Whelp, thats what Funcom gets for having Tornquist work on anything that isn't the continuation of The Longest Journey that never happened. Some episodic thing if I recall.
EDIT: Guess thats still happening. He's got a tweet mentioning it and a possible TLJ2 from just yesterday. I'm content.
But, yeah, not shocked about TSW bombing in the slightest. Had some neat ideas wrapped up in what seemed like a pretty bad game from what I played in the beta.
I have been a subscriber to Nintendo Power since 1996. I'm really sad to see it's ceasing publication. The Magazine had actually gotten better in the last few years.
I guess now my goal will be to acquire a complete Back issue set.
Switch Friend Code: SW-4598-4278-8875
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
I have been a subscriber to Nintendo Power since 1996. I'm really sad to see it's ceasing publication. The Magazine had actually gotten better in the last few years.
I guess now my goal will be to acquire a complete Back issue set.
I was a subscriber from April 1992 (the WWF cover with Hogan and the SNES controller) til 98 or 99. I'm going back and looking at old covers right now and letting the waves of nostalgia roll over me.
50 issues from having all the Nintendo magazines? If so . . . damn!
I actually think its pretty amazing it has been around for as long as it has as I can recall a number of gaming magazines ceasing a couple years ago.
Yep. I'm missing most of the early ones (I think the earliest I have is issue 19...can't remember off the top of my head), but I started subscribing around issue 92 or something like that (I remember because the 100th issue was in my first year as a subscriber) and have renewed my subscription every year since. I found about 30 of the earlier ones at a used booksale one time for 5 cents each. that helped a lot!
I will admit that the last few years it seemed like the Magazine would cease to exist at any moment, though, because they really didn't have anything you couldn't find online. They did have some good retro features in recent issues, though.
Switch Friend Code: SW-4598-4278-8875
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
Ever wonder why the Android game market lags far behind iOS despite selling phones like crazy? Apparently, it's because piracy is rampant there.
One huge issue is that the average smartphone gamer doesn't even realize that piracy is as bad as it is on Android, and subsequently may accidentally download a pirated version of a game, Misha Lyalin, CEO of Cut the Rope developer ZeptoLab tells Gamasutra.
"Users ofter search for 'Cut the Rope' through a search engine and end up downloading a pirated version," Lyalin says. "That's just an honest mistake.
"While we do try to take down most copycats and pirates, a lot of ways to protect our games would be not very user-friendly or won't meet our quality standards. Because the user is the most important piece of our puzzle, we generally choose to focus on adopting our business model -- utilizing ads and in-app purchases - rather than taking on pirates," he says.
The iOS platform is still Zeptolab's top priority as a result of Android's issues, Lyalin admits, although the Android platform still allows his studio to deliver its games to a huge number of players, despite whether they actually pay for the products or not.
"Ultimately, that is what's most important to us," he says.
Dead on arrival
...
Madfinger recently made its zombie shooter Dead Trigger free-to-play as a result of terrible piracy rates -- however, this wasn't the first time that the studio had fallen foul to piracy on the platform.
"The piracy rate for Shadowgun was actually even higher," she tells us. "It reached 90 percent, then after a few months decreased to 80 percent and now it is falling bit by bit and averaging at 78 percent. Being sold for $8 and $5 later, there was no effective way of defending against piracy."
And yet, the studio believes that "Android is just as important as iOS. Both platforms have their pros and cons anyway. As for development issues, there are no differences between these platforms. We do not prefer one of them to the other."
She goes on to note, "The Android install base is so big that it can't be cold-shouldered by developers - especially when using the Unity engine makes this process considerably easier,"
...
Sports Interactive's dabble with the Android space was well documented earlier this year, when its game Football Manager Handheld saw a piracy ratio of 9:1 on the Google platform.
The studio's director Miles Jacobson noted that he has never seen piracy rates that bad before -- Football Manager 2009 had a 5:1 piracy rate, but that's about as bad as it had been before Football Manager Handheld hit Android.
"We are well aware of piracy on all platforms, and were expecting it to be bad on Android," he added. "But it's still a shock when you see just how bad it is! It has had an effect on the company - there are costs, both financial and opportunity wise, for each person playing the game, and each hurdle that we face."
Jacobson believes that the Android platform simply cannot stay in the same way that is currently is otherwise all Google Play users are going to be left with is free-to-play titles.
"Someone clever will come along and do something to help fix it," he adds. "Piracy will never go away though - it hasn't on any format in the last 30 years."
This week's Famitsu reveals that Minna no Golf 6 will be returning to the PS3 on Nov 22. This is the same Hot Shots Golf game which was a Vita launch title. The PS3 port will be crossplay compatible with Vita, as well as compatible with the Move controller. There is no price mentioned yet.
Sony is just dead set on precisely following the skidmarks the PSP left, aren't they?
Well, this is probably gonna piss off a lotta Vita owners, but I'll say it anyways:
Looking forward to a Gravity Rush port!
Don't know about the golf game, but Gravity Rush uses the Vita's controls rather well. Wouldn't feel the same on the PS3 (although they could probably improve the load times).
The saddest part about TSW hurting Funcom so badly and it getting so widely panned in reviews is that it's one of the only MMOs that's gotten that near-mythical "miracle patch" at the end of beta that turned a mediocre game with shoddy combat into a surprisingly good, engaging, original game with pretty good combat, if a bit on the slow side.
Most of the low-scoring reviews (especially the infamous G4 one)? Reviewed the beta.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Most TSW players I've talked to, even the ones who left, feel that the TSW review scores are due entirely to the fact that Funcom didn't spend enough money on advertising.
Most TSW players I've talked to, even the ones who left, feel that the TSW review scores are due entirely to the fact that Funcom didn't spend enough money on advertising.
I'm curious what the line of reasoning is behind that?
I'm hoping that doesn't come off as dismissive, I'm geniunely curious how they feel it would have affected review scores, because in this industry I'm not going to handwave that off as I've seen weirder things happen (like companies starting to assign bonuses based on sites that are basically giant internet polls).
Personally I've been chalking it up to a bad roll of the dice with the market, and that they were just doomed in ways they couldn't fix, but I really haven't been reading up on the external factors.
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Ever wonder why the Android game market lags far behind iOS despite selling phones like crazy? Apparently, it's because piracy is rampant there.
One huge issue is that the average smartphone gamer doesn't even realize that piracy is as bad as it is on Android, and subsequently may accidentally download a pirated version of a game, Misha Lyalin, CEO of Cut the Rope developer ZeptoLab tells Gamasutra.
"Users ofter search for 'Cut the Rope' through a search engine and end up downloading a pirated version," Lyalin says. "That's just an honest mistake.
"While we do try to take down most copycats and pirates, a lot of ways to protect our games would be not very user-friendly or won't meet our quality standards. Because the user is the most important piece of our puzzle, we generally choose to focus on adopting our business model -- utilizing ads and in-app purchases - rather than taking on pirates," he says.
The iOS platform is still Zeptolab's top priority as a result of Android's issues, Lyalin admits, although the Android platform still allows his studio to deliver its games to a huge number of players, despite whether they actually pay for the products or not.
"Ultimately, that is what's most important to us," he says.
Dead on arrival
...
Madfinger recently made its zombie shooter Dead Trigger free-to-play as a result of terrible piracy rates -- however, this wasn't the first time that the studio had fallen foul to piracy on the platform.
"The piracy rate for Shadowgun was actually even higher," she tells us. "It reached 90 percent, then after a few months decreased to 80 percent and now it is falling bit by bit and averaging at 78 percent. Being sold for $8 and $5 later, there was no effective way of defending against piracy."
And yet, the studio believes that "Android is just as important as iOS. Both platforms have their pros and cons anyway. As for development issues, there are no differences between these platforms. We do not prefer one of them to the other."
She goes on to note, "The Android install base is so big that it can't be cold-shouldered by developers - especially when using the Unity engine makes this process considerably easier,"
...
Sports Interactive's dabble with the Android space was well documented earlier this year, when its game Football Manager Handheld saw a piracy ratio of 9:1 on the Google platform.
The studio's director Miles Jacobson noted that he has never seen piracy rates that bad before -- Football Manager 2009 had a 5:1 piracy rate, but that's about as bad as it had been before Football Manager Handheld hit Android.
"We are well aware of piracy on all platforms, and were expecting it to be bad on Android," he added. "But it's still a shock when you see just how bad it is! It has had an effect on the company - there are costs, both financial and opportunity wise, for each person playing the game, and each hurdle that we face."
Jacobson believes that the Android platform simply cannot stay in the same way that is currently is otherwise all Google Play users are going to be left with is free-to-play titles.
"Someone clever will come along and do something to help fix it," he adds. "Piracy will never go away though - it hasn't on any format in the last 30 years."
Piracy is a fair enough point, but the real question is whether that piracy is actually cutting in on the profits in any meaningful way. Is it better to not make anything for Android at all and make no money, or is it better to develop for Android, sell a bunch of copies, and then have a bunch of people pirate the game who were never going to pay for it on any OS anyway?
To take the extreme end of the statistic there, how many copies sold did that 10% of non-pirated copies include? Was it at all comparable to iOS sales? Because if only 10% of the game out there are legit, but that 10% equates to a similar number of sales on iOS devices (or even just something significantly profitable), then who gives a shit about the piracy? You're still making the money off the game as you would have normally.
I'm not saying the guy isn't wholly unreasonable, but there's no sense of scale there. For a console example, if a company made a game with the usual AAA budget and sold 10 million copies but 90 million people pirated it who would never have bought it anyway, would that really be a solid reason to not develop for a console? Wholly hypothetical, obviously, but I still would like to know how these guys did business-wise even with all that piracy.
Ever wonder why the Android game market lags far behind iOS despite selling phones like crazy? Apparently, it's because piracy is rampant there.
One huge issue is that the average smartphone gamer doesn't even realize that piracy is as bad as it is on Android, and subsequently may accidentally download a pirated version of a game, Misha Lyalin, CEO of Cut the Rope developer ZeptoLab tells Gamasutra.
"Users ofter search for 'Cut the Rope' through a search engine and end up downloading a pirated version," Lyalin says. "That's just an honest mistake.
"While we do try to take down most copycats and pirates, a lot of ways to protect our games would be not very user-friendly or won't meet our quality standards. Because the user is the most important piece of our puzzle, we generally choose to focus on adopting our business model -- utilizing ads and in-app purchases - rather than taking on pirates," he says.
The iOS platform is still Zeptolab's top priority as a result of Android's issues, Lyalin admits, although the Android platform still allows his studio to deliver its games to a huge number of players, despite whether they actually pay for the products or not.
"Ultimately, that is what's most important to us," he says.
Dead on arrival
...
Madfinger recently made its zombie shooter Dead Trigger free-to-play as a result of terrible piracy rates -- however, this wasn't the first time that the studio had fallen foul to piracy on the platform.
"The piracy rate for Shadowgun was actually even higher," she tells us. "It reached 90 percent, then after a few months decreased to 80 percent and now it is falling bit by bit and averaging at 78 percent. Being sold for $8 and $5 later, there was no effective way of defending against piracy."
And yet, the studio believes that "Android is just as important as iOS. Both platforms have their pros and cons anyway. As for development issues, there are no differences between these platforms. We do not prefer one of them to the other."
She goes on to note, "The Android install base is so big that it can't be cold-shouldered by developers - especially when using the Unity engine makes this process considerably easier,"
...
Sports Interactive's dabble with the Android space was well documented earlier this year, when its game Football Manager Handheld saw a piracy ratio of 9:1 on the Google platform.
The studio's director Miles Jacobson noted that he has never seen piracy rates that bad before -- Football Manager 2009 had a 5:1 piracy rate, but that's about as bad as it had been before Football Manager Handheld hit Android.
"We are well aware of piracy on all platforms, and were expecting it to be bad on Android," he added. "But it's still a shock when you see just how bad it is! It has had an effect on the company - there are costs, both financial and opportunity wise, for each person playing the game, and each hurdle that we face."
Jacobson believes that the Android platform simply cannot stay in the same way that is currently is otherwise all Google Play users are going to be left with is free-to-play titles.
"Someone clever will come along and do something to help fix it," he adds. "Piracy will never go away though - it hasn't on any format in the last 30 years."
Piracy is a fair enough point, but the real question is whether that piracy is actually cutting in on the profits in any meaningful way. Is it better to not make anything for Android at all and make no money, or is it better to develop for Android, sell a bunch of copies, and then have a bunch of people pirate the game who were never going to pay for it on any OS anyway?
To take the extreme end of the statistic there, how many copies sold did that 10% of non-pirated copies include? Was it at all comparable to iOS sales? Because if only 10% of the game out there are legit, but that 10% equates to a similar number of sales on iOS devices (or even just something significantly profitable), then who gives a shit about the piracy? You're still making the money off the game as you would have normally.
I'm not saying the guy isn't wholly unreasonable, but there's no sense of scale there. For a console example, if a company made a game with the usual AAA budget and sold 10 million copies but 90 million people pirated it who would never have bought it anyway, would that really be a solid reason to not develop for a console? Wholly hypothetical, obviously, but I still would like to know how these guys did business-wise even with all that piracy.
Then you also have to ask how exactly are they tracking how many people are pirating it, if they're not just flat out using some bullshit RIAA mathematics(i.e. this didn't sell as many as we think it should have, therefore the difference is due to piracy)?
Or does Android or the program itself have some sort of regular "phone home" mechanism for programs post-storefront? Because that in itself would be pretty damn scary even in legitimate copies. But you would expect something like that to be found and cracked out pretty early in most cases if it even was there.
Most TSW players I've talked to, even the ones who left, feel that the TSW review scores are due entirely to the fact that Funcom didn't spend enough money on advertising.
Doubtful that it's about advertising dollars, but it could be about press relations. MMORPGs are a pain in the patoot to review. They are huge and require a major time investment in order to evaluate thoroughly, especially if you're stepping into one as a generalist reviewer who hasn't read all the pre-release details like many hyped fans do. The companies overseeing several recent large releases, noteably RIFT and Guild Wars 2, have made some impressive efforts to contact a wide variety of review sites and make themselves and their game available in a reporter/reviewer friendly manner. Having the opportunity to play a game with and directly question developers and PR people before launch goes a long way towards orienting the average reviewer to an MMO.
I haven't personally had contact with Funcom about the game, so I don't know what its pre-release press relations were like. I can only speculate that if reviewers didn't have a good link with the company, they were more likely to write reviews that weren't informed in terms of what that last-minute patch did for the game.
Want to find me on a gaming service? I'm SwashbucklerXX everywhere.
Ever wonder why the Android game market lags far behind iOS despite selling phones like crazy? Apparently, it's because piracy is rampant there.
One huge issue is that the average smartphone gamer doesn't even realize that piracy is as bad as it is on Android, and subsequently may accidentally download a pirated version of a game, Misha Lyalin, CEO of Cut the Rope developer ZeptoLab tells Gamasutra.
"Users ofter search for 'Cut the Rope' through a search engine and end up downloading a pirated version," Lyalin says. "That's just an honest mistake.
"While we do try to take down most copycats and pirates, a lot of ways to protect our games would be not very user-friendly or won't meet our quality standards. Because the user is the most important piece of our puzzle, we generally choose to focus on adopting our business model -- utilizing ads and in-app purchases - rather than taking on pirates," he says.
The iOS platform is still Zeptolab's top priority as a result of Android's issues, Lyalin admits, although the Android platform still allows his studio to deliver its games to a huge number of players, despite whether they actually pay for the products or not.
"Ultimately, that is what's most important to us," he says.
Dead on arrival
...
Madfinger recently made its zombie shooter Dead Trigger free-to-play as a result of terrible piracy rates -- however, this wasn't the first time that the studio had fallen foul to piracy on the platform.
"The piracy rate for Shadowgun was actually even higher," she tells us. "It reached 90 percent, then after a few months decreased to 80 percent and now it is falling bit by bit and averaging at 78 percent. Being sold for $8 and $5 later, there was no effective way of defending against piracy."
And yet, the studio believes that "Android is just as important as iOS. Both platforms have their pros and cons anyway. As for development issues, there are no differences between these platforms. We do not prefer one of them to the other."
She goes on to note, "The Android install base is so big that it can't be cold-shouldered by developers - especially when using the Unity engine makes this process considerably easier,"
...
Sports Interactive's dabble with the Android space was well documented earlier this year, when its game Football Manager Handheld saw a piracy ratio of 9:1 on the Google platform.
The studio's director Miles Jacobson noted that he has never seen piracy rates that bad before -- Football Manager 2009 had a 5:1 piracy rate, but that's about as bad as it had been before Football Manager Handheld hit Android.
"We are well aware of piracy on all platforms, and were expecting it to be bad on Android," he added. "But it's still a shock when you see just how bad it is! It has had an effect on the company - there are costs, both financial and opportunity wise, for each person playing the game, and each hurdle that we face."
Jacobson believes that the Android platform simply cannot stay in the same way that is currently is otherwise all Google Play users are going to be left with is free-to-play titles.
"Someone clever will come along and do something to help fix it," he adds. "Piracy will never go away though - it hasn't on any format in the last 30 years."
Piracy is a fair enough point, but the real question is whether that piracy is actually cutting in on the profits in any meaningful way. Is it better to not make anything for Android at all and make no money, or is it better to develop for Android, sell a bunch of copies, and then have a bunch of people pirate the game who were never going to pay for it on any OS anyway?
To take the extreme end of the statistic there, how many copies sold did that 10% of non-pirated copies include? Was it at all comparable to iOS sales? Because if only 10% of the game out there are legit, but that 10% equates to a similar number of sales on iOS devices (or even just something significantly profitable), then who gives a shit about the piracy? You're still making the money off the game as you would have normally.
I'm not saying the guy isn't wholly unreasonable, but there's no sense of scale there. For a console example, if a company made a game with the usual AAA budget and sold 10 million copies but 90 million people pirated it who would never have bought it anyway, would that really be a solid reason to not develop for a console? Wholly hypothetical, obviously, but I still would like to know how these guys did business-wise even with all that piracy.
Then you also have to ask how exactly are they tracking how many people are pirating it, if they're not just flat out using some bullshit RIAA mathematics(i.e. this didn't sell as many as we think it should have, therefore the difference is due to piracy)?
Or does Android or the program itself have some sort of regular "phone home" mechanism for programs post-storefront? Because that in itself would be pretty damn scary even in legitimate copies. But you would expect something like that to be found and cracked out pretty early in most cases if it even was there.
Yeah, I was wondering about that last bit myself. I'm no expert in network or programming, but it wouldn't be too hard for somebody with expertise to pick up outgoing information and put in a mechanism to block/stop it. So I guess they basically just completely made up the numbers, had to use something wholly unreliable like polls, or have some sort of questionable and super-sneaky way of detecting what people are doing on their Android devices.
But regardless, a shock figure of "90% of the copies were pirated at a certain point in time" is pretty useless without extra (and reliable) contextual data to indicate whether or not all that piracy actually had any meaningful affect on legit sales. Without that, the claim just looks like another piracy boogeyman claim.
If you are a dev bought by EA, just take the bag of money and run.
Nice to see EA properly returning to form, I guess. Reminds me of that whole "Battlefield/Desert Warfare/promising the devs for that mod the moon and punching them in the balls at the first fiscally-sound moment" fiasco.
As much as I don't want all those people at EA to end up jobless, the industry really does need enough of a crash to bust up these big assholes screwing up lives and ruining the industry.
Pretty much what everyone was guessing was going to happen (or had already happened, just waiting on an announcement).
If you are an developer bought by EA/Activision, remember this: In their eyes, you are not someone "who works for them". You are an "employee". The former gets to tell the company what they can do to help. The latter just gets told what to do. And if you don't like it, well, another difference is that "employee" is a position, not a person.
Ever wonder why the Android game market lags far behind iOS despite selling phones like crazy? Apparently, it's because piracy is rampant there.
One huge issue is that the average smartphone gamer doesn't even realize that piracy is as bad as it is on Android, and subsequently may accidentally download a pirated version of a game, Misha Lyalin, CEO of Cut the Rope developer ZeptoLab tells Gamasutra.
"Users ofter search for 'Cut the Rope' through a search engine and end up downloading a pirated version," Lyalin says. "That's just an honest mistake.
"While we do try to take down most copycats and pirates, a lot of ways to protect our games would be not very user-friendly or won't meet our quality standards. Because the user is the most important piece of our puzzle, we generally choose to focus on adopting our business model -- utilizing ads and in-app purchases - rather than taking on pirates," he says.
The iOS platform is still Zeptolab's top priority as a result of Android's issues, Lyalin admits, although the Android platform still allows his studio to deliver its games to a huge number of players, despite whether they actually pay for the products or not.
"Ultimately, that is what's most important to us," he says.
Dead on arrival
...
Madfinger recently made its zombie shooter Dead Trigger free-to-play as a result of terrible piracy rates -- however, this wasn't the first time that the studio had fallen foul to piracy on the platform.
"The piracy rate for Shadowgun was actually even higher," she tells us. "It reached 90 percent, then after a few months decreased to 80 percent and now it is falling bit by bit and averaging at 78 percent. Being sold for $8 and $5 later, there was no effective way of defending against piracy."
And yet, the studio believes that "Android is just as important as iOS. Both platforms have their pros and cons anyway. As for development issues, there are no differences between these platforms. We do not prefer one of them to the other."
She goes on to note, "The Android install base is so big that it can't be cold-shouldered by developers - especially when using the Unity engine makes this process considerably easier,"
...
Sports Interactive's dabble with the Android space was well documented earlier this year, when its game Football Manager Handheld saw a piracy ratio of 9:1 on the Google platform.
The studio's director Miles Jacobson noted that he has never seen piracy rates that bad before -- Football Manager 2009 had a 5:1 piracy rate, but that's about as bad as it had been before Football Manager Handheld hit Android.
"We are well aware of piracy on all platforms, and were expecting it to be bad on Android," he added. "But it's still a shock when you see just how bad it is! It has had an effect on the company - there are costs, both financial and opportunity wise, for each person playing the game, and each hurdle that we face."
Jacobson believes that the Android platform simply cannot stay in the same way that is currently is otherwise all Google Play users are going to be left with is free-to-play titles.
"Someone clever will come along and do something to help fix it," he adds. "Piracy will never go away though - it hasn't on any format in the last 30 years."
Piracy is a fair enough point, but the real question is whether that piracy is actually cutting in on the profits in any meaningful way. Is it better to not make anything for Android at all and make no money, or is it better to develop for Android, sell a bunch of copies, and then have a bunch of people pirate the game who were never going to pay for it on any OS anyway?
To take the extreme end of the statistic there, how many copies sold did that 10% of non-pirated copies include? Was it at all comparable to iOS sales? Because if only 10% of the game out there are legit, but that 10% equates to a similar number of sales on iOS devices (or even just something significantly profitable), then who gives a shit about the piracy? You're still making the money off the game as you would have normally.
I'm not saying the guy isn't wholly unreasonable, but there's no sense of scale there. For a console example, if a company made a game with the usual AAA budget and sold 10 million copies but 90 million people pirated it who would never have bought it anyway, would that really be a solid reason to not develop for a console? Wholly hypothetical, obviously, but I still would like to know how these guys did business-wise even with all that piracy.
Then you also have to ask how exactly are they tracking how many people are pirating it, if they're not just flat out using some bullshit RIAA mathematics(i.e. this didn't sell as many as we think it should have, therefore the difference is due to piracy)?
Or does Android or the program itself have some sort of regular "phone home" mechanism for programs post-storefront? Because that in itself would be pretty damn scary even in legitimate copies. But you would expect something like that to be found and cracked out pretty early in most cases if it even was there.
They can track it with leader boards.
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Ever wonder why the Android game market lags far behind iOS despite selling phones like crazy? Apparently, it's because piracy is rampant there.
One huge issue is that the average smartphone gamer doesn't even realize that piracy is as bad as it is on Android, and subsequently may accidentally download a pirated version of a game, Misha Lyalin, CEO of Cut the Rope developer ZeptoLab tells Gamasutra.
"Users ofter search for 'Cut the Rope' through a search engine and end up downloading a pirated version," Lyalin says. "That's just an honest mistake.
"While we do try to take down most copycats and pirates, a lot of ways to protect our games would be not very user-friendly or won't meet our quality standards. Because the user is the most important piece of our puzzle, we generally choose to focus on adopting our business model -- utilizing ads and in-app purchases - rather than taking on pirates," he says.
The iOS platform is still Zeptolab's top priority as a result of Android's issues, Lyalin admits, although the Android platform still allows his studio to deliver its games to a huge number of players, despite whether they actually pay for the products or not.
"Ultimately, that is what's most important to us," he says.
Dead on arrival
...
Madfinger recently made its zombie shooter Dead Trigger free-to-play as a result of terrible piracy rates -- however, this wasn't the first time that the studio had fallen foul to piracy on the platform.
"The piracy rate for Shadowgun was actually even higher," she tells us. "It reached 90 percent, then after a few months decreased to 80 percent and now it is falling bit by bit and averaging at 78 percent. Being sold for $8 and $5 later, there was no effective way of defending against piracy."
And yet, the studio believes that "Android is just as important as iOS. Both platforms have their pros and cons anyway. As for development issues, there are no differences between these platforms. We do not prefer one of them to the other."
She goes on to note, "The Android install base is so big that it can't be cold-shouldered by developers - especially when using the Unity engine makes this process considerably easier,"
...
Sports Interactive's dabble with the Android space was well documented earlier this year, when its game Football Manager Handheld saw a piracy ratio of 9:1 on the Google platform.
The studio's director Miles Jacobson noted that he has never seen piracy rates that bad before -- Football Manager 2009 had a 5:1 piracy rate, but that's about as bad as it had been before Football Manager Handheld hit Android.
"We are well aware of piracy on all platforms, and were expecting it to be bad on Android," he added. "But it's still a shock when you see just how bad it is! It has had an effect on the company - there are costs, both financial and opportunity wise, for each person playing the game, and each hurdle that we face."
Jacobson believes that the Android platform simply cannot stay in the same way that is currently is otherwise all Google Play users are going to be left with is free-to-play titles.
"Someone clever will come along and do something to help fix it," he adds. "Piracy will never go away though - it hasn't on any format in the last 30 years."
Piracy is a fair enough point, but the real question is whether that piracy is actually cutting in on the profits in any meaningful way. Is it better to not make anything for Android at all and make no money, or is it better to develop for Android, sell a bunch of copies, and then have a bunch of people pirate the game who were never going to pay for it on any OS anyway?
To take the extreme end of the statistic there, how many copies sold did that 10% of non-pirated copies include? Was it at all comparable to iOS sales? Because if only 10% of the game out there are legit, but that 10% equates to a similar number of sales on iOS devices (or even just something significantly profitable), then who gives a shit about the piracy? You're still making the money off the game as you would have normally.
I'm not saying the guy isn't wholly unreasonable, but there's no sense of scale there. For a console example, if a company made a game with the usual AAA budget and sold 10 million copies but 90 million people pirated it who would never have bought it anyway, would that really be a solid reason to not develop for a console? Wholly hypothetical, obviously, but I still would like to know how these guys did business-wise even with all that piracy.
Then you also have to ask how exactly are they tracking how many people are pirating it, if they're not just flat out using some bullshit RIAA mathematics(i.e. this didn't sell as many as we think it should have, therefore the difference is due to piracy)?
Or does Android or the program itself have some sort of regular "phone home" mechanism for programs post-storefront? Because that in itself would be pretty damn scary even in legitimate copies. But you would expect something like that to be found and cracked out pretty early in most cases if it even was there.
They can track it with leader boards.
Sure, with legit purchases; that's just common sense, since it's gotta be super-easy and legit to simply keep track of how many people purchased a game.
What we're wondering about is how they came up with the figure of "90% of the games were pirated", since the pirated versions wouldn't have gone through the marketplace and thus would have had to either been tracked some other way or the numbers made up entirely.
Unless you mean the pirated versions also have access to the leaderboards for the purchased games? Because that would be a dumb way to have the games and systems designed. Why would you let people have access to official online assets with unlicensed copies of the game?
And even if that is a perfectly good way to track pirated copies, we'd still need other numbers to understand the context. Granted, any amount of piracy using up leaderboard resources is a cost nobody should have to eat, but there's still the fact that 90% of the game being pirated is itself a useless figure without knowing if ten or a million copies were sold.
The only thing you have to circumvent on a pirated version of an app is the marketplace
So yeah, they will have access to leaderboards and whatnot unless the developer goes to extraordinary measures to keep them out, like separate logins
Bearing in mind that their legitimate users, when confronted with having to register for another account to play a phone game will probably just say fuck this and uninstall before buying widgets
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The only thing you have to circumvent on a pirated version of an app is the marketplace
So yeah, they will have access to leaderboards and whatnot unless the developer goes to extraordinary measures to keep them out, like separate logins
Bearing in mind that their legitimate users, when confronted with having to register for another account to play a phone game will probably just say fuck this and uninstall before buying widgets
Huh. Like I said, I'm not an expert in this, but why couldn't the devs have a system that tracks leaderboard access against the account a game was purchased through. You have to have an account to use the marketplace anyway, so shouldn't you be able to make sure the same device the user has an account on is the account used to purchase the game? Or something along those lines.
Obviously that's a massive oversimplification of the issue, but to some extent this problem seems like devs don't want to have to make protection for their own games beyond what the marketplace provides. And the secure access thing is a whole slippery slope of player access versus program protection, so that's not exactly simple either.
But still, we need to know what kind of real sales these guys are getting while blaming piracy for their problems. The costs incurred by the pirates as a drain on things like the cost of running a leaderboard for all users is also an issue.
The only thing you have to circumvent on a pirated version of an app is the marketplace
So yeah, they will have access to leaderboards and whatnot unless the developer goes to extraordinary measures to keep them out, like separate logins
Bearing in mind that their legitimate users, when confronted with having to register for another account to play a phone game will probably just say fuck this and uninstall before buying widgets
Huh. Like I said, I'm not an expert in this, but why couldn't the devs have a system that tracks leaderboard access against the account a game was purchased through. You have to have an account to use the marketplace anyway, so shouldn't you be able to make sure the same device the user has an account on is the account used to purchase the game? Or something along those lines.
Obviously that's a massive oversimplification of the issue, but to some extent this problem seems like devs don't want to have to make protection for their own games beyond what the marketplace provides. And the secure access thing is a whole slippery slope of player access versus program protection, so that's not exactly simple either.
But still, we need to know what kind of real sales these guys are getting while blaming piracy for their problems. The costs incurred by the pirates as a drain on things like the cost of running a leaderboard for all users is also an issue.
The marketplaces don't tell you who bought your game. Any check like that is all on the game and can be circumvented by pirated copies.
New Sony patent that will allow television commercials to be played as online social games using the PS3 & other devices some games are shown using the PlayStation Move.
Nintendo Network ID: V-Faction | XBL: V Faction | Steam | 3DS: 3136 - 6603 - 1330 PokemonWhite Friend Code: 0046-2121-0723/White2 Friend Code: 0519-5126-2990
"Did ya hear the one about the mussel that wanted to purchase Valve? Seems like the bivalve had a juicy offer on the table but the company flat-out refused and decided to immediately clam up!"
I don't know if it's the three panel setup that's making me read it as a joke, but that is cracking me the fuck up. Sony, whoever you have working in your patent office, lock them down. They are a visionary.
It is a nifty (or alternately, devious) idea though. If you want to dismiss the ad, you have to pay attention to it, if only briefly.
If someone can't buy a game for a dollar I don't know what's wrong with them.
This is a single anecdote, but I doubt it's too abnormal across the mobile space... Chris Pruett developed Wind-up Knight for iOS and Android, and mentioned his piracy percentages on twitter about a month ago. I'll go ahead and link to the first status, and string together the rest into something that's a bit easier to read:
Lotta press about Android piracy lately. For the record, our piracy rate is about 12% on Android and about 15% on iOS. When Wind-up Knight for iOS was a paid app, the piracy rate was more like 80%. I think piracy is, as always, a red herring. You can't stop it, but as long as it's slightly arduous, it's not a lot of lost sales. Because a huge number of people who pirate software would never buy it in a million years. You aren't losing a sale to them. Piracy starts to matter only when pirate users can cost you money in other ways, e.g. network bandwidth and server cost. Yet another reason to be a free app in today's mobile marketplace. Also, for both Android and iOS, close to 100% of our pirate users are in China. Those users can't buy things on Android anyway.
I mean, this stuff is probably common sense. $0 is an infinitely lower barrier to entry than $1, but some people will pirate anyways. Piracy is most rampant in regions where users either can't buy or culturally are not used to buying something. Interestingly, Chris says that his actual revenue is roughly 2-to-1 in favor of Android.
Additionally, here's how he figures out the piracy numbers:
I don't know if it's the three panel setup that's making me read it as a joke, but that is cracking me the fuck up. Sony, whoever you have working in your patent office, lock them down. They are a visionary.
It is a nifty (or alternately, devious) idea though. If you want to dismiss the ad, you have to pay attention to it, if only briefly.
Sony patent employees have a history for this sort of thing.
Achire on
0
BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
Most TSW players I've talked to, even the ones who left, feel that the TSW review scores are due entirely to the fact that Funcom didn't spend enough money on advertising.
Doubtful that it's about advertising dollars, but it could be about press relations. MMORPGs are a pain in the patoot to review. They are huge and require a major time investment in order to evaluate thoroughly, especially if you're stepping into one as a generalist reviewer who hasn't read all the pre-release details like many hyped fans do. The companies overseeing several recent large releases, noteably RIFT and Guild Wars 2, have made some impressive efforts to contact a wide variety of review sites and make themselves and their game available in a reporter/reviewer friendly manner. Having the opportunity to play a game with and directly question developers and PR people before launch goes a long way towards orienting the average reviewer to an MMO.
I haven't personally had contact with Funcom about the game, so I don't know what its pre-release press relations were like. I can only speculate that if reviewers didn't have a good link with the company, they were more likely to write reviews that weren't informed in terms of what that last-minute patch did for the game.
For all the other goofy shit they do, I actually like Kotaku's method of MMO reviewing. They keep a weekly report over the span of 4 weeks which at the end they write a review of their total experience. I wished more companies ape that method, honestly
PSN: Waybackkidd
"...only mights and maybes."
0
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
That patent image screams, "Bring back the Sony Laughing Man thread."
If you are a dev bought by EA, just take the bag of money and run.
So we ignore the bit where the guy at Popcap says "if it weren't for EA behind us, the cuts would've been a lot more severe" and just blame EA for the hell of it anyway? Good form.
Rumours of Studio Liverpool’s demise began with a post at the GR Arcade forums.
Sony then issued a statement confirming the closure:
“As part of SCE Worldwide Studios, we do regular reviews to ensure that the resources we have can create and produce high quality, innovative and commercially viable projects in an increasingly competitive market place. As part of this process, we have reviewed and assessed all current and planned projects for the short and medium term and have decided to make some changes to our European Studios.
It has been decided that Liverpool Studio should be closed. Liverpool Studio has been an important part of SCE Worldwide Studios since the outset of PlayStation, and have contributed greatly to PlayStation over the years. Everyone connected with Liverpool Studio, past and present, can be very proud of their achievements.
However, it was felt that by focusing our investment plans on other Studios that are currently working on exciting new projects, we would be in a stronger position to offer the best possible content for our consumers. Our Liverpool Facility will continue to operate, housing a number of other vital WWS!E and SCEE Departments.
This should not take anything away from the great work WWS are doing and the incredible games and services that we have made, and continue to make.”
Ugh.
Well this makes it the third studio Sony closed immediately after developing a Vita game.
Posts
EDIT: Guess thats still happening. He's got a tweet mentioning it and a possible TLJ2 from just yesterday. I'm content.
But, yeah, not shocked about TSW bombing in the slightest. Had some neat ideas wrapped up in what seemed like a pretty bad game from what I played in the beta.
Steam - Wildschwein | The Backlog
Grappling Hook Showdown - Tumblr
I guess now my goal will be to acquire a complete Back issue set.
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
I would say I'm missing about 50 issues from a complete set.
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
I actually think its pretty amazing it has been around for as long as it has as I can recall a number of gaming magazines ceasing a couple years ago.
Yep. I'm missing most of the early ones (I think the earliest I have is issue 19...can't remember off the top of my head), but I started subscribing around issue 92 or something like that (I remember because the 100th issue was in my first year as a subscriber) and have renewed my subscription every year since. I found about 30 of the earlier ones at a used booksale one time for 5 cents each. that helped a lot!
I will admit that the last few years it seemed like the Magazine would cease to exist at any moment, though, because they really didn't have anything you couldn't find online. They did have some good retro features in recent issues, though.
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/176214/The_Android_piracy_problem.php
http://blog.popcap.com/2012/08/21/popcap-update-from-john-vechey/
via neoGAF.
Well, this is probably gonna piss off a lotta Vita owners, but I'll say it anyways:
Looking forward to a Gravity Rush port!
Don't know about the golf game, but Gravity Rush uses the Vita's controls rather well. Wouldn't feel the same on the PS3 (although they could probably improve the load times).
Zeboyd Games Development Blog
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire, Facebook : Zeboyd Games
Most of the low-scoring reviews (especially the infamous G4 one)? Reviewed the beta.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
I'm curious what the line of reasoning is behind that?
I'm hoping that doesn't come off as dismissive, I'm geniunely curious how they feel it would have affected review scores, because in this industry I'm not going to handwave that off as I've seen weirder things happen (like companies starting to assign bonuses based on sites that are basically giant internet polls).
Personally I've been chalking it up to a bad roll of the dice with the market, and that they were just doomed in ways they couldn't fix, but I really haven't been reading up on the external factors.
Piracy is a fair enough point, but the real question is whether that piracy is actually cutting in on the profits in any meaningful way. Is it better to not make anything for Android at all and make no money, or is it better to develop for Android, sell a bunch of copies, and then have a bunch of people pirate the game who were never going to pay for it on any OS anyway?
To take the extreme end of the statistic there, how many copies sold did that 10% of non-pirated copies include? Was it at all comparable to iOS sales? Because if only 10% of the game out there are legit, but that 10% equates to a similar number of sales on iOS devices (or even just something significantly profitable), then who gives a shit about the piracy? You're still making the money off the game as you would have normally.
I'm not saying the guy isn't wholly unreasonable, but there's no sense of scale there. For a console example, if a company made a game with the usual AAA budget and sold 10 million copies but 90 million people pirated it who would never have bought it anyway, would that really be a solid reason to not develop for a console? Wholly hypothetical, obviously, but I still would like to know how these guys did business-wise even with all that piracy.
Then you also have to ask how exactly are they tracking how many people are pirating it, if they're not just flat out using some bullshit RIAA mathematics(i.e. this didn't sell as many as we think it should have, therefore the difference is due to piracy)?
Or does Android or the program itself have some sort of regular "phone home" mechanism for programs post-storefront? Because that in itself would be pretty damn scary even in legitimate copies. But you would expect something like that to be found and cracked out pretty early in most cases if it even was there.
Doubtful that it's about advertising dollars, but it could be about press relations. MMORPGs are a pain in the patoot to review. They are huge and require a major time investment in order to evaluate thoroughly, especially if you're stepping into one as a generalist reviewer who hasn't read all the pre-release details like many hyped fans do. The companies overseeing several recent large releases, noteably RIFT and Guild Wars 2, have made some impressive efforts to contact a wide variety of review sites and make themselves and their game available in a reporter/reviewer friendly manner. Having the opportunity to play a game with and directly question developers and PR people before launch goes a long way towards orienting the average reviewer to an MMO.
I haven't personally had contact with Funcom about the game, so I don't know what its pre-release press relations were like. I can only speculate that if reviewers didn't have a good link with the company, they were more likely to write reviews that weren't informed in terms of what that last-minute patch did for the game.
If you are a dev bought by EA, just take the bag of money and run.
Yeah, I was wondering about that last bit myself. I'm no expert in network or programming, but it wouldn't be too hard for somebody with expertise to pick up outgoing information and put in a mechanism to block/stop it. So I guess they basically just completely made up the numbers, had to use something wholly unreliable like polls, or have some sort of questionable and super-sneaky way of detecting what people are doing on their Android devices.
But regardless, a shock figure of "90% of the copies were pirated at a certain point in time" is pretty useless without extra (and reliable) contextual data to indicate whether or not all that piracy actually had any meaningful affect on legit sales. Without that, the claim just looks like another piracy boogeyman claim.
Nice to see EA properly returning to form, I guess. Reminds me of that whole "Battlefield/Desert Warfare/promising the devs for that mod the moon and punching them in the balls at the first fiscally-sound moment" fiasco.
As much as I don't want all those people at EA to end up jobless, the industry really does need enough of a crash to bust up these big assholes screwing up lives and ruining the industry.
If you are an developer bought by EA/Activision, remember this: In their eyes, you are not someone "who works for them". You are an "employee". The former gets to tell the company what they can do to help. The latter just gets told what to do. And if you don't like it, well, another difference is that "employee" is a position, not a person.
They can track it with leader boards.
Sure, with legit purchases; that's just common sense, since it's gotta be super-easy and legit to simply keep track of how many people purchased a game.
What we're wondering about is how they came up with the figure of "90% of the games were pirated", since the pirated versions wouldn't have gone through the marketplace and thus would have had to either been tracked some other way or the numbers made up entirely.
Unless you mean the pirated versions also have access to the leaderboards for the purchased games? Because that would be a dumb way to have the games and systems designed. Why would you let people have access to official online assets with unlicensed copies of the game?
And even if that is a perfectly good way to track pirated copies, we'd still need other numbers to understand the context. Granted, any amount of piracy using up leaderboard resources is a cost nobody should have to eat, but there's still the fact that 90% of the game being pirated is itself a useless figure without knowing if ten or a million copies were sold.
So yeah, they will have access to leaderboards and whatnot unless the developer goes to extraordinary measures to keep them out, like separate logins
Bearing in mind that their legitimate users, when confronted with having to register for another account to play a phone game will probably just say fuck this and uninstall before buying widgets
Huh. Like I said, I'm not an expert in this, but why couldn't the devs have a system that tracks leaderboard access against the account a game was purchased through. You have to have an account to use the marketplace anyway, so shouldn't you be able to make sure the same device the user has an account on is the account used to purchase the game? Or something along those lines.
Obviously that's a massive oversimplification of the issue, but to some extent this problem seems like devs don't want to have to make protection for their own games beyond what the marketplace provides. And the secure access thing is a whole slippery slope of player access versus program protection, so that's not exactly simple either.
But still, we need to know what kind of real sales these guys are getting while blaming piracy for their problems. The costs incurred by the pirates as a drain on things like the cost of running a leaderboard for all users is also an issue.
The marketplaces don't tell you who bought your game. Any check like that is all on the game and can be circumvented by pirated copies.
Yeah, but a lot of these games android games aren't exactly expensive in the first place. cut the rope is only a dollar
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
New Sony patent that will allow television commercials to be played as online social games using the PS3 & other devices some games are shown using the PlayStation Move.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=9&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1="sony+computer"&OS="sony+computer"&RS="sony+computer"
Pokemon White Friend Code: 0046-2121-0723/White 2 Friend Code: 0519-5126-2990
"Did ya hear the one about the mussel that wanted to purchase Valve? Seems like the bivalve had a juicy offer on the table but the company flat-out refused and decided to immediately clam up!"
It is a nifty (or alternately, devious) idea though. If you want to dismiss the ad, you have to pay attention to it, if only briefly.
This is a single anecdote, but I doubt it's too abnormal across the mobile space... Chris Pruett developed Wind-up Knight for iOS and Android, and mentioned his piracy percentages on twitter about a month ago. I'll go ahead and link to the first status, and string together the rest into something that's a bit easier to read:
I mean, this stuff is probably common sense. $0 is an infinitely lower barrier to entry than $1, but some people will pirate anyways. Piracy is most rampant in regions where users either can't buy or culturally are not used to buying something. Interestingly, Chris says that his actual revenue is roughly 2-to-1 in favor of Android.
Additionally, here's how he figures out the piracy numbers:
Sony patent employees have a history for this sort of thing.
For all the other goofy shit they do, I actually like Kotaku's method of MMO reviewing. They keep a weekly report over the span of 4 weeks which at the end they write a review of their total experience. I wished more companies ape that method, honestly
"...only mights and maybes."
No more Wipeout.
Things to not say about what you'd do to someone's mother.
So we ignore the bit where the guy at Popcap says "if it weren't for EA behind us, the cuts would've been a lot more severe" and just blame EA for the hell of it anyway? Good form.
Ugh.
Well this makes it the third studio Sony closed immediately after developing a Vita game.