Vintage Story is too difficult to pirate

[brndd]

I figured I'd not mince words with the title.

In Minecraft you can set a multiplayer server to "offline mode" to allow clients to connect without a valid game licence. AFAIK Notch basically added this feature to enable small-scale piracy of the game for LAN parties and such, and it's a small miracle Mojang-Microsoft haven't removed it from the game yet.

Vintage Story doesn't seem to have such an option, and I'll be frank, I wish it did. It's very difficult to get friends who aren't the biggest fans of block games to try the game out with you in multiplayer. I think it's one of those situations where piracy can actually increase sales: these people are very unlikely to buy the game without trying it, but some subset of them might buy the game after trying it out in multiplayer with friends.

 

[l33tmaan]

Shhh, people don't like this topic!

[PhotriusPyrelus]

Gotta say, the thread title had me ready with my pitchfork, but the content makes some degree of sense.  I remember installing a "spawn" install from StarCraft to play multiplayer via LAN.  Genuinely perplexes me that more games didn't have that kind of an option, though LAN parties seem almost non-existent now (no, internet cafès and similar places don't count).  Which is kinda strange to me what with how powerful and comparatively trivially transportable laptops can be now.

At the very least, it would be nice to eventually have a demo, but I'm sure they have much more important irons in the fire right now.

Edited May 30, 2023 by PhotriusPyrelus

[l33tmaan]

I believe there IS a demo but it's of a very old creative build?

[brndd]

13 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Gotta say, the thread title had me ready with my pitchfork, but the content makes some degree of sense.  I remember installing a "spawn" install from StarCraft to play multiplayer via LAN.  Genuinely perplexes me that more games didn't have that kind of an option, though LAN parties seem almost non-existent now (no, internet cafès and similar places don't count).  Which is kinda strange to me what with how powerful and comparatively trivially transportable laptops can be now.

At the very least, it would be nice to eventually have a demo, but I'm sure they have much more important irons in the fire right now.

Online gaming is so convenient these days that LAN parties don't really exist. I feel like we sort of lost some of the culture of trying out new games with friends in the process, which was, let's face it, mostly enabled by piracy at LAN parties.

In a couple of friends circles/gaming communities I am a part of, we try to keep that tradition alive with semi-regular "Friday game nights" (not necessarily occurring on Fridays) and, for longer-term games, private servers, and the hardest part is always finding a game that 5-10 people actually own and want to play. For the obvious reason that people tend to not want to pay money for a game they will probably play exactly once, most of the games we end up playing are free-to-play titles and older titles with no DRM.

I feel like the Minecraft offline server thing strikes a pretty good balance here. It's inconvenient enough that it's very much inferior to actually buying the game (painful to install mods or even launch the game, servers get little in the way of user verification so cracked public servers are difficult to moderate, etc.), but is sufficient for LAN parties and private online games among friends.

As it stands, it's pretty difficult to convince people to try a niche indie title like Vintage Story ("looks like minecraft? no thanks, i don't like minecraft i'm not twelve"), so I think some kind of try-before-you-buy solution would be beneficial to the game.

[Rhyagelle]

Rather than encourage piracy of any scale, it would serve better to target at those "demo first" sort of people with what they actually want/need. A demo. Vintage Story has one, but it's old and doesn't represent what the game is today at all. Maybe there's a plan for another, more modern trial/demo? Perhaps a version of the game with some features restricted, or a time-restriction? 

[PhotriusPyrelus]

12 hours ago, l33tmaan said:

I believe there IS a demo but it's of a very old creative build?

Creative isn't really a good taste of the game, though.  Personally, my favorite demos of games like this just have a stone wall in your progress at some point.  Like maybe make the demo version not generate ore other than copper, and don't let it play maps created in other versions?  That *seems* like it should be pretty easy to do...  Though you then run into the problem of not being able to use your demo save in the main game...  Hrm.  Maybe limit the map to 1k blocks in each direction, then when it converts to the full version, it spawns everything as normal past there?  I dunno, but there's gotta be a better solution than creative mode...

Buuuuuuut, like I said, they have more important things to do at the moment, like get the game to 1.0 Release.

[Locklear]

Honestly mate, the game isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things.  Just buy some copies and support the devs.

[Thorfinn]

LAN parties weren't driven by piracy, though. Some games required 1 CD per 8 players, some 1 CD per 3 players, some allowed client installs, and I recall several that were, say, 30 day installs.

But I think you are right. The option of on-line gaming made that model too unrealistic. It was too easy to Hamachi what was intended to be a concession for LAN parties into outright, well, piracy isn't the right word, but you know what I mean.

Like @Locklear says, it's not that bad. About $15 a throw in quantity 4. That's a whole lot better than a lot of games in the late '90s where they were $50 each, and each needed it's own CD.

[LJim]

My opinion is that if a game is good, people will buy it regardless of how easy it is to pirate. An example is Factorio, where the dev actually encourages people who can't afford it to just download off a torrent. Yet, despite never having been on sale, and even with a price increase, it's one of the highest grossing indie games. I think there was a study done too that showed DRM could have an adverse effect on a game's sales (but I might be remembering wrongly). 

But I'm not Tyron or Saraty or any of the devs. Ultimately it's their sales, their livelihood, and thus their call. 

Edited June 18, 2023 by LJim

[Ralfolas]

I totally agree with @brndd.

Next week I'm actually going on a four day, 8-10 man LAN party.

Being 100% honest there are only two options:

1) Someone figuring out a way to run the game on all machines without requiring to buy 8+ licenses.

2) No Vintage Story on the LAN Party.

There will be many game suggestions and if a game requires to buy 7+ copies for over 100€, it is simply off the table.

And while option 1 could potentially cause someone to pirate the game, it is much more likely that some of my friends would buy the game afterwards.

[Thorfinn]

The return policy is overly generous -- 2 weeks since purchase or 10 hours of playtime, whichever comes first. That is published return policy, though they tend to be more generous than that. No harm in asking for a refund even if technically it was running for 15 hours. Worst case they say, "No."

You could buy one or two Family Packs now, install one Pack, and if it's a hit, install the second. If your friends lose interest, switch to a different game. You should easily be able to keep the run time on that second pack under the 10 hour limit. And if it's a complete flop, you should know within the 10 hour limit, and be out nothing at all. The credit card company floated you an interest-free loan.

If it goes over great, you can probably resell the copies to your friends at a profit. Don't know if they have a policy on that, but I've had to change my name and email once and that was hassle-free.

Edited September 19, 2023 by Thorfinn

[Ralfolas]

Thanks @Thorfinn, I wasn't aware of the generous refund policy! And while I'm generally on your side regarding your suggestions, it just wouldn't be appropriate.

You see, if I were to buy the game for the others I would more or less compel them to play the game for at least a few hours (and if I would start with one family pack, I'd split up the group). Therefore they'd most likely reject this offer right away - even if we could refund the accounts afterwards. I will definitely show it to the guys on my PC and who knows, maybe one or two will buy it afterwards and we'll play together remotely after the LAN party.

But my main point was that I wish that Vintage Story had a less strict "authentication policy". I've only heard about it in a "Most Overlooked Survival Games"-kind of YouTube video, which I think is a shame. As already mentioned by others in this post there are examples of indie games that sell extremely well despite being easy to play without a purchase. And I want to add Beyond All Reason to this list. It is an excellent, completely free indie RTS game, which is financed only by donations. You can even host matches on their servers for free.

Not saying that Vintage Story should be free as well, but I doubt that strict piracy protection is really suitable for indie games. Indie games should be as accessible as possible to compensate for the lack of large marketing campaigns.

But as @LJim said:

Quote

But I'm not Tyron or Saraty or any of the devs. Ultimately it's their sales, their livelihood, and thus their call. 

[Rhyagelle]

What your asking would just make it so that the devs lose money because everyone is pirating the game or they buy one copy and share it between 10+ other people. The game is like $20, it's not expensive, why not just buy copies? If your friends don't want to play for very long or there's no need for them to play more than 2hrs at your LAN party, I don't see why Vintage Story should weaken its security and risk its funding just to appease players or situations like that. If the game were more expensive, I could see the argument for a better demo or trialing basis a bit more, but not as it is. 

[Yskar]

I think this game would get a lot of sales if it was avaliable on Steam, outside USA and EUR this game suffer with lack of regional pricing, i'm Brazilian, on my currency this game is quite expensive for an indie game, worth it of course, but cost the same of an AAA game in 2018.

An demo with iron stuff and beyond locked would be enought (and some fixed color on the skin denoting an demo player account).

[Maelstrom]

Steam has been mentioned numerous times in almost as many threads.  It's even the very first FAQ

https://www.vintagestory.at/features/faq.html/

[Tyron]

Uh, no idea how we've missed this for 4 months but advocating for piracy in any form on here is not appropriate. The games purchasing and refund options are sufficient. Low income countries is simply something we cannot serve properly at this point in time.