Random Ramblings

Some pretty cool stuff has happened in gaming and technology this week and so I wanted to write a little about some of the things that interested me.

Greenheart Games Piracy Story

Unless you live under a rock or don't pay attention, you've heard about Game Dev Tycoon by now. The story itself has already been all over the place, but the general idea of it is that the developers of the game uploaded a "cracked" copy of the game to a well known torrent site at the same time that they released the game. They were tracking the downloads of it and at the time of the stories hitting over 93% of the copies out there were the pirated copies.

What those who pirated the game didn't know was this version was slightly different to the actual bought version. You could play the game until a point where a message popped up that looked like this:

Irony... Sweet sweet irony. Credit to Edge Online

That's right, the pirated game made the games you made get pirated (ouch my head). Soon after threads on many forums popped up filled with so much irony that it really hurts to read. Some selections below:

"Guys, I reached some point where if I make a decent game with a score 9-10, it gets pirated and I can't make any profit ... is there some way to avoid that? ... There's no point inventing a new engine because the revolutionary game made out of it will get pirated and I will not be able to cover my expenses,"

"Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me! ... not fair."

 Some other pirates asked if they were able to "research DRM" to protect their games. And all of this over an $8 game. There is no excuse for not paying less than a meal at McDonalds to play a good game. At the end of the day however, I can see this helping Greenheart Games with sales and publicity of their game. I will be buying it, and all because of some piracy within piracy.

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

Made by Tharanon

The latest Steam survey popped up for me today and I was very interested to see the results. It seems that nVidia still has the majority share in video cards with 52% of the market. ATI cards make up 33% of the market with the rest being Intel. Something that I sort of always knew but didn't realise was just how much of the processor market Intel holds (73%). The rest of it is pretty standard, but worth a look.

Anyway that ends the Random Ramblings, I'll probably be doing this style of post a little more.

GAME ON!