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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperBusinessPiracy and the four currencies
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I_smell
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« Reply #20 on: March 07, 2012, 03:25:45 PM »

We straight-up put our game on the pirate bay when that came out. It was already happening on other, smaller sites even while the game was still in testing, so we decided that if it's gonna happen, we should at least be the ones steering the ship.

To leverage gain from what we were doing, I made a twisted mod version of the game where all the characters wore pirate hats and eye-patches, a lot of props were replaced with rum and gold pieces, some people had hooks for hands and so on. The idea was to give people something to laugh at, or tweet about, or post on reddit and forums about- and just give everyone a secret joke to be in on.

It worked! Everyone talked about it, everyone laughed, some people debated piracy (not my intention but alright), and we got a tonne of coverage n made some sales. PirateBay even deleted any other upload of our game as a sign of good faith, so the only version up there is my pirate version. Even our Season 2 expansion isn't up there.

So the lesson learned is that you should just accept that people will pirate your game- BUT you can do more than just sulking about it.
« Last Edit: March 07, 2012, 03:43:10 PM by I_smell » Logged
Xienen
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« Reply #21 on: March 07, 2012, 05:12:01 PM »

We straight-up put our game on the pirate bay when that came out

...

So the lesson learned is that you should just accept that people will pirate your game- BUT you can do more than just sulking about it.

Holy crap, man! Brilliant! Simply brilliant! I have been developing games in some capacity for the last decade, but I've always thought that the whining over piracy is exaggerated.  My most recent ex-employer said "we've lost millions to pirates!" to which I said "oh? tens of millions of people have downloaded the game?"...and I got looks like I was retarded followed by "no, only about 50 thousand, but at $20 a piece that's over a million dollars".  I just kept my mouth shut, not wanting to start a war with the president over it. IMO, every download is not a lost sale, not even close...maybe 10% of the downloads are lost sales...maybe!
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Nix
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« Reply #22 on: March 12, 2012, 09:52:57 AM »

It's good marketing because you'll get a lot of press for doing it. So if you want some of that sweet sweet press, jump on the bandwagon quick before torrenting your own game is commonplace.
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Barnslig
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« Reply #23 on: March 12, 2012, 09:36:07 PM »

Different people have different resources, and they just try to get what they want with the resources they have, I believe.  Some people have lots of money but not much time or inclination for pain in the butt stuff, so they buy.  This is usually an older affluent crowd.  Some other people have tons of time and effort to put into pain in the butt stuff but no money, so they try to play through other means.  This is usually a younger crowd.

I'm overgeneralizing on the groupings but that's generally how I think about free/paid media.  The trick is to entertain both so everyone is playing and you eventually get to people who pay. Since distribution on the internet is so cheap people can afford to have businesses or games where only 1% of people pay. 

Thanks for sharing the post!
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Xienen
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« Reply #24 on: March 13, 2012, 12:24:47 PM »

I definitely agree with your generalization and the fact that it's an over-generalization. I agree with your remark of 1% of people paying is an affordable model for free-to-play games, but I'm not sure that same 1% will work for traditional pay-to-play games...I would guess it needs to be at least in the double digits, right?
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larsiusprime
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« Reply #25 on: March 13, 2012, 12:34:41 PM »

@Xienen:

It depends on how big your total audience is. For instance, on Kongregate (the source of about 80% of our sales), we've had ~ 500,000 plays total. Not sure how many uniques that represents, but even assuming it's something like 100,000 unique players, a 1% conversion rate is still 1,000 sales, which ain't bad.

We've actually had about 10,000 sales so far from Kongregate, so we're somewhere between a 1-10% conversion ratio (because I'm unsure what the real unique player count is).

Of course, this is because we have a free browser demo that we uploaded to flash portals. There's no way we'd ever be able to drive that kind of traffic to our own site by our own power, so in the case of a "traditional" downloadable game sold on a site without a public demo, and not being on a big portal like steam, in that case you'd need a muuuuuuch higher conversion %.
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Nostrils!
Xienen
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« Reply #26 on: March 13, 2012, 03:50:09 PM »

@Xienen:

It depends on how big your total audience is. For instance, on Kongregate (the source of about 80% of our sales), we've had ~ 500,000 plays total. Not sure how many uniques that represents, but even assuming it's something like 100,000 unique players, a 1% conversion rate is still 1,000 sales, which ain't bad.

We've actually had about 10,000 sales so far from Kongregate, so we're somewhere between a 1-10% conversion ratio (because I'm unsure what the real unique player count is).

Of course, this is because we have a free browser demo that we uploaded to flash portals. There's no way we'd ever be able to drive that kind of traffic to our own site by our own power, so in the case of a "traditional" downloadable game sold on a site without a public demo, and not being on a big portal like steam, in that case you'd need a muuuuuuch higher conversion %.


Tell me about it!  I see what you're saying and I agree that success depends on audience size AND conversion rate.  At present we have both an audience and conversion rate issue.  We'll be taking the game to mobile and web over the next few months, so that should help us out... *fingers crossed* =)
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larsiusprime
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« Reply #27 on: March 13, 2012, 07:23:09 PM »

Flash portals like Kongregate and Newgrounds are generally more "meritocratic" than heavily hand-curated portals like the AppStore, Steam, BigFish, etc.

I know for a fact that on Kongregate whether you get featured on front-page is nearly 99.9% dependent on your aggregate user review score. I've been able to get my past 4 games on the front page at least once each, so the only real obstacle there is the quality of the game itself and how well the audience receives it. I've been able to wrack up several million lifetime plays for my past 3 games combined on all the flash portals, but of course they had absolutely zero monetization strategy so I made a couple bucks on advertising and that was it Smiley. Defender's Quest has done much better because it drove traffic to our website and converted to sales. Your mileage may vary, but flash portals have been great for us!

I can't speak to mobile strategies at all, have no experience there at all.
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Nostrils!
team_q
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« Reply #28 on: March 13, 2012, 07:45:08 PM »

Hey dude,

I thought the article was excellent thanks for the insight.
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« Reply #29 on: March 13, 2012, 07:45:25 PM »

Yeah, I'm not quite sure how we're going to handle mobile and web, yet.  I know we're looking at rolling with ads for mobile with a paid ad-free version...I'm wondering if the same concept will work for web or if we should do a limited version that requires a purchase to continue playing.  That would make sense if you simply don't get as much money for ads in a web game...anyone have any experience with that?
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larsiusprime
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« Reply #30 on: March 14, 2012, 05:34:12 AM »

My experience with ads is making epcm's (Earned Cost Per Mille) in the tens of cents. So, every 1,000 plays can get you like, 30 cents, maybe up to a dollar if you are phenomenally lucky. So, 500,000 plays could net you a whopping $150-$500. And that's for half a million plays!

Generally, if you want someone to pay for something, you need a bigger pull than just "no ads." If you're leveraging on flash portals those will have tons of ads anyway, and might even roll some before your game, or refuse to allow you to have your own in-game ads on the version you upload.

Also, demo-upsells are tough with the flash market. When we initially launched under a demo format, we got a late of 1-star hate reviews, and had to quickly respond to the comments and fix our game information and title (turns out the problem was we weren't advertising enough up front that the game was a demo, and people were suddenly hitting the upsell screen and getting pissed).

After that, our score started going back up. We're at about 4.1 right now. Previous games I've done (which were completely free) were at about 4.3-4.6 at their height. So, if you do a demo up-sell, you'll have people who hate it no matter what, but these aren't your customers. Their votes do matter, though, because they push your visibility down if the score drops too much. That's why most people tend to do some kind of free-to-play situation where the core game is free and they only sell premium content - the freeloaders don't get pissed, and the customers have something to buy.

So, we had success with a demo up-sell format, but it's not the way people usually do things in the world of flash games, and most people (including myself) were surprised it worked. The other game I've heard of that made this format work was Creeper World: http://www.kongregate.com/games/whiteboardwar/creeper-world-training-sim

Conventional wisdom is to do free-to-play, and there's tons of articles on that. We tried something different and it worked for us and we're still not entirely sure why  Shrug
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Nostrils!
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« Reply #31 on: March 19, 2012, 04:42:28 AM »

Note: I haven't read much of the topic besides the first page.

I think you might be missing a "currency", incentive. Is there any incentive to purchase the game beyond warm fuzzy feelings? I'll use a game that most people are familiar with, StarCraft 2. This game had a (albeit small and "tacked-on") single player and multiplayer aspect. The multiplayer is obviously the focus and there was really no reward in playing the game solo.

This means that there is an incentive to purchase the game so you can participate in the multiplayer aspect of the game, something which you can't do if you don't purchase.

There may be ways around this, but it still doesn't allow you to get involved in the official multiplayer areas of the game, instead you rely on (possibly sub-par) cracked servers.

This creates an incentive to purchase the game, because you get something that pirates just can't offer at all. In fact, this kind of incentive even drives up the $T and $P of the pirated game (however, may reduce $I as a side-effect).

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« Last Edit: March 19, 2012, 04:47:56 AM by Faceless » Logged
Chromanoid
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« Reply #32 on: March 19, 2012, 05:26:59 AM »

Maybe a currency that measures the network effect would be more precise. I assume that any technical thing can be rebuilt by pirates. Social networks are unique and can not be copied. Blizzard cannot offer the same community as pirates and the other way arround. A bad official multiplayer game operator may even offer a less popular gaming network than an inoffical service operated by pirates or other third party operators. Afaik http://garena.com is a very big/popular battle.net alternative that offers multiplayer gaming even for cracked versions of Warcraft 3 etc.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2012, 05:34:15 AM by Chromanoid » Logged
larsiusprime
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« Reply #33 on: March 19, 2012, 05:55:23 AM »

@Faceless,

I definitely agree Smiley

My theory can be expanded into any number of currencies - whatever you perceive as having to "pay". All that goes into your decision to get something or not, so the "four currencies" are by no means an exhaustive list and is limited only by your imagination.

I think what you're describing with "incentive" with regards to a quality multiplayer experience is less of a "currency" along the lines of the other four, which is mostly there to measure what the user "pays," but instead part of "value" - ie, what you're getting for your money, time, pain-in-the-butt, etc.  In most of my examples, I assume that the value of the pirated version is exactly the same as the legit version, which is definitely not true in all cases, as you point out here!

So, a fully exhaustive cost-benefit analysis of piracy vs legit would weigh both the value of the product with the cost of acquiring it. In this case, the value of a high quality multiplayer system on a well maintained server with lots of other players can definitely tip things more towards the legit purchase, even if the pirated version costs less time, money, pain-in-the-butt, etc.
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Nostrils!
larsiusprime
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« Reply #34 on: March 22, 2012, 02:52:58 PM »

Part 3! "Pay What You Want" and the 4 Currencies
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Nostrils!
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« Reply #35 on: April 04, 2012, 02:54:50 PM »

I think a lot of people who pirate going to do just that. Some people are just out to get anything for free. I wonder what the age groups are that actually pirate video games over just buying them. I would think (just off the top of my head) that it would primarily be teens if only because they may not have the funds to buy 'x' game.

For myself, I like to buy physical copies of pretty much any game (if available). Anything digital has to be pretty easy and quick to get and enjoy (i.e. Netflix service).

This is an interesting topic
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