Yet Another Game Studio Chooses To Mess With Pirates As A Strategy
from the lulz dept
There are lots of ways content makers can respond to copyright infringement. From going fully legal and suing, to attempting to threaten to sue to scare the hell out of the “pirates”, to seeking government intervention that would negatively impact all kinds of innocent folks, to trying (and failing) to curb piracy using DRM, none of these are particularly good strategies.
And I don’t know if simply choosing to have some fun by messing with the pirates is all that better from a results standpoint, but I do know that’s it’s my favorite thing that game companies do against piracy. Whether it’s changing game functions to get people to accidentally out themselves as pirates or making never ending vuvuzela sounds in the game, it’s quite often just downright funny.
Well, now Big Ant Studios is joining the club, having already gotten pirates to call themselves out by messing with them and stating that it has future plans to continue the hijinks. It starts with Cricket 22 and some minor annoyances in illegal copies of the game, namely a white flashing screen that occurs in between matches.
This is happening over and over again. Pirates pirate the game, see the weird issue, go to the forums to try to figure out how to fix it, only to find out that it was done on purpose to annoy pirates. Not a whole lot of harm in this, but it’s worth noting as well that Symons, CEO of Big Ant Studios, is coupling this with some fairly human messages to those that chose to buy the game after getting messed with.
That last bit is in reference to plans Big Ant claims to have for even further messing with those that pirate its games in the future. In other tweets and comments, it’s very clear that Symons is having a great deal of fun with this. While I might suggest that putting this much time and energy into combatting piracy at all might not be the efficient use of the studio’s time, I’ll also say that the human approach Symons is taking here, including allowing previous pirates to keep their games progress if they switch over to a legit version, makes it hard not to root for him and the studio on this one.
Is it worth all this effort? I’m not sure, but I’m here for the fun compared with heavy-handed legal routes.
Filed Under: annoyances, copyright, cricket 22, piracy, video games
Companies: big ant studios
Comments on “Yet Another Game Studio Chooses To Mess With Pirates As A Strategy”
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Hang the infringers like the pirates they are. That will prevent future infrirngement by them, and simultaneously discourage others.
Re:
Shh honey the adults are talking.
You chose to play the game… you’re on your own.
He’s doing business, and having fun. As long as their ‘pirate’ detection is flawless (I highly doubt it is, because I have an idea of how sw works) then it’s a win if only for the entertainment value he gets out of it.
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It doesn’t have to be flawless, it just has to have little to no false positives. False negatives aren’t an issue in this case, since they won’t affect legit users in any way.
That said, sales up 300%? Sounds worth it to me.
Tsch Tsch Tsch
When will game studios learn not to deal with pirates. They should know at this point that they bring cutlasses and shit.
Re:
Since the advent of the digital age, the digital cutlasses are most useful in Mortal Kombat.
But bringing a cutlass to Big Ant Studios? That just ain’t Cricket!
Re: Re: Brutality
There was a whole genre of brutality sports games in the early 90s.
No clue why that didn’t continue. I remember football (American) and hockey. I think there was a baseball game too.
The only thing close today is mutant league. Aside from NBA JAM those were the limit of sports titles I played more than once.
We need more, modern, rip their spine out sports games.
Copyright Cultists: How dare they scoff at our precious little monopolies and use our “Intellectual Property” without giving us our rightly deserved rent we deem fit to charge for the use. Let us teach those scoffers of our precious copyright monopolies a lesson not to mess with us. Oh why not make mean-spirited practical jokes on them so they will be sorry and get with the sacred program we have decided for our captive market. They learn their lesson and then will give us our rightly-deserved $$. This way We will win converts to our way of thinking and people will think us as cool and hip instead of the small-minded, ungenerous, greedy money-grubbing assholes that we are. Look, we already have a gullible Techdirt writer giving us accolades about how enlightened we are! How proud are we to think out this sound business strategy!
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And is that a good way of using the formula of CwF+Rtb to build a sustainable business model? By nagging your fans to death, playing mean-spirited practical jokes on them, and threatening them by legal actions, this is adding value and giving them good reasons to buy? the good reason to buy they give is to avoid their harassment and so have peace of mind?
How a wonderful business model indeed. Quite praiseworthy, eh?
How about stopping glorifying them and their backward thinking and maybe push to abolish copyrights to promote more intelligent innovations in business models and get rid of the social parasites and their lame business models? I’m sure society will be better off. And that will get rid of the problem of pirates. Eliminate the problem of the copyright cultists and the problem of pirates is eliminated as well and we dont have to hear more about the whining of the very entitled copyright cultists moaning about their scoffers not respecting their little pathetic copyright monopolies and they not getting every bit of profits they think they are entitled to.
Re: Re:
Steam became a thing despite the maximalists imposing the current model.
The rise in sales does suggest it was mostly an access problem, like Gaben said. Being able to keep their progress does help as well.
Re: Fuck you
I work in software development. I need to get paid, pay for my work or don’t use it.
Re: Re: IDGAF
So donI, and everything I’ve ever done that I had control over was released as IDGAF licensing.
If the product is worthwhile, you’ll get paid for it.
Re: Re:
I don’t use it. Why do I need to pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars and fund a court case because your IP address evidence is shitty?
Re: Re:
Fuck you back, copyright landlord or enabler. If your job depends on exploiting people, you should be ashamed. find a more socially productive job.
I have no problem with you being entitled to opportunities to make a living on your creation per se, but I have problem with your self-entitlement of money you think you “deserve” from society for your work how shitty your product may be or not. Recognize the difference. Entitled to make money from your creations, that’s all well, but fuck your self-entitlement to subsidies from society, comprende? Fuck corporate welfare or copyright holders welfare or “starving artists” welfare. Fuck your self-entitlement to work that does not pay enough on its own merits and need subsidies from society though copyrights to pay enough. If your product is not societally valuable enough to make a living on without help of copy restrictions then find another product to work on.
You being entitled to opportunities to make a living on your creations is one thing but being entitled to monoploy rents on products not valuable enough to be marketable without help of copyrights is a entirely different thing. The “fact” that copyrights are needed for a commercially viable industry in software development is not proven. It is just your dumb assumption based on the faith of the copyright cultists. What’s wrong with wanting government economic policies to be justified by demonstrated economic necessity or demonstrated holistic benefits to society and to be empirically driven? Instead of like being driven by forces of cronyism capitalism? And designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many? Especially when it comes at expense of our civil rights like freedom of speech for example. Faith-thinking or self-serving materialistic morality from the copyright cultists is no way to base government economic policies on or a basis for taking away freedoms from the public. How about supporting government creating economic policies using empiricality instead of religious-like thinking? How about promoting non-materialistic values for once? Is America materialistic enough already? How about worshipping something other than the Almighty Dollar? Culture does not need to be all about the money.
The government is supposed to be the government of the people not the government of corporations and copyright holders. You are not special, okay? Fuck your privileges. Fuck your monoploy rents and your self-entitlement to your pathetic business model and the inflated $$ you think you “deserve” from society for your product that depend on legally -forced artificially created scarcity for “value” to be commercially viable instead of on actual societal value. Copyrights are not supposed to be for YOUR benefits but for the benefits of ALL people. And since it works against the welfare of the people, it should be abolished. America does not revolve around your industry or your world, comprende?
Re: Re: Re:
With this principle, no product could be created at all. The reason is that at beginning when the quality of the product has not yet been fine-tuned, the product does not meet the quality requirements of the customers and thus cannot be valuable enough. But if you spend too much time fine-tuning it, the product becomes too expensive (if you count all the work spent for it). Thus no product can be created at all, simply because they’re not “immediately” valuable, when the necessary fine-tuning of the processes have not been fully implemented yet.
The products gets cheaper and higher quality when you fine-tune the processes of creating the products. But with your principles, none of the products can overcome the “death valley” of product creation, when the product is too low quality and too expensive to be valuable to customers.
Re: Re: Re:2
Nonsense.
Numbers not sophistry like yours should be used to demonstrate the economic necessity of copyrights . The burden of proof should be on the copyright promoters because they are the ones seeking governmental oppression. In a society that value freedoms, the default position a government that purported to be a government of the people should have is to have copyrights abolished in all cases except in cases the copyright promoters successfully meet their burden of proof that society is well-served enough to warrant the oppression they are asking for. What is considered adequate, that is the question. In my opinion, the promoters have not showed adequate justification in any current case. The question we should be asking in every case for copyright restrictions, is it worth it? How much do we value in dollars the diminishment of our civil rights and our public domain for example? If we agree copy restrictions have net benefits in certain cases, we should be asking how much time should we restrict ourselves for and how extensively should we restrict ourselves in all commercial cases and in non-commerical cases as well? Not using faith or sophistry, but by following the numbers to see what does work well and what does not. We alao should be determining together as a society what do we value more than rather blindly following the materialistic values and glorification of greed of the copyright cultists.
In any case, the case for copyright restrictions should be measured and demonstrated to benefit the many on whatever measurement of value we agree to use. If it fails to demonstrate net benefits to the people or it is demostrated lacking in justification to warrant all the restrictions then the copy restrictions should be abolished for that case. This should be the default position. We dont revolve around the corporations or the copyright holders. They should revolve around us. They should be asking how they can serve us, rather asking how more can they extract from us. We should not be asking how can we serve THEM. We don’t need copyrights automatically established on everything for 100 years plus after creator death. That is plainly ludicrous. What copyrights takes away has economic value as well, not only just societal value.
Is copyrights worth it, no, not in general in my opinion, but some cases I’ll allow it may be. But I don’t care for the copyright cultists’ materialistic values so how do we agree in how much this or this should be valued? If copy restrictions and all the surveillance and crap that they come with is deemed necessary and desired for economic reasons, it better be backed by economic data. if the economic data does not back the current copy restrictions sufficiently, we should abolish them. We should not be supporting copy restrictions based on faith it is necessary and good, or sophistry, or self-serving morality, or emotional arguments like “oh think of the starving artists” or other crap we hear from the copyright cultists.
Re: Re: Re:3
The benefit of copy restriction is that people need to create the works from scratch. This “creating the product from scratch” is key activity in copyright laws, basically to ensure that essential services of our society does not become unmaintainable when noone in the world is able to recreate the material from scratch. Thus copyrights are encouraging people to start from low level and slowly build techniques to fill in the gaps after the previous technology gets exploded. Thus under copyright law, the authors should do the following operations: 1) examine what is a stable base for the work 2) kill all technologies that are unstable 3) build the gaps from scratch to ensure that the unstable part can be recreated on demand.
This deals with sustainability of the technologies we build.
While some people complain that starting from scratch means that people are unable to finish their projects and the overall output quality is lower. This isn’t the case though. There’s real technical limitations like computer memory sizes and cpu speeds/moore’s law etc. which anyway limit how far the technology can go. Thus the only alternative is to remove what other people have created and build different variation of the same module. This is what it means to build things from scratch.
Gamifying moderation
I await the day when techdirt figures out how to troll it’s own trolls in a similar vein.
I still worry, however, about false positive detections annoying paying or legit users.
I still think techdirt should offer Kobe (and any intrepid volunteers) a truly unmoderated comment section.
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Wouldn’t help. A troll that does not attract outrage starves. We’ve seen that with Parler, we’ve seen that with Truth Social (even the Big T doesn’t post there!)
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Honestly? I’ve always preferred the swift, violent approach.
How Mike hasn’t banned Chozen after being straight up harassed by the Neonazi fuck boggles me.
Re:
Yes, I’m trolling like the game companynis trolling the pirates, it all is in good fun, right? The techdirt writer thinks what the game company is doing great, eh? So in same vein I do the same. What is good for goose is good for gander? It’s just all harmless fun, right? Or is it bad to mock the copyright cultists but good to mock the pirates kind of thing? My bad.
Re: Re:
I remember the first time I got high too bro.
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Comments caught in the spam filter are still visible only to you but with a “held for moderation” added to the bottom…
Wait a minute…
Big Ant is a subsidary of Nacon.
You know, the publisher trying to dispute Frogware’s ownerahip of at least 1 game?
Uh, "White, flashing screen"?
As someone who does not thankfully have the photosensitive kind of epilepsy, but knows people who do…. uh…. could they have perhaps chosen something better?
Re:
Not many people have the sort of photosensitive epilepsy, which is affected by a fairly narrow range of flashing cycles per second for people who are sensitive to that sort of thing. A whitesceen is not going to trigger that. But playing games or watching anything on a display for long periods might. Bad fluorescent or LED lights. Or certain colors. Or patterns.
This is a dumb complaint given the ramifications (positive and negative) of these potential triggers.
Huh?
It all sounds a bit weird, really – pirated games don’t just grow on trees: they get released by a warez group who did the cracking of whatever protection the game was supposed to come with. In this instance, that INCLUDES any and all of these annoyances, which are not supposed to still be in a proper bootleg release. So dunno, who exactly are we talking about here? Lazy/incompetent bootleggers…? People who try to “pirate” games by copy-pasting the game folder…? Are we just gloating at an exceedingly poor straw man…?
Re:
Often they go one better than that too, and fix performance issues which are present in the official release by correcting glaring errors which cause the game to not fully enable multithreading on certain CPUs and the like.
Basically, the courtesy horn
The somewhat equivalent to this: https://youtu.be/lv8wqnk_TsA
I rather have that than “damaging” DRMs like sony rootkit, phoning home, or any other acts outside the software.
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Already tried this in 1994
We already messed with pirates in 1994, when our amiga game was released. Basically we had detection if the floppy disk was copied without deep copy and if so, the game worked kinda funny. And once first pirate failed to copy the floppy with deep copy, all the subsequent copies were working funny. Sadly soon after, the cracking groups cracked the game and then there was copies without the protection floating around in the marketplace.
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TP, you’re definitely not the first one to try this “fun DRM”. Ever heard of the Secret of Monkey Island? It had a code wheel where you would line up faces of different characters and if it was correct, you could play the game.
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Sounds like you tried to turn bad code in “copy protection” bro.
Re: Re:
That wasn’t the worst code the project had. What do you think of the feature that the game needed 1Mb of chip memory when most of the amiga’s in the market only had 512kb of chip mem. The publisher must have had tons of fun printing to the packaging that it requires 1mb of chip mem while knowing that half the people don’t read the small print until they purchase the game, only to find out that it doesn’t work in their amiga.
Re: Re: Re:
Tero, the truth is you never had a team, and the only games you’ve ever developed are the demos you have on itch.io that make a child’s first Flash animation on Newgrounds look like Pixar’s work.
Re: Re: Re:2
So your theory is that the 100 million gadgets that people were purchasing all over europe were all created by me alone, since I never had a team.
I don’t think so. While our technology always was lagging behind the bleeding edge, and even after moving to fix the problem by adopting opengl, our technology stacks are all fragmented and behind the curve. But noone is going to do 100 million gadgets without some access to a bigger team.
Guess demo scene and the nerds who grew up in 1980s is going to save our ass by providing technology that is a little more up-to-date and fresh coming from oven. They have already learned to avoid pirate areas and all moved to writing demos/intros and maybe moved to game jams. Assembly and Ludumdare are very fresh and new, so maybe if we throw enough stuff to a wall, something will stick.
But it’s all technology development. All the anti-tech people will be plesantly suprised when their computers are not flickering like hell, and you don’t need to stop using essential computer equipment for epilepsy warning. That blunder happened even to the richest bastards on the planet, i.e. the folks who created star wars. But meshpage.org and related technologies designed around that problem. We can confidently say it’s better than star wars.
There’s still the mickey mouse problem. Comic books are essential for children at the age 5-10 and our technology is focusing on the same age group. It needs to be better than whatever mickey mouse animations they had in 1980s when we watched frame rate blunders created by the animation technology at the time.
Re: Re: Re:3 Everyone can see it but you bro
“So your theory is that the 100 million gadgets that people were purchasing all over europe were all created by me alone, since I never had a team.”
No our theory is you are a really, really, bad liar who’s ego is too bloated to properly interface with reality.
Re: Re: Re:4
You know, it’s illegal to take someone’s money without passing along some replacement for it. When people purchasing symbian phones were passing millions of euros to the company, the finnish law says that the company must pass some product to the customers. Since you only went so far as call me as a liar and not a criminal, the story must follow the finnish law. Given that the millions of money is in our company’s bank account and it’s being invested to IOT projects according to old financial times article, the 100 million products must have changed hands, if we’re going to get the story straight.
So your options are:
1) either accept that the 100 million products exist
2) or find out loophole from finnish law that says how companies handle exchanging products to money.
3) or declare that you didn’t go far enough when you called me a liar
4) or find out other way to get those millions of money without stepping over finnish law
Either way, the options are looking pretty grim for your story.
Re: Re: Re:5
The lie in question is not whether you’ve developed code used in 100 million working phones that were sold at some point. If anything, I’d question whether you’re actually developing any games like you claim Meshpage was, after you’d allegedly signed a non-disclosure agreement with a publisher after seven years of negotiations.
Either way, Finnish law doesn’t get involved. You might not like it, but it’s not against the law of your government to not believe your claims.
Re: Re: Re:6
And this is because you define “game” as something that involves cunning trickery and spy stories. The products available on meshpage simply cannot fulfill this strict defition and thus no games are coming?
Re: Re: Re:7
None of the games I play on a regular basis involves those themes or game mechanics.
This is… honestly not a problem with me. If you don’t design games or an engine to support the genre of game someone wants, it’s not the other person’s fault.
Re: Re: Re:3
Suppose you were given the benefit of the doubt, and to be fair, you could believably have worked in Nokia and maybe contributed a few lines of code used in phones at some point. And that’s the thing, “at some point”. The fact you did work in such a capacity does not magically make Meshpage a product worth using. To use another example, Valve was a pioneer in game development and publishing. They were a titan for a time with Team Fortress 2 and shifting it to a free-to-play model. Now TF2 is a shell of a game populated by sniper bots. You can do something great and then fall into irrelevance afterwards.
This is probably true, but you’re the one who’s claimed on multiple occasions to hate other humans. Your lack of a team is a self-inflicted problem.
Not including flashing lights is not a tech problem. It’s entirely a design choice. Never mind the fact that you’re barely in the same industry. And if you refuse to compete with Blender on the basis that Blender has a larger development team, you’re not going to compete with Star Wars.
The appropriateness of introducing children to comic books aside, given the variety of comics in the industry, at no point have you actually shown your technology to your age group. All you’ve done is a few itch.io demos, at best, made $2 off of them in 10 years (in your own words), and consistently got angry at the government of Finland for not making you rich beyond your wildest dreams. And again, you hate other humans. You can’t even be bothered to demonstrate your engine to children. Hell, you think teaching other people a programming language is a waste of your skill and genius. Nobody with a functioning brain believes you intend to educate children in any meaningful way.
Re: Re: Re:4
I dont think you understand the real problem. Its more than just flashing lights. You need to keep movement steady too, i.e the old animations with 30fps just wont cut it.
Re: Re: Re:5
This is not the complex mechanical challenge you want people to believe it is. Having a static camera that doesn’t move unless keyframed otherwise is one of the most basic things you can do in an engine for 3D animation.
You keep trying to market basic functions of 3D engines as impressive and difficult to warrant the government giving you money. Here’s another reminder: it won’t. Your government doesn’t owe you a cent for ten years of a passion project that you yourself personally engineered to not make money.
"More pirate pain..."
…coupled with an offer to let pirates save their progress if they buy a legit copy makes me wonder if soon pirates will not be able to save their progress.
Turning one sale into 3 is technically 300%. Nobody in countries where cricket is popular can afford to pay $45 USD. The cheapest regional price is in Turkey (approx $20 USD) because the currency is incredibly devalued.
“Steam sales are up 300%”. One use for piracy is “try before you buy”, as most games don’t have demos and people may not think Steam’s 2-hour refund window is long enough, or may not know/want to use it. DRM that effectively prevented piracy would reduce sales as well, whereas this kind of mostly-playable strategy is likely to increase sales.
Re:
As long as purchase can easily patch out APir ‘features’ it works.
And games like rocket league where the pirate flag became a kool badge.
Some publishers’ APir options are so popular they let you keep them after purchasing.