Greenheart Games is the indie studio behind Game Dev Tycoon, writing about piracy, mobile release results, and app store reviews.
HN links it for the cracked Game Dev Tycoon release where pirates went bankrupt from piracy, which some commenters initially found silly but then appreciated.
Just read through the Game Dev Tycoon article: http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/
I was on the edge of my seat waiting for him to say something like "We used the pirated version that we released to communicate with all the people who pirated the game and we were able to convert 30% of them into paying customers!"
But it didn't happen... It sounds like he just used it to really subtly hint that the people should have bought the game. Seems like a wasted opportunity. I feel like a popup that said something like this would have converted a bunch of people and turned the pirating problem into a marketing opportunity: "Haha, you are playing a pirated copy of this game, that's why you are losing all your money to game pirates. Its all good, but if you upgrade to the paid version this problem will go away, here is a link to buy the game. Happy gaming!"
This is great.
Reminds me of Game Dev Tycoon's developers releasing a cracked version of the game onto torrent sites where you'd always lose due to players pirating your game [0]. When I heard what they did I sort of thought it was stupid, but the chart at the end where they show that 90+% of the users of the game were playing the pirated version is somewhat chilling. Kind of makes me want to release a version of games I make to pirate sites (well, if I ever went indie... this would be a very hard sell anywhere I've ever worked), just to get similar usage information, although it's probably a mistake, as the information would only bother me.
[0]: http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/
While fairly offtopic, this reminded me of Game Dev Tycoon ( http://www.greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/ ) which seems to be written using HTML5 + JS + Chromium.
I like this game, and I equally like the way they got traction. They released a restricted version on The Pirate Bay, although the description of the torrent was as if it was a full game. Not very usual, but nothing new either. But a well written blog post about it (http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/) got them homepage of HN and loads of other press coverage, which helped to take off.
Well done.
Greenheart Games - http://www.greenheartgames.com/jobs -world-wide (REMOTE work)
Game designers, game developers, graphic artists, writers and sound designers.
Hello, I'm Patrick from Greenheart Games and applications are for game developers, game designers, writers, graphic artists and sound designers are still open for January 2014!
All the info is available on our website (it's a bit long for a forum post):
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We are the creators of Game Dev Tycoon, a small business simulation game about creating your own game dev studio.
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I think the most ingenious anti-piracy trick was "Game Dev Tycoon"'s, which is after this post was made.
The pirated copy had users unable to win or pass a certain point because their games started to get pirated (in the game).
They also released the cracked game themselves to torrents, thus bypassing the troubles other games had where legite players got hit by anti-piracy issues.
http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/
> spared me of the headache of dealing with pirated things
Without any sort of DRM and today's internet speeds, pirating digital media would probably be like Napster
Greenheart Games famously purposely released a different version of Game Dev Tycoon for pirating. You can read the blog post here: https://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/#:~:text=Over%2093.6%25%20of%20players%20stole,version%20is%20likely%20much%20higher.