Find me one successful company that relies on morality as the cornerstone of it's business plan.

I wouldn't expect human beings to change anytime soon, so you might think about changing your business plan in the mean time.

The way you summarise this seems slightly misleading to me. It is the interviewer who raises the piracy question and Felix gives every indication of understanding that the piracy level isn't directly relevant to sales.

A high piracy percentage isn't even necessarily bad. Rather than representing reduced sales it might be a sign that the game is being enjoyed by the people who play it and is therefore spreading by word of mouth amongst the pirates.

As Dom said too, I don't think piracy rates are bad so long as your sales are doing well. If my games hit above 90% piracy but I'm still raking in the cash then I wouldn't care as much.

As someone who has pirate games in most of his old console library and only started buying original games once I got a job there's a lack of quality when you pirate a game. It loses something for sure.

The bad called piracy (because real pirates steal to sell the stolen goods) is a practice that is highly promoted by software protected by insane and inutile techniques.

crackers take them as a challenge and users think that is normal to use that kind of programs because existed since they have born in the software world

ps: 95% must be a joke btw (inflated as the economy)

About 90% of married people cheat on their spouses, too, statistically. Fairly similar number. To paraphrase Edmund: I'VE SOLVED THIS! People are not as good as others say they are! They have flaws!

I still can't believe how people can pirate independent games...

Lol at Flaws... eheh paul it's already 210 comments.. it's time to stop it eh eh..

Now talking seriously, yes it's wierd to see indie games in warez. Btw What is this GreenHouse they talk in the Article?

On the game i would say i am not surprised, if you make 'niche' games you can't expect mass selling... Why not pubblish your game on the Iphone toorather than wii?

^^^
Agreed.
What is a real shame is that there are indies out there who do NOT have DRM on their software which are relatively cheap to buy and yet there are people who STILL pass it around in torrents for free. :\

Yes, it is unfourtunate but often ppl are gready and thoughtless,. OR perhaps it is that we are living in an imposed economic system (banker controled corporate capitalism) that is counter productive to human nature? We should devise a new system, that is in tune with human nature. Why not a debt free society where resources are used responsibly, to provide for the needs of all, and people are not made to work endlessly to pay for systemicly created debt, inflation, and interest that flows money/wealth/resources up to few, created from the efforts of the many,. When the banker created artifical debt based system is removed, ppl will balance time working of material needs (food/shelter) with creative/spirtual/philosophical/scentific persuits. I would be happy working 5 hours a day growing raising my own food and haveing 5 hours to work on games dev. music, etc. At that time I will not need to charge for my efforts with those more 'artistic' endevours. All things are posible.

I find it a tad ridiculous that there are that many pirates for this game -- I downloaded the demo and that was deterrent enough for me. The game is disjointed and buggy; not my idea of fun.

Also: JPH, your might want to spend some time studying economics and sociology -- there's a lot of data and history that points to such an optimistic model failing, endlessly. You'd have to work more than 5 hours a day to feed yourself; pray you have no one else to support.

Put a code in the game that if atempt to hack it delete the HD and put a virus on the pc.
There.

I don't see a thing wrong with this. Those who pirate never intended to buy the game, thusly you never even had potential sales. You don't ever lose money when you have things pirated, you only lose "fake" money that you could've had.

Also, piracy can help increase sales. Many pirates I know claim that if the game deserves money and isn't a ridiculous amount (say, $60), they will pay for it and support the developer; most follow through with that claim.

Hi I am the developer of another indie title, and I too can report very large piracy rates.
Quite saddening, but not much you can do about it really. Using DRM will only hurt legit users as the cracked versions will have it wiped.
Best of luck.

In reply to Pedgi.
As the first anon poster here i've rebought all the good games i pirated whilst at college. but then again i even rebought games I already legally bought. Good games will always be purchased and if the pirate grows a heart they'll buy and replay games.

dont give up on humanity just yet!

Last time we checked, we could estimate a 80% piracy rate of Harvest, based on non-demo scores submitted to our high-score server. Most of the pirates had used the the cracked Reflexive version of the game.

Our conclusion was that we've wasted time and paying customer's convenience by adding DRM to our game.

What're the sales numbers on legitimate copies? I'd like to know if it's worth it to get into this field or not.

jph, i'm with you on that point!!

Greg, ...not with todays technology, knowledge about history and the facts about the outgoing resources... - a new, sustainable model will be needed, i think that's fact, and the internet is/can be kind of a "sandbox" for trying it out and changing our minds @"global culture eco system". just my opinion...

i would be all for a indie game portal, where all would be for free. but donations would be enforced by a special point system... each member/player/maker would have a point account. you could vote for games with points (small transaction without tax), and support the creators, depending on your income and opinion. points convert back to money...

0rel, why abstract the value of money by transferring it to points? is a point worth 1$, or .087$? i have a big problem with these kinds of imaginary currencies.

Exactly 0rel,. I am not a primativist, I propose appropriate tech. used in balance WITH nature. Permaculture. BTW hows the music progy coming?
Greg - I have indeed studied human organisation from various angles and through numerous lenses for many years now. This thread has re-ignited some of my thoughts on this and a proper responce don't fit here,. therfore I will be revamping my site with a new 'eco-village of artist' proposal, with a blog, forum, and my collected research and ideas, and referance materials in the hopes of building a community, first online,. and then in physical space. Cheak my site in the near future, or my old site has a bit of info.., I have been gardening since I was a small child and am quite aware of what level of work is needed to shape natural systems to produce food,. and homes. Strawbail construction is a passion of mine, growing houses!

FISH,

* otherwise one would have to pay via credit card or PayPal, what always costs something. with a community currency, a donation would be directly added to the receiver's account, which would be taxless, and easy to use interface-wise.

* 1 point ~ 0,1 cent, so that it would be possible to make "micro donations", repeatedly, after updates, also during development maybe, or just to help somebody/a group to start a project.

* points feel better, more like voting points, than money.

* a point system could help to keep track of everything, for easier administration and control, so that people who spend more could get bonuses, or kind of "supporter tags". maybe all transfers would be even transparent for everybody? Would probably quite risky, community-wise...

* as a creator, one could start with 0 points, get some by contributing to the community (by making games, other content, writing reviews, maybe even by collaborations or moderation...). the earned points could be given back to others again... all without ever touching real money, or loosing value due to repeated "transfer taxes".

* the platform holders could earn money by applying a tax, only when you buy points or convert them back to money (~10-20%?).

* the point account would be (like in a forum) part of the web interface, and easy to use... when enough people accept and use the point system in a positive way, new members would naturally make that too. get points - give points. which couldn't be achieved with normal donations, i think.

i've also posted something about that idea before, here

but hey..., i have really no experience with such things ;-), and wouldn't be able to build something like that myself, anyway... i just think, something like that could solve piracy problem in a positive way, and also raise more awareness of the type of products we are dealing with here... it makes sense to support hard working, creative people, but it really doesn't, to sell software like normal "material products", for a fixed price per piece, worldwide. the value of material products is fundamentally different from 1:1 copyable, "eternal" goods, like software pieces ...that's also why i personally don't think software piracy is the same as stealing something.

http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/05/indie_developers_make_some_mon.html#comment-870664

Hey, i just had an idea: Why not pay for the effort of creating the original instead of for the effort of copying it?

Oh wait, there's no infrastructure and its culturally obscure... and it would probably not be complicated enough.... hmmm

0rel how does this solve the issue of piracy? Are the games all flash games or are there downloadable games as well? If the later how do the downloadable games compete with free? Does the author make money solely on the goodwill of the community? Finally how does the operating of this service make money? Does he also rely on the generosity of the community?

@Alex,

0rel how does this solve the issue of piracy?
all would be for free.

Are the games all flash games or are there downloadable games as well? If the later how do the downloadable games compete with free?
all sorts of pc games.

Does the author make money solely on the goodwill of the community?
yes! :)

Finally how does the operating of this service make money? Does he also rely on the generosity of the community?
no, the site owners could make some money by a conversion tax for buying points (and/or converting them back).

but,
hmmmm...
honestly,
i don't really believe it would work, after all.
it's waaay too optimistic,
probably. beside other issues...

The idea that people would pay for this game when games like jumpman are given away free is absurd.

I think you run into a bunch of trouble when you allow users to convert points back to cash. You're giving the points a cash value, and it might even be legally recognized as gambling.

You just have to love pirates. The most amusing thing about them is how they try to justify their actions. Who are they trying to convince? Themselves?

"Those who pirate never intended to buy the game..." is plain wrong. Sure not all would have bought it, but as long as piracy is risk-free and easy to do, even people who would have bought a game will do it.

"Also, piracy can help increase sales. Many pirates I know claim..." Well now that's a two for one. Increase sales by telling friends how to pirate a game? Pirates claiming they are honest? That's like like a heroine addict claiming he's a benefit to society by introducing a friend to crack and of course he can stop any time.

Hilarious stuff :)

"Sure not all would have bought it, but as long as piracy is risk-free and easy to do, even people who would have bought a game will do it."

Are you talking about yourself here?

@Anonymous

Pro-oh-oh-jecting a bit, to be sure?

You can't contain human nature in a blog comment. Any claim to the contrary is pure hubris.

And love the obligatory nonsensical comparison of pirates to some unrelated real-world problem. Always the winner argument.

Oh please. You're all guilty of projecting and generalizing about human nature. No one knows how the mob of pirates think because it's a mob.

To those who blindly defend piracy in all its forms: try creating something, try pouring your soul into something - and then watch that same thing cracked, torrented, pirated, and otherwise dissected. The worst part will be their stinging claim that all piracy somehow helps you and they're doing you a service? That's just as stupidly dogmatic as the propaganda spewing about DRM and activation limits.

Anyway, we're all guilty and we're all bad people. The end.

The age of selling redistributable content is dead. If it can be copied and "stolen," it will be. That's how the world works now, and short of dismantling the entire Internet, that's how it will stay.

Piracy cannot do the service it's capable of doing if the only way to compensate a creator is the fixed price point of the original game. If every pirate had the option to easily, effortlessly donate at least a dollar to AYIM's developer, it would make quite a lot more money.

Stop rationalizing piracy you idiots. You make me sick.

Remember when VHS was going to cripple the movie industry?

Good times...

I agree with Dom, the missing part of the quoted answer gives a better understanding of AYIM creator's opinion:

"Bootlegging is a reality on the PC and we definitely know that not every game cracked means a lost sale, there’s no easy 1:1 conversion here. We are also of the strong believe that any game will be cracked, no matter how we try to protect it, so our philosophy is that adding DRM or anything similar only annoys the people who actually pay for it. We don’t want to do this so we sell our game DRM free on our site to make the process of buying And Yet It Moves as easy as downloading a bootleg. The interesting bit is also that the current crack that circulates on bittorrent trackers etc. is actually a cracked greenhouse version and not the DRM free game we sell via our site."

Hey guys,
Broken Rules here.
Thanks for all the interest and heavy commenting. Bootlegging still seems quite the hot topic :)

First of all we want to say that we calcualted the rate using data from the online highscore tables, which makes this numbers quite accurate. Still the 95,5% sound too exact and they are in the interview by mistake, we actually wanted to round this number, which we got from the calculator, to 95%, but forgot it.

Secondly thanks for also quoting the whole sentence out of the interview, as our answer was not supposed to be whiney. This is all not about complaining but about giving out information others might find useful. We know that the issue of bootlegging is quite complicated and not everything about it is plain bad. At least we know that many people are interested in playing And Yet It Moves :). Still, there is a correlation between our not-so-stellar sales and a high bootlegging rate and we will have to react to it.

Last but not least we are currently hosting a competition and you can win a full version by playing the demo. For more information go to http://www.andyetitmoves.net/index.php?content=competitions

Have fun competing and may the fastest win!

Greets
Broken Rules

PS: Spread the word and tell all your friends as well ;)