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Game Developer Offers ‘Pirate Amnesty’

Drew Wilson — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 07:05:48 +0000

There's an interesting development with the developer of the game Machinarium. The developer has decided to offer a "Pirate Amnesty" and sell their games for $5 to anyone who downloaded unauthorized versions. The package includes the official soundtrack for the game.

The offer was posted on their blog. To their credit, it's certainly a more progressive approach than most to courting file-sharers. Rather than threaten litigation and demand hundreds of dollars or threaten file-sharers with disconnection, they are offering a deal with their game and soundtrack. One reason this is actually a better approach - particularly with a smaller company, is because the biggest problem for smaller developers is actually getting their name out in the market. One of the fastest and most cost effective way to penetrate the market is, I'd argue, to get high profile release groups to release the work. It's not like a smaller developer has the ability to fund nation-wide TV ad campaigns, so cheaper marketing typically has to suffice. This is, of course, not to say this developer actually put their game online for free in the first place as if it was just simply pirated of course. The fact that people are downloading it for free means that there are people playing your games which is really good news. Worst case scenario is that you spend a wad of cash and spend a year developing a video game and no one plays it after. That tends to kill companies that develop games. The posting on the blog says, "Our estimate from the feedback is that only 5-15% of Machinarium players actually paid for the game." A survey based on feedback clearly is not scientific, but for the sake of argument, let's say this is the actual number of an even 10% (a number that keeps popping up in terms of a paying percentage in my travels interestingly enough). If an earlier game you've developed sells a hundred copies for $20 per game, that's grossing at $2,000. Probably low, but this is hypothetical. Now, you've made a few games and you've developed a bit of a reputation, so a later game sells 1,000 copies. Same price would net you $20,000 gross. Sounds like a lot, but you've probably hired a few people to take care of things like art and sound design. Now your next game is part of viral downloading for free. The game gets downloaded, again, hypothetically because there's no good way to track this sort of thing, 5,000,000 times. 10% of those people pay for the game. That means 500,000 people paid for the game. At $20 a game, that's $10,000,000 gross. Make of that number what you will, but the point is, even if only 10% pay for the game consistently, then your goal is to get as many people downloading that game for free as possible because it's all about marketing. If you get 10 people to download that game for free, that means 1 person will pay for it. I think content creators shouldn't look at downloads as a loss and look at downloads as a potential gain. The reason so many people play World of Warcraft is because everyone has heard of it. The reason not everyone plays a game developed by a small company is because fewer people have heard of it. If people are playing your games, that is power you can use to leverage the market and it doesn't necessarily mean trying to get as many people to pay for it. It can be leveraging word of mouth too. The sale isn't limited to people who have downloaded the game for free. An update added to the blog said it's for anyone willing to buy the game. "we just want to assure you," the blog update said, "we don’t think you have pirated the game first if are going to buy it now:)" "This sale isn’t only for [pirates], it’s for all. Thanks to everybody who paid for the game!" Personally, this is actually quite a smart move for this developer. I'm a little hesitant on the fact that the posting said how it is illegal to download the game for free, but that's pretty much splitting hairs. It's appealing to people who are most likely checking out what you have to offer. It's hard to go wrong with that. The sale runs to August 12. Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

eMule Beta Testing – Responses From the Community

Jorge Gonzalez — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:46:45 +0000

A few days ago, we reported on eMule going into beta testing. We went to eMule to discuss things like how the test was going and how this will affect the many mods of eMule.

There was a lot of excitement in the eMule community with word that a new version of the main eMule client getting an update. So we went over to the eMule forums to get a better picture on what the excitement was all about.

Some Support explained to ZeroPaid that most of what there is to know about this development has already been posted in the Beta forum. He added, “It’s a normal beta phase which we do for before every new release.”

We went to a number of eMule modders to get their responses. Stulle, developer of a number of mods including StulleMule told ZeroPaid, “I think the new version is a great step to improve KAD in matters of security against attacks. Many mods in the past started to [adopt] Netfinitys Safe Kad but it was neither all nor the majority which is using the official client. As such [the whole networks stability will improve].”

Here’s what else he told us:

Another great thing is the Captcha for messages. In the past the modders either had to maintain a list of bad messages like in the Xtreme mod or we had to rely on heuristics. The new captchas will ensure that we do not receive random messages generated by malicious clients. So this is a real improvement.

So, these two are the most obvious changes and as a result will the MorphXT loose all old “Safe KAD” features for the time being and we will see if Netfinity makes an effort to make a new version or maybe he is satisfied. Same applies to my ScarAngel project and Mephisto project, of course.

The StulleMule mod will most likely loose the hard coded list of leecher messages as they become pretty futile. As for Xtreme and subsequent I am uncertain if it will be changed or not. It’s all a little complicated there right now with Xman missing for quite some time. We gotta see if he returns or not. I hope he does although I will not let the Xtreme mod die if he does not.

There is little I can say about the testing. The short pre-beta phase proved to be beneficial and the beta phase proves to be beneficial, again. I think the official eMule team is doing a good job with all the testing and this really helps fixing bugs before they make it into a real release. Having a good base makes it easier for us because we do not have to keep up with official bug- and hotfixes. Although I have not started merging MorphXT or any of my mods, yet, the beta phase is also a great opportunity to merge the code. This in terms helps to release our mods closer to the actual release date, if we dare that is.

Leuk_he, a developer of the MorphXT mod of eMule told ZeroPaid, “For morph we will remove the (netf) safekad implementation because merging it will be hell , and rely on the official improvement in kad.”

When we asked David Xanatos, developer of NeoMule, how he felt the beta testing was going, he responded, “The Beta-testing process of 0.49a is much better than the previous ones, as you may notices from a thread in the development section the new version was available to some Moders long time before the public beta in order to help testing and fix the most important bugs.”

“The more peer review in a development process the better.” He added.

We asked him how this development will affect the mod he develops and maintains and he responded, “Not at all I think, it does not change anything on the need to update the Neo sooner or later, if I had enough free time, I presume the early availability of the beta code would speed up the release of a new Neo version, but momentarily my free time is very limited and so I’ll update to the final when it is final and most likely with some weeks delay.”

zz, developer of the ZZUL mod seems to have been unable to respond to our inquiries.

Overall, it seems that the latest beta test has been, overall, well received. Many users are currently working out the bugs in the system. Of course, it’s a beta version, so there probably is going to be bugs in it. The more users that work on the beta test, the better so as to get a more stable version developed among other things. The near future of eMule development appears to be very promising.

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Microsoft to launch code-sharing site

Jared Moya — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:02:34 +0000

Microsoft on Tuesday is expected to officially launch a community-building Web site where it will share code with developers.

The CodePlex site will be a venue for Microsoft to provide programmers with tools available under its Shared Source licenses. These licenses allow people to view the source code of products, the software giant said.

The site, which had been in beta testing, is meant to foster more interaction between Microsoft and programmers with technical information and software, it added.

Popular products already available on the site include Microsoft’s Atlas AJAX development tool kit and Iron Python beta 1.