Who needs all the glamour and expense of European racing when you have American Racing 3D from MH Soft bringing you the whole Stock Car experience, from road courses to monster ovals. 7 tracks, 11 opponents and 6 cars to choose from should be enough to keep anyone going round in circles.
Gentlemen... Start Your Smartphones!
Ewan wrote:Who needs all the glamour and expense of European racing when you have American Racing 3D from MH Soft bringing you the whole Stock Car experience, from road courses to monster ovals. 7 tracks, 11 opponents and 6 cars to choose from should be enough to keep anyone going round in circles.
As with other games with no trial versions, doomed to disappointing sales. Why, oh why....
Steve
because trial versions usually get hacked..
Well, not really. It's easy to do trial versions where you remove all the assets but the ones from one or two levels. It's what I do. Easy to manage, and you're sure that you're not widespreading a commercial version.
The big problem is that commercial versions are hacked right away, well pirated is more appropriate. Pirates buy it and then remove the protection.
My first customer, you hear it, my first customer on a portal was a pirate ! I know because at the time I was not 6680 compatible and the guy bought it. He contacted me, and I tried to solve the problem without having a 6680 myself. It was all "write and try". As with all personalized version I send, I leave a "signature" of the person I send it to. Two days later, the game was on emule, and I found the signature of this guy 😞
Needless to say, he's an administrator of a forum dealing with S60 stuf...
BitRabbit
Fairly depressing account that. I fail to understand people's mindset - do they not realise the damage they are doing. What would their reaction be if someone stole their work from them.
Maybe we should do some kind of feature article on the issue.
Rafe,
depressing yes and no. On the one hand, when you make low sales, and even lower revenue because everybody take a chunk of your work, it is. On the other hand, we know that pirating problem is here and you have to live with it. It's why I didn't spend much time on protection system. It's useless. Piracy is here, that's it... True they don't realize that small companies won't last very long... But they have gGameloft and MForma 😊
Reminds me a small French game makers in the golden years of gaming, Froggy Software. They were doing adventure games for the Apple II, a platform plagued by piracy. They chose not to protect the games, nothing at all. This let them sell their games the equivalent of 30e when most games on this platform was 80 or 100e.
Why DRM isn't implemented in the phone itself by the way ? and the OS would provide APIs to check legality of the software 😊
Rafe wrote:BitRabbitFairly depressing account that. I fail to understand people's mindset - do they not realise the damage they are doing. What would their reaction be if someone stole their work from them.
Maybe we should do some kind of feature article on the issue.
The mindset of people is they want as much stuff as possible as easily as possible, then if there's any ethical problems they just come up with reasons to con themselves into thinking the ethical problems don't exist or don't apply to them.
I used to volunteer to promote Fair Trade coffee, and we'd go round supermarkets and various charities asking people to switch to it because it gave a better and more sustainable price to the people in developing countries who grew the coffee beans. I can understand the average supermarket shopper just not grasping the intricacies of economics that makes Fair Trade coffee more ethical, but I can't understand the attitudes of charities and church groups that we visited. They came up with almost any excuse to carry on using Nescafe or whatever, "It tastes too strong" (why not just use less?), "We can't afford it" (you're a charity/church, surely you can afford to buy non-slave-labour coffee, it only costs 50% more) etc.
People who use pirate software will often come up with the following excuses, and they're all tripe:
1. "I can't afford to buy software" - If you can't afford games, how can you afford a $200 - $600 smartphone? I've even heard people say this about the game Tibia ME, which costs $5.
2. "I pirate way more than my entire income, so what I pirate has no impact on sales" - This is a bit like saying it's okay to hit someone as long as you hit 499 lampposts afterwards, on the basis that hitting a lamppost is legal and 99.8% of your assault victims are lampposts. Just because you wrap something immoral in a sea of irrelevant actions doesn't mean the immorality is wiped out at all. If everyone pirated way more than their income, no one would buy any games at all, so there's clearly something wrong going on.
3. "These game companies are loaded, they can afford it" - Actually most Symbian developers I've spoken to have been tiny teams of not-that-well-off programmers, sometimes even just one or two people. The brilliant Legacy RPG series is a two-person team for example. They have rents to pay and families to feed, if you pirate their games they'll just stop making them and get a different job, it's as simple as that.
4. "So many people buy the games legally, the industry can afford a bit of piracy" - This might have been true in the days before the Web when the only way to distribute games was physically on disks and tapes, but nowadays it's easy to distribute pirated software worldwide instantly for free. Like BitRabbit said, you'll see a game released one day and a free pirated version available worldwide on a website the next.