"Piracy doesnt harm businesses"... Reality Check + [Weekly Update 2018-05-25] (Patreon)

In working so hard towards the new release of Taps, I havent looked at the SoE activations server in a little over 3 months. I lost interest between getting the game to Steam and the last moan I had around piracy, trying to migrate players to what we hoped would be a better mechanism for distribution of updates etc. and I can see all our important stats between Steam and Nutaku admin panels these days.

This morning after cross correlating this data with sales and other metrics to form the above graph, I'm pretty broken in all honesty and questioning the point of the last 5 years of hard work...

That's not an understatement, a plea for your sympathy or a shock comment to garner support, its a raw emotive response to seeing the efforts of everyone involved crippled and downtrodden by piracy and the continual pace these fucking locusts keep going at vs even the most recent Steam discounted price week.

I've removed the metrics themselves but you should between the lines be able to see that absolute ravenous piracy of Shards vs actual sales. The most telling data in the last month (green bars) shows Steam Sales, and the week of the 60% off absolutely overshadowed by activations of 1.0 and 1.01 (which at this point are almost all pirated copies) that continue at significant pace.

All legitimate purchases and supporters of SoE now have a Steam Key (yellow bars) but this also includes the keys we have distributed to YouTubers and influencers via Keymailer and again, you see the sweeping difference between these (which includes every Nutaku purchaser and every Offbeatr supporter) you get an even bigger feeling for the scale of the discord.

My point? 

I don't know. I just wanted to share with anyone that cares to listen the reality of what piracy can do to small indie games studios and the bullshit  that it doesnt harm anything.

Even if you take the 1 pirate != 1 sale as fact, its still pretty debilitating to see that thousands upon thousands of people are interested in stealing your work, but not willing to pay for it. Those spikes in activations 100% do not correlate to sales, I can assure you of that!

Then there is the other fallacy that although they steal it now, they will go on to support you in other ways. Again, utter conjecture if you plot those spikes against Patreon support, there is absolutely no correlation. We haven't sold a thing in the shop for months and I havent seen any improvement in Taps IAP either.

What Next?

In all honesty, right now I dont know. Filing DMCA requests falls on deaf ears and even though information on every activation to the server, pirated or not, gets stored and I could pursue action there but the horse has bolted so whats the point. To quote The Donald, most of these parasites are in "shithole countries" and ignore Adobe requests, so what chance do we have?!

I get it... people like to get something for free if they don't have to pay for it, SoE is "expensive" compared to even a AAA title and we should "expect piracy for a game like this" (yes, some dickhead actually said that to me...) but it still sucks and doesn't justify these numbers.

If you're reading this, and did pirate a copy of our game, perhaps think about contributing a $1, even for just a single month, as a gesture of goodwill!

Anyway... rant over... here is this weeks update:

• Finalised the syncing issue with the 3 sets of animations stacking for armour, head and weapon.
• Reddit and Google AdWords campaigns for Shards in trial mode. Some minor increase in sales but need to be careful not to create a negative deficit, especially in GA
• New Database server online - server install, DB migration and test environment all in place
• First new WebGL build now in place on the Nutaku Sandbox. More bug fixing but its minor teething niggles at least
• Handful of new icons for weapons (slow week due to Animator recovery)
• Fishing game review = revisions. Code broken so no actual update video, but new strike system discussed and improvements
• Frozen Fish Sword and Candy Stick double handed weapon animations finished.
• Achievements fully migrated to the new system (all server side)

The Isle of Man TT starts tomorrow which usually means 2 weeks of chaos on the island but other than a single hangover, that should be the only negative for next week!

Cheers to all our current supporters too, whether you're buying our games, still pledging via Patreon, using our IAP in Taps or generally just being awesome in the Discord, it keeps me going...

...sometimes you just need a rant!!

Del @ CryptidTech