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The Witness is being heavily pirated. J. Blow says piracy could impact his future.
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Jacksinthe
Banned
There's a lot of cool stuff that can be done. I don't think completely stopping gameplay is an option, rather, like the reassigning controls thing - it can still be played, but inciting an "ahhhh, this fucking dev" moment even if I can't see their face, is fairly priceless. I can't beat them, might as well glue their feet a little.
There's even an achievement for making it through our game with constantly reassigning controls. You get nothing but our appreciation, despite obtaining the game illegally. I may think you're fucking slime for pirating it, but I can't not acknowledge epic feats of gaming.
I remember discussion about how this game broke his bank (I will take a correction if wrong).
That sounds to me like he went all in, like small devs usually do. That makes this relevant.
That might be a similarity, but the free press he gets is REALLY a whole different level compared to how indies have to fight for attention constantly.
Free press? You mean making a game that reviews really well?
He got just as much free press before that as any other indie developer who made a successful game before would get. If Toby Fox spent all his Undertale money on a new game, he'd get the same press.
Making a name for yourself doesn't suddenly not make you non-indie, not unless your brought on by a studio or sommit.
Nowhere in my post did i say that devs are entitled to your money by default, that would be an absurd statement. However, there seem to be a fair amount of people who are interested in the game and want to buy it, but are upset that it is 40 dollars, and more or less act as if they are entitled to the game for whatever price they are willing to pay. Thats what my previous post is responding to. If you dont want to pay for this game, thats obviously completely fine; you and the creators will just in essence part ways and go about your business, no hard feelings. Im talking about the people who stay behind, and say that they should have the game for less. Imagine that tactic if you are buying a ticket for a movie, or if you are buying the newly released iphone. Its absurd.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
It's not a fair world, what one deserves and doesn't deserve has little bearing and is a very subjective thing.
SinCityAssassin
Member
All I can say is that I hope they buy the game if they find out it's worth the price. Though the argument for piracy is always funny to me because most of the time it's essentially justifying stealing.
Jacksinthe
Banned
I made the distinction prior by saying he may have more wiggle room. That doesn't mean everyone will respond in kind.
Rising_Hei
Member
Only that it's not (and i'm clearly against it), it's like having a machine that prints real tomatoes out of nothing
I'll bite. How would he benefit?
Doctor Ironic
Member
Doesn't Denuvo still have a ton of problems with it, especially on the performance side?
TheWaxyPaxy
Neo Member
Honestly, anyone arguing or debating in favor of the price point for this game as rationale for people pirating would be written out of my life if I knew you. Seriously, as if these people are entitled to this product like it is a community service or essential part of society that Jonathon Blow somehow excluded them from based on the price point. Jonathon Blow offers a product at a price, if one deems it just, one buys it. There is no grey area here. What kind of fucked up logic it takes to even type out a response trying to justify people taking something for free that they simply are not entitled to, is beyond me. I won't even try to argue if it is worth $40 because it is subjective but people taking something for free illegally can go fuck themselves in general and in this case, in particular.
X-COM 2 is £27.99 on Funstock Digital and they often do a small discount code.
Rise of the Tomb Raider was £30 on GMG with their 25% off code.
I got AC Syndicate Gold Edition from Nuuvem for £26, sadly they've region locked that site since I ordered that. So Nuuvem is out of the question these days.
Fallout 4 was £30 on Funstock before release with a discount code.
Honestly, it's just a case of taking a bit of time to find the best price.
I think the problem with The Witness is, it's only available on Steam and Humble Bundle. So there's no competition to drive down prices at all.
This was my problem, though i ended up caving sadly in the end.
Its RRP is 1/3 lower than PC games that can be bought for less than it. One of the biggest advantages of PC gaming is having an open marketplace where competiton happens, allowing customers to get good deals. The Witness completely went round this. I am often able to get new copies of 'AAA' PC games at launch for <£20. even at a place like Amazon I've recently managed to preorder Dark Souls 3 for about £25, not so long ago I got Dying Light at launch for £17.99.
Silent Chief
Member
It's such a weak argument. It's also true of shoplifting.
CheesecakeRecipe
Stormy Grey
All tests for performance have been inconclusive either way, as far as I know. The real problem lies within the anti-tamper methods which can mess with certain types of modding. There are some which do require direct access to, and edits within, the exe file. Denuvo stands in the way of that as part of its protection scheme against cracks and other unsavory uses.
I really hate the semantics battle that occurs in these threads. End result you have something you shouldn't whether a copy or a physical thing. It's not yours and you have it, period.
Edit: I don't mean you as in the person I quoted.
Denuvo ain't cheap. And Blow likes DRM-free which is why he released a DRM-free version of it.
Shoplifting removes a item from somewhere, piracy makes a copy. Not the same thing.
Audioboxer
Member
It's a bit of rhetoric to say he's going to collapse financially, the game will still make a ton of money. Like all pirated content does.
I don't think you can blame the guy or anyone else on their own personal twitter having a short rant or post after working really hard for years and seeing piracy stats. Especially in the honeymoon period just after release.
Once you're in a position to create your own product or game I think you might be able to empathise a little more rather than just tell the guy to STFU and deal with it. A lot of developers will just blow it off, but all humans express themselves differently.
I don't think you can blame the guy or anyone else on their own personal twitter having a short rant or post after working really hard for years and seeing piracy stats. Especially in the honeymoon period just after release.
Once you're in a position to create your own product or game I think you might be able to empathise a little more rather than just tell the guy to STFU and deal with it. A lot of developers will just blow it off, but all humans express themselves differently.
Gamezone
Gold Member
They are still arguing about that.
Silent Chief
Member
PC is the platform of low price sales. Stuff gets released on PC 5 years later and people go crazy on the high volume sales.
Oh, so you think he should have half the sales he's getting now(the developer himself said that the sales on PS4 aren't better) to release it 5 years later at a lower price because... Reasons.
Right.
Yeah, this is a good point.
It's not like he's trying to take action against pirates to stop them from downloading/playing his game for free, he's just annoyed that people are doing it. People saying he shouldn't waste his time fighting this fight seem to be overreacting, he's not ever really in this fight. Not yet, at least.
No, it isn't, one is a digital good and one is a physical good that is depleting and actually costing money.
That's no defense for pirating, but it's ridiculous to act like they're the same thing.
Jacksinthe
Banned
Way to miss the 1981 posts between yours and the one you quoted.
isn't Denuvo run by bunch of formers pirates in the past?
They used to be pirates and they know how the pirates think
If you think about it, it's getting more funnier.
What? No, it's not. At all. This makes absolutely no sense. You can grow your own tomatoes, you can't make your own copy of The Witness.
Technically you could, but it would probably take several years and a couple million dollars.
drotahorror
Member
Once I saw it was $40 (I didn't know til a couple days before, surprised there wasn't a big thread about it or I may have missed it), I knew it was something I'd pass on for now. Being not a big fan of puzzlers but I did have a bit of interest in it, I figured I'd wait for a sale. If it was $20 I would have likely bought it day 1 though.
When the answer is in the 2nd post,why would I read 1981 posts?
There were two problems specified by the anti-drm crowd, the first being how it ruins your HDD/SSD, the other about how it "probably" affected performance to a noticable degree because occupies a chunk of the cpu. The former has been debunked, the latter remains unsubstantiated, over one year after the original accusation were made. I remember a few anti-drm fanatics promising that they would return with comparisons between the cracked and uncracked version of the games in question, such as Dragon Age: Inquisition, FIFA 15 and Lords of the fallen, because if Denuvo is associated with drm, it must be bad somehow, right?. But a year later, still nothing.
Yeah, why follow the discussion when your own opinion already got validated in the second post, what's there left to say really, /thread
I think that might account for some of the piracy. There's a point where, X being the value of someone's time, Y being the effort required to pirate a game, and Z being the cost of that game, X * Y > Z. At $40 for a puzzle game, even a great one with high production values, you're going to have a bad time.
Blow probably didn't do himself any favors by coming out against piracy, either. This just fans the flames; in my experience those who pirate don't feel guilty over it. The better way to handle it is to just look at piracy as a part of the cost of doing business, and move on.
here we go again
TheWaxyPaxy
Neo Member
You just simply do not respect or appreciate anything that isn't tangible then. The argument isn't whether or not there is some quantifiable cost associated with a physical object. It is an argument about something more than simply associating the value of an object with the physical nature of it.
Do you think a piece of plastic, because it has literal mass, is more valuable than 5 years of someones life? As a nurse it pisses me off more than anything that if someone had their pinky finger cut off they would freak the fuck out but I could tell the same person they have a blood sugar average of 300 but they dont "see" it so they don't give a fuck and will die within a year. The rationale you proposed is fucked up beyond belief. Value and importance being reduced to something tangible or physical, especially in this case, is incredibly rudimentary and incredibly neanderthal.
Silent Chief
Member
A stolen car isn't a lost sales.
If a lot of people are pirating the game, than there is a lot of sales being lost.
Snow is getting a lot of marketing out of this, but more importantly, every developer and publisher are also hearing about this. Everybody must be checking their DRM options now.
brooklyniteOne
Member
Cant front, the price did stop me from buying at launch. Just heard some impressions (giantbomb etc) and based on that and this thread I just went ahead and made the purchase.
Not unless you had a copy of the game sitting next to you and were copying the code exactly. It's like saying you could write ASoIaF while only having skimmed the first chapter of the first book.
TheWaxyPaxy
Neo Member
You remind of of the movie the Squid and the Whale. A kid enters a talent show and plays a Pink Floyd song and no one knows who Pink Floyd is and they all think hes amazing until they find out he stole it but he says something along the lines of "well, I COULD have wrote it" after he has heard it and listened multiple times. What a joke.
TheWaxyPaxy
Neo Member
Care to enlighten us on the cost difference of sales of pirated games versus marketing advantage from this situation? You can't. Yet you still say it, like its a thing, that is true. You don't know.
Chris Murphy
Member
The Witness is a AAA game, it just has a small team. What it lacks in assets and systems it makes up for in the depth and breadth of the puzzles (albeit based on a similar theme). Although for the Witness describing it as a puzzle game is a disservice to the overall experience.
I have done 90%+ of all the puzzles in the game, I'm just mopping up the remaining few, so I have a good understanding of what the Witness is.
You are paying for the quality of the game experience and the ability needed to create it, as opposed to a team of hundreds that created 500 different real world objects and sounds. That's not to say that the Witness fails in it's in-game assets or sounds because given the small team what they have created is nothing short of astonishing. Furthermore, the attention of detail in the asset production and placement in the world in creating some of the puzzles is on an entirely different level to any game seen before it. The ingenuity of the puzzles has a value. There isn't a AAA publisher that has created puzzles like this. Puzzles in AAA games are like tick tack toe to The Witness' chess. People are usually willing to pay more for something that is better than other things in the medium. You are paying £30 for an experience that I believe any AAA publisher is incapable of re-producing.
Reading this thread is depressing. So many will gladly pay huge multi-national conglomerates a good margin more for a game that is created to siphon even more out of the customer through DLC and in-game transactions. The Witness is a standalone game that nobody else would be able to make, or at least has not made yet.
£30 is not a lot for a one time experience that will make you learn things in a multitude of different systems, that opens your mind to new thought processes and teaches you the patience of learning things for a first time; when compared to games where you move the cursor to a polygonal based human body and click a button, despite their productions values.
The film Monsters was made on a budget of $500,000. When going to the movie theater you had to pay the same price as if you were going to see Battlefield Earth which had a budget of $73,000,000. Only in games is there a vocal number of man-children that complain about an asking price for something without taking in to account it's quality.
The thought process that indie developed games are worth less than big publisher games is archaic. If an indie developer can do more with less then they certainly deserve to have that ability rewarded.
Are the people opposed to £30 price point un-willing to pay for talent? It seems that they just do as much mental gymnastics as possible to ascertain that quality can not equal price point.
There's a reason why people buy Rolex watches when a £5 watch does the exact same thing.
I have done 90%+ of all the puzzles in the game, I'm just mopping up the remaining few, so I have a good understanding of what the Witness is.
You are paying for the quality of the game experience and the ability needed to create it, as opposed to a team of hundreds that created 500 different real world objects and sounds. That's not to say that the Witness fails in it's in-game assets or sounds because given the small team what they have created is nothing short of astonishing. Furthermore, the attention of detail in the asset production and placement in the world in creating some of the puzzles is on an entirely different level to any game seen before it. The ingenuity of the puzzles has a value. There isn't a AAA publisher that has created puzzles like this. Puzzles in AAA games are like tick tack toe to The Witness' chess. People are usually willing to pay more for something that is better than other things in the medium. You are paying £30 for an experience that I believe any AAA publisher is incapable of re-producing.
Reading this thread is depressing. So many will gladly pay huge multi-national conglomerates a good margin more for a game that is created to siphon even more out of the customer through DLC and in-game transactions. The Witness is a standalone game that nobody else would be able to make, or at least has not made yet.
£30 is not a lot for a one time experience that will make you learn things in a multitude of different systems, that opens your mind to new thought processes and teaches you the patience of learning things for a first time; when compared to games where you move the cursor to a polygonal based human body and click a button, despite their productions values.
The film Monsters was made on a budget of $500,000. When going to the movie theater you had to pay the same price as if you were going to see Battlefield Earth which had a budget of $73,000,000. Only in games is there a vocal number of man-children that complain about an asking price for something without taking in to account it's quality.
The thought process that indie developed games are worth less than big publisher games is archaic. If an indie developer can do more with less then they certainly deserve to have that ability rewarded.
Are the people opposed to £30 price point un-willing to pay for talent? It seems that they just do as much mental gymnastics as possible to ascertain that quality can not equal price point.
There's a reason why people buy Rolex watches when a £5 watch does the exact same thing.
We dont know if that is the case, if the game ends up selling way below expectations its possible that one reason for this could be that the market thinks the price for it was too much. Until then no one knows.
Its the #1 downloaded game on torrent sites according to the article, this is nothing new since there is always a #1 when there is a ranking. So what changes for developers exactly after he tweeted that that they didnt know before?
As somebody who is a big fan of Jon Blow this makes me rather sad.
I know there's a large discussion about whether or not piracy actually detracts from overall sales, but at the end of the day I couldn't imaging putting the amount of work into a game that Jon does and then seeing nothing from it. In fact, he even mentions that he likes to see people enjoy the game, which really proves how much he loves his craft, but damn I can't help but feel bad for the guy. He's one of the few people I can point to in the industry that really pushes the medium in the directions it needs to go.
Imagine spending several years of your life working on something that you put your heart and soul into, then once its complete you see some guy on twitch making money off of a stolen copy.
I know there's a large discussion about whether or not piracy actually detracts from overall sales, but at the end of the day I couldn't imaging putting the amount of work into a game that Jon does and then seeing nothing from it. In fact, he even mentions that he likes to see people enjoy the game, which really proves how much he loves his craft, but damn I can't help but feel bad for the guy. He's one of the few people I can point to in the industry that really pushes the medium in the directions it needs to go.
Imagine spending several years of your life working on something that you put your heart and soul into, then once its complete you see some guy on twitch making money off of a stolen copy.
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