Kenshi on a torrent site?

[Express]

http://netforbeginners.about.com/gi/o.h ... rrents.to/
So I found this just now, and am pretty sure it shouldn't be here. Guess I'll just post it here.

[Hatsune_Neko]

http://netforbeginners.about.com/gi/o.h ... rrents.to/
So I found this just now, and am pretty sure it shouldn't be here. Guess I'll just post it here.

thanks
here is a more direct rout
my Anti Virus software went bonkers clicking your link.

http://torrents.to/search/kickasstorrents/Kenshi

Maybe Chris can do something about it maybe now that he knows??

and just noticed, this was my 777 post!!!

[Ookami]

There isn't much that can be done if a game is already being torrented by people.

Most sites won't take it down or remove it unless it's a fake or the file in the torrent is a virus.

And even if most sites do remove it... Kenshi is on thepiratebay and they won't remove it, ever. (considering it isn't fake or a virus)

Though on the bright side, the pirated version doesn't include the updater thingy, so it's not like people can continue to update to new versions... and the pirated version is the one with the endless bandits >.> which in a way is a very frustrating punishment.

Really, the only thing Chris can do is ask people not to pirate it. Creating a DRM or something to 'protect' against pirates wouldn't do much good.
Triple A games have DRM and they're cracked within 24 hours, so chances are he'd just be wasting his time if he stopped working on the game to create a DRM of any kind.

[Hatsune_Neko]

sad but true.

[p1t1o]

In all honesty, its a good thing really, in this day and age - you ought to be more worried if NOBODY was pirating it!

I think that the reality is that even though its piracy, it vastly increases your market penetration because: A) more people will see it and play [a version of] it; B) a decent proportion will pirate it and be like "Well, this is excellent, I want the full game!" and then pay for it.

Think of it as free advertising

Piracy is a sad fact of the human condition, but I think the best way to deal with it is not brute force (DRM etc) but by going with the flow and using it to your advantage.

[Tolwrath]

Greenheart games, etc.

[fidias]

i have a friend of a friend, who very often download pirated games, and then if they are good, hi buys it... demos are often very deceiving....
plus.... when this friend of mine was younger, and poorer, he couldnt actually BUY any games, so he would download it pirated. but then you think.... he WOULDNT buy the game, even if it where amazing, because he didnt have the money to.... so in any case, is not like the developer was losing money, because this friend was not a potential client. so all in all, i dont really see pirating like a bad thing.
that being said, i dont know if most people who download a pirated version of a game will pay for it, if they are happy with the content....

any toughts?

[Ookami]

i have a friend of a friend, who very often download pirated games, and then if they are good, hi buys it... demos are often very deceiving....
plus.... when this friend of mine was younger, and poorer, he couldnt actually BUY any games, so he would download it pirated. but then you think.... he WOULDNT buy the game, even if it where amazing, because he didnt have the money to.... so in any case, is not like the developer was losing money, because this friend was not a potential client. so all in all, i dont really see pirating like a bad thing.
that being said, i dont know if most people who download a pirated version of a game will pay for it, if they are happy with the content....

any toughts?

Beyond the most likely thought that comes to mind after reading your post? (I'm sure other people will get this)

Yes. And while yes, the person is not a potential client. Company's still consider it a loss since they have no way to guarantee that the person who pirated the game, software, etc. will eventually buy it. So they consider that a loss in revenue, even if you don't.

Demo's being deceiving... I don't think so. It's more like demo's are more of a lazy version of the game and some demo's even go as far as to limit things the person who is playing the demo can do. I don't think I've ever played a demo of anything since the demo discs for the PS1.

On the aspect of someone buying a game, if they pirated it...
In a lot cases, it's just people making excuses, but there are probably a few people who do buy the game they've pirated if they liked it enough and actually want to help the dev who made it.

And on that note... unlike most I'll admit that I did pirate Kenshi, but I bought it within 24 hours. I had to break into the Bank of Wife, but that's beside the point.
If admitting it gets me banned or anything... so be it, but I'd rather not beat around the bush or lie.

[Santaissick]

One can try to think from the "positive side" that more people buy the game after pirating and trying it out but I'm sure it's not like that. I'm 100% sure that all games would have more sales if such thing as pirating didn't exists.

I used to pirate a lot of games... All of them actually... And even if some games I liked I did buy afterwards it's nothing compared to hundreds (thousands?) in cash I stole from the companies in shape of games. I don't pirate any more though. There's absolutely no need to pirate now that there's steam sales. Quality games under 10 bucks a piece W00T






And to other remotely relevant story from my pirate days... I had to get my computer fixed in a professional company because some kind of virus, that I wasn't able to fix myself, messed it up. The next day I get slightly confused call from the guy which I left the computer. He says that it's definitely virus that messed things up and there seems to a lot more going on as well. He says that they have to run some kind of program that has to run days in a row so it's going to take a lot longer than it was originally thought.

Maybe 4-5 days later I get a message that I can pick the computer up now. When I came to the store and told what I came for, I got like a REALLY bad glance from behind the desk. Glance that says along the line of: "So you are THAT guy." The dude behind the desk proceeds to get the computer from the back and puts it on the desk and he starts explaining what they discovered.

There were a LOT more viruses than just the one that messed everything up. They couldn't even start recovering the lost folders and fixing the problem I originally brought the computer there for before getting rid of the viruses. They had to run a program that really precisely inspects every part of my computer. They found over 300 different malwares, spywares, adwares and other viruses. He is clearly astonished and shocked about the fact that it is even possible while he starts lecturing me that he has never in his career seen anything so diseased and that the only way to achieve that is by huge amount of downloading illegal material.

He said that they were able to remove the viruses and probably recover almost all of the lost data. After solid 15 minutes of lecturing about how illegal pirating is and warning that police might come after me and warning about how dangerous it is and how big is the risk of downloading viruses when downloading illegal material from the webs, he finally lets me pay and leave. After setting all up again I noticed they really had done a good job. They were able to recover everything important and there were no problems anymore. I noticed that it was even faster to start and run everything faster than before the melt down, so even all the viruses that I hadn't noticed before were slowing down the computer significantly. I was able to start torrenting games, movies and music even faster again...

TL;DR Computer went crazy. Company fixed it after finding over 300 viruses.


So... Yeah... Pirating. And a bottle of rum! Yarrrrr

[Ookami]

Over 300? ...Wow...

Usually it only takes 1 to ruin everything for me.

[p1t1o]

Yeah, I've been stung by a pretty nasty virus too, clever little ****er, absolute meltdown, uninstalled all internet browsers and somehow (cant quite remember the details) disabled the antivirus I had at the time, I think AVG. How do you go online to download firefox without firefox? (uninstalled IE a long time ago)

Downloaded firefox at work, brought home. Installed. Download awesome suite of freeware anti-malware tools from filehippo. Remove virus. Re-start. Computer boots, windows fails to start, a critical file has been snatched away somehow.

Only option is to re-format. Luckily didn't lose any data but guess what, any *.ISO files (image files of CDs or DVDs) were corrupted...



On another note, I heard some statistic or other (ok I know statistics quoted by "someguyontheinternet", ie: me, arn't exactly a reliable source...) from Germany, it stated something along the lines that those people who pirate music, are the people who *spend* the most too. If this were true, removing piracy, if that could be done, would actually *harm* the music industry.

Here's hoping that anyone who pirates Kenshi, buys it.

[Clawdius Talonious]

Stopping software piracy is, generally speaking, not worth the effort. Studies have shown that for every 1000 copies that you prevent being pirated, you make about one sale. With a game like Kenshi, it's probably better to have 1000 broke folks playing the game and enjoying it than it is to have one guy buy the game. After all who knows how many of those 1000 people would eventually buy the game, either out of a sense of moral obligation or more likely, because they want to play the newest version of the game and it hasn't been uploaded by any nefarious community members, who may be too busy enjoying Kenshi to do so.

Since Kenshi's advertising budget is limited, word of mouth is important. While a software pirate may not have the cash to purchase the software they're playing, they often are members of gamer communities and have friends who may well hear about Kenshi for the first time from one of these people. It's certainly difficult to quantify how often that sort of thing may happen, but at the same time piracy is to be expected in any game that is available in a DRM free version. And as was related to me via BMT when I purchased the game:

I won't have no evil DRM system on my ship! No sir!

It's a shame that Steam doesn't allow for personalized game purchasing messages, Chris hardly has time to wish all of our beards a hundred years of health manually.

[Tolwrath]

Wasn't it on sale for like $8 a month ago anyway? The "lack of money" excuse doesn't really apply.

[Clawdius Talonious]

it's tough to say why exactly piracy abounds in the numbers it does for some titles. World of Goo experienced something like a 95% piracy rate, as in 95% of the people playing the game hadn't bought it. The numbers on titles that go up as part of a Humble Bundle typically see a substantial uptick in piracy rates when they go up in the Humble Bundle. And, yes, this includes the titles you can get half a dozen of for 30 cents etc.

While the financial motivation isn't always the driving force behind it, it's often the reason given by people pirating software. Regardless of your reasons, it sucks when you resort to piracy of indie games. I know that some people espouse the concept that I should find it all equally offensive, but I can empathize with people who don't want to pay 60 bucks for a AAA title that has already sold over a million copies rather than buying groceries. When you don't want to buy a 5 dollar indie game because you could get a cheeseburger combo instead, that's when I start to feel like it's a pretty dick move.

Ars Technica has a new crowdsourced discussion of the idea of trying to protect software from piracy. A number of hardware vendors have kicked around the idea of slowing down every process and creating false positives and the joy of making all software less reliable with hardware piracy checks. Of course, since they can't really do that sort of thing unilaterally other companies would be happy to sell hardware that wasn't broken, meaning that it would be a foolish move.

The bottom line is, time is money, if you can invest a thousand hours into making your software impossible to pirate and it brings in an extra thousand sales it may be worth your time. Of course, harder to quantify is how many people don't purchase your product because they feel like your onerous restrictions are treating them like thieves. I've seen a ton of people say they would go out of their way to pirate various titles, specifically because they had onerous DRM. On the other side of that equation is that I myself have purchased Far Cry 3 as Ubisoft's first title in a long time that didn't require always-on DRM, and South Park - The Stick of Truth as their first title that hasn't required Uplay in a long time.

The financial incentive for trying to stamp out piracy is, in all honesty, not even really an issue. The reason AAA companies are so quick to show that they're willing to inconvenience their customers for the sake of trying to punish pirates (which is honestly ludicrous, the only people who will be inconvenienced are your legitimate customers, pirates will strip out that code entirely) is because it's a show for their stockholders. Stockholders who don't play games, and just want to see that something is being done about this "lost profit" perception that comes along with piracy.

For years companies refused to localize their games into Russian, laboring under the false impression that there was no market because everyone in Russia was a pirate. This was self fulfilling prophecy, when you release a localized version years after the community has done that work and want to charge full price for a game that has been available elsewhere for years, of course you're not going to sell as many copies as you'd like.

While it may not be as applicable in the software industry, I imagine it is relevant that a recent study suggests that a lot of the people who pirate music are also the same people who buy the most music legitimately.

The music industry is an interesting case study on the concept of piracy in general, at least in my opinion. Games executives fall into the same trap that Recording Industry executives fell into for years. The projections failed to meet the actual sales data, so the record industry blamed piracy, instead of acknowledging that the slow attrition of inflation and stagnant pay had begun to adversely affect their bottom line. It certainly didn't help their cause when Metallica took it upon themselves to become the face of anti-piracy advocacy, given that people who had been fans of their early work felt that the quality of their music explained their failure to meet sales expectations. And now we're seeing a similar situation where bloated AAA budgets results in design-by-committee styles of games that don't always live up to their fans expectations. Moreover, games that are successful and sell 5 million copies in their first few months on store shelves are being billed as failures, because the idiots who do their projections said they would sell more copies than any other game in history.

It's certainly not easy to say what the true underlying cause of indie game piracy is, even if the financial reason is one of the most often given by those who are happy to expect others to work for free. Whether that is the case or not doesn't really matter though, the only people you can really bludgeon with your anti-piracy measures are your customers, pirates will nullify those software license checks and phone-home bits in the code. In the game of piracy the only winning move is not to play.

[Xen]

Cant see anything bad in this situation.
Its kinda like demo. You can play it, but you must update it to have something more, and to update it you mast use key, which obviously is blocked by Captain, so you have to buy it.

If verewolf didnt post game on torrents (0.40) I possibly wouldnt buy the game.

[SamuraiNZ]

My flatmate showed me "pirated" version of this game, that night it was on my steam list.
Pirating is not good or all bad...
I can't be sure I would of known about this game any other way.

[Seimears]

I am not against pirating for the fact some big buisness goes to far. But on that note there is no way on earth I would go through any one I do not trust to download a program. I am not going to risk putting some virus and shutting my pc down and haven to spend hundreds of dollars to fix it when it could of cost me just a few dollars to buy the game in the first place.

[Seimears]

When it comes to my pc I take my dads advice when it comes to fixen a car. If you fix it cheap expect it to break if you want it to last be smart and spend that extra money or expect to be spending more for that cheap part.

[Ookami]

A somewhat valid reason for 'indie game piracy' I imagine would be suspicion. And by that I mean people know what to expect from AAA game dev's, but indie dev's are all different and people aren't going to go and pay 20-30 bucks for a game and find out it sucks.

Chances are they'll pirate it first, find out if it's good or bad.

I've come across a lot of indie games that look and sound awesome when you go by the 'summary' of the game and it's screenshots, but most indie games don't have a demo.

So you usually have to buy it to know what the game is actually like since chances are, youtube may not have a review video or a let's play from someone.

Most people don't want to pay that 20-30 dollars for a game and then find out that the developer half-assed it or worse, the game is nigh unplayable because of bugs, poor quality work, etc and then the dev goes 'poof' and disappears. (aka shovelware or cash-in)

If someone pirates an indie game on suspicion, I can understand it and honestly, I agree with it. I'd be more than pissed if I spent 20-30 or in some cases 60 dollars on a game and found that it works (starts up and everything), but there's enough bugs in it that it's unplayable and basically a proverbial brick that the dev doesn't feel like fixing.

'Guise of the Wolf' is pretty much the perfect example in this. It's $15 (reasonable price, in my opinion... if it worked) but it's utterly broken and everything is half-assed. This game is a prime example of why 'some' people may pirate to 'try' the game before buying it. They'd rather not make the same mistake twice and... basically flush their money down a shovelware-creating toilet.

For an indie game $10 or less... I think some people pirate those mostly just to see what it is as most games around in that price range are point & click and casual games. No one really wants to buy one of those on accident because then you really do feel like you wasted your money. (unless you like those kind of games)

If someone pirates it for a different reason... yeah, I'd have to agree that is a dick move.

[deadwetdog]

If not for pirates bay i never would have known about this game and if i had i never would have paid cash for it iv been cheated by half made bs games so many times the basic ideal behind the gaming industry is put out so much bs and put all money in to advertising so that when people get bored of the crap game they buy another one i saw in kenshi a great game and was happy to buy it would have payed twice what i did happily bought it before it was even on steam and just today got the newest update great game but the way the gaming industry has gotten you cant expect anyone to just put faith in much of anything without trying it out first but pirated games defiantly have there problems to if your going to play a game more than a few times you don't want to loose all your saves and re install the game and find a new crack for every update such a great game i hope they make a fortune on it i also hope this indie trend of making games puts a big dent in company like EA which put millions on advertising games they cant be botherd to making worth playing or even playable and this isnt even in beta and is a great game already