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What have your experiences with piracy been?  (piracy of something you made)  How did you take it at first?  And how about now?

I recently noticed my first run of piracy, I noticed a huge spike in traffic and looked to where it was linked from and there it was. :'(

That's too bad. ):

So, how much did your wallet shrink?

if you had more traffic how much you can capitalize on that?

Given the type of traffic advertisements would be the only way to capitalize on it.  Maybe someone who visits will buy it, but realistically?  probably not.

As far as "wallet" shrink, well I'm glad they setup their own download mirrors and torrents.  Bandwidth isn't free.  However my motivation on the other hand, that has taken a hit.  How do you stay motivated when you see such rampant piracy?  I expected piracy, but I expected some sals with it as well.

Remember that not every pirated copy is a lost sale, and there is a good chance that the pirates may attract new sales.

Piracy still sucks, but at least there's a silver lining.

I mean try to pull a "publicity stunt", offer "DLC" or whatever that would increase value of the "captured market" and establish yourself as a "brand", use that to "champion" future game and receive feedback ... so it became a "marketing spending"

...

???

OMG What I'm saying now, I'm turning into a KOTICK  :o

What bothers me most is that someone took the time to make a keygen for a $4.99 game.  I have been more than prepared for a 50 or even 70% rate of piracy.  But all this traffic and not a single sale today.  Yet it was worth the effort of making a keygen.  They even tried posting the links on my site.

Can you provide a link to your site here?

www.firehawksoftware.com (http://www.firehawksoftware.com)

For reference google search http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=goo+ball+madness+keygen&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 (http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=goo+ball+madness+keygen&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

That sucks.

A bit off topic, but you should really proofread your website. There are a lot of mistakes that make the site seem quite amateurish.

One of my android apps I'm selling is pirated pretty hard. I just release updates every now and then so the pirates have to go through the hassle of cracking and downloading it again, usually some convert across. Whatever. People that pirate your game would never buy it anyway.

Checked out the web site, went to the Goo Ball Madness page. The first thing that struck me, literally, was the accusatory and bitter headline "Attention Pirates". This did not make me feel good and will alienate legit customers.

As Rob said, the overwhelming majority of pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway and focusing on them will be counter-productive. You need to make certain the people that are interested enough to actually visit your page feel welcome and appreciated.

I added that yesterday after I noticed 99% of my traffic was coming from pirate and wares sites.  I intend to remove it.

I've done some android as well, didn't notice piracy (doesn't mean it didn't happen), but depending how you implemented your protection they may not have to really crack it again.  In my case, they made a keygen, I can't just change my key, the would invalidate people who bought it.

In general, I didn't post here to look for ways to prevent piracy.  Or under the assumption that pirates would have bought my game so I lost all kinda money.  It was more of a personal/emotional thing.  Were none of your really bothered the first time you saw massive piracy of something you made?  I did end up getting a sale out of all the piracy, so thats a plus.  But still its overwhelming to see more traffic in 24 hours than I've seen in the past 2 months, and all of its coming from pirate sites.

Maybe I should have just posted on the human hugs thread.

You got a sale out of that traffic, how many sales did you get before it?

You can capitalize it by selling a few mega map packs, maybe? Seems like a game worthy of it.

None, its the first, which is a good thing.  I am still working on more levels for the game, which paying customers get for free (this is the reason for selling the game via license key so I could easily distribute updates)

Well props to you for continuing your work on the game despite the piracy factor. I'm sure it feels shitty to have something stolen from you, but it takes a pretty big person to admit that piracy is part of this business and to continue working on something despite it.

Human hugs for you CowBoyDan.

Thanks, while people who pirated the game may not have bought it, the pirate sites and file hosting sites are making ad revenue from it.  Im happy for people to play the game, ive given away review copies left and right, all and all other people will probably make more money from giving away my game than I will selling it.  Money is probably a big reason for piracy.  Have you ever seen a piracy site that wasnt littered with ads?  I wouldnt care the slightest if people buying the games shared it with everyone they knew.  But its a huge difference when pirate sites show up on page one or two of search results for you game.

Ah... So you got your first sale out of piracy? Well there is something pleasing to see.

You can always contact the website admins and reason with them and ask them to remove the links. I would go so far as to offer a discount to whoever had a pirated copy and went legit.

The # of seeds on the torrent of your game should be a gauge of your personal worth

Well the main site I found pretty much is all about pirated software/music/etc and nothing more.  I doubt they'll be very receptive.  There are already over 20+ clone sites (quick google search), some of them in russian (I don't know russian but russians seem to like my game).  The file hosting/sharing sites all have their DMCA information, so once you PROVE that the file is copyright material they'll remove it, and then the pirates will just upload it again.  You'd think they would make sure files that included "keygen" "hack" "crack" etc in their name would be flagged or something, ultimately they probably don't care, they get ad revenue regardless if the content is legit or not.  They only care about covering their behind legally.

Nice solution. Pirate your own game, make ad revenue.

I don't think you read that clearly.  I'm not making the money from the pirated copies that people download from the 20+ download/share/file sites out there, nor am I making any money from all the pirate/warez sites linking to all the download locations for it.  After all, why do you think people run these sites?  Bandwidth isn't free.  Its roughly 10 cents per gb.  Bottom line, people ARE making money off of our creations when they pirate them.  There is money to be made in distribution pirated ip.  Ask any blogger, its all about having content to keep people coming back to your site, look at and clicking on ads.  Except these people (the ones making available the content, not the people getting it to play it) aren't creating the content.

I think I got into the wrong business in life, this chaotic good thing isn't working out, should have rolled chaotic evil, seems more profitable.  Maybe next life.

I was joking.

Of course others are profiting off your work, but technically they are also providing a service they need to support. It's just that in this case their business model is more sound, even though it consists of stealing and providing it for profit.

Looking at my heavily pirated Android app, I have like like a 7-1 pirate to legit ratio, which I feel is quite good. I've also gotten emails from people who said they pirated it but they liked the updates I added so they bought it anyway, which means its a converted sale, which is a net gain.

Perhaps I'm not understanding... are they stealing it directly from your servers or something? If not, then you're not losing anything.

My bandwidth usage has been pretty high, much of the traffic has been from sites that link to a keygen download (supposed to include the game as well).  Beyond that nothing is for sure, negative side could be people grabbing the keygen and coming to my site to get the latest download, positive could be people found out about the game from the pirate site and came to my site with good intentions and just downloaded the game to function as a demo.  (you download it, it works as a demo, you plug in key, it becomes full game, new version comes out, you download it, key stays in place, stored in some app directory somewhere so you don't have to re-enter it, so now you have new version, if you switch machines, you just plugin the key on the new machine).

So when I put out the new version soon, the copy all the pirates have will tell them there's a new version just like the legit copy and evaluation/free copies.  They come grab the new version, maybe a few buy it too?  I'm getting close to the next update, so this will be soon.

So the real problem here is that in demo mode you get to play say a tenth of the game while the download contains 100% of the contents? So a solution would be that the additional 90% will be downloaded when an accepted code is entered. Then you would pay less bandwidth for demo downloads and could change the key generation algorithm whenever you notice undue traffic.

Since piracy is a problem I believe your best bet is to setup online registration system and give people who purchased your game additional content once in a while as long as they are registered (and paying) customers.

This way you can block abused accounts and even motivate people who played pirated version to buy your product eventually - if they are hooked to your game, of course.

This seems like a terrible idea. I can't see any type of registration system working either by handing out dlc directly to those people (who could easily re-upload it) or have an always-on internet drm. Unless you're thinking of something else, I can't imagine it being worth the trouble to put in place.

So what exactly got pirated?

Steam works fine preventing piracy.

Create a newsletter for registered users with a unique download link?

What's to stop me from uploading that downloaded file though?

Each downloaded piece of DLC would be tied to the key given by the dev?

So people can make a keygen for that? I'm not seeing a point here. I'm assuming you're thinking that pirates won't make a key generator for a simple dlc, but I think you'd be surprised.

I think he means when the dev sells the game, he adds the key to a database, and when he uses the key, it's ticked off as "used" or removed from the database. That would mean that pirates would have to luckily generate a key after someone buys the game or hack the database. In the first case, the player will report to the dev that the key isn't working and "deactivate" it. When starting the game, it checks if the key was "activated". That means you need internet connection to start the game, but it means it makes sure that the product you are using was bought.

I know nothing about security and all of that came out just now, so if there is a flaw like hacking the databases and quickly adding in an unused made up key, well this is as tight as I can think of.

Exactly.

That's a terrible idea. I want to be able to install the game that I buy on multiple computers that I own. Or what if my computer crashes and I want to reinstall the game? Its key would already be ticked off. DRM is never the best solution. The best solution is to give people reasons to want to pay for your game instead of pirating it, like a superior experience (Steam).

Well the idea was based on finding a really secure way to prevent piracy. I understand that to make selling your game really flexible, you'll need to risk pirates pirating. The thing about Steam is that back when I used to torrent things, I found a forum dedicated to hacking the Steam application and downloading games from the forum. I never used it as it was complicated, but I saw a lot of people posting on that forum.

So stopping pirates is most probably impossible, so I guess the best way to make money is to give your game publicity and polish it well so people WANT to buy your game.

This is absolutely true. I pirate (I'll admit it), though not much. My pirating does mean, however, that I don't see digital goods as something that are behind locked doors which require money to open like goods in a physical store. When I pay for software, I see it as more of a donation. I feel bad pirating something that obviously had a lot of work put into it! In the end, I'll really only pirate something that I want if I genuinely don't have the money to pay for it. And when I do have the money, it generally goes to my favorite things first.

It may be more secure but you'll run into people like myself who will almost never support this "one time code" drm. At which point, you're still losing a sale and the respect of people who could've bought your game.

This is basically what I've been saying, so I don't know why I'm having to argue the use of a terrible drm system with eyeliner. Again, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't, the best thing you can do is make a quality game and earn the respect of the people who play it, so they're willing to pay you for it. Until someone comes up with a magical sure-fire way to stop piracy and not alienate the customer, this seems to be about the best thing you can do.

No it doesn't, many of the games on the site next to mine were from steam. 



If you have the software on your machine, you can reverse engineer it.  The only way to make the keygen for my game was to know the secret hash salt value which is only contained 3 places, on my machine in a php script (for generating free/eval licenses), on my commerce provider (for delivering the actual key to people who buy it), and in the game itself.  So they have to reverse compile my game to figure it out.


When I worked in a previous job, our software (business to business, not public/consumer level customers) was sold on a per seat/time period basis.  Ie pay x amount for y months for z users.  Our paying customers would reverse engineer our obfuscated code in order to use the product on more machines.  Our customers were large banks and financial firms.  We used public/private encryption on the license files, so it was cryptographically impossible to generate licenses, so they just modified the software itself.  We're talking a product that has a very limited number of users here, not something that has a potential customer base the size of the internet.  Every few releases we'd change/improve our licensing scheme (we were constantly issuing new licenses anyway).

So... one option I have is to use a public/private encrypted hash instead of the simple one I am using, this would force the pirating persons to release modified version of my game, so they would have to re-crack the software after every update. (which has been every few weeks).  I'll have to issue new keys to any customers who bought the game so far (easy at this point), and to anyone I've given a free/review copy.

Users can still still share their copy with all their friends and their computers (something which I am perfectly ok with).  The "license" is tied to the email address that purchased it, not exactly personal information, but it was enough that I can blacklist a specific key if it became wide spread.  (Again, I am ONLY concerned with mass piracy).

My game had a keygen BEFORE its first sale.

I don't want to restrict legit users.  If the game were "done done" and I wasn't going to release updates, I would have just sold the game via hidden download (something my payment provider can handle, and many others do as well), but I wanted to release updates, new levels, thats the only reason I even have a "license key" type of setup.  I don't want to use drm.  It'll be broken anyway and it others legit customers.

As I have said, I expected piracy, everyone should, but the level of it just really overwhelmed me.   The only solution is to require constant connection and provide your game as a service of sorts (you cannot pirate free copies of a MMO).  This is the reason why so much of the software industry is "software as a service" you cannot pirate software that lives inside a secured server.

Anyway, this has really digressed from my intent in my original post.  I posted more as a personal appeal to others who have been pirated from to share their thoughts and feelings.  How/if they got over it and kept going on with their work. 

In summary I've received one sale so far, and my own web site no longer shows up on the first page of google search for my games name, the first result is a pirate site.  And the first several pages are mostly clones of the keygen download.  I really didn't anticipate it being pirated this early on.  Only half of the intended levels are completed, it hasn't received much attention until now.  Its my first big project as an indie.  I went into this completely expecting small sales figures.  It was my "hope" to make enough to buy Unity Pro once all was said and done.  So small goals really. 

So far I've made more money on a small android app I wrote last year (its called Read2Me, it lets you open a html/txt/epub file from your device or the web and processes it through text to speech so you can listen in the car, kinda minimalist and small but I created it because I wanted it myself, selling it was an afterthought).

Perhaps once I finish the levels I intended to make I should focus on iOS games instead.

Or you can add an in game store and attracts whales ...  :whome:

Btw. is there a way to get Trine2 for free? My little brother wants to play it.

 :facepalm:

obv a joke bro

Please don't bring the indiegamer dev forum here. That's the place to grief about piracy and to mindlessly hate everyone that tries to take a realistic approach to it. Their adamant hatred and demonisation of piracy over focusing on the customers that matters and making games was what made me leave that place in disgust.

Sympathies on breaking your teeth on the harshness of reality, now focus on love and get back to making games and discussing experimental design in the creative forum already.

Seriously, everyone, take all asshat ideas about destructive, restrictive and alienating DRM to the fanatics over at the indiegamer forum or to EA, where there is an ready audience for it. :-X

Man, you obviously didn't even read what he said. Quit being such a self-righteous douche.

It certainly wasn't my intent to head anything towards DRM.  I hate DRM.  My game has about the simplest "protection" scheme I could employ to keep people honest, and was picked because it took very little time to implement with my payment processor and within the game itself (maybe 30 minutes of time all in all).

As I tried to indicate, this was more to share experiences of games others have worked on and how they dealt with piracy and stayed motivated, so I ask, what was the first game you created that was pirated?  How did you stay motivated to keep making the games that you've made?  Were they pirated also?  How quickly?  Have you personally tried any of the things you suggested or personally know someone who has?  How did they actually work out?

Your game hasn't sold well since it probably wasn't good enough / marketed well enough / priced properly / capturing enough of the market, whatever. Not because of piracy.

if someone made a keygen, couldn't you just change your game's keygen algorithm?

my game has been pirated quite a bit, probably like 10x more than its sales; i don't mind too much but it is weird to pirate a game that is perpetually pay what you want. but perhaps they don't know that it is, since they don't even go to the site, or perhaps they don't have any way to buy things online. i'd only mind it if they *could* pay for it, but are just lazy and don't, i don't mind piracy that comes out of not being able to buy stuff online or being a kid and having no disposable income or living in the third world where even the $1.75 minimum price is a significant amount

i do a few things to prevent it, such as telling rapidshare/megaupload to remove versions of it when i come across them, but that's about it

I wouldn't worry about piracy unless they're stealing your bandwidth.
Like everyone else has said, focus on the guys who are paying you and create a better experience.

nm not on topic

Except for the price point (its $4.99 btw, not exactly a high price), why was it worth the time for someone to make a keygen?  Thats what I don't get, my game wasn't that popular (yet, optimistically).


Paul, yea I could change it, but that adds annoyance to the people who did buy it as they'll need to get a new key from me, and people I've asked to review it, though at this point those numbers are small enough to have very small impact.

Jakman, its hard to say if they are stealing it or if more people just happen to be interested in it at the same time as the keygen went out, but my bandwidth has gone up quite a bit.  

i just googled "goo ball madness" and (what appears to be) the keygen was the first result that came up. kinda sad :(

what you could do is have the game contain a list of keygens that were already generated (preferably encrypted somewhere), and those would still work. it's just that new ones generated by the keygen would not work, since they wouldn't be on that list. presumably the list of the keygens that are legit isn't so huge that it'd increase the file size by a huge amount (even if it's a few thousand, that's still only a few kb of data)

i myself don't even bother with a keygen system, pirating it is as easy as sharing the zip file or even the link to the full version of the game on my site (which isn't protected by passwords or anything)

I'm more wondering why all this pirate traffic is coming to your site if there's independant download mirrors and torrents of your game.
I'm surprised they gave a link to your site at all.

So it's really mystery piled on mystery here.

My game was pirated the first day we released it and I cried like a little bitch.
I released it on a forum just to test for last minute bugs but that forum was an obvious place for piraters to hang out. I was so stressed out by it that I set up google key words for when ever a new pirate search result came out to try to take blogs down. That just led to more stress . The best thing I did for myself was stop worrying about it. My partner wasn't worried.  A game without players playing it is worse than making 0 moneyz. Eventually those players might turn if they like your next game enough. I'm sorry if that didn't help but it stressed the hell out of me so *HUGS*

Also, that sucks that your #1 search is pirates! Try to get some reviews going to topple that.

this is pretty simple: people often google a game's name and look at its site before deciding to pirate it or not. after my game got on the pirate bay i got a ton of traffic, just from people checking out the site to see more information about the game

there are a lot of reasons to go to a game's site besides buying the game. for instance, looking at the FAQ, or reading/posting in the forums, etc.

I know this is an unusual option to stop people from pirating your game... but if you really want to you should just send a PM or email to whoever put up the file to be pirated (if you can). I'm sure if you ask them politely to take it down, they would consider taking it down. You could tell them how it has affected your company if you wanted them to feel bad too. I don't know if this would work, but it's worth a try... right?  I haven't dealt with pirating yet... but I haven't released a game yet. Pirater's are usually normal people who just don't consider pirating as stealing. If they were confronted by the developer they would most likely feel bad. One thing to not do is put DRM in games to stop piracy. All it does is affect people who actually bought the game, and stop piraters for like an extra week or so. DRM takes away from the player, and stops a pirater for only an extra week or so, so instead of putting DRM in games (for those of you thinking of that), you should just reward the player. Rewarding the player could be as simple as putting a leaderboard only viewable by those who bought the game  or as complex as rewarding the player with discounts of future commercial games or the ability to view trailers of your future games before the trailers are released.

That's so blatantly simple I feel like an idiot now.  ;)

if you put in a leaderboard that is only viewable by people who bought the game, that's DRM. besides, can't the discounts and the trailers be pirated as well? rewards that can be pirated are not really a reward for non-pirates

Do you think that pirates simply haven't thought about the morality of it? Most pirates (especially the active ones who put up torrents in the first place) believe pirating is okay ideologically. It's not really a matter of not thinking about the developer. It's a matter of believing that anyone should be able to play a game, even if they can't afford it. Besides, once a game is on thepiratebay, it's not something that the uploaded can just take down (I don't think). That's not how torrents work.

What about seeding corrupt files? I think I heard some indie mention that.

yea, this  :'(

I actually hadn't given this too much thought.  The main reason I went with the simple (and I mean simple) keygen was so I only had to manage one version of the game, which had two builds (mac and windows), the download is both the demo and the full game.  It was easy to write a simple php script to generate (which I just dropped into the payment processors fulfillment stuff).  The php script takes the email address, combined it with a little salt text token, sha256's it, then base 64 encodes it so its easy to copy and paste.  The game itself just verifies this by repeating it, ensuring that the email hashes to the same value.  I don't want to keep any user information on my server, so I don't.  There are no customer names, emails or anything else stored in my web site, it only hosts content, I let the payment processor be the source for all that stuff.

I may just do what you did in the future.  Do you have any idea how much of your download traffic is from pirates?  At least the group that pirated my game was kind enough to include my web site, and references my youtube videos, and provide downloads locations.  While many of the individual download locations only have a few dozen downloads there are tons of them it seems, that could have really chewed into my bandwidth even more than all the traffic.

If you seed corrupt files, the piracy community will resent you for it, and they have the mechanisms in place to shunt those corrupt versions out of circulation.

A better idea would be the approach that Serious Sam 3 took, where they distributed a "cracked" version of the game that would use the mechanics of the game itself to prevent the player from reaching the end of the game. In the "pirate" copy, a specific enemy in the middle of the game shows up that has abnormally high stats and can't be destroyed. The player can hold out against this enemy, but can never actually beat it, and can never reach the end of the game as a result.

This is a much more clever way of dealing with piracy.

I don't see the point. If they realize the pirated version is limited, they will pirate the full version. If they don't realize it's been planted, they will think the game sucks and get frustrated. If people are going to pirate your game (which they will), you might as well let them enjoy it (don't you make games to be enjoyed!?). People generally pirate because they can't afford it. Why punish them for that?

In No Time To Explain's pirated edition, all the characters have eyepatches and tricorn hats. It's a cool way to make people think of the poor developer throughout the whole game.

Why are you including the FULL GAME in the demo exe? That's pretty dumb. That's probably even why you're getting the increased traffic... they can just download the demo and use a keygen? Even if it's more effort to maintain a separate demo, it's probably worth it? I bet even Paul's setup is more effective than that  :-\

Sucks to have that many people pirating your game, but you said it was a Russian torrent site, right? Chances are the people visiting from that site would never buy it anyway, you probably just need to market it to a better audience.

Will lead to bad-will and bad word-of-mouth. If the game is corrupt most downloaders will think "shit game" rather than "crap torrent".

The Serious Sam 3 way is cool, because it will let players test the game, whet their teeth, get a good impression of it, and if not buy it then speak well of it to others. Probably even laugh appreciatively about the "copy protection".

in Serious Sam 3, the dev put a giant pink scorpion (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e91q5BtlxK0) that cannot be killed when a player play a pirated version(like what Mikademus said.) it's good, but if the player didn't realize that thing is DRM content, they will just think the game is broken. plus, didn't you can kill all the stuff with console code? it will be just cool if that scorpion can say stuff like "how dare you pirate this game!"

in No Time To Explain, i heard the dev upload the so-called "pirated" version on Pirate Bay for all those seafarers to enjoy the game. like what agersant said, eye patch and pirate hat.

there's a lot of interview with bunch of indie/mainstream dev that they share their way of handling pirate, but most of it that i heard is, they will tell you not to worry about your stuff being pirated.

ohh, and hey, those people that crack your game will not considered to take down the pirate link, and like Eres said, some seafarer are those people who can't afford the game($4.99 is quite a lot for some country, they can buy food for 3 day with that amount). well, think Robin Hood.

The "keygen" had to be created specifically for my game.  Unless someone accessed my computer or the payment processor (unlikely), they got it by reverse engineering the game code.  Not sure if you understood that.  This approach used to be called "shareware".  With Pauls approach (which I am not knocking, just to be clear) someone just has to either crawl his site directories (since its not secured in anyway), or share the download url after they buy it.

The russians started it from what I can see, (not 100% sure I don't speak russian and the translation I got online was really bad), and I could care less.  What really got me was first seeing pirate links show up before my own site in google search, and then seeing it come up as no 1.  With my own site not even on the first page of results.  I am no longer a relevant search result for my own game.

I'm not going to try to stop the pirates, its not worth the effort, there are more of them than me.  I'm not even going to bother contacting the file sites to remove the files, they'll just pop-up again, and I saw like 20 mirrors already.

I will continue my endeavors, likely pushing some iOS stuff, possibly a non-game android app idea I've been given that seems quite valid, maybe some small free games for ad-revenue.  But the worst part is I'm going back to work full time as a software developer, so I won't be working on any of this nearly as much as I have the past month and a half.

I don't think you realize how expensive $4.99 is. Right now Limbo is selling for $2.49 on steam, and I don't think even you believe your game is twice as good as Limbo.

Edit: Also having a keygen show up first in results is a massive marketing failure.

:wtf:

I agree with the massive marketing failure part, but are you serious about the pricing thing? The price of a 2 year old game - during a steam sale, no less - is a shitty way to determine the value of another game. This type of attitude is kinda depressing to see, especially with the recent glut of game bundles even further devaluing indie games.

Yeah, $4.99 isn't expensive. If pirates aren't going to buy it at that price, they aren't going to buy it at $2.99 or $1.99. The most stupid thing anybody could do to try to combat piracy is lower the price of their game. Not only will you still not be getting any sales from pirates, you'll earn even less from your actual customers.

That's not entirely true, look at how well games sell when they go on sale on Steam for even a few dollars off. If I'm unsure whether I'll like the game I'm more likely to try something the price of a chocolate bar than a meal (yes I judge most of my purchases off how much food I can buy).

From what I've seen you are more likely to make more sales if your game is cheaper, especially if you say it is a sale. This extends to anything because it happens with my friends and Amazon as well. I'm mostly basing that off of how I make purchases and how I observe my friends making purchases though.

I wasn't saying $4.99 is expensive, I'm brushing upon what Bobo was mentioning, it's relatively expensive. Your average customer is expecting a lot more for a lot less. With all these bundles where for $0-5 you get half a dozen games, older titles are discounted like crazy, and even 1-2 year old AAA games are dipping into the sub $5 range, a game selling at $5 needs to be approached carefully since it's unfortunately outside of the current impulse buy range. That means if you want to sell it at $5, you really need to research your target market and approach it carefully, capture your niches.

For instance your problem is a key generator that unlocks the rest of the game, that they've already downloaded. In the old shareware model you alluded to, the entire game wasn't there. Basically you had a demo and if you liked it, you send in the cash and they'd send you the rest of the game. With your current setup, the player reaches the end of the demo, wants more, googles the name of the game, and even if they intend to purchase it, they get keygens as their first result (100kb away from unlocking the rest of the game). An extra download after purchase plus your current key system would have been better.

Even just putting your keycheck code in your freely available demo gave anyone who was interested at reverse engineering software able to have a shot, making keygen creation a lot easier. If you would have walled off the rest of the game, along with the keycheck functions, I bet a keygen wouldn't have appeared so quickly.

I'd try to wall off the non-demo parts of the game along with the keycheck, and change your keycheck functions so the previous keygens stop working. You can manually give your current purchasers a new key that would work while letting your automated process handle the new purchasers. Of course you'd need to have a significant update to entice older players to the newer version, but you'd be in a better situation than before.

If you want even more DRM, keep a list of of active keys server side and have your game lazily check. If it successfully reaches your server and the key isn't in your db, disable it. If you get many ips, (or many different hardware ids) hitting the same key, deactivate it and send the original purchaser a new one.

Or hell, pull a full Eres and just have a direct download to the full versions sans key checking.

Also I apologize if I'm coming off as rash. Reading back the style I've been writing as of late feels overly aggressive, and that isn't my intention.

This attitude of making games dirt cheap is getting out of hand. Sales are effective not because of the lowered cost but because of the limited opportunity to get the same value without losing as much, that's the enticement. But now sales are happening 24/7 and it's becoming a game of "buy game when it goes on sale for dirt cheap", and gamers are growing into the mindset that a game should only be purchased when on sale. That is terrible news. That makes it harder and harder for the new guys, and we get further market elitism-ization and then indie no longer carries the 'indie spirit'; indie becomes a denotation rather than a connotation. When no one will buy a game outside of a mass marketed and covered sale like Steam or HIB then... Then what do upcoming guys have? They have nothing. But that begs the question that if they can't get in those things then do they deserve success anyway? The answer in that lies in the fact that these sales cater to marketing marketable products, and a large portion of marketing is in branding, and the developer is that brand. If the developer has no brand in this increasingly marginal market of discount-craze, then how will they get anywhere? It's self-defeating. This is just like other media industries and the same game of struggling to get a bone from the big 'pubs or going against them and trying to create your own success--Sounds like "indie: part 2". And perhaps I'm blowing this shit way out of proportion, but hey, it's 3 AM.

Well, the market is getting tougher for developers, and much better for indie game players, so I wouldn't say it's getting out of hand. You couldn't get as many great games for cheaper ever before. It will only get worse as more developers dip their hand in the pot. Unfortunately this means if you're trying to sell anything you need to dedicate a distasteful amount of time to marketing.

On the other hand, marketing was always tough for indies. In fact, I'm sure it's easier now than before. From firsthand experience I can tell you that a lot more people(read: people who are not indies) are becoming interested in indie games. It is disappointing that their primary expectation is they'll come from HIB, but hopefully that can change over time. The fact that the average gamer wants to hear about indies games means big sites like IGN will be more willing to cover indie games, because that's what their readers want to hear about. It's been happening already, after all. So yeah.

i wonder how easy it was to make a living with shareware games in the 90s (if you weren't id software ;)).

I wasn't talking about sales. I was talking about permanently lowering the price in an attempt to convert pirates to buying customers. Ain't gonna happen.

Well I put out the next update, time to see what the pirates do (if they just download it from my site or they distribute new files with the updated version, or what, its anyones guess)