| hello everyone! This is Cas from Puppygames. It's been very interesting reading this thread (thanks ewj for posting!) A few straight from the horses mouth facts: I sat down and worked out what our revenues are, and they work out as $750/month over the last 7 years. Out of that, we pay for hosting, advertising, accountancy, and tax, leaving about $400/month and then Chaz and I split the remainder. Chaz just about scrapes a meagre existence in Spain. I live in the UK though so I have to keep on doing a day job (I've got a family to support). So up till now Puppygames has always been part-time! It'd be nice to do it full time. If you're wondering why we bother at all, well, it's because it's actually a monumental pain in the arse to release two versions of every game - a demo and a full version. It's loads easier just to do a full version which can be unlocked. That's all our "DRM" is, really - just a really simple way of doing unlockable demos which won't go wrong and is practically impossible to not understand. Also, anyone who thinks that it was a "lot of work" developing the system should probably know... it wasn't. It's really trivial stuff, and most of the hard bits are built in to Java anyway like the public/private key encryption. We're already working our little fingers off making the game, can't afford to spend any more time on unlocking schemes! It really is utterly trivial for anyone with half a brain to defeat, and even crack and release. It's Java - any fool with JAD and Eclipse can rip it out. But what we're getting at here is... what's the point? The demos are lengthy, the games are cheap, the rights we give you along with the games are exactly the rights you would expect to have and want. They're exactly the rights I expect and want from things I buy, anyway. Lots of piratey types give all sorts of feeble excuses as to why they get dodgy copies of things but at the end of the day we basically addressed every single one of them except one which is that the games cost too much and you wanted them anyway! Which we're figuring out how to address right now. We tried in the past reducing the prices of the games but discovered they made even less money. Any suggestions? |
The overriding reason people pirate is that they can something for free, so why pay for it?
When I was a poor student I pirated games too, but now that I'm a somewhat well payed software developer I buy pretty much every (mostly indie) game I play (and quite a few I end up not playing) because ~$20 every month or two is simply not an amount of money I will notice missing.