Enough is enough - people pirating games purchased via website

[Patrick]

I won't give you any names here, but enough is enough! Following incident occured yesterday:

Some dude had the guts to purchase a game from our website, pay for it with his credit card and then put it up on some forums as the "full version", practically giving it away for free. Now normally we don't know the people doing this, as they purchased the game from some other channel than our website, but this time he made the "mistake" of getting the game directly from us.

Unfortunately for him, we can track versions purchased from our website throughout the web, so we noticed his illegal pirating of our game and well - let's put it this way: He's in deep trouble now!

It's days like these that I start questioning the reasons why I'm doing this, when people start exploiting our kind services - if it continues like this we really have to consider discontinuing the development of Java based games and stop giving the games away via email - it will be WAP download only then, but hey - those people don't want it any other way.

It's in your hands - talk to your friends if they've once again downloaded a pirated copy of a game, tell them how it hurts us - the people creating those games - directly, tell them how uncool it is and that they're sore losers if they think that pirating is cool. And if they counter that they don't got the money for the games - well life sucks, welcome to capitalism! If you can't afford something, you're not meant to have it - that's the rule! You don't go out and steal a car or bicycle, just because you want it and can't afford it!

We still believe in our customers as being the power that drives the market. We're pretty on our own with this view inside the industry, so if you want to help proving those guys wrong, stop pirating our games and start encouring your friends to do the same.

[Highelf]

It's very sad announcement...
Can You tell as from which site, or who bought game and published it?

It's in your hands - talk to your friends if they've once again downloaded a pirated copy of a game, tell them how it hurts us - the people creating those games - directly, tell them how uncool it is and that they're sore losers if they think that pirating is cool. And if they counter that they don't got the money for the games - well life sucks, welcome to capitalism! If you can't afford something, you're not meant to have it - that's the rule! You don't go out and steal a car or bicycle, just because you want it and can't afford it!

I tried...they had just lauht from me...they said, that if noone from FISHLABS won't ask them about publishing their games, they will do it still :/

[Patrick]

Well it's quite easy - if you don't pay for our games, we won't be able to create games for much longer!

[Highelf]

Damn! But what we can do????
You need to contact with specific site administration and say that Your games are not allwed...
Gameloft did it...and I think he got profits...

BTW-I got some money to spend, and I got big willing for Gladiator. Unfortunately-I am not able to buy it... or maybe there is already runned SMSM payment service? I could try myself, but when I tried last time, I lost 2 zl for internet connection xP
Please tell me if something....

[Idea_generator]

Yeah.. I have to agree with Highelf that purchasing problems are a biiiiiiiiiiiiig reason for piracy... It's sad but I can understand u as well. I dunno whatta do (((

I did my best ((( Posted your call at seclub.org and translated it to russian.. We shoul do smthing...

[Auster]

sadly highelf is right, we, as fishlabs fans (yet, until start releasing symbian games) know that it's very hard for you the piracy... but, the rest oif the people see you like gameloft or glu, they only say : they are rich people, it doesn't matter the piracy, they will not go poor...

that's the problem with those people...

[Highelf]

So, dear FL, here is Your turn. You need to get know which sites are pirating, and send to their administrator mails about vorbidding publishing Your games.
Look, Gameloft did it and he is still producing games, and heąs not poor, he doesn't fear piracy... Why to do not make the same with FISHLABS? And improve his position in rankings?

[Patrick]

Originally Posted by Highelf

So, dear FL, here is Your turn. You need to get know which sites are pirating, and send to their administrator mails about vorbidding publishing Your games.
Look, Gameloft did it and he is still producing games, and heąs not poor, he doesn't fear piracy... Why to do not make the same with FISHLABS? And improve his position in rankings?

We know where our games are pirated and we know who is responsibly for some of those sites and yet there's nothing we can do. Most sites are hosted on servers in countries where copyright law isn't enforced as vigorously as here in western europe or in the USA, so even the local authorities don't feel the need to do anything about it. In most cases even the admins share pirated copies of the games and openly welcome their users posting illegal content. You think that those admins would actually care, if we'd tell them about illegal copies on their forums?

What they'd say is "hell yeah, of course those are illegal copies, that's what this forum is all about for christ's sake"!

And here's the difference between us and Gameloft - Gameloft creates cheap and easy games for the most part - games that don't even have a small percentage of our development costs. So for every game we put out, they're able to put out 10-15 cheap 2D games. And they need less purchases to break even, their market appearance and the sheer force of having a "Guillemot" as their CEO makes them somewhat impervious to this kind of piracy.

But we aren't Gameloft - we aren't a multi-billion dollar company backed by good connections with UBISOFT (why else would Gameloft get all UBISOFT licenses? Because their CEO Michel Guillemot's brother - Yves Guillemot - is CEO of UBISOFT and the company was founded by the five Guillemot brothers), we don't churn out title after title with top deck placements just because we are "Gameloft". That's why piracy hurts us directly and on a much bigger scale than them.

[Auster]

when i was a pirat with your games, in laneros.com you sent me a letter, to me and them, and since that day they don't allow the users to post any illegal content in mobile section, i don't understand in part

[Highelf]

The biggest polish site is siemensjava.pl
I found there (at least)-demo of Your Gladiator (AWESOME GAME! I can't wait for SMS payment.... :S), but I wasn't there long time...