Adventure Gamers - Forums

About Piracy

the game states what % of people choose the same culprit and moral choice as you did, so yes, if you allow it, we gather data from your game, and your game only. Calling it spying is exaggerated as it’s a part of the game experience to share your conclusions with other players. It’s ten time worse about data collecting when you are playing an online game, that will check your NAT, Hardware capacities and so on.

the assertion that people pirate game in order to avoid being “spied” doesn’t make any sense. Many online games are pirated and played online, where data are gathered anyway, if people wouldn’t want to be spied, they would never play any of those games, that are, incidentally, the most popular.

And if people didn’t want to be “spied”, they wouldn’t go to any Forum, register there and post, as the usage of any Web Browser leads to cookies installation that are gathering 1000 times more data on a daily basis, than all the Sherlock Holmes that can be created in the next 6 millions years.

We know we have 84 (today 83%) of pirates because we see the numbers of people that started the game, the number of cases finished, it’s a simple equation.

Is it bad? it’s standard for very good games on PC

About Loading :
The loading times in the game are around 10-15 seconds on a normal comp. Yours must have low RAM, low end video card or else to reach a minute even in the heaviest scenes like Kew Gardens. I advise you watch any let’s play vids on youtube to see it by yourself, it’s unlikely you would see a loading time that long, on PC or PS4 or Xone.

Iznogood For the cases you failed, there are logical deductions to why the culprit is the culprit. The fact that you didn’t see them doesn’t mean there are not present.

Again, you believe your opinion to be the truth for everyone else among the hundreds of thousands that already played the game, that’s…weird.

You are drawing a black and white portrait while the game is not about that. But I can start to read your opinion once I remove words that make it too manichean.

Wael - 10 October 2014 04:27 AM

We know we have 84 (today 83%) of pirates because we see the numbers of people that started the game, the number of cases finished, it’s a simple equation.

I haven’t bought a Frogwares game for PC since The Awakened remastered because of the copy protections used. Especially bad is the on-line activation thingy used for at least The Testament of SH and, I would assume, this new game. I haven’t downloaded the games either I should add. Played JtR and Testament on Xbox360 and PS3 respectively. Good games!

Are you saying that 83 % of all players who have finished the complete game are pirates? In that case I’m really surprised, since I would assume a lot of people that download a game illegally probably aren’t that interested in it to begin with.

Also, have you ever taken into account that some people may be put off by the the anti-piracy schemes and therefore choose to download illegally instead of buying? I would think that’s not uncommon at all.

Really hope you good people at Frogwares will do like so many others these days and sell your games DRM-free in the future. Not only do I believe you will sell more games. You’ll recieve a lot of good-will as well.

Iznogood you wrote this “So the number of people who “failed” in at least these two cases, has nothing to do with the difficulty of the deductions, only with the pure-guesswork or coin-toss nature of those 2 cases.”

it doesn’t sound like your opinion, it sounds like it’s the truth for everyone else who played these cases. You wrote it, not me, no need to overeact. And if I’m ready to accept criticism and I truly am because I read what you write and I take seriously your critics, maybe you can accept mine too over the formulation of your opinion.

Making a game like SH7 takes years, I’m not going to read your post and say “hey, you’re right” or “No, you’re wrong” based on your post. I gather data, and I’ll use it to prepare our next time. your data are the data of the player who just finished, other data will come in a month, other will come in 6 months.

Now, if it’s difficult for you to hear that your critic would be more effective if formulated in a less imperious way, I won’t bother you anymore.

SPOILER

About the loading time please check this video, from a stuck player and count the time he needs to start one of the heaviest scene of the game (the mine) once he presses continue, it’s 10 sec. If on your comp it’s significantly longer, it means your hardware is at fault. you can send us your dxdiag at support (at) frogwares.com and we’ll try to advise you what to change in order to get better loading times.

Veovis.

your argument in favor of DRM removal is about a battle that is already over for some time from our experience.
It’s already years that Arsene Lupin and Jack the Ripper have no DRM on them. Testament had DRM for a couple of months after the release then it was removed.
We also give steam keys for free for players that bought our games years ago and cannot play them as their disk is damaged or else.
Note that we were not necessarily paid for those game in the first instance, many publishers collapsed and never paid us (Dreamcatcher, CDV, DTP, Mastertronic, Digital jesters, etc…)

Crimes and Punishments have no DRM and it was cracked within a day. Some people might support us if we didn’t have DRM in the past, but numbers show it’s an incredibly tiny minority in the ratio sales/piracy.

Between 2.30 and 3.0 The player is not loading, he is actually inside the deduction space.

The game is not going to throw you away from the deduction space because you arrive at destination, you can use all your interface in the cab and many players use it this way to check clues, dialogs and of course, deductions.

You surely notice also how low is the framerate of the video, meaning that resources are taken to capture video and also probably her/his comp doesn’t have optimal hardware. Still, loading is nowhere close to a minute.

if you had problem with loading time, send us your hardware list and your steam install path, we’ll advise you what to do. you can refer to steam support page for more information.

Wael - 10 October 2014 10:41 AM

Veovis.

your argument in favor of DRM removal is about a battle that is already over for some time from our experience.
It’s already years that Arsene Lupin and Jack the Ripper have no DRM on them. Testament had DRM for a couple of months after the release then it was removed.
We also give steam keys for free for players that bought our games years ago and cannot play them as their disk is damaged or else.
Note that we were not necessarily paid for those game in the first instance, many publishers collapsed and never paid us (Dreamcatcher, CDV, DTP, Mastertronic, Digital jesters, etc…)

Crimes and Punishments have no DRM and it was cracked within a day. Some people might support us if we didn’t have DRM in the past, but numbers show it’s an incredibly tiny minority in the ratio sales/piracy.

Ok. It’s easy to understand and respect the frustration a developer must feel over piracy. Some people, myself included, does not consider DRM-free at Steam as DRM-free for real, but that’s an issue that has been discussed to death already so Iet’s not go there. I’ll buy C&P for the PS3 or Xbox360 eventually. Hope you will sell more of your PC-games via GOG in the future.

Read the last pages. The responses here to an interesting comment about a player’s experience, comments about a spyware issue, and about drm protection are a bit ridiculous/are nice examples of rhetorics in action/are great marketing.

To stick to the last issue: I agree with Veovis. It may be discussed to death, but it is still relevant. Requiring to have Steam installed to download a game/use a dvd is for some players a hassle, and I guess it will be enough reason for some others to download an illegal copy. For some it will be a reason not to buy the dvd.

A steep (download) price, and big differences in pricing between the countries (Steam), will also promote piracy.
Apart from that, there’s only one way to fight it I guess: inform, trust and take care of your (potential) customers.

I don’t think btw that all illegal downloads can be equated with (plain) piracy, though it might be a negligible number. If a demo isn’t offered, some will just try a cracked copy to decide if they will buy the game. Some will use it as backup, to keep their own copy mint (for various reasons), or as as an easier way to install/replay (keeping it on a hard drive as iso file).

robert foster - 12 October 2014 12:49 PM

To stick to the last issue: I agree with Veovis. It may be discussed to death, but it is still relevant. Requiring to have Steam installed to download a game/use a dvd is for some players a hassle, and I guess it will be enough reason for some others to download an illegal copy. For others it will be a reason not to buy the dvd.

There is another issue with the DVD version—apparently it is not complete, and requires downloading additional files. There is a user review of the game over at amazon.co.uk where the person had to spend hours waiting for the additional files to download. Isn’t the whole point of a physical copy to avoid having to spend unreasonable amounts of time downloading? There is such a wide disparity in Internet connection speeds across the world, also bandwidth caps, bandwidth throttling, and the like, that interferes with downloading. Assuming your customers are all capable of fast, unlimited downloads is ignoring part of your customer base. What is wrong with putting more than one DVD in the case if more disc space is needed?