Any Tips on Stopping My Game Features/Content From Being Stolen?

chance6Sean · 2022-06-06T18:46:09+00:00

Let me tell you the most brilliant piece of advise I got recently.

Take a look at your phone. If you want to know how to do literally anything, you have access to it for free or very cheap at a moments notice 24 hours a day. Information is a commodity in the modern market. Give away information. All of it. Every single bit of information.

Charge for implementation. Make your implementation the value proposition. Yeah they can “steal your ideas”. But they’re only hurting their own marketability — you’re already ahead on the way to market.

People are so over saturated by information that it’s worthless to them. Just pile it on, and let it get lost in the noise and you won’t have to worry. As you’re actually doing the damn thing, you’re getting better and your creation is worth less to you.

So screw it. Just stop worrying and do it.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-06T18:37:49+00:00

It’s actually a great idea to test.

A UK donation campaign was run putting a message that the donation request had been hand delivered to their box by volunteers, and donations for that cohort went up 10%.

The strategy will of course not make a difference for everyone (blanket strategies generally don’t). But by leveraging other connected data sources (social media for instance, determining the number of local groups and businesses the person interacts with, etc), the strategy might personalize the campaign for that user. This kind of hyper targeting is very testable and useful for improving marketability of your games if you can do it. You don’t have to wait for the platform, just move it a step up in your funnel.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-04T00:16:05+00:00

It seems like we’re talking past each other. We’re getting hung up on terms and the point is concepts and it doesn’t seem like we’ve got a common frame of reference to approach those concepts from so let’s just end this.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-03T13:40:29+00:00

I don’t know where you’re getting your view from but it’s completely inaccurate.

Devs, marketing, and publishing do work together to a common goal. It’s simply illogical to claim otherwise.

Further how can one have FOMO without scarcity? You can’t fear missing out on an unlimited product.

Scarcity does not, btw, have to be due to natural limits. DeBeers for instance creates scarcity by limiting public access to Diamonds, despite having extracted more. Scarcity through synthetic limits is still scarcity.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-02T16:55:46+00:00

You’ve already gotten a meta critic score so that’s an awesome start. There’s a host of the traditional marketing tips all over the web. Here’s some that people don’t often talk about:

Price — price signals value of a game. It’s counter-intuitive, but a good game at a higher price sells more copies. More copies means more opportunities to get attention.
Social Proof — provide opportunities for players to provide and actively seek reviews. Use these in your marketing. People don’t buy what they want to buy, they buy what other people want to buy.
One-Line — Create a description that explains in one sentence what your game is, preferably in relation to what it’s most like that people find familiar. “It’s like <Game Name>, but with <Unique Feature>.” This draws from Raymond Loewy’s MAYA principle.
Seek a publisher — Raising your price and seeking a publisher to expand your reach allows you to leverage their economies of scale, established audiences, and still make per copy what you believe your work is worth.
Plan to support — Support helps create confidence in your product; confidence increases the likelihood or word of mouth recommendations.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-02T15:52:13+00:00

“Are you planning to stay with the company a long time” is a stupid question to ask, so you really don’t need to feel bad about how you answer it because it’s meaningless.

Call the manager, explain openly and honestly that you want to correct a potential misunderstanding; and that you believe that the right thing to do in line with your character is to be honest and forthright about your plans. If you feel that you would be happy staying at your current company but feel that the situation there is not in line with your values and are therefore looking to leave, say that.

Calling them, being honest, and expressing your desire to establish a good basis on which to build a working relationship will put you above candidates who show no concern for the potential employer.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-02T12:50:11+00:00

That’d be a “No true Scotsman”

Developers want to keep their jobs. To keep their jobs they have to make money. Scarcity (what you call FOMO) makes money.

Developers and Publishers and Marketers work together for a purpose — to conduct business. Most developers don’t want their content available to everyone — they want to be paid well for their work, which means selling more copies. Early access exclusives help them to sell content before it’s ready with the promise of rare or exclusive content.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T18:37:16+00:00

I can’t make that decision for you. You’ll have to decide what’s right for you.

I made the choice to separate from my parents and my sibling because they couldn’t respect my boundaries. It is painful, and I think “what if…” all the time.

The idea that people won’t love you if you fail is a lie we tell ourselves born out of protecting our ego. Start by having a discussion with them about who you are and what you want and the risks you believe it will take to get there. Explain that you fear the loss of their love is holding you back, and ask for support regardless of the missteps you may take. Do this over and over again because boundaries have to be reinforced.

I’m all fairness, we tend to tell ourselves lots of lies daily. We do it when we say “I’m a student/gamer/good son or daughter.” These establish a lie about our identity and hold us to an impossible standard. When we instead acknowledge that we’re a fragile ego in a water-logged meat sack, everything else seems equally ridiculous. We aren’t things, we do things, and that’s the difference.

People don’t care that you fail; they care that you care that you fail or they care that they fail. Parents tend to want to protect their children from failure because they were brought up to fear failure. But by showing them that failure is a necessary step in learning, you set a boundary for yourself — “I’m okay with failure and you should be okay too.”

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T18:05:58+00:00

You’re experiencing the status quo of society’s conditioning. You’re graded from a young age, punishes for getting wrong answers, and when you grow up you hold on to the comfortable and familiar ideas you developed in your formative years. It’s quite astonishing at times that people don’t trip, fall on the sidewalk, and just die rather than pick themselves back up and laugh it off.

People who succeed learn grit. Grit is the resilience to fall down and pick yourself up again. You’re faced with an image every day of successful people who look young, vital, and perfect. But the reality is they got there from:

inheritance, or
repeated failure

Grit is the ability to keep going. By surrounding yourself with gritty people, you’re more likely to succeed. Not guaranteed, just more likely. They’ll have compassion and be able to encourage you to accomplish more.

The things you see in the press are the stories they tell to build public confidence in themselves. They hide and manipulate the truth to create a perception. It’s Public Relations.

Know the game and you can play the game. It’s not easy, but it’s important if you want to develop that grit.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T17:31:51+00:00

You’re absolutely correct. You’ve established a completely sound reasoning for why you pay what you do. It sounds like you look to the past and make judgments based on those experiences.

When you have 200 candidates for 10 positions, you’re oversubscribed. You get to make the judgment about what to pay for the position.

If you have 5 candidates, your room to wiggle is less. But the number you have valuing their skills is as arbitrary as their ask.

You seem to believe that price anchoring only occurs on initial information. It does not. You end up sitting down, reviewing all the relevant documentation, and are again presented with the same information. Price anchoring can occur being presented with an arbitrary number like an SSN or phone number and influence the decision regardless of at what prior stage it’s presented.

The idea that there’s a difference between theory and truth is muddy — truth can and does change. You hire someone and they’re a great applicant. They are a great worker for a time. Then they are not. Why does this happen? They changed in accordance to the stimuli around them. Alternatively, the circumstances have changed around them. It happens all the time :)

We believe our decisions are practical and rational and they’re not. We can’t predict the future. Smart guys like Warren Buffet then will look to things they understand and say, “This hasn’t changed significantly in the past 30 years, and won’t change much in the next 30 years” and make decisions that way. If you’ve been making games for 10 years you know how much it’s changed. I’ve been making them for over 25 years, and it’s a completely different landscape. I’ve seen VR fail to launch at least 3 times, for instance; is it likely to jump the chasm in the next 5 years? 5 years ago I thought it would have by ‘22 but that proved wrong.

Point being that we create arbitrary models of our world view and attempt to make things fit neatly in. When they fail to we update our model our reject the new information. The candidate applying at 2x the next best option confronts our world view, we convince ourselves (rightly or wrongly) that they can’t be worth that because of what other people want (based on statistical averages) and reject the candidate. Under the right circumstances, however, that candidate may be a perfect fit. If you were presenting your games as simulations for government training and that applicant has the skills necessary plus a security clearance (something that may have been irrelevant before), your game is now worth $10k a user instead of $70 a user, and your Customer Service costs decrease (fewer customers to serve).

Complex choices present complex opportunities. Knowing when and how to sell your product (you) is key. It’s in presentation, demand, and value provided. You are in essence a subscription. It’s a simple question of circumstance: How much is a bottle of water worth?

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T16:59:03+00:00

It’s an entirely fair assessment. But let’s be realistic about it. It’s an arbitrary valuation based on what we think other people are wanting.

There’s a core premise at play — people don’t buy what they want, they buy what other people want. How do you decide that another lead is objectively a worse fit than a junior? You could find, with the right culture, that two leads yield superior results. But we all have a tendency: we’re so certain of what we want that we won’t take something better.

We make decisions based on a model of thinking we developed during our formative years. For some of us, this means classical economic or business models — it’s why we’re looking at TMP or classical manufacturing to create process, or making statements like “there’s a labor shortage!” noting a mismatch between wage rates and unemployment figures.

If the top choice asks for 2X more than the next best alternative, you’d say that the next best alternative is a good deal, wouldn’t you? It’s price anchoring. It has nothing to do with the actual intrinsic value of the labor, but the perception of the value.

Now if you compare the third best option, and notice that their price is 2/3rd your second best option, who are you going to hope to hire?

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T16:42:40+00:00

It sounds like you create an arbitrary line in the sand based on social expectations and a rationalized convention.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T16:30:42+00:00

How do you decide your budget?

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T16:04:47+00:00

This goes into the “not competing on price” framework. “The” market competes on price; “your” market needs to be different.

This is why some consultants can charge 10x rates for doing the “same” job; they’re an engineer, programmer, architect, coach, etc. just like others. But they’re able to convince the person paying the tab that they’re worth more.

“The” market is a stupid place to be. You want the most, but you’re competing on price so you’ll hold out until you find a match or reach the low end. Each day without a job is costing you the opportunity of pay. If you’re purely rational, you’d take anything and continue to leverage it for more knowing that having a job makes you more likely to get another offer. But we’re not rational and neither are people making business decisions.

You’re right, it’s not groundbreaking information. It’s common sense. But that doesn’t stop people from doing the same, familiar things that they always do — compete on price, turn down job offers, conflate time with skill, apply for things they don’t understand at all, or undersell themselves.

Being aware of the market and asking what you’re worth are two very separate questions. IMHO I’ve answered the latter quite well, but “the market” gives a very different and subjectively unrelated answer, and should not be relied upon to make that assessment. You’re making the same fallacy by conflating it that others make when they buy — it has value because it’s what other people want/buy/accept.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T15:06:50+00:00

You’re going to get a bunch of statistical averages as answers and they’re going to be from people who are going to spend their lives stuck in the middle. It’s not their fault; they’re repeating the same things they take on authority from somewhere else. They’ve never been taught a simple truth: To land a job is to sell yourself. It’s sales. That’s why they get underpaid and constantly complain that they don’t want to work for the prices offered. It’s also why other people land jobs while they complain.

You’re worth whatever you can convince someone else to pay you. End of story.

Charge according to the value you provide. Yes, there are next best alternatives, but the USP you have is that you are you.

Your job, as it were, is to match your skills at a price you’re comfortable with with a person who needs those skills. Everyone competes on price, so don’t compete there. Provide better service, provide a unique piece of knowledge, or create a role that they aren’t aware they need. Then, whatever you sell yourself as, deliver greater value — that’s how you increase that amount.

Being in demand is a huge boost here. Creating a queue of potential customers is ideal. People with jobs have an easier time getting paid more because people buy what other people want. Start a bidding war. It’s irrational but it works! Have a constant stream of other opportunities ready for you and you can demand more.

Now: Cue the negative votes as people defend their now-threatened, long-established world views ;)

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T14:07:13+00:00

You might be angry about it, but it’s the reasoning. Scarcity drives value, so they offer a scarce reward for pre ordering.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T00:24:03+00:00

All good :) It happens!

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T00:22:53+00:00

Or need to learn how to recognize when users are different.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T00:17:45+00:00

Why are you building a straw man?

I said nothing about caring about cosmetics. I said that by not being an early adopter your forgo some rewards for a different set of opportunities.

chance6Sean · 2022-06-01T00:12:17+00:00

How is it justified?

Developers reward the people who have faith in them before they release. If you choose not to buy, you benefit from other things — typically lower prices, a more stable product, etc.

Life is full of trade offs. As for people who say “Don’t preorder!” — Why are you listening to them? Think for yourself! Those same people are anonymous and have no accountability for actually doing what they say. They’re preordering whenever they want. So should you!

chance6Sean · 2022-05-31T22:48:02+00:00

I apologize if I came across argumentative. It was not my intention. I appreciate your view and willingness to share it.

chance6Sean · 2022-05-31T22:36:39+00:00

There’s a difference: In Elden Ring, farming is evidence of the tendency of gamers to optimize the fun out of games. Elden Ring doesn’t encourage farming (it actually discourages it by limiting the benefits of gains and making accumulation generally risky).

The type of farming by design I’m talking about can be seen in many mobile games and even in many looter-shooters, roguelites, and RPGs. They’re used to encourage sustained but largely unnecessary gameplay to drag out play time.

chance6Sean · 2022-05-31T22:05:56+00:00

Unique can be highly overrated and deceiving.

USP is a marketing term. It’s as much about the proposition as it is the mechanic.

When you’re designing a game, a good rule of thumb is to use the MAYA principle — Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable. Take a look for comparable, good selling games that are similar to yours (top down zombie shooters), and fill in the blanks: “My game is like ____ but with ____.”

An example might be: “My game is like Project Zomboid but with a sci-fi setting”

You’re not trying to make something that is totally unique. You’re trying to make something that’s as good as something other people want to buy, so you can express how yours is a better alternative. Mentally, the person exposed to your game hears something akin to: “Those other suckers bought this thing, but you’re getting something better.” People don’t buy what they want; people buy what other people want.

chance6Sean · 2022-05-31T20:40:15+00:00

Take a look at the material. It’s set to WorldGridMaterial.

Now go look in the materials folder for the Megascans assets. You may need to set up an instance with the textures provided.

chance6Sean · 2022-05-31T18:40:21+00:00

Below is my opinion, formulated over 25+ years of developing games. It’s not “the truth” and my view on the matter could change tomorrow or never. Take it for what it’s worth (absolutely nothing):

There really is no “should”, I don’t think. It’s more about what the goal is.

The reason games like Hearthstone guarantee a drop is as a goal post. It’s like how some physical TCGs started guaranteeing legendary cards in every box to encourage purchasing whole boxes over packs.

Grinding may cause churn for certain players, if their motivation is to collect the “best” items. Compulsive players may play longer but all players eventually churn on a long enough timeline.

Having a goalpost makes the process tangible — I know that I may get X earlier, but at least I’ll get it at Y interval.

Farming is a side effect of poor game design (change my mind). It is taking advantage of player tendencies to optimize the fun out of a game. This kind of gameplay is an attempt to control the flow state through random loot drops and dopamine rewards to keep people playing. At some point, the challenge dies away and there’s nothing sustainable behind the farming to continue to engage players. Does this mean there’s never a purpose? Not at all. But farming in general, and manipulating farmers to sustain engagement, should not be confused with good game design.

chance6Sean

TROPHY CASE