Pirate mode is quite hard on the start, and that's it.

[RealOfficialTurf]

You start with 70K. Even if you made your game as cheap as possible, in pirate mode, you can't break even! I managed to survive the start by quickly gaining research points to discover game engine and DRM, and that still requires me taking the bailout option or selling shares!

Is this the reality? Is this how every game developers started their career in real life?

And after I had a game engine with only copy protection V1, there's really not much of a challenge, aside from 20-ish percent people still pirating my games.

Guess you can't survive the harsh world without a DRM.

P.S. Does DRM actually hurt fans? I didn't see any more fan mails after the DRM revolution. Maybe the fan numbers dropping a little bit?

P.P.S. It took me very long to get a fan mail about a fan that got hurt by DRM. Guess I'll take non-pirate mode after this one playthrough is finished..

[WanderingHero]

The devs have admittied Pirate mode wasn't realistic and the game in general took liberatires for the sake of gameplay. Though origonally Pirate mode was anti piracy designed to make pirates feel bad for pirating

[Mobbstar]

Yeah, original Pirate Mode was distributed by the devs on the black market to torture people who download games from there

Back in the days, console games were on custom cartridges, and as such hard to pirate, but PC and consoles like the PS1 had CDs, so piracy took a cheap hardware modification at most. Though pirates would go as far as mass producing fake consoles and sell ripped games for them, especially for nintendo consoles. It's fascinating.

DRM isn't all that painful to the end-user nowadays, Steam even automates product keys and the likes for you.

[LazyTribe]

Originally posted by RealOfficialTurf:

You start with 70K. Even if you made your game as cheap as possible, in pirate mode, you can't break even! I managed to survive the start by quickly gaining research points to discover game engine and DRM, and that still requires me taking the bailout option or selling shares!

Is this the reality? Is this how every game developers started their career in real life?

You can beat pirate mode without ever including DRM into your products. Just make better games and do it more often.

Originally posted by Mobbstar:

DRM isn't all that painful to the end-user nowadays, Steam even automates product keys and the likes for you.

It depends on the DRM that you are including with your game. I consider most DRM to be malware because it usually negatively impacts performance or privacy of my computer system. However when a product is offered in a manner that is convenient, correctly priced, and not treating customers like criminals people tend to obtain things in a legal manner. So even a little DRM can help (like Steam, Spotify, Netflix) but it all too easily can start to hurt consumers and/or profits (Denuvo!!!).

[Mobbstar]

Originally posted by Lazytribe:

You can beat pirate mode without ever including DRM into your products. Just make better games and do it more often.

No DRM means you lose over 80% of your profits, in which case the games do not even properly cover their developement + time cost in my experience. To me, it's a race for getting the first share sellout offer so I can afford Copy Protection V1 and start actually making money off my products.

[LazyTribe]

Originally posted by Mobbstar:

Originally posted by Lazytribe:

You can beat pirate mode without ever including DRM into your products. Just make better games and do it more often.

No DRM means you lose over 80% of your profits, in which case the games do not even properly cover their developement + time cost in my experience. To me, it's a race for getting the first share sellout offer so I can afford Copy Protection V1 and start actually making money off my products.

The 80% doesn't stay the entire game. As you get more fans the pirated amount goes down too.

[DortSnort]

Originally posted by Lazytribe:

Originally posted by Mobbstar:

No DRM means you lose over 80% of your profits, in which case the games do not even properly cover their developement + time cost in my experience. To me, it's a race for getting the first share sellout offer so I can afford Copy Protection V1 and start actually making money off my products.

The 80% doesn't stay the entire game. As you get more fans the pirated amount goes down too.

meh, that's mostly applied for end-game, but even with my CPv7 (or whatever the last CP is), I can still get over 20% people to pirate it