Halfgeek's Forum Posts

  • Aphrodite

    Its a chicken or egg scenario. But the damage was done a long time ago. It's just building as time goes on.

    Google's Android is very weak on security. Any device can instantly install pirated apps (APKs) from any source, there's nothing on Google's side to prevent that. At least on iOS it requires jailbreaking a device which involves a few steps which is enough to deter many users from not doing it. That's all it takes. A few steps where they have to plug their device into their PC, download some crack software and spend a minute or two on it. That is enough to deter many mobile users... because let's face it, a lot of folks can afford a few $ here and there for apps, rather than going through the jailbreak process (ie. not worth their effort!).

    Some interesting insight from a cool indie dev group:

    http://www.butterscotch-shenanigans.com ... art-1.html

    In particular this one is quite brave:

    http://www.butterscotch-shenanigans.com ... emium.html

    http://www.butterscotch-shenanigans.com ... -play.html

    Somebody

    Yes, piracy rate on Android is insane but sure, there's still some who are willing to reward gamedevs.

    Thats one good thing with C2, porting is so easy. Imagine if you had to pay a studio $20-40K to port your PC game to mobile for example. I wouldn't bother with Android if that were the case.

  • I never see Pirates as you "losing money" or potential lost sales etc. They don't buy it anyway. That's the mentality of the majority of Android gamers.

    That in-availability in China doesn't fly.

    A lot of financial reports released by indie devs on iOS or Steam (both available worldwide), I typically see their break down as such:

    ~50% from USA & Canada

    ~30% from UK & Europe combined

    ~10% from Japan/Korea/China

    ~5% from Australia/NZ

    ~5% from rest of the world

  • http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/15/monume ... -ios-game/

    There's other small indie devs who blog about the topic with similar conclusions.

    Android is a dead weight for developers to make $ with paid apps. 95-99% piracy rate.

    Free titles with Ads also generate very little revenue on Android due to the wide usage of AdBlockers.

    Freemium with IAPs on Android again generate a lot less revenue due to the wide usage of Freedom or other apps which hack/fake IAPs.

    In my own limited experience, I find these points to be true. I make a lot more $ on iOS than Android.

    It now makes a lot of sense why so many studios develop for iOS first then later port to Android, or not even port at all (not worth the $ invested to port). Luckily for C2 devs, porting to Android is straight forward and requires little investment.

  • You just need to change the compiler to beta. The bug is fixed in Crosswalk 10 (beta) but present in Crosswalk 7 (stable).

  • Looks fine to me.

    On both PC (Radeon R290) and Notebook (Intel HD4000).

  • glerikud It was a known Crosswalk bug, it was reported fix but we're awaiting the fix to make its way into XDK's cloud compiler. If it works for you, they must have done the update on their end.

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    — Will do! Mailing you for the secret sauce right now!

    Aurel Glad to be of help, your game, announced early last year was my inspiration to try harder personally, to aim higher than I was comfortable with at the time.

    Thanks for being a bright beacon for us all (small-time C2 gamedevs)! Looking forward to playing the heck out of TNP once its on Steam!

    ps. Hopefully we get Steam Cloud & Trading Cards in Greenworks! Would a re-write would be required to put LocalStorage (Save) into the same folder as the NW exported game for Steam to sync, Ashley ?

    You can add ignore gpu blacklist into the chromium args in package.json & package-win.json (I have both versions dunno why, I require it in package-win.json).

  • Many WebGL "Effects" that come default in C2 is to be avoided for mobile games, period. There's a few that are perfectly usable without major performance penalties but most of them, no go zone.

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  • m4a for iOS and ogg for Android works fine for me.

  • Looking at the pics I had no idea what its about but after watching the gameplay vid, wow! Nice work!!

  • Gamers and hardcore gamers in particular are tech savvy so the portion of them who own jailbroken iOS devices or rooted Android devices is very high. The majority of users, particularly casual game players, I would expect the portion to be very minimal.

    In particular, I frequently discuss mobile gaming on Reddit and those guys are more towards the hardcore/geek gamer market, Ads never work for them. They nearly all have AdBlockers. A lot of them also use tools for free IAPs.

    It seems like you never get $ from that market.. but its not true! They fully respect a good game and will reward ethical developers by buying full paid apps or buy IAPs that they deem fair.

    Ultimately if you respect the gamers, you will find many of them (enough anyway) who will reciprocate & happily pay for your content. So it's NOT about how to stop, punish or deter pirates. It's about engaging the core who value your work.

    If anything, PC gaming has taught us DRMs fail utterly and only punish legit gamers.

    mollaq It's not a battle Ludei will win (ie, blocking some IDs). It's extremely quick & easy to spoof a new ID. Ultimately it cannot be stopped if users are tech savvy enough to jailbreak their devices. But if you wanted to make it harder for pirates, that responsibility lies with Apple & Google, to make more protected OSes that aren't so easy to break.

    Also, the "com.zeptolab.ctrbonus.superpower1" spoof or those types are the ones you know about. There are other free-IAPs method that you cannot detect, the player just gets whatever item freely with no notification. They don't even need wi-fi/net connection.

  • It's quite common nowadays, on Android in particular the rate of fake IAPs is >50% according to several dev blogs I read. There's a tool for rooted Android called Freedom, it enables free IAPs. There's something similar for jailbroken iOS devices as well.

    Freemium games with IAPs is not a solution to piracy of paid premium games as time goes by and more users become aware of these tools.

    There's no solution to piracy. A large portion of gamers will be pirates. Accept it, move on, cater to those who give you $ instead.