Around a year ago, I made a post on this subreddit because someone offered to pay me 500$ for the IP of my Steam game. Thanks to all of your support and kind words <3, I decided not to sell it, even though I was really tempted.

A few months ago, I received another offer, this time for only 100$ Needless to say, I just ignored it.

So why am I posting about this again?

Recently, someone was arrested for stealing cryptocurrency by distributing malware through Steam games. It turns out that one of the main ways malware can be introduced on Steam is through game updates. Apparently, they were buying released games so they could push malicious updates to players.

I'm really glad I didn't contribute to something like that, even unknowingly.

Even if this post doesn't reach many people, please spread the word if you know someone who's getting these kinds of offers. And besides, your games are worth a lot more than 100$

Lately I've been living a soap opera.

Quick recap: my game went viral in China, with all the good and bad that comes with it. If you want to read the story from the start, I'll leave links to my other posts at the end.

But today I'm opening up a debate I never had a strong opinion on: does piracy help or hurt games? Because I think piracy is eating my game, and my server, alive.

---

My server blocked

A couple of days ago, my hosting provider started blocking my backend. That's where I handle player analytics, scores, and so on. Turns out an excess of requests was forcing my server into temporary shutdowns. I thought I was being attacked, so when I asked them to just block the conflicting IPs, they told me there were hundreds of them, and that it looked like a legitimate flow of players.

Happy about the success and stressed about the urgency, I spent several days optimizing database calls, adding Cloudflare protection, and upgrading to a bigger hosting plan just to make sure there wouldn't be more blocks.

---

For every 10 new players, 9 are pirates

When I finally finished optimizing everything, I checked the new players table and their usernames caught my attention. All of them were named xdgame, a Chinese website known for promoting pirated content.

Every time I hit refresh, at any hour of the day, exactly 22 of the last 25 entries had that name, despite being different Steam accounts. Today I had to widen the filter to the last 100 entries to confirm that 99% were pirates.

[Screenshot of table full of pirates]

---

Optimizing my anti-pirate system

I already covered how my anti-piracy system works in previous posts, though honestly I don't know if it still works on this PC version or if they've already bypassed it.

[Link to anti-piracy system post]

As soon as this situation started, I did an extra optimization on the database to stop processing data coming from these versions. But the underlying problem is still there: there's nothing I can do on the client side, since I have no way to update the pirated version. That means the number of calls hitting my server stays exactly the same, and the only thing I can do is keep a bigger server plan to hold up the service. Hopefully the pirates update their version at some point.

Even so, I decided to leave new user registration active, just out of curiosity to see where my players were coming from. That's how I ended up counting that 99% today.

---

"Pirates aren't in your market" - ☝️🤓

When the piracy situation got out of hand, I partnered with a Chinese publisher, who I have to admit seem to work really well. They opened pre-registration 2 weeks ago, took down several mobile pirated versions, and got thousands of sign-ups for the official version on day one. I've been genuinely happy with the reports they've been sending me.

Part of the reason I did this was an argument I kept seeing a lot: that if the game isn't on mobile, new pirate players are pirates because they don't have a PC to play on. But now that mobile piracy seems somewhat more under control, PC piracy is growing at an incredible rate.

Maybe they were simply choosing mobile out of convenience, not necessity, when it was free.

---

I released a PC-only feature that made everything worse

One of the updates I released to keep improving the official version was a mod that connects the biggest Chinese streaming platforms (Douyin, RedNote, and Bilibili) to the game. This lets livestream viewers show up as customers in front of the streamer and chat with them.

This mod is an external executable shared on my game's forum. It started slow since nobody knew about it, but now there are hundreds of players live on those platforms every single day.

Personally, I think this has also driven the increase in PC pirate players, since they can enjoy the mod here, when they couldn't on mobile.

---

Does piracy help games?

I don't buy into the "pirates who enjoy the game will buy it later" idea, so I was never a defender of piracy, though I never condemned it or looked down on anyone for pirating either. I just live alongside its existence and try to do so in the best way I can as a developer. As I explained in other posts, my only "remedy" was making the burger joint's customers dress up as pirates while an un-mutable sea shanty plays, and only paying a couple of doubloons for their food. A feature that kicks in after an hour of play, and works more like a bit of karma toward pirate players than an actual punishment.

When my game started going viral, I also wrote a post saying that maybe piracy itself helped me reach more people, since it generates more videos on social media and gets more people talking about the game.

[Link to piracy post]

But after analyzing these last few days, I think I might have been wrong. Here's the data:

• March 2025: My game came out a year and a half ago.
• June 2026: It goes viral in China through Douyin (their version of TikTok).
• June 28: The pirated PC version comes out, without many players.
• July 11: Mobile pre-order goes live on TapTap China, and anti-piracy measures are put in place.
• July 18: I release the Livestream mod for PC.
• July 20: I notice an increase in PC pirate players, though it had already been building up before this.
• July 20–22: My sales drop about -40%, and SteamDB shows a noticeable decline in active official players.

Right now I'm counting 9,000 players under that piracy website's name.

So at this point, my opinion on piracy is no longer "piracy exists in parallel with healthy growth."

---

Why am I writing this?

I'm not writing this looking for attention, since thankfully the game is still doing well. Nobody here needs to buy it, that's why I'm not sharing the name. [Link to the post about my game is doing well]

My day-to-day over the last month has been putting my project aside to handle this situation as best I can, and while stressful, it's been quite the experience. That's why I keep sharing it so much.

Many of you have encouraged me to keep posting about it, but to those who haven't, I'm sorry if I've become tiresome with this topic. I feel like it shows a side of gamedev that a lot of people don't talk about, out of fear that the situation will get worse or just jinx it.

The main reason I write this is because I genuinely enjoy sharing my story, it's helped me make better decisions for my project and my future as a studio more than once. I've gotten messages that made my day, and I feel like other users find it interesting too. Again, if that's not your case, I hope you'll forgive me for continuing.

I'll keep you posted whenever there's news. If you want me to, that is.

---

*Disclaimer: This post is AI-translated. I'm a native Spanish speaker, I wrote and structured all of this in Spanish, and had AI translate it into English. I reviewed the translation afterward to make sure the message hadn't changed. Hope you don't mind.

---

*Update: After some users suggestions I tried to remove the php files that were receiving all the data and update oficial users to a new endpoint. Somehow pirates trying to reach a non-existen url causes a higher CPU usage so I used Cloudflare to block this URLs. Now server is under 10% of usage! 😁

I'm looking for ideas and information here. I'm working on an indie game, and I've long had this idea of beating pirates to the punch and sharing a "pirated" version of my game which is exactly the same as the retail version, only all characters have an eye patch. I don't really care about copy protection, anti-cheat, etc... Piracy is going to happen no matter what, so I might as well have fun with it.

(I don't want to break any reddit rules here, so probably better if y'all don't just post a list of torrent sites or anything... I'm mainly wondering if people could share any stories about how they got pirated themselves, in ways I could take advantage of?)

Edit: If it helps, the first version will be on Steam. A future iOS release is on the schedule too, but that's further off.

We're working on a game with online chat and user made content, aiming to ship next year. Been reading up on age assurance and I'm not clear what's expected of someone my size.

What I understand is that if there's user-to-user contact, you're in scope and a self-declared date of birth isn't considered enough anymore in a few markets.

What I don't understand is the realistic option for a 2 person studio. Asking every player to upload a passport would tank us on launch day and I don't want to be storing that either.

Trying to work out if this is something I budget for and how.

I know friends and family are not worth it as they are bias and do not really want to hurt feelings, but I feel like with how fast content is rolling out now, its almost impossible to get any eyes. Its almost like you have to do a marketing push for a prototype. I threw something on itch expecting at least maybe one comment or 2, made a few reddit posts pointing to it but it feels impossible to gain any attention on something I'm not even trying to sell just validate if the idea is sound or not.

At my place of work, we make architectural 3d models (not for video games). We have a good process. We model in blender and texture it. It's quick and efficient.

My boss has recently come up to me and said the following: "we're more going to build a much more complex model and 1, use shrink wrap modifier. 2, use snap to face. 3, poly build tool.

Then bake with normal maps, AO, and curvature. Because this is how video game assets are created"

The baking part makes sense, but is the first part correct? Do video game Devs use all those steps to build their models? It seems a bit long winded?? If creating new models, I assumed they were just built from the ground up

Edit: thanks for all your answers everyone! <3

I have been making some small games to learn game development. All my attempts seem to be not very presentable, being lame, not fun. However I learned something during the process and feel like I'm building up a knowledge base I can use to make better games next time.

Let me explain my question. I want to put in more time in effort into a really good game. "Good" meaning that I feel I could sell it and it could sell at least 1000 copies. Or if it doesn't sell, "Good" meaning that my friends and family enjoy playing it and in general it is a fun game.

I see other games devs post they have worked on their game for 5 years. What took you so long? Did you spend time on programming and learning even how to build it? Did you hire someone to make the assets or did you do them yourself?

Or does it really take 5 years to make a really good game with polish?

Edit: I'm trying to decide to make smaller games faster or focus on one big game, how much time and effort is needed for what type of genre. Have a full time job so I don't have a lot of time. I've only tried a few different ideas, nothing concrete. I would like to put my time into an outcome to sell a game I made. You're right, if it starts selling then it could be used to determine if it was a good game. "Good" is a subjective term.

Edit: Depends on the type of game, the knowledge and practice needed to even begin, the amount of assets, the amount of time devoted to development.

A good game can be small and take a day, or be a whole world and take years.

I'm specifically talking about localisations/translations that were built by the devs themselves or specifically/intentionally contracted, not something crowdsourced like Minecraft. In other terms: first- or second-party unusual localisations only!

Additionally, this does include minor national languages (either in terms of speakers, or by availability of media in them), but also large minority languages that don't get a lot of screentime.

A few examples I know of:

• Tamagoneko - Belarusian and Tatar
• Steredenn, which while it's not listed on Steam as such, seems to have an official second-party Breton/Brezhoneg translation
• Antro - Catalan
• The Dark Queen of Mortholme - Galician
• Maid of Sker - Welsh
• Scholar Adventure: Mystery of Silence - Basque

^{Obligatory disclosure: no I am not a developer of any of these I've linked to or connected to any of the teams or devs in any way}

Most of these languages are not financially viable to support a first/second-party localisation into, so they're understandably not very common, but I'm still interested in seeing if you've seen any that stayed in your mind

Hi guys, long time lurker here.

As a side quest in my life, I'd love to deconstruct and remake a RTS I played when I was younger.

The end goal is to remake the game for my own sake and have fun while playing, without beeing frustrated by the terrible AI dating from 1997.

What would be the best way to deconstruct (or read the code) the game and understand how it qorks under the hood?

The game is "Dracula: Reign of Terror", otberwise known as "Vlad Tepes Dracula" in some markets.

Thank you all in advance

Hey everyone,
I’m currently studying Computer Science with a specialization in AI & ML, and I’ve decided that I want to pursue a career in game development. I’m still at the beginning of my journey, so I’d really appreciate some guidance from people who are already in the industry or have experience in game development.
I’m trying to figure out the best place to start, what skills I should prioritize, which game engine and programming languages are most valuable to learn, how to build a strong portfolio, and what the hiring process is generally like for game development roles.
If you were starting from scratch today, what path would you recommend? Any advice, learning resources, or personal experiences would really help.
Thanks in advance!

I've had this survival game idea stuck in my head for ages and wanted to see what other people think.

Imagine Rust, DayZ, Foxhole, Satisfactory and a bit of Schedule 1 all mixed together.

The focus isn't just survival, it's building an actual civilisation. Players can become farmers, logistics companies, weapons manufacturers, chemists, traders, governments or raiders. Huge factions could build empires with factories, settlements, convoy routes, laws and even taxes. Instead of progressing from "wood spear to assault rifle", you progress from carrying supplies in a backpack to organising six-truck convoys supplying entire player cities.

The part I'm most excited about is the wipe system.

Instead of a normal server wipe, every few months The Eternal Dark begins.

For seven in-game days, the island slowly starts dying.

- Day 1: NPCs become uneasy and raise prices.

- Day 2: Every bird leaves and rich caves collapse.

- Day 3: Animals become aggressive, then start dying for no reason.

- Day 4: Stress constantly rises, even while resting.

- Day 5: Shops close. Forests give you an eye icon showing you're being watched.

- Day 6: Rivers stop flowing, plants rot, and animal skulls mysteriously appear on player vehicles and walls overnight.

- Day 7: The sun never rises. Only a blood-red horizon remains. The wind suddenly dies, everything goes silent... then distant howls begin. Players hear their friends calling from inside the forest even though those friends are standing beside them.

At first there is only one creature.

It sits in a tree.

Watching.

Then it starts multiplying. Every hour or every player it kills creates another one. The first wipe would catch everyone off guard because they'd waste all their rockets, ammunition and supplies thinking it's just a normal wipe. Afterwards, future servers would prepare months in advance for The Eternal Dark, creating a completely different late-game economy.

The idea is that players spend months fighting each other, then suddenly have to decide whether to keep fighting or unite against something far worse.

Would this actually be a game you'd play, or am I just dreaming way too big?

I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback, criticism or ideas.

Hello I am am a "normal dev". Meaning I don't do any game dev professionally. I have 20 years as an infra/backend dev. My background is mostly in cloud computing, virtualization, and API development.

I decided to take the plunge into game dev for my 46th birthday last September. And I'm having quite a fun time. I do want to state my goals in making a game:

- I don't want to be a professional game dev

- I'm probably not going to try to sell my game, and even if I did I wouldn't expect it to sell

- the learning process is just as important as a finished game

- I tend to like details

With that said I am making my game "from scratch". Just using Zig and Raylib. I am using Spine2D for animation. And I'm making a 2D run and gun boss rush game in the vein of a Cuphead. Its pretty much an "arcade" shooter

Anyway its been incredibly fun. One genuine insight is this

Gamedev often feels like solving data problems. You are transforming data based on events and you are passing it to be processed. And I think that is what makes it fun, because I did do engineering in a previous life. And this reminds me of it

I also feel while I'm a gamedev noob. I think I would not have enjoyed using an engine. I don't particularly like visual styles of programming. Though it have some merit. But I also kind of what to know what's going on under the hood. Only place where I maybe accepted some abstraction is with rendering. I think trying to learn GPU programming would have been too much to try to learn. With that said, my spine2d integration did require some direct calls to the GPU because I needed to draw my attachments and verticies to the GPU

Gamedev is probably the only personal project I stuck with this long. Also, worth noting. I don't use AI for any of my code. I only really use it for research and to look things up. Especially useful when explaining equations and game dev concepts. Google search is REALLY bad these days

Anyway not sure is this is the right place to share this. But felt I'd share the perspective from an old guy

I'm curious to know how you grow your community and engage players. What's worked for you, and what do players really find interesting?

General consensus about possibility to make a living from game development, especially as one man band developer, is very bad - probably more than 80% of games don't make any money, and those that do, it's way below software development salary that one would get in a non-game development industries.

But the minority who managed to make a decent living from game development as one man band developers, how did you achieve a sustainable business? Emphasis is on sustainable, because one could maybe get lucky and earn some money with one game title, but then would follow a series of flops, lowering his effective hourly rate on the hamburger flipper level.

To start off I’m an app dev not a game dev. I was making a turbo simple 2d game for fun and realised an app of mine in prod could be helpful to some of you too so I’m sharing.

More info in that: especially when making uis for games getting the visibility right on the text the fonts the contrast between colors can be as hard as it is when making a standalone app in my surprise. So I thought i would share this with you too.

I always resorted to Claude to make themes but I realised thats because the apps we use to customise the theme are not fun enough. Making a theme should feel like making a video game character. Added a tinder swiper and a fancy theme details animation for example

This is a theme editing app but ok what is the goal here? I know there are apps that do this but none of the good ones are 100 percent free. So the first goal was matching all the features for free. Also even in the paid ones using them doesn’t feel as good as it could in my opinion and major quality of life features are missing.

I also wanted this to be very fun to use. I have adhd and I turbo procrastinate micro adjustments so I needed a theme editor app that felt satisfying to use. There also needed to be the feeling of satisfaction after finishing editing a theme.

Final goal was to make other fun features other apps just don’t do but I really wished they did. As little friction as possible to get a normal theme that doesn’t look like slop then spending a little bit of time micro adjusting the details.

What I actually built up to this point:

I had a very smart idea of yanking the most popular vscode themes and turning them into app themes along with faithful recreations of popular website themes + my custom apple inspired themes. Important! Something the other apps don’t do and I had to do my self manually and wasting tons of time was generating complementary and contrasting colors. I mean I don’t want the app to either be black and white or everything is green and I also don’t want to spend 2 hours selecting random colors.

Other smart idea but work in progress is something that mounts it self inside your app like expo go dev menu and lets you edit the theme that way (didn’t implement yet I want feedback if this is a waste of time or actually sounds cool). I have made the components to pull this off for other things so I may do it anyways because I think this looks cool.

Made the tinder style swipe cards a beautiful theme overview typography themes a metric ton of beautifully crafted previews (everything the web apps do)

My main goal was to get this working on my phone for me because I love micro adjusting these things all the time. I managed to make an interface for making and editing themes as good as all the web apps but with a tiny screen instead. I added nice transitions to make adjusting css variables as fun as possible (hard task 😭)

Ok also there’s a bunch of features I was missing from the already existing ones. I wanted to be able to pick a primary color and have complementary colors etc auto generated and I wanted modes for this. Should the bg be completely white as well as cards? Gray bg white cards? Everything tinted? Page tinted blue primary colors yellow or something? I added auto generators to handle these things.

Another thing I was missing was being able to create one theme and have it auto convert to everything else. I mean I wanna be able to create a shadcn theme and have it able to be exported as a hero ui theme a material ui theme all of them. I made an adapter that handles this automatically.

I wanted this to feel cute and I want to be able to feel like I have created something and not just played with a gloried text file for 30 minutes. I added a collections tag with folders and a handsaw’s signature for each user and a poster generated from each theme.

This has helped me so much personally I want your feedback on this. Sadly there is nothing you can download yet but you can follow the updates on my twitter it’s on my Reddit bio.

Btw this is also coming to iPad mac and web. Android should work too since it’s cross platform but I don’t want to commit to that yet until I have actual users. It may sound silly but making sure no elements overlap the App Store screenshots etc take time.

For screenshots, it’s pretty easy to make a “fake” mockup of a level/area that’s not fully complete but framed to look production-ready, but for a trailer, it’s pretty hard to get good in-game footage that’s up to quality.

I’m thinking of launching a page for my game that’s very early in development to start gathering wishlists potentially from customers who know they would like my game purely from the description + screenshots, and waiting until a later point until I have enough good quality footage to compile a trailer.

Am I shooting myself in the foot for launching a Steam store page without a trailer initially? I know it’s a cardinal sin to not have a trailer, but I was planning on adding one eventually, but I’m unsure as to whether I would need to wait for a good trailer until publishing the storefront page.

TL;DR: Should I publish my Steam page as soon as possible, or is there a real risk to launching a “coming soon” page without a trailer (but will add one eventually)?

We’ve been building a mystery thriller game for mobile and web over the last two months. It's a hobby side project that we're working on alongside our full-time jobs.

We're thinking about crowdfunding the project, but we're not sure how appropriate crowdfunding is for games.

Our current plan is to create a 10-15 minute MVP gameplay demo, upload it to YouTube, and promote it to see if we can get community support and raise some initial funds.

Do you think this is a good approach? Or is there a better way to raise some initial funding for a game like this?

Hi, so we're a team of 4 making a Superhero JRPG, and as we've gotten further into development we've realized how useful like 5K would be to completing the project in a reasonable amount of time.

We've made spreadsheets, done the math, and priced out everything. Now comes the struggle of marketing an RPGMaker game. We're in the process for creating a kickstarter prelaunch page (alongside the actual page), but for now we have to actually market the game (or at least get people interested).

Our issue is that most of the things we have to show off is two characters, one area, but we have a lot of concept art and such. So marketing has been an issue of just finding stuff to show off? We tried out Twitter, but that didn't work out too much, so I believe our current social medias are Insta, Reddit (Although this one barely is used), and Tumblr. I get these aren't the best places to market, but our game's audience will probably also be there.

We will have a demo to come out alongside the pre-launch page, and a lot of graphics / things to showcase on the page itself.

Marketing seems to be the biggest struggle for all devs, as I've noticed. Without paying for ads and such, what else is there to do for marketing than just posting on every social media account things you've made for your game?

I've seen some people say that having a discord is extremely useful, especially if you have those who actually care about the project in there, as they would be more willing to fund a kickstarter.

If anyone has advice or knowledge, I would love to learn about how other kickstarter's have had their successes!

i've been working on a small text format for procedural character movement. each phase can contain joint targets, a world-space travel waypoint and contact constraints.

a simplified step looks like this:

step "Right crosses behind" 0.65s flow:
knee_right: flex 25
travel: 0.6 0
pin: foot_left floor
reach: foot_right floor

when i first added travel, the path looked correct in the floor guide but the character mostly marched in place.

the problem was the meaning of pin. a floor foot pin translated the whole root until the foot returned to its contact point. that works for things like lunges and static supports, but during a gait it cancelled the authored root travel on every step.

i ended up treating a clip as gait only when it has authored travel and alternates floor pins between the left and right feet. for those phases the root stays at the authored waypoint and the stance leg is solved toward the planted contact with constrained IK.

same-foot pins and contacts with props still use root translation, since those usually describe moving the body around a fixed support.

that fix exposed another bad assumption in my examples. some closing steps used ground-lock even though the foot was actually relocating. i changed those to reach the floor instead. the movement looked similar, but the definition now describes what the foot is really doing.

this is still a kinematic system, not a full physics simulation. i also use a slightly larger floor-contact tolerance during locomotion because the current leg chain cannot model a proper heel to toe roll.

if you've worked on procedural locomotion, would you make stance and swing explicit in the format, or keep inferring them from alternating contacts? i'm wondering where this inference will start breaking down.

this is part of Posecode. the implementation and test are here:
https://github.com/posecode-dev/posecode/pull/97

I'm working on a spot the anomaly type game in the same vein as Exit 8, The Floor Above and The Cabin Factory. The gimmick of my game is that you are a game tester, so your job is to test different levels of a top-down adventure game and look out for anomalies / glitches.

Out of the 90 wishlists my game got so far (it's the third day after releasing the page), 29 come from Japan, even though my page didn't have a japanese version, and neither did my trailer. I'm guessing it's because that type of game is very popular there due to Exit 8 being a japanese game.

How do I reach out and captalize on that audience? What sort of community / social media works best? If anyone has experience with that, please let me know.

This is my game's Steam page if you are interested:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4968650/Little_Knights_Last_Night/

Looking for the ancient version of Havok 4.6.1 r1 or any 4.0+

I keep hearing it's about the quality of the art, the ui placement, the "look" of a game, but that feels like only part of the story. Lots of indie games have serviceable but simple art (like Undertale) and they feel great to play start to finish, but then you have Undertale fan games and even the best of them like Undertale Yellow feel a little off even though the visuals might actually be better in some places.

Hello! My sister and I are currently planning to build a 2D game. She's good at art but hasn't worked on a video game before and I only know how to code. If I tried to draw, it would be indistinguishable from a toddlers' drawing.

Anyways, I was wondering if there are any resources to doing video game art as someone who already knows how to draw as a lot of what I can find seem to be for beginners. Also, any tips on good practices for video game artists and artstyles that would be manageable for a solo artist? We're also considering getting another friend to help with the art so I'm wondering how the artstyle would stay consistent with multiple artists working together. Thank you!