The author of the game Stealin was outraged on Reddit by high piracy in Russia: out of 1200 active versions of the game, only 7 were purchased. The remaining versions were downloaded illegally.
A social network user under the nickname dzak8383 describes the problem as follows:
“A week has passed since the release of Stealin. And on YouTube almost every day, someone posts a video on how to download it for free. How do you deal with it?
I found out about the problem when they recorded a really good video of how to spin the game. I could pay to record a review of a game or gameplay of this quality.
In Russia, the game has about 1200 Android users, but only 7 paid ones. This is not the usual 60%! That’s 99.5%.”
At the end of the post, he shares that he is aware of the existence of a shareware type of distribution, but hates games of this type.
The post of an employee of Binary Banana (developer studio) caused a resonance. But not everyone was on the side of the author of the game.
“How many of these 1,200 users would pay for the game if you made it impossible to hack? How many of these seven paying players would have heard about the game from friends who hacked it? If you only have 7 paying players, perhaps the problem is that your game is simply not attractive,” wrote one commenter under the nickname Merosi.
“The problem is that you look at the remaining 1,193 as lost sales, when in reality the players would not even consider your game if it were “not pirated”. At least you got free marketing— word of mouth from this. And maybe even it will help you stand out from hundreds of other games,” Excess agreed with him.
Stealin
As for directly solving the problem, the following option was suggested: installing the appropriate protective DRM (especially since Google Play includes license verification).
The problem is that such solutions are constantly being hacked. And even those that — for reasons of protection — require constant online.
Plus, one of the users spoke in the spirit that the genie has already been released from the bottle: “if you release a new version that is difficult to crack, people will just continue to use the old one.”
So it turns out that there are actually no solutions.
The developers themselves did the following: in Unity, and the game is made on it, there is an opportunity to check whether the game has been recompiled. Based on this feature, Binary Banana has made it so that in the modified versions the following message is shown to the player:
“It looks like you didn’t buy me, and you’re playing a stolen version. It’s okay, not everyone can afford to spend a few dollars on a game or a cup of coffee. But can you at least help me get more users?. Share a link to my Facebook page and tell your friends about me. Maybe other people will buy me and my author will make more versions for you! Thank you!”.
And what do you think about ways to solve this problem (if free-to-play is not an option?).
P.S. The studio has stopped advertising the game in Russia.
P.S.S. Funny incident, the name of the game (in Russia consonant with Stalin, which, in fact, the authors focus on when promoting) is translated from English as “theft” (Stealin). Here it is quite possible to joke with sadness: “as you name the yacht, so it will sail.” Although, of course, the problem remains serious.
A source: reddit.com