| I agree. It's certainly more prudent to go with the flow [of piracy] rather than waste time and resources struggling against it. The Hotline Miami developers did just that.[1] Although the 93.6% piracy rate the Greenheart Games article references initially seemed shocking, I was reminded of the stance Gabe Newell has repeatedly taken over the years, of piracy being a service issue.[2] Part of that can be applied to this situation. a) Convenience With third party content distribution, the customer is likely purchasing the game via an interface they're already familiar with. They are used to acquiring their content through this interface on a regular basis. For the sake of argument, if you were to compare: Steam, torrents, and a checkout form on the developer's website, the latter sadly doesn't stand a chance in the contest for convenience. Since Game Dev Tycoon isn't on Steam yet, which distribution method wins out? Piracy. There's actually nothing wrong with the game's website purchasing process; it's quite nicely streamlined and requires no login. However, a lot of people tend to loathe buying games directly from a developer's website, because it results in fragmentation of their games library, and it's one more purchase to keep track of. Some users are militant about keeping the entirety of their games on one platform for just this very reason. b) Exposure Game Dev Tycoon is currently on Steam Greenlight but not yet approved. If they have the good fortune to be green-lit, the piracy rate may just turn on its head. The game is also available via Windows Store. To put it gently, Windows Store isn't exactly Steam. That said, I'd be interested in the ratio of sales between their website and Windows Store (my money is on the site). c) Benefits If you search this story, you'll quickly notice that it has spread like wildfire across the gaming press. The game is receiving large amounts of publicity as a result. Said publicity may end up being what tips the Steam Greenlight scales in its favor towards availability on the Steam platform, which in turn would ostensibly result in a massive boost in sales. Not to detract from the cleverness of Greenheart's experiment and subsequent article, but I find it more than a bit ironic that the egregious 93.6% piracy rate may in fact be what indirectly results in Game Dev Tycoon game making it on to Steam in the first place. [1] http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/10/25/hotline-miami-devs-endorse... [2] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe... |