My fear of Game Dev

Because we know the difference between a publisher and a developer?

I'm not saying you're one of them, but I've seen people get up in arms about why one of the big publishers is evil and how their DRM or their DLC or some other random crud means that they shouldn't be given any money but, hey, thanks to the internet lets all play their games anyway. The thing is that behind the big publisher label and their corporate suits who people love to hate there's also a developer label - guys who typically just pull a wage, often do bucketloads of overtime to get a game into your hands before Christmas, and rely on the financial success of their work to keep them in a job.




On the thread topic, I'd encourage you to think of it like this. You've got a very limited amount of time and resources and your key performance indicator is the number of sales you make. Put your time and resources into whatever will increase that number the most. Anything else is a distraction.

So, if you choose to spend time and resources chasing piracy, do so with a focus on increasing sales rather than a focus on decreasing piracy. Also, only do so if you think you can get more sales that way than if you spent the same time and effort on other sales-oriented activity.

There are no easy answers here, little useful information, and everything cuts both ways. For instance, a pirate has already shown interest in your game and gone and got it. That's a plus, you're already engaged with them, you might be able to convert that engagement to a sale in less effort than would be required to find and convert a random. On the other hand, if you find and convert a random you've got the same number of sales but more people playing your game and - if it's good - hopefully showing it off and talking about it.

 

That is very good point.
I'm probably not even gonna worry about Serial Numbers and stuff with my game, but I may, if I do it, it will be at the last minute before release. (Well not literally lol) But you get what I mean.

This game is going to take a long time to make.
I'm not focusing on bombing great graphics, I'm focusing on a fun childrens game, but can still be enjoyed by adults(a game like Banjo Kazooie)

 

So the solution to increase sales is... drum roll please... try to sell more copies!

I thought about that publisher comment carefully... and I just figured that seemed like a greedy stuffed suit kind of thing to harass players in a pointless pursuit of stopping piracy. What game developer, especially a programmer, I figured, could possibly be so silly to think you can stop a hacker from cracking a piece of software that is running on their own machine?
Somehow, I just picture an email saying, "Your game is great, now just change a few things we want changed and add some piracy protection and we'll be ready to go."

 

Sure, if that's what you want to take from that. Clearly my actual point made it though via stealth, though: I think you should focus on increasing sales rather than decreasing piracy.

What's better for a developer: a game with 100,000 sales and 0 pirated copies, or a game with 200,000 sales and 800,000 pirated copies?