Pirated faces are gone.
On January 31, the domestic independent game "Enemy of the Whole Network" launched the second DLC "Hello World", at the same time, the porting of the mobile version of the game is also in full swing. These are supposed to be something that players and developers are happy about, but the momentum doesn't last long.
On February 10, AlubaStudio, the developer of "Enemy of the Whole Network", posted through the Steam community, Weibo and other platforms that in order to thank players for their support last year, the game's native music was listed as the game's DLC for free, but in the year that the music was on the shelves, it was pirated by various pirates without authorization and the rights protection was fruitless. In the end, the development team decided that the acoustic music DLC would be removed in March this year, and if it needed to be used, it could contact the game company to authorize it, and it would be free to use.
Piracy is so crazy? Free music is also not spared
"Enemy of the Whole Network" is a network security-themed puzzle game, in which the player will play a hacker to accept a series of tasks, using a variety of social work skills to complete the goal, find out the truth of the incident, the game has received 94% praise on the Steam platform.
Behind the super high evaluation, it is actually the crystallization of the hard work of the production team. Producer BY once said that in order to complete the development of this game, he resolutely sold a suite, but fortunately, the final game was loved by players, selling more than 200,000 copies, and finally recovered the cost.
Different from the huge open world of the "Watchdog" series, as an independent game, "The Public Enemy of the Whole Network" chooses a small and beautiful route, focusing more on the creation and narrative of the world view, and the gameplay level is also quite a taste of text puzzle solving, through the "Internet" search clues in the game to solve the puzzle, the story is gradually stripped of cocoons, layer by layer, quite a bit of "reverse referee" feeling.
In order to make the game's world view and plot more infectious, the game has carefully produced several theme tracks, among which the two tracks "Crime and Punishment" and "Love and Eternal Life" have received unanimous praise among the player groups.
In the game soundtrack DLC page listed the list of production personnel, it can also be seen that the development team has worked music production, and invited a professional music production team to join. Of course, in order to save costs, the creator and singer of several of these songs is actually the head of the game's screenwriting.
After the announcement was issued, some players said that they could not understand the game developer, and the operation of cutting off an arm without any results in safeguarding their rights, believing that such behavior may not be fatal to piracy, but will also lead to the restriction of players' access to genuine content.
In fact, removing the Steam store does not mean that players will no longer have access to these soundtrack content. Different from the announcement in the Steam community, in the statement of Weibo, the official clearly stated that the music will be uploaded to NetEase Cloud Music in the future, and according to GameLook, NetEase Cloud Music has now listed the tracks in the DLC, and it is also provided to players in a fully free way.
Because the announcement did not disclose the specific details of music piracy, it is not known where these soundtracks were stolen for the time being, but given that the soundtrack of "Enemy of the Whole Network" was downloaded and used for free, it is still pirated and stolen, and it is not difficult to feel the anger of the development team.
In addition, as we all know, the theft of art materials in the game industry has always been a hard hit area, but although the copyright problem of game soundtrack music is relatively rare, it is still worth the attention of developers and game companies. In the field of streaming media in overseas markets, the issue of music copyright has become a major minefield.
For example, in an overseas game "Blood Revenge" released last year, due to the setting of an automatic jukebox system, which sets up a lot of popular songs, players can freely demand. However, the game developers only got the license for these songs, not the streaming rights.
Therefore, during the game's release, the game's communications manager Alissa Barry said: "If players play Blood Revenge live, please pay attention to the jukebox content, because we do not have the right to stream the songs we play, so we must turn off the music when using this feature." ”
The problem of piracy is endless, and solo developers are invincible
The phenomenon of piracy is not new in the game industry, and it is particularly serious in the field of indie games and ultra-casual games.
Due to the small number of independent game and ultra-casual game development teams, it is difficult to have extra energy to take care of piracy rights protection work in addition to daily development, update and maintenance work. And these pirated copies flow into the player community, bringing not only loss of profit, but also damage to the brand of the development team.
In the recent BK documentary, eggplant, the producer of "Taiwu Painted Scroll", has admitted that the piracy problem at the beginning of the release of "Taiwu Painted Scroll" in 2018 was particularly serious, and the sales of pirated games have even reached half of the sales of genuine games. At the same time, he also said that during that time, he often received feedback emails from players, saying that he encountered problems such as game installation and BUG, and many of the problems encountered by players were caused by the use of pirated games.
Similarly, BY, the producer of "Enemy of the Whole Network", has a similar experience, saying that some players have run to the official chat group to defend their rights because of the evil bugs in pirated games.
In order to deal with the problem of game piracy, the team will have two employees spend the morning dealing with piracy every day. IN an interview with the industry media said that sometimes it wants to give up, but it feels sorry for the genuine players.
Last year, the most concerned in the solo travel circle was the "Portia Time" piracy incident, the developer Pasia's difficult rights protection process made many players and developers in the industry indignant, and after this incident, many solo development teams also set up a "domestic independent game anti-Taobao piracy joint statement" and the developer of "Public Enemy of the Whole Network", Alaba Studio, is actually one of them.
In addition to the cracking and piracy of the game itself, in fact, some game derivative content, such as game materials, character images and game music, are also the hardest hit areas of piracy.
In 2017, the domestic independent game "Mist Detective" was stolen before the finished product appeared, ran to overseas crowdfunding websites to defraud crowdfunding funds, and was found in time after the developer and appealed to Kickstarter to finally solve the problem.
In 2018, after a domestic indie game called Snake Force was stolen from the public source code by the copycat game, it was preemptively listed steam before the benzun, and even launched a copycat iOS version.
In 2020, game science's "Black Myth: Wukong" was amazingly released, and then there were many advertisements for "Black Myth Wukong Mobile Game" on the Internet. Game science master Mei Yangqi personally responded on Weibo that most of the mobile game advertising resources that copied "Black Myth: Wukong" came from the free materials of Unreal official Paragon, and said that the legal counsel was following up.
At the beginning of this year, the PV of "Showa Rice Story" was popular all over the Internet, and a few days later, a copycat mobile game with the exact same name and very similar promotional materials appeared in the App Store. Subsequently, 2PGames, the publisher of Showa Rice Story, responded by sending a lawyer's letter to the pirate party.
If it is said that the pirated games sold in the e-commerce platform can also be protected by means such as reporting stores, then the theft of game materials, music and even open source code is really invincible, not only requiring developers to "patrol" online with high intensity, but also to identify materials, etc., which is undoubtedly more difficult for an independent game with limited resources.
According to the statistics of the national tour sales bar, the revenue of domestic buyout games reached 2.79 billion in 2021, an increase of 335.9% year-on-year, and almost all of them are independent games. While domestic independent games ushered in the golden era of development, the problem of piracy has become more prominent.
In December last year, the National Copyright Administration issued the 14th Five-Year Plan for Copyright Work, which mentioned that it is necessary to strengthen the support work of promoting the development of the copyright industry and promote the research of the index system related to the copyright industry. Organize key industries such as software, games, film and television, music, and online literature to carry out research on copyright asset management, promote the professional identification and training of copyright asset managers, and drive the strengthening of copyright asset management in all fields of society.
With the gradual improvement of people's copyright awareness, stricter supervision, and gradual improvement of copyright protection measures, piracy and black production may be difficult to completely eradicate for a time, but they will eventually dissipate with the passage of time.
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GameLook Daily Game Industry Report
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