Technobabylon reveiw12/27/2023 Of course no individual act of piracy is responsible for this state of affairs, just like no individual purchase is responsible for a developer's financial well-being, and at least in certain circumstances it's hard to be annoyed at someone for pirating a game. As someone who grew up in the age of standalone, well-made single-player game, it's distressing to see that type of game being relegated to a niche. It's impossible for me to quantify the effect, and maybe I'm spinning a just-so story, but it certainly seems to me that the two are related. Moreover, the perception - whether fair or not - that piracy suppresses sales is probably a significant cause of various trends that have worsened games, specifically increased movement toward: (1) consoles (2) games with inescapable online integration or at least an online-experience priority (3) F2P with microtransactions (4) "early access," crowdfunding, pre-ordering, and other ways of locking in money before piracy can conceivably suppress sales and (5) using post-release patching (which is to say, premature release) to encourage legal purchasing. Even assuming piracy imposes no other costs, it worsens games in that regard. Pirates also need to accept reality, and reality is that widespread piracy causes major developers to implement DRM that harms the gaming experience in various ways. That said, I think it's mistaken to believe that piracy harms no one. You have to accept piracy and work within a reality in which people can get your game for free almost as easily as they can buy it. In my view, current technology does not offer a feasible way to stop piracy of traditional single-player games, so I don't think it's worth pretending otherwise if you're a developer. This seeming cleverness could attract customers to the game. Rather, the audience is people who have already paid, who will feel better about having paid because they can laugh at pirates, and people who haven't bought the game but will hear about it, and/or about the developer, in a way that will make the game and/or developer seem clever. They probably don't even hope that it will cause a single pirate to buy the game, though I suppose some small number of them might in a touche kind of hat-tip. I think Croteam's move is less an anti-piracy measure than it is a piece of performance art designed to attract paying customers to the game of course they know pirates will work around it, and I can't imagine that they think that it will deter piracy.
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