Ah yes, the middle ground with a pirate site being NO PIRACY WHATSOEVER. A completely reasonable expectation to have.
That was it, there was no compromise allowing free early access, that's my point. I wasn't addressing reasonability or the piracy aspect I have been known to defend against here, I was addressing the fact that there was and still is a free option given that can't really be called compromise, but that would have served the purpose of a middle ground option had it been used by the people it was offered to by the developer himself.
We all can cite our own middle grounds. We'd all have some valid points.
One can argue that another middle ground would be for Selebus to live with the fact that piracy exists and that it might at least be bringing him exposure that he otherwise would not have had.
At the end of the day this is a pirate site. Selebus knew that before he posted his game here. He still knows that today. That probably brought him some early exposure that he would not have had. He has even acknowledged that the high ratings on this site were corelated with subscriptions and in the past had asked his discord followers to leave 5 star reviews of the game here.
But fine, all of us have some cognitive dissonance eventually. But ultimately, even if he never uploaded it here, if his game somehow ended up getting as popular as it is today, it would have eventually made it to this site anyway. Piracy tends to be a symptom of popularity. The games I see here that don't get posted quickly are games that are much less popular. Wasting so much time and energy an an eventuality seems pretty pointless.
He is also free to try to implement DRM. I don't think he'll be successful if he tries it himself. If he pays someone else, I don't think he'll get back the money he's hoping too. Short of going with denuvo or something (which costs $25k per month), the game will be cracked very quickly - especially if he sticks with renpy.
Ultimately the reason he's pissed off is he started spending more money and his income growth has stagnated. He blames it on piracy. It's probably a lot more complex than that. I'd say all of the following are much bigger factors than piracy: It's a very niche game that has probably reached most of its potential audience, the game tends to be unforgiving to new players, global economy slowing causing people to cut back on unnecessary expenses, and a general reduction in quality long term. His public attitude also will not do much to attract new players.
No developer selling their game, so as to exclude those giving it away for free in the first place, is going to just lie down and accept that, the difference is that some are more hostile against it than others. I've seen some take some serious steps to combat it, far worse than anything Sel has done so far in terms of the severity of the action, though usually actions in the game itself or in the distribution.
You may have given him an idea, make the game so unpopular that users on sites like this avoid it like the plague. This would drive the will to upload the game through the floor simply by virtue of no one wanting to play it outside of the patrons that are already committed to playing until the end.
I have seen other methods used that keep the patrons in line. He could implement distribution tracking and ban those who are recorded as in violation. He does have the potential for volunteers on the DRM thing, we saw firsthand on this thread how willing some patrons are to come to his aid, there's no indication that none of them are capable of implementing DRM, I can tell you that right now even from an internal perspective. The only indication is that there are some decently tech savvy people in the patronage, not how tech savvy they are.
Don't worry mate, i made a very similar point a few pages ago and i'm canonically 14 now. I'm definitely a cynic but eh, age is just a number amirite ?
If i were Selebus Deleted member 1697433 i wouldn't bother with DRM and stuff. I wonder how hard it would be to just include some more realistic kids in the game since F95 don't care about anime kids. Like hot samples of games that were actually banned like Proud Father or The Guardian. As an ad/partnership or something.
That would risk doing far more than getting it banned on pirate sites, it could get it banned across the board on his official third party pages and quite possibly put him in legal hot water if he goes too close to the forbidden line. That's like Icarus playing with fire in one hand while not only flying too close, but directly into the sun. This is not worth his entire revenue stream plus the potential for legal trouble.
He literally states he is selling this, he can't do that with a game made with KK, or does he think he's the exception that's allowed to do whatever he wants?
I can post the link here for those renders, if anyone wants it, I got them all nicely packed in a zipped file.
Mega
Done, leaked now, I don't know if it's completely up-to-date, but it was when I downloaded them all.
He's in a grey area with SubscribeStar, which a lot of people seem to consider selling the product even if it normally isn't seen that way legally, leading to some discussions of other games in other places devolving into arguments over the issue when some players don't get what they want.
