Suppose a game developer officially embraces BitTorrent for their new game. "Sure, go ahead and torrent it," they say, and even go as far as to provide official torrent links for it upon the game's release.
Have they financially doomed their game by doing this or is there some way they can make their budget back from this? Would embracing BitTorrent be a self-destructive move on the developer's part?
There are entire record labels that set their price to pay what you want for music and they are doing fine.
no, this will guilt trip pirates into buying their game instead
devs who don't mind people playing their games for free but still want to make money they just don't use drms
No. The people who already pay for games will pay for games. The people who pirate exclusively, always pirate exclusively.
Those who pirate then suddenly buy your games, are exceptions, not the norm.
Telling people to pirate is good will, and is a load off your servers as well, assuming you host your games there.
If your game is shit, you still won't make a lot of money, that's the bottom line. It doesn't matter if you support piracy or not.
Rape Day game already did
Devs of the Darkwood literally did just that, and dropped official torrent on Piratebay, so people could play the full game for free day 1.
It became a small phenomena and sold well.
It's all about making a good product people will WANT to support.
Multiple indie devs have done this as a PR stunt and as far as I know none of them suffered financially for it.
Hotline Miami did that
I dont know how to torrent
A lot of indie bands make most of their money from merchandise sales. Give the torrenters a coupon code for a discount to encourage them to buy more of your game's merch.
How? Even a bunch of thirdworlders can do it, so why can't you?
>"Sure, go ahead and torrent it," they say
Didn't Notch say something along those lines?
Making shitty songs is probably a little easier than making shitty games.
He's a third worlder moron
Just kickstart a free game, giving the kickstarters the game like 2 months early.
I've seen a ton of indie devs offer pay-what-you-want pricing on Itch. Wonder how well that works for them.
No, the Factorio devs would rather you pirate their game than buy it off a key site and you can play multiplayer with pirated copies, and that game sells like crack.
>make game
>take out a loan from some bank
>have thousands and thousands of discs printed
>have to pay "artists" and manufacturers to print all of this shit and put it together
>have to pay a distributer to get them on shelves
>your game sucks and doesn't sell
>take a massive loss on the physical media
or
>make a game
>let people play it
>ask them to pay if they liked it
>even 1 customer "donating" means profit
it should honestly be the norm at this point. anybody that actually buys a game on a whim deserves to get burned on a shitty purchase
devs that openly tell people to pirate their game are based.
Not really when you can just copy paste everything for a game.
I pirate free games
stop overthinking things retard
what you described is basically making a free game with a "support me" option
and guess what - games like this exist
If it's authorized by the copyright owner, is it really piracy? Isn't torrenting only piracy when they don't want you to do it?
most indie bundles are devs giving away their games for nothing hoping it'll gain some traction
>Have they financially doomed their game by doing this or is there some way they can make their budget back from this?
depends on the size of the budget
what you can expect is
loyal fans will pay, if you already have a large following, they'll pay the price, and maybe even one generous richfag will pay beyond the normal price, you may survive if you have a loyal fanbase
lots of people will be able to play, therefore growing the audience and raising the chance of someone paying if they enjoyed the game, though you should expect 1 in 100 to actually pay, and most will underpay, most gamers are kids with no job and no money
you will save money on bandwidth/advertising/distribution
yeah, and they fucking SUCK
a waste of time, which is why they dont get traction, why nobody buys and they stop making games hopefully
Even a free game, if it's good enough, can support the developer if they accept donations.
Dwarf Fortress does exactly this.
WoW and LoL updaters use Bittorrent.
Pretty sure some other (GOG?) services use Bittorent to reduce server load.
Any distributor using a site with accounts could run a private tracker with per-account access to torrent files.
It's just a fucking protocol, you can pirate with ftp, http, CD, or pigeon.
You'll probably save a lot more money on server bandwidth costs since it's P2P.
Speaking of torrents, what is the best client to use in 2022? I've been using Deluge for a long time but the Windows version hasn't been updated in years.
You can just buy a bunch of loops from Splice or Sounds.com and paste them into Garageband.
>I've been using Deluge for a long time
Same. So can't help ya there.
Yeah all of these devs didn't mind piracy and none of them suffered for it. The key is to have console ports because that's where most of the money comes from, especially on Switch.
Deluge is still the best for me, though qbittorrent is also decent. There are times where people still use utorrent and I'm thinking "why??"
This is called f2p. Many f2p
games have had you download the game from other users who already downloaded it.
Goddamn is Yea Forums getting stupid
Game Dev Tycoon literally did this on release
Most game devs already do it but put some cheeky shit in that either fucks with you or reveals you're a pirate when you complain about it until someone patches it.
for every 10 pirated copies somebody buys your game
if nobody pirates your game nobody is going to buy it either
At that point you might as well add microtransactions.
This. I buy copies for my friends if a dev is a pirate.
They'd probably be violating licensing deals if they have any licensed content.
I use qbittorent. I used to use Deluge but the UI was just too shit for me to continue using it.
Depends on the budget. Could a game like Elden Ring turn a profit? No. Deltarune. Yeah.
You didn't pirate the game.
This. When I was playing music we would list in bandcamp as set your own price and had a few people throwing 20s at us for a crappy demo.
Torrents would be a no problem if developers would bother creating a game demo for their game to test. Also people who torrent are very often not a demographic that will buy your game anyways, so you don’t have to really care about them
None of these things would be a problem if we achieved post-Capitalism and headed towards a moneyless world where this stuff wouldn't matter.
If a game dev offers their game for free, I won't buy it. I'll download it for free, play it once and uninstall it.
Imagine how much more efficient the internet would be if the entire web were P2P and distributed.
It doesnt
>t. did this
Question, if I'm a game developer releasing a game and I say its fine to pirate and even provide a link, but the pirated version has crypto miners packed in, is that illegal?
Its definitely moral, but is it legal?
Yes and no. If you don't know what you are doing, then it would just be throwing your money away. Especially if no one even likes the game. It's like a burp. It's gone and it stunk, but everyone noticed and as long as the link is floated around.
If people like it, then it generates fame. So with fame you'll want to use it for influence in places that it will actually cause something good to happen. Like at Walt Disney Corporation, or id software, or someplace soulless that wants talent if it exists, but it's impossible for real talent to actually do something in a place like that.
Assuming the game that is made is actually God in any way. The sΩymonster wants to do that too that's why they calling it wokeism.
Project Zomboid's dev did it, but then he had a mental breakdown because people still thought his game was shit.
It was back in 2013.
If you're caught putting a cryptominer in your game, your paying customers might also decide to boycott you out of disgust.
>ur game sold like shit cause piracy plz buy our gaem :3
>P2P more efficient
Based retard
Brave browser basically did this. Every link was replaced with their crypto referral at the end so every click wold make them money.
But when people found this out they just apologized and everyone forgot about it.
Pajeets still shill this shit browser everywhere for $0.02 per post.
I get the fastest and most stable downloads from torrents, it also keeps download servers from being overwhelmed and going down.
Deluge uses fuckton of RAM and CPU because it's a shitty port, plus outdated windows build is the security hazard.
qBittorent used to be great but the latest version rapes your HDD spiking disk usage to 100% on some machines and it hasn't been fixed last time I checked.
I use Transmission now, it's simple and lightweight, but does everything I need, except renaming torrents and folders doesn't work properly on Windows.
>lightweight
>smooth UI
>just werks
Come home.
the best devs are the ones that purposefully release bugged torrents of their game.
i remember one of the serious sam games would spawn an invincible boss to kill you after 20min of playing.
another game i tried pirating the dev coded it so the graphics settings turn themselves down all the time, so the only way to have high gfx settings was to pay him $10
Operation Flashpoint straight up just ruined your gun's accuracy over the course of 20minutes until you couldnt hit the broad side of a barn no matter what weapon you used
>The key is to have console ports because that's where most of the money comes from
actually this
i think PC sales are only like 25% of the market these days last i saw a chart.
mobile games and consoles (playstation/nintendo/xbox) were the other 60 or 70%
(mobile games was half of that)
unfortunately we live in a time where it's not worth it to make a PC game anymore and mobile games are more than half of the market, thanks to a handful of fat thirsty richfags who spend $10k on anime jpgs
Literally Minecraft
No because most people don't know how to use torrents
Is there anything wrong with releasing a game for free while selling cosmetics?
you question, but you clearly understand