{"id":503,"date":"2011-03-30T19:34:14","date_gmt":"2011-03-30T18:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.frozax.com\/blog\/?p=503"},"modified":"2015-04-04T21:47:54","modified_gmt":"2015-04-04T21:47:54","slug":"piracy-stats-spring-up-harmony-pc-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.frozax.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/piracy-stats-spring-up-harmony-pc-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Piracy of Spring Up Harmony (PC Game) : 96%"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s very difficult to estimate the piracy rate of PC games, and even more to estimate the impact on the sales. For my last game Spring Up Harmony, I found out that the piracy rate is\u00a096% (!)<\/strong>. Higher that I’d thought, really. Read the details below and find out how I obtained this number.<\/p>\n

The game<\/h3>\n

The PC version of\u00a0Spring Up Harmony<\/a> was released last February as shareware. The trial version gives access to 6 out of 35 levels and restricts access to multi-player game play. The registered version costs $4.99 and gives access to the full game.<\/p>\n

The game has an online rankings feature. I used this feature to gather statistics about players. Of course, I do not have any information on players playing offline.<\/p>\n

The pirated version<\/h3>\n

A few hours<\/span> after releasing my game on my site, I receive a\u00a0Google Alert<\/a> with a link to a\u00a0Russian\u00a0forum pointing to a hacked version of the game. I download it (no virus inside, good point) and it is a package with the full version with a key generator unlocking the full game included. And the following days\/weeks, I regularly received alerts with sites linking to the full game for free using download sites or torrents.<\/p>\n

The response<\/h3>\n

As soon as I found out about this version, I quickly uploaded an update. As for every update, I have a unique ID in the game. I changed it so that the ID of games downloaded from my site is different from the ID of the pirate copy found on torrents. I also modified the script used for online rankings to disable the features for pirates and I removed the existing pirates in the rankings. Instead of receiving the rankings, pirates get a specific message downloaded from the rankings server to incite them to get the full version (see screenshot below).<\/p>\n

\"piracy\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I also tried to take down a few links on download sites by reporting copyrighted material but it’s very slow (when it’s even working).<\/p>\n

A twitter user posted a link to the full game too. I contacted twitter (using this specific page<\/a>)\u00a0immediatly, they replied in 14 days (!) and only removed the single tweet about my game. The user is still using twitter to post dozens of illegal links to games everyday. Useless.<\/p>\n

The different categories of players<\/h3>\n

By examining the logs of the access to the online rankings script, I could split the players into different categories:<\/p>\n