PA is now being pirated

Fully agreed.

Similar story goes for me, did it when younger, but it's not like i could have bought more without cracked games, stopped it.

Purely annecdotal though, the 'demographic is the point where it gets interesting. You're making a big assumption, but what is the demographic behind pirated games? Why wouldn't they buy it? Is there an overlap of people pirating and buying games? Do they just lack the money? Are they used as demos? What's the chance of enjoyable games being bought? Would pirates even decide/be able to spend to spend on games without pirated copies? Is it a younger audience, an older?

See, that's the issue, there was never any substantial information about the people downloading that stuff, just a boadload of anecdotal evidence, which isn't even necessarily honest. The most dedicated pirates could be people spending the biggest part of their income on games, for all we now. Or it's the other way round, who knows.
So doing anything with piracy is just going out by baseless assumptions and ideas, which is why companies totally screw up when it comes to stuff like DRM. CnC3 or TlotRTBfME made me sometimes wish i pirated the games so i didn't have to deal with that malfunctioning crap.

I'd like to point out a fact i read some time ago regarding piracy on games.

If you think about it, at the end of the day you'll earn money from gamers that are quite engaged by the game.

Let's look at the one that goes directly for the pirated version and never buys the original. There are many reasons to make this choice ( for example, shortage of money, or absence of a genuine interest into the game). What's in common with all of them is that, they wouldn't have bought the game in the first place, even without a functioning pirated version. There are not the means from that gamer to pay it. On this line of thought , would you consider that lost money?

If we assume it is not, then the net result is that piracy gives more advantages than disadvantages . A main advantage is, we get all the gamers that can't buy the game right now, but that will in the future ( either by growing in interest, longing for the perks of being a customer, or simply because of a surplus of money ) .

So, with or without piracy, Uber earns money from who is really interested to PA. The only difference, i think, is that with piracy a consumer is able to make a more confident decision on how to spend money.

Thoughts? ( gtg lessons will edit for grammar later, bahbay <3)

Probably. I would also argue the spawn installations did a lot for that games popularity, though.

Well, it comes all down to the question if a notable amount of people interested in the game would buy it without cracked copies. This is a question which is basically impossible to answer. As a result fighting piracy is like hunting ghost while you don't even know if they exist.

I'm impressed I was able to decipher that

I know it's hard to make informed statements about piracy and its effects. I just look at it from the moral perspective. If you're playing a game and you could have bought it, you should have bought it.

Welcome back @WataCoso - long time no see

Good job.
I considered adding RotWK to it, but that seemed like overkill.

Of course. At it's core, piracy isn't justifieable.

See, Devs these days don't even bother to make a demo. Back in my days, there'd be a demo for every game. Some games even had multiple demos (like, original Hitman). So demos were so good, people were making mods and additional missions for demo (Operation Flashpoint). We had so much demos, I even had Demo subfolder in my games fodler.

These days, they just show you a banner 'yo man, buy this game, it's good, trust me'. And I know I can't trust any review or video on internet. The only person who can tell me if game is good or bad is me. So, when I was more active on steam, I'd pirate every game that doesn't have official demo, before deciding if I should buy it or not, sometimes even only to check performance on my machine. I literally used those as demo versions - never even completed a single mission. Helps a lot to not pay for crap. Another good example would be Space engineers. This game was on my wishlist for a while, I've read some reviews and watch some video, and it was all cool. They made a free weekend this week. Demo, free weekend and torrents is the same thing to me. I downloaded it and it turned out that it lags like hell on my laptop. If I'd trust reviews and not my own experience, I'd be one of those guys who payed for the game and got hugely disappointed, then started hating it very much and spammed steam discussion with 'wtf crap' threads. But thanks to demo, I am not doing this.

Because damn, games cost money. You don't buy suits blindly. You gotta check if it fits you.

See all those mad people on steam forums? It's because they couldn't try the game before buying it. So, the question is, what is worse financially: people not buying game because they didn't like when they tried it for free, or people who payed, got disappointed, and told all their friends not to buy it?

It's still kinda iffy.

What if the game is really old, you can't buy it anywhere in store or online, and the original developers and publishers are long gone.

See bolded part

That's what i ment with 'at it's core'. If you take a closer look at it, then illegal copies can be a very, very complex matter. Legal doesn't even have to mean right, good or justified.

For example, something out of that region:
To play homeworld 2, i have to specifically use a german crack, because it doesn't start otherwise. Technically illegal.

If you like it, buy it. Simple as that.

Billionaire life motto?

"That's a cool island, I like it, I'm gonna buy it".

I concur.

Obviously I was referring mostly to games. But sure. If you have the money, buy an island!

Very true.

Still wouldn't fix things though. Ergo, it would be perceived as a waste of resources for something that doesn't notably solve a problem (and I'd imagine the companies themselves, especially with online games, or games with an online component, have a better idea of piracy scale than consumers).

Also, the problem you get with demos is that they're not necessarily representative of the full game, or in some instances even of the finished product.

So it's swings and roundabouts. But sure, more demos.

Still better than a trailer, than has nothing in it but pre-rendered scenes and numbers (x square kilometers, y weapons) and bunch of spectacular screenshots none of which were taken in actual game.

Spoiler

Random example that came to my mind was this 'screenshot' from Bad Company 2.

Well, yeah, BC2 is not a bad game, but this screenshot has zero information about gameplay. In fact, there is no such scene in this game. And all their screenshots are like that.

If there is no demo, torrenting shouldn't be illegal. Unless selling faulty crap that you can not try before buy and can not return after purchase is illegal as well.

I bought PA without pirating, obviously, I'm lucky PA turned out to be awesome game, because if it wasn't, I'd be really mad and who knows how many sales uber would lose if started spreading my word. Currently, at least 10 people that I know bought this game because of me. And since my PA steam review has 700 likes, this figure might be higher. If I'd be mad, none of my friends would buy the game. However, if I didn't pay anything and tried game for free, and didn't like it, I wouldn't be mad, and my friends could make decision of their own. So figure would be between 0 and 10.

tl;dr if you have to pay beforehand for something you can not try, and something that you might not like, you'll be more disappointed, then if you'd only wasted time and not money.

* better for you than a bad trailer that isn't representative of the end product. Which is subject to consumer laws, dependent on country and/or state and/or geographical region (like the EU).

But yeah, gamers generally can't be bothered actually utilising their legal rights. They'd much rather say "piracy is fine" instead

Nothing justifies piracy.

There is a fully legit reason why we don't have demo's any more.

It's because if a game is bad, then the demo prevents people wasting money, demos actually really hurt a games sales, especially if the demo is good enough that all people wanted to do was actually in the demo.


Too good demo, people don't buy the game.
Bad demo, people don't buy the game.

And a average demo usually just makes the game look bad, so less people buy the game.

Back in the day, Demos did what they were supposed to do Entice the player to buy the full game.

As it did with me and TA and Warbreeds Played the demos, bought the full games a week later

When I was a lot younger, we used to pass the disk around at LAN parties. Not everybody would want to buy a game if you could only do a big multi-player with your friends every other weekend. I never pirated games other than LAN parties thing, Demos were plenty in the Magazines.

Now at days we have lots of videos online of game play, access to a lot of information. Steam has made getting new games very easy. I have found most demos are really no longer necessary for most games. PA being an exception it really needed a tutorial demo at least with a 1v2 AI match available. I'm sure there were many reasons that they could not do it.

I am not proud of sharing games back in the day, but I feel I have made up for it with the uncountable number of games I have purchased over the last 25 years. I believe if you contribute your monies to developers who truly love making games, then you will offset the negative effects of the pirates.

BTW, excellent update Uber.
I noticed the cronocam important event indicator too!

Uber should insert a lil snippet of code into PA that would make the game itself check with the registry and then with Steam, or an official launcher. If its a mismatch, the game itself would lock until the game is actually bought or is properly registered on the system.