Battle Dungeon (by Hunted Cow Studios)

[DaviddesJ]

Originally Posted by MrMojoRisin

Oh, I don't know. Ask EVERY OTHER DEVELOPER that has a similar online structure how they do it. You have to be totally naive to believe that this is just some random isolated case of "piracy gone wild". Piracy has been around ever since there have been things to pirate.

Most publishers do in fact fail, and piracy is a big problem. But the issue here is not completely general to other games. The issue is that, among other problems, they designed their game in a way that is server-intensive, but that as long as the customers using their servers are paying for the game, they would generate enough revenue to pay for the servers. This isn't a problem that most games face because they don't create the same degree of server load. You could call this naive (maybe they should have worked harder on server efficiency in the first place, or made different economic assumptions from the start), but I sort of admire naivete, when you look at the struggles to make and publish and generate revenue from your own games, if people weren't a bit naive and optimistic, we wouldn't have any indie games at all.

[geoelectric]

This is just weird.

MrMojoRisin is completely correct: this *always* happens if your game is at all on the radar. Piracy will never be eliminated. Planning for it is part of a game release, and part of the economics of selling games.

There'll be a burst of pirates at the beginning, and then they'll move on to the next big game and the people who bought it will be most of who's left. Then most of them will move on as well.

HuntedCow sounds incredibly naive if they didn't plan for that. Even without pirates you need a sufficiently elastic server structure that you can account for your sales bursts without wasting capacity during lulls.

What I hear is essentially if their game had been at all successful, everyone who bought it would have dealt with server scaling issues. That would have hosed the game in and of itself. Pirates are the scapegoats here.

I'm also hearing this wasn't a quality problem re: coding; this was a gross design issue. Re: my earlier statement as a quality pro, that's significantly less forgivable. Scalability testing is not optional when rolling out an online service.

[DaviddesJ]

Originally Posted by MrMojoRisin

Didn't they offer to reimburse those that spent money on the game? So that would logically point to me that they actually know who spent money on their game! Or am I missing something there?

Logically, if you request a refund from Apple then they can approve it. But they don't have any logical way to link a purchase to a particular TouchArcade user account, as this user requested.

[MrMojoRisin]

Originally Posted by DaviddesJ

Logically, if you request a refund from Apple then they can approve it. But they don't have any logical way to link a purchase to a particular TouchArcade user account, as this user requested.

Right. Hopefully they would not give a free game to everyone on a website that claims to have paid for this game.

[DaviddesJ]

Originally Posted by MrMojoRisin

Right. Hopefully they would not give a free game to everyone on a website that claims to have paid for this game.

Glad we can agree about that. That's all I said.

[Hunted Cow Studios]

Originally Posted by heppi1234

How do I get my refund?? I've been on your qebsite but since there isn't a link for the game I can fill out a support request???

Hi heppi1234,

If you click this link:

https://www.huntedcow.com/support

Then where is says 'Select Game' choose 'General Support', then in the box to the right select 'Other Issue'.

[Hunted Cow Studios]

Hi all,

Firstly thank you to everyone for understanding - it's been a pretty horrible day.

We've posted a more detailed announcement on our forum about it here if your interested.

Cheers,
Hoofmaster

[sakinnuso]

Originally Posted by WakeOfPoseidon

Even though I feel bad asking for a refund due to the surrounding issues, I went to their support page and filled out a ticket. For those that bought the app, here were the instructions I received in order to receive the refund:



If you don't still have the email receipt, You can also get to the "Report an Issue" from your purchase history in iTunes.

Thanks. Didn't know the procedure. Guess that makes things easier. LOL.. better than asking for a random PM like i did earlier. Somebody had it right. I could totally be a pirate, too! Now i feel like less of a dunce

Originally Posted by Ayjona

I'm curious: in what ways would turning a game that is already an asynch experience into an "asynch experience", streamlining the controls and the addition of command queuing help combat piracy?

Perhaps the streamlining wil simplify the game and make it less appealing to pirates and players alike. That sorta makes sense.

Actually, the issue is definitely piracy but that's a problem with ALL iOS stuff. Can't necessarily fight that. The thing that was killing the company - actually directly financially hurting them - is the strain on the servers. This game was unique in that every single action was sent to the server, thus making it an incredible strain (i'd imagine) on the system. Highborn and other similar games don't quite work in this fashion.

Changing the game to fit the structure of its peers, ie, how you play a turn and how that data is communicated, would be less actual architectural strain on the developer. Again, I'm making broad assumptions here based on what has been reported. That was why I suggested a re-examination and re-release.

I'm certain that Hero Academy and Highborne were also pirated, and they were considerably higher profile games. Yet, they weren't completely destroyed upon the game's opening weekend debut due to piracy.

I'm only suggesting that, perhaps, by changing those elements, they might be able to salvage a sellable title without killing themselves.

[MrMojoRisin]

Originally Posted by Hunted Cow Studios

Hi all,

Firstly thank you to everyone for understanding - it's been a pretty horrible day.

We've posted a more detailed announcement on our forum about it here if your interested.

Cheers,
Hoofmaster

Any chance of releasing this as a single player game? I would still buy it in a heartbeat.

[TheOctagonTheory]

I think there should be some kind of user account validation, e.g. you have to enter your iTunes purchase receipt order number in order to get a user account. I don't know how that could be checked though. It might be a pain to impliment and a pain to users but there are more cheap ass bad ones then good ones out there. So let the good ones pay the price for the bad ones. This way the good ones will 'come down' on the bad ones. Piracy is too easily accepted as a matter of course.