Welcome to Publisher Inc., user!

Welcome to Publisher Inc., user!

We have brought young creative minds such as yourself on board in order to provide us with fresh new ideas which will help us increase our market share and consumer satisfaction. Recent studies show us that we are losing 67% of potential sales on our video games due to illegal piracy. In order to combat this, we have chosen you to come up with new revolutionary anti-piracy measures for our video games, which should help increase sales and attention because of our cool anti-piracy measures!
You are free to come up with anything you want, as long as it prevents piracy. Our other employees will take care of the implementation.

Should you fail to produce adequate results, then you will be forced to attend a Corporate Brainstorming Training Course in San Francisco as is stated in the contract you have signed. Have fun, and good luck!

playable demos.

Make a good game at a reasonable price.

Denuvo

Lower the price of games by $10 via digital distribution and create great multiplayer features.

Maintain transparency between developer and consumer. Cut out the media middle man where able and have the people most passionate about their project show what they have to offer. This builds a sense of trust between consumer and you and the consumer reaps the benefit of knowing (for the most part) the product they're getting.

Less tailoring things for conventions/press releases, more developer blogs and progress streams.

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no idea how that made it in there

One thing to stress about this: Do not take TOO MUCH feedback during this stage. Your goal is to be transparent, not to be a doormat. You're the professionals with the vision, after all. Your fanbase can have good input sometimes but if you bend over backwards to please everyone you end up in an FFXV kind of situation where you change nearly everything because "feedback".

Demos, however, are great as well for achieving the end goal of getting people to know what they're paying for before they do, which will drive piracy (and even refunds) down significantly.

Focus testing has shown us that media hype and attention is higher when only 'select' people get to pay our games and spread good words, while leaving the rest to speculate. Demos are unfeasible, as we risk losing many pre-orders and first day sales that way.


Aren't we already doing that, user? Our hit franchise Soldiers of War is a massive critical and financial success, as all games in the franchise are sold at a reasonable 60 US dollars with additional season passes and DLC.


While the use of Denuvo has come up before, we found the percentage they ask for each sale unreasonable, and have thus decided to pursue our own anti-piracy measures.


If games such as GTA V can sell millions at the price of sixty US dollars, then so can we! We have already forced social media integration in all of our games, so gamers can share their experiences with the rest of the world.


We feel that the developers themselves are not always that 'media-savvy' and can't always describe their games in a way that would sound attractive to the public. Often our developer interviews show footage of our developers happily working on their games, which should be plenty. Don't many gamers just trust in us to begin with if we release games they like?

Do space Call of Duty but with an over the top balls to the wall fast paced anime plot with more, bigger robots and cute girls instead of gruff manly soldiers.

the people who get "hyped" about games are the same sheep that wouldve bought the game anyways on name alone. your job appealing to them is over as soon as you give your game a recognizable name and a spotlight at e3 that isnt a total disaster. you need to appeal to people on the fence, the people with actual brain cells who know how to pirate games, and know that just because played 10 minutes of it and gushed about it, doesnt mean it's good. these people judge games by the actual content, not trash marketting. therefore, you show them the gameplay, by making a demo.

Many of our hit games sell more than enough provided the launch isn't abysmal. Spending more time and money appealing to a niche minority with unrealistic standards for videogames who will more likely leave a negative review seems rather wasteful and pointless to us. Instead, in order to appeal our games to as many people as we can, we have instead opted to go for gameplay anyone can enjoy without too much effort, and embracing diversity so minorities will be drawn to our games and leave a good review.

Wait, how would illiterates leave reviews?

Du you still believe you belong to the target audience?

Then your game isn't good enough to stand on its own merits and it deserves to sell less.

Look at games which people still play enthusiastically today, many of them have laughable graphics compared to what modern systems are capable of. Look at these games, find out why people like them so much then use that during development of the game, not by copying exactly what they did, but by adapting what they did in a way that fits your game. Plus, its always better to sell many games at a lower price than fewer games at a higher price. You might actually get some goodwill for your consumer if they see you aren't trying to rape their wallets.

you only care about the bottom line right? who cares how many bad reviews you have if your game sells well. the dumb consumer will buy day one or preorder, so reviews do not matter to them. and if you have a demo, people will weigh that over the reviews, as they are able to play it themselves. and it costs very little to make a demo. if you really want to be a jew about it, just slice out half a level that you have done and put it out a month or two before release. if you dont even have half of a single stage presentable two months before the game's going to drop, then that's a whole other issue.

It's simple! Anyone can understand what a thumbs up and thumbs down means. Many of our games don't even require any reading ability! An abundance of easily-palatable dialogue and visual cues such as objective markers means anyone can play our games.


Of course, we are completely up to date with the current market trends. We have already bought up the rights to many old popular franchises, which are currently in the process of being rebooted, so the exciting old gameplay can be repackaged to please the modern audiences, just like Bethesda's DOOM. This way both old and new fans can be pleased.

GUYS I GOT IT, I FUCKING GOT IT GUYS. THIS WILL BE THE GREATEST IDEA EVER SINCE THE INVENTION OF THE WHEEL. YOU READY? YOU FUCKING READY? HERE WE GO, LET'S MAKE a good game

I'll personally go and sexually harass every single person that has illegally acquired this game.
Trust me, I've done this before and got great referrals because of my tactics.

How did that work out for Sonic the hedgehog (2006), Bionic commando or Alone in the Dark?

Have you tried created something new instead of tying strings to the limbs of a rotting corpse and prancing it around?

You're fired.


The idea has come up before, but unfortunately not all countries across the globe are willing to disclose the personal information of the criminals stealing our game. We're currently lobbying for increased government surveillance over the internet, which may take some time.


Most of our new IPs are aimed at the mobile market and VR gaming, where they may set a foothold in the market before anyone else does. Right now it's risky to release a new IP with a proper AAA budget behind it, so we're more content with playing it safe. We have some ideas for spin-offs of our own franchises and crossovers with other franchises, so any new IP we create doesn't go completely unnoticed.

Then don't do that, give $1 million to a small team and give them a year to see what they come up with. If it looks promising then give them some more money and LEAVE THEM TO MAKE SOMETHING WITHOUT YOU INTERFERING. Great games have been created with less.

We are always looking at others for inspiration, and when we saw that GTA V became one of the most profitable games of all time despite its massive development budget, we believe we can do the same. The mantra of our company is: "Never settle for anything less", which applies to everything we do. If we think we can get the full 200% out of anything, then we will do it. If there's a promising idea we can do with $1 million, then we believe we can expand and improve that idea with $10 million. If a small team is capable of doing great things, a greater team is capable of doing greater. While we entrust the mechanics and fun of the game to the developers, what the developers sometimes want is not always profitable, or not as profitable. Sometimes critically well-received games do not sell much, and that leaves no future for possible sequels or for the developers themselves. That's where we come in, and we ensure that games can at least break the profit margin. Many great games have been developed this way, such as Skyrim, Fallout 4, FarCry 3, and Destiny.

Make games that only appeal to stupid people. Stupid people are incapable of piratism as it requires some technical know-how. Making games for consoles and certain, lacking groups such as feminists also reduce the amount of piracy. I would also recommend disguising the game as an indie project.

The problem you have is that you wish to inject yourself into the creative process, dictate terms and try to force deadlines and targets.

You lie to your consumers about your games to get them to preorder, buy season passes and otherwise spend their hard earned money on games which you force out early and unfinished. You are the problem, your consumers react by downloading your games and you think they're the problem. Your job is not to design the game, your job is to facilitate the creation of the game then get it shipped out. If you step back and allow your devs the time, money and creative freedom to make the games they want then you will profit from it. If you don't then even with your abhorrent business practices you will eventually stop you profiting.

You have a choice, either you make great games and have a happy customer base and therefore a fuckton of money, or you keep on doing what your doing and cut the goose that laid the golden egg up and end up with a mess and the collapse of your corporation.

Spend over 50% of your profits on advertising? Put in as little as effort and money as possible, pump out as much as possible.

Make games that aren't shit.

We enforce deadlines and targets to put a leash around the developer's necks, as creative people tend to bite off more than they can chew, lest we end up with another Daikatana. If we and the developer sign a contract where a deadline is established, only for them to have a half-baked product ready by the time of the deadline, then that's their fault for not being able to stay on schedule properly, and overestimating their abilities. Without deadlines many time ends up being wasted on trivial things, rather than polishing the essentials. Of course, we can renegotiate, once we have built up some trust and faith in the developers' abilities.

By no means does our promo material present a fake image of our games. It may only consist of 10% of the game, but it's no different from what everyone is doing or has done. Intentionally showing the worst parts of your game is a terrible idea for marketing. Even if we allow our developers total creative freedom, actual quality or profits can not be guaranteed. Even during the early games of the video game industry when people relied less on publishers, there were many flat-out forgettable games made while only some stood out. Much like how it is today.

Nowadays we don't have many superstar developers everyone can believe in, considering many of them took the crowdfunding route for some reason. We consider crowdfunding and indie gaming more of a market for taking risks, while the AAA gaming industry is doing just fine with great games even if we don't take wild ideas all the time. Many of our satisfied costumers enjoy our games, bonus DLC, and marketing hype, so we see no reason to change up our business plan.

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>We enforce deadlines and targets to put a leash around the developer's necks

mfw Mr. suit user is as angry as I am

Then you accept that eventually you will alienate everyone single consumer you have, your games will tank and your profits will become losses, resulting in you all losing your jobs and your careers as every other major publisher is doing the exact same thing.

I'll going to get off this sinking ship before they storm the lifeboats.

I say we start making more games that require custom controllers. Certain enthusiast titles can be greatly improved by introducing special peripherals to improve the immersion of the game experience. If you need to buy a controller to play the game, people are going to just buy the game because it comes bundled with the controller, and it's too much of a hassle to get it second-hand. This only really works for some games, but it'll definitely reduce the rate of piracy for those titles significantly. Sequels may use new controllers, or add small extra peripherals to the kit so that customers don't need to shell out for a whole new controller every time. For example with the Steel Battalion Mech controller, you might introduce a new "sensors panel" add-on which features some new gameplay mechanic, and the sequel won't run without that plugged in. For a guitar hero type game, you might add a distortion pedal.

Not only would this severely inhibit the ability of people to pirate our games, we'd also be able to improve the user experience by giving them a whole suite of great peripherals to play with.

Nah, if they start struggling to make ends meet they can just buy out smaller studios and asset strip them.

...

This idea might have been feasible in the past, but focus group testing and interviews have shown us that the modern average gamer finds any unconventional controller rather overcomplicated, and we have already received many complaints of poor quality custom controllers, whereas more sturdy materials would be too expensive in the long run. On top of that, if we look at the future, virtual reality and motion control should make controllers entirely redundant. This idea could have certainly worked in the past, however.

So long as there is a gaming industry there will be small guys.

Mr, Suit, then could you explain o us why Steel Battalion Heavy Armor failed so awesomely, while Steel Battalion 1 completely sold out its (admittedly, reduced) stock?

Then why the concern about piracy? Checkmate, jew.

Serious solution: Cloud gaming.

If the consumer doesn't own the exotic and expensive hardware required to run the game and only owns a dumb terminal piracy becomes irrelevant. You might as well give the source code and assets away under a permissive copying license.

This might seem like a poor decision initially but it could help you operate grey market services to perform market research that would be illegal with regular paying customers. The ongoing program known as 'El Dewrito' is a successful example of this.

This area is already a patent minefield and some competitors have implemented it in a halfass way with an always online requirement turning tech savvy users off the idea. So a sensitization period is required to phase out the need of a single player game mode. We should look at how we sold using our data mining tools as an 'achievement' or encouraging the spread of our brand on social media as inspiration to bring in this new era of piracy free gaming.

Bad marketing.


Because we and the developers who worked so hard on their game are denied their hard-deserved money from pirates who feel like they're entitled to everything.


We really, really like this idea. Do you mind if we implement it?

DRM so far has thoroughly failed to do anything other than harassing our paying consumers. Every new DRM software is cracked within a month, or even just mere days. And the best part about it? You don't even need to be tech-literate to do it, given that you can download the game on various sites with minimal risks.

I hence suggest a radical step: Drop the DRM.

As already mentioned, DRM does not stifle software piracy by any means. It's useless. And atop of that, it's an extra expense, both in terms of money, and in terms of PR. There is not a single consumer, paying or not, who likes DRM. Just drop it.

Take a look at Hotline Miami. Very popular game; sold millions. And here's the thing: It was banned in Australia due to the resident moral panic. What did the developers do? Put up a cracked version of their own game on pirate sites so that Australians could play it anyway. This gave the developers a massive PR boost to the point that even hardcore pirates sought to buy rather than to pirate the product, simply because they felt that the game was worth it and the developers deserved their money.

In short: Drop the DRM. Stop indirectly accusing all of our loyal consumers as criminals. Give them the feeling that we appreciate and care about them, and they will respond with their wallets.

And then makie it multiplayer and charge a subscription?

Aint this basically an MMO? Those are quite expensive to run.

If you pirate the game, it hunts down and screencaps your porn folder, then emails that to everyone in your contacts list.

How would it locate the porn folder?

Checks filenames for common terms used in pornography first, and if that fails it just screenshots any folder with a large number of jpgs or video files and sends them all out. As a bonus, if we can get our hands on the child porn hash lists that companies like Google have, we can search for those too.

It's the one that says "Don't look"

Hash tables.

All this forced diversitiy in this picture and the boss is still a fucking white male. Triggered.

Reminds me of that Japanese porn game that would use the webcam to take a picture of you if you pirated the game. Fun times.

I feel like I've heard of that before, but I can't remember the name. Made me glad I don't use a webcam.

That's a great idea! Surely nobody would risk the embarassment of having their nude no-no pictures published online!


We have found a website called isitporn.com
We are incredibly pleased with the results, and are looking to implement it as soon as possible!

To add to this giving away the source code for their 'Lumberyard' engine is currently part of Amazon's strategy to get games running on their servers. It's a free game engine that only works on their cloud service.

By giving the assets away you can improve on Valve's method of profiting off user generated content. Instead of having the modding community create free assets for their own personal use or that of the community why not encourage them to help you instead? Gabe Newell's attempt was a failure because he didn't have enough community managers and PR to help with such a drastic shift. Simply paying off the top 10% of modders to support it would have been more than sufficient to get the gaming community on board.

To defeat piracy you must embrace it by giving away your product for free entirely. Retaining just enough control to fool the customer into thinking he has enough agency to participate and contribute for the betterment of a carefully curated community is the hard part.


It's not expensive when subscriptions, data mining, just in time advertisements and microtransactions fund it. Some provides offer free services in exchange for valuable data, for example Holla Forums uses cloudflare for ddos protection.

So when can I expect my first paycheck?

WHAT I LEARNED IN GRAD SCHOOL IS…

Since you said I could do anything that prevents piracy, try putting your shitty game available on your website via download link. Then if dumb faggots want to play said shitty game, they'll be more inclined to pay for your shitty product because of your oh so cool strategy. I may be getting my technicalities wrong, but its not piracy.

I have a great idea, but first, I brought kool-aid for everyone. Drink up!

how to waste money

Well done user, this thread perfectly encapsulates what happens when you decide to sell your soul to a mindless corporation run by retarded hacks.

Dont provide any actual suggestions, merely suggest something along the direction the company is already taking and collect your paycheck as you ride the wave of stupidity into the ground.

If you're smart, you'll already be lining up another job, with a better company, that is less likely to fuck you in the ass.

make 1/8th of a game.
Release it as the shareware version.
Nobody buys the full version, but at least we didn't waste resources making the other 7/8ths of that game.

Pic related.

You can't. There are simply more people looking for ways to circumvent any measure you can place for material gain, personal interest or as an ideologic statement.

The only thing you can do is either keep shitting out sub-par focus group approved crap like everyone else or stop being massive faggots and stop wasting money on stupid shit like anti-piracy measures which never recoup the costs of R&D and implementation.

I'd fuck the two bitches on the left, possibly at the same time, and the asian bitch on the right. I'd let the black bitch suck me off and maybe I'd put it in her pooper. As for Game Theory guy and discount Micheal J Fox, I'd convince them to help me hack into the e-mail accounts of everyone in the office and then use their precious information to blackmail them into giving me anything I want. If they refuse then I'll blackmail them into helping me blackmail everyone else in the office. It'd be great.

Make games free as in freedom.

Give away large quantities of the game for free instead of spending millions on marketing. The word of mouth alone will make those left out of the deal purchase the game, and will generate a fanbase for other games the developers produce.

...

You know what? On second thought I'm just gonna take a nice crusty shit all over this fucking board room!

You'd be spending the revenue gained from those sales on marketing, anyway.

Why not just spend the rest of eternity doing remasters of old games?
You guys have no talent or creativity to make a new good IP so just remaster your old games and release them on new systems.
Look at Modern Warfare or Resident Evil.

Make the second screen smartphone app compulsory and have it notify you of illicit installations. It already stores all of the user's personal information.

Alright Mr. Suit. Here's what you do:
1. REDUCE COSTS
Less marketing means less money spent on
All of this is a waste of resources. We live in [CURRENT YEAR], the age of the internet. Everyone and their mother has instant access to a number of regularly updated news sources. Social media is your number one marketing outlet. It costs your next to nothing to market to people online. Stop wasting money on superfluous marketing tactics of the past, your game will not go unnoticed. You people bitch and cry about how expensive it is to develop video games, but at the same time you throw money around on useless bullshit, and then you expect us to feel sympathy for you? Fuck off.
2. ELIMINATE ANTI-CONSUMER PRACTICES
As long as you're clear on what you're showing us, people will not be able to accuse you of false advertising. As consumers, though, we reserve the right to call your product shit for petty and personal reasons.
3. (MOST IMPORTANTLY) CREATE A DECENT PRODUCT
You are not entitled to our money. Fuck you. If you want money, you should strive to create something of value. There are many elements of a video game that are subjective and will be argued over until the end of time. Generally speaking, allow your creative people to run with their own vision. Give them more room to negotiate and just let them do their thing. If you deem something as "too risky" then consider that in negotiations and try to find some common ground with these developers. You people were paid in business school to understand how to negotiate, right?

Aside from that, you can impose deadlines but if the creative people need more time then fucking give it to them. "A delayed game will eventually be good, but a rushed game will be forever bad" or something like that. Let them make a polished and finished product for fuck's sake. Now, all of the above will not eradicate piracy, but it will effectively reduce it by a large margin. Face it, you CANNOT get rid of piracy. It just won't happen. Instead, you want to cater to your consumers and make them happy.

Nice

Some form of peripheral that shocks the player when they attempt to play a game not published by you.