeding a bunch of random files, it wont work. Because the bittorrent clients report the names of the files they are downloading.

And yes, if it is not obvious I am frequent torrent user. I download lots of porn, old movies, and tv shows. So I guess I'm a pirate, arrrrr.

[Tim_Ward]

DeadMilkman said:
Tim_Ward, unfortunately that wont really help, because torrents are not only usually posted to multiple sites, but there are torrent sites which index other sites torrents as well.... basically they spread.

Obviously you'd have to to target more than just mininova.

You'd never get rid of it entirely, but the more sites you can get it taken down from the less people will find the torrent and the less people therefore will pirate the game. If you really think that'll help sales.

[Azselendor]

actually, you target the original uploaders.

See, any copy of SEV that is copied from the CD, I believe, uses a key, correct? If so, that key can be traced to the original person who pirated it via strategy first's shipping logs. If it's sold online, we have a credit card and a shipping address. If its sold in a store, then we can trace the cd key to the batch shipment sent to a store, then check with that store's purchase logs to find out who bought it and even get a picture (and if we got time, maybe play a rousing game of one-sided chair beatings).

Once we find the SOB, we then look at his torrent uploading stats and the number of down loaders for that torrent and pull a page from the RIAA, We take that information and times the number of down loaders times the number of days available times the full retail price to determine how much he owes aaron.

And if he's outside the country or unwilling to pay, I'm sure more than one of us will be more than happy to play the aforementioned chair beating game with him.