Yes, but telethons work on the "We're going to be as annoying as he**, reminding you every 30 seconds of the shows you're not going to get to see until we get X dollars" model, where as you're suggesting "We're going to make something you like, and keep making something you like until you give us what we want."

Yeah, it basically does give the farm away, and then asks the receiver to give something back for what they've already received.

Fair point.

That's not unique to episodic projects, though.  The vast majority of modern commercial games are sequels or tie-ins to something that was profitable.

Doesn't that make them episodic themselves then?

You could make a pretty compelling argument for that.

But then we'd need to come up with a new term for games which are built to be small portions of a larger standalone work, sold at a lower-then-normal price, in order to make their creation a smaller financial risk.  Because "episodic games" would just mean "games", at that point.

I don't think it'd a matter of laziness as much as profitability.  On the flip side, if an episodic project is continuously profitable, it might continue indefinitely.

That's not unique to episodic projects, though.  The vast majority of modern commercial games are sequels or tie-ins to something that was profitable.

Well, like I said a few pages back, a service like Steam or the iTunes app store makes paying much more convenient than pirating. (iTunes also makes piracy impossible - one reason why I think indie devs should go for it).

Yeah, convenient payment is essential.  It's difficult to make people feel that payments straight from your game app are secure (unless you've got a huge reputation), so you sort of have to go through a trusted third party. Which is annoying, as you'll be losing a lot of sales due to having to send people to another site to do the transaction.

But there are a lot of other models already in existence - again, like I mentioned before, CaravelGames gives you a year-long subscription to their hint service and their high-score table. It's much easier to stop people accessing these things illegally, since you don't need to worry about things like multiple computers using one account.

Interesting.  I wonder how well that works for them.  It sounds like they're not selling their games, but rather are selling a subscription to their online services.

Or at least, that's how it's going to look to the people considering pirating.  I wonder how compelling those hint services and high score tables are.

Multiplayer games have had this down for years. Have a members-only matchmaking or clan-making service. Have private servers. Have an online leaderboard. It's easy to limit these things so only paying customers can access them.

Yeah, the whole "avoiding-piracy" thing is really a solved problem if you have an online game that requires a subscription or otherwise matches players against a credit card number.  It's a lot harder to do this for single-player games.

The trick is to think about it like this: how is the legal version better than the pirate version? If the only answer is warm fuzzy feelings, you are going to lose some revenue.

Good point.  You can lock down your network services no problem.  But that really weakens (or destroys) your game for offline players, and makes even the online people worry about what'll happen if or when your services shut down.

And anything you distribute to the offline players can be redistributed by pirates.  The only way around that is (as you suggested) to distribute new content extremely frequently, faster than the pirates will keep up with (which means you have to continue creating new content forever, and incurs all the hassles that e-mail mailing lists always do, etc).

So I dunno.

For the record, I personally like the ISC license, which is a cleaned up version of the MIT license.

I like that one;  hadn't seen it before!

All my code is currently under the GPLv3, but I've been thinking about changing to something more permissive.  I'd been considering the ZLib license, but ISC seems to have basically the same requirements while being more comprehensibly written.

The core idea behind episodic games is that if you make (1/n) of a game and it doesn't sell, then you've only lost (1/n) as much money as if you'd invested enough to make the whole game.  And if it does well, then you can build the second (1/n) of the game and continue.

It's really just a way to mitigate the financial risk of an unsuccessful game.  And by mitigating the risk, it also means that you can try more adventurous things;  things that you aren't certain will sell well, because the risk is lower.

In practice, (like most things) it doesn't work quite as well as it sounds like it should in theory;  you generally have to do an awful lot more than half the work to make the first episode, and less work to make the later episodes.  But it's still a lot more financially safe than taking the monolithic approach, especially for small companies.

I'd still like to hear any counterarguments you would have brought to the table.

The big ones were these:

Cost of physical goods and shipping would have to drive the registration price up substantially, in order to cover the costs of the physical goods as well as the costs of developing the game.

Tying a physical product to the game registration makes the game feel like a freebie;  like the price being paid is just being paid in order to purchase the physical good.. which means that you're in danger of people not registering if they don't want the physical item.

You could even smash our two ideas together, and call it the "telethon" model.

The what?

The telethon model.  The game becomes the entertainment acts, people send contributions in and people who contribute a lot are given "thank you" gifts.


Now that I'm thinking about that, most telethons have either a particular "target" amount of money which they're aiming to raise, or a specific duration, or both. 

So what if when you released a game, you worked out "It cost me 'x' amount to make this game, plus I'd like a little bit of profit" (where 'x' is worked out based upon time, expenses, and other costs), and just displayed on-screen how much money had been raised.  The game client would occasionally call home to update the on-screen tally, and once the full amount had been raised, the game would convert to freeware status for everyone.

That model seems to work really well for telethons on public television.  I wonder whether it'd work for video game software as well.  Like the above suggestions, it totally eliminates any point to piracy.

I like the idea of restrictive licences that stop people distributing my stuff for money, say (GNU doesn't do this).  And I'd certainly like any distributions of my stuff to come with back-links to a place* where the most up-to-date version is kept (I don't know which licences might require people to do this).

Well, there's the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License, which I think does what you want?  Either that or the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives License;  you didn't specify your preference about whether or not you'd like to allow people to modify your work. 

The "Attribution" licenses let you require distributors to include a web link to your site, or anything else that you want to require as attribution.

The "Non-Commercial" licenses let you restrict people from making money from distributing your work.

The "Share-Alike" licenses allow people to modify your work and redistribute, as long as they redistribute under this same license.

The "No-Derivatives" licenses disallow people from modifying your work and redistributing.


But there's a whole heap of Creative Commons licenses, all made up of various combinations of these types of clauses, and there's sure to be one that does exactly what you intend.  (They even have a simple web form to help direct you to the specific one you want)

What about a staggered pricing model which actually provides incentives for the player to pay more?

I was midway through writing a post about why physical goods wouldn't work, when your message came through and totally changed my opinion about it.  Tying delivery of the physical goods to an optional higher price registration is an awesome concept.

You could even smash our two ideas together, and call it the "telethon" model.

You set it up so that people can type in any registration price at all, with an absurdly low minimum (I still suggest around $2 as a minimum).  For that, they get a digital download of the game and a registration code.  But you also advertise the 'threshhold prices' at which people will receive the extra "thank you" gifts, to be shipped to them as physical objects.

...almost makes me wish I didn't distribute all of my games for free, just so that I could try out that scheme and find out how well it'd work in practice. 

Fight piracy, of course. But fight it by trying to give people incentives to pay for your game.

I suggested the "each customer specifies their own price" concept a few pages back, to try to make registering less effort and less painful than pirating;  it sounds like at least a few other folks have mused about that same concept, though nobody's actually tested it yet.

Do you have other ideas to contribute?

The problem is that the traditional things that people are doing right now (time-locked demos, extra content, etc) are all foiled by piracy.  If the extra incentive is included in the pirate download, then it's not an incentive, so all of these software-based "extra stuff" or "crippled features" approaches simply don't work as anti-piracy incentives.

We're so alike, and yet I cannot subscribe to your last point of view. I have never ever been actually hurt by piracy. On the other hand, I have been constantly screwed and raped by corporations all my life, from every possible side, through every possible orifice.

If everything you say is true, then I can guarantee that you have been hurt by piracy at some point, whether or not you realised it at the time.

Anyhow, I'm certainly not defending corporations.  In fact, I never even mentioned them.  But I'm quite happy to concede that there are certainly some terrible companies doing deplorable things out there.

but I bet you got a car?

Actually, no.

I have no car.  I make two public transport transfers and walk for 30 minutes to get to work;  it's about an 80 minute journey in each direction (it would take less than 30 minutes each way, if I had a car).  My work is in creating commercial software.  Sales of that software pay my rent and put food on my table.

And yet, I write games for fun in my spare time, and distribute every one of them for free on my web site (check my profile for the url).  I also release almost all of my code and data files under open source or Creative Commons licenses.  So yeah, I'm a "brain-washed corporative[sic] drone".

Whether you like it or not, piracy actually hurts real people.  People who don't own "yachts and villas".  I'm sorry if that upsets you, but it's the truth.

Also: make a game without a single character of on-screen text. All quantities such as score, money etc have to be represented visually. Also, the menu, if any, must not contain text.

Yes, please!  I want to make something for this one. 

What's interesting is that this thread is supposed to be a discussion about pirates and pirating, and all the personal attacks are directed from the anti-pirate group.

Who precisely do you imagine that the pirates might be nobly refraining from making personal attacks against?

They already steal food from our children's mouths;  are you suggesting that they'd want to call us names, too?  And that we should be thrilled at their restraint?

[in my eyes]

people like me are simply "too nice for this world".

Sure, I could be nice (and I really want to) and buy everything, but there is, in my eyes, no reason why I should. It'd just put me on the losing end of the stick.

I think I've gained all the deep insight into your point of view that I ever want to have.

We steal stuff.

people like me are simply "too nice for this world".

Speaking purely from the open source side, if you still kept frowned upon piracy, and still sold your work commercially, would there be a problem with releasing the source code to paying customers? It'd make cracking a whole lot easier I suppose, but that's going to happen anyway.

I don't think this works in practice;  all of the major Open Source licenses mandate that source code be available to everyone who receives a copy of your software;  not only to those who pay for it.


At the end of the day, how we want to release our products is the creator's choice, not the pirate/Open Source zealot's choice.  If you want more stuff available freely, then you make it;  stop pretending to be the boss of everyone else.  And best of luck paying your rent. 

If I make a song and allow people to copy it and they do so as many times they want, what horrible things could suddenly occur?

Nothing at all.  There's nothing at all wrong with that.  (Of course, to stay true to your "source code" comments, you'd also have to give away all the software you used, all your source materials, your original mix tapes, etc.  Based on your previous comments, though, I'm sure you wouldn't have a problem with that.)

The thing is that unlike you, many of us make our livings selling software, or books, or music, or film, or television, or other creative works of IP.  It pays our rent and puts food on our table.

If we had to give away our source code and everything for free either officially (via your mandated Creative Commons or Open Source licenses) or unofficially (by deciding that there's nothing wrong with piracy), then we couldn't afford to make software any more;  we'd need a day job in order to pay our rent, and couldn't make the amount or the quality of software that we make now.

And pirates wouldn't have anything to pirate any more.

[Why should I feel bad about pirating something I would never buy?]

I see plenty of insults thrown at pirates, but precious little reason why I should give a shit. Why should I feel bad about pirating something I would never buy?

Because it's taking and making use of someone else's hard work without compensation, against their express wishes.

Because in so doing, it shows a complete lack of respect for the author(s) of the work you're taking.


This is what was meant when the "pirates are selfish dicks" thing was mentioned, above.  And you can call that an insult if you want, but if the shoe fits...

I've been thinking about the magnatune.com approach, lately.

I mean, I release all my stuff for free.  But if I was going to charge for it then I've been thinking that it might be interesting to let each purchaser set their own price.  The purchase process would say, "Please enter what you feel this game is worth (minimum $2, recommended $10)", and charge them whatever amount they entered.

By having an absurdly low minimum price, I imagine that it'd be far less bother for the casual pirates to just buy the thing than to go through all the trouble of locating pirate copies, and voluntarily paying more than the stated amount would make everyone else feel like they were making a contribution toward something they really liked.