@@ashsessions911 No, he explains it perfectly. The original pirated copy involved significant changes to the code, one of which was hardcoding the language to Chinese. Afterwards, other folks took that existing pirated copy and swapped the data files to change the language back to English. Your suggestion that the "original chinese reversers" "swapped the fonts" is flat out wrong. Had they merely swapped the font/text files, then the subtitles in their Chinese-only copy would be spaced incorrectly (which they weren't.) I find that it helps to listen to the clip first before inventing your own headcanon. Also, hardcoded is absolutely the correct term. They took something that was conditional and made it unconditional. They hardcoded the language to be Chinese by modifying the game itself, not the data files associated with the language. (We know this because the subtitle spacing is correct and that apparently comes directly from a manual offset the game's code.) The subsequent English copy didn't fix the fact that the language was hardcoded. Instead, the creators of the English copy just manually replaced the hardcoded Chinese language's data files with the English versions of those same files. EDIT: I'm not sure if @ashsessions911 deleted their comment or if RUclips is just being silly. Regardless, I just wanted to say: Ash, wherever you are, I hope you're having a good day. Your comment was factually incorrect, but that doesn't mean I hate you or anything. I'm just another crank in the RUclips comment section.
@@justsomeredspy nicely explained, this guy is delusional, probably envious haha. Imagine saying "he doesn't know what he's talking about" to a game dev that took part in making one of the most popular puzzle games of the last decade haha
@@treypoling their DRM is invasive and runs on a Kernal level and sometimes prevents legitimate people from playing the game. They sometimes remove games that you've purchased from your library without refunding you. The best devs actually tell you to pirate their games if you can't afford it yet and buy it later. (E.g. Notch (Minecraft) and Toby Fox (UNDERTALE). That's what I did and I appreciate them for that. I own both games now.
I doubt it was a dedication. They’ve simply removed steam’s hooks, so provided a hardcoded solution instead. Sure they could choose English or smth instead, but why?
I mean how much money do you really make streaming, if you're not an extreme outlier. youtubers with millions of views make like 500 bucks a month. 2 games is about 120 bucks.. yeah I would be suprised if they didn't.
@@mycollegeshirt The Witness is $40 regular price, currently $10 on sale, it's not $60. That $20 difference would be enough to buy a whole other game, or even multiple (through sales or bundles). Twitch streamers (and likely the same for RUclips Live and other platforms) with moderately sized audiences who stream daily or semi-daily will make far more than $500 a month, especially if they have a strong community. There are channels I watch with less than 5k subscribers on RUclips who make hundreds in donations in just one or two livestreams, because their content is engaging and entertaining. If you're only making $500 or less a month from streaming or making videos about games, it's obviously not your full time job anyway, so you can probably afford it regardless of the fact that it would pay for itself. In no scenario is it a problem of affordability. And even regardless of that, they have an ethical DUTY to pay the creators of a game if they are actively using it to make money from playing.
@@9hoot789 Okay, let's do the math... There are approximately 7.23 million active streamers on Twitch... Not viewers.. streamers... in April 2024... This is down from 9.89 million in January 2021. So, according to Twitch, Twitch has about 240 million active viewers. If we spread that equally over all 7.23 million active streamers on Twitch, that is well, I guess on average 0.1-0.25 subs per viewer (Notice how many unsubbed in every major channel)... Considering there is literally ZERO, zilch, NADA data on this (Twitch doesn't really wanna share), the 0.1-0.25 is pretty darn generous. This would be 10-25% of viewers. Considering when you watch a major channel, easily 95 to 99% of the viewers would be subless, and there doesn't seem to be a major trend of subscribing to literally every channel you watch (even when you do sub), I still personally believe 10-25% of viewers is generous. On the lower end that would be between 723 000 to 1 807 500 subs to go around. You know what, let me extra generous, let's double it and say 1 446 000 to 3 615 000 subs. Let's even be so generous to say that everyone who subs, subs at tier 2. 10$ per person. That would be somewhere between 7 million and 18 million dollars worth of subscriptions... Now it is a 50/50 (An announced 60/40, doesn't make it better, not going to look further into that frankly) subscriber share of the money with the creator. This would be about a dollar to two dollar per active streamer. Obviously it is not just a dollar to two dollars SOME streamers earn, and the VAST VAST majority will earn literally nothing. Even if we go SUPER generous, and double and triple these estimates, we still only end up with millions, vs. millions of streamers, and we know that there are streamers who literally became millionaires through streaming... obviously some had outside help (like sponsors), but overall.... it isn't much. Your "moderately sized" audience based on anecdotal evidence (Twitch ain't gonna release the stats), is seemingly around 200 followers... or very dedicated followers... that is like 500$ a month... If someone doesn't really have the money to buy a game before, they likely wont really be super likely to afford it after spending their (if lucky) "salary" on other expenses, and chance are that they don't have the time to actually earn the expenses if they are attempting full time streaminer. Anyway, it might seem simple at first, but we don't have the numbers, and the only numbers that makes sense, still puts the amount of people capable of earning, to a RIDICULOUS small amount.
i was expecting him to mention the loading zone chunk in the middle of the map where it would try and load like 4 areas and severely chunk performance every time you walked through
How wretched it must be for a creator to go, today I want to watch people experience my game! and then hop on twitch to see that half of them had so obviously pirated it. Totally sucky.
this is jonathan blow, hes made enough money from braid, im sure he doesnt care that hes not getting paid, just that theyre playing and experiencing his game
@@BalsamicJeebs well sure, except that The Witness cost a lot more money to make and he went into debt doing it. And I'm pretty sure he's said he's gone into debt again on the next game. Which, fine, that's not unusual for a business I guess. But if the next game fails it's not like he has fuck you Braid money to fall back on. That was all invested in The Witness. And then Witness money was all invested in the next game. You want more games, you pay for them. That's the only way it works
@@1337pianomanMost game pirates at least used to say, "If you enjoy it pay for it." There was and is an understanding that most people pirating a game are doing so for financial reasons, so they remind people to buy it legitimately later if it's still viable.
Even better, do what Arkham asylum did and upload a bespoke version of the game to trackers yourself. If your game is even semi popular it will absolutely be cracked and pirated, even tiny indie games. Maybe even make it so you’re locked out of endgame content and make it easy to transfer save files over, might win back some people who enjoyed the game
Settlers 3 released in 1998 and had something like this. If you were playing on a pirated copy it would play like normal, but when crafting gold bars you instead got pigs.
Serious Sam 3 also had something like that. About 20 minutes into the game, if you were playing a pirated version, you would encounter an unbeatable enemy that locked you from continuing forward on that level. It looked like a bug, but since it was deliberately hard-coded, the devs were able to just dismiss bug reports of that kind with "buy the real game" because it was obvious which bug reporters had an illegal copy of the game
Batman Arkham Asylum had an anti-piracy "bug" where the grappling hook wouldn't work but it takes about two hours to get to the point where you'd get it, otherwise the game works perfectly until you reached a wall you can only pass with it. A lot of users online were hilariousu complaining that it was broken as a result. The Godfather game had a bug were pirates copies had inverted aiming with weapons but normal aiming for moving around and also wouldn't let you enter or exit vehicles. The shooting was manageable to a limited extent but you had to run everywhere and the game map was pretty big. I think the fourth game mission you're driving a car(the game loads you into the car in a Cutscene) with a bomb in it and you can't enter or exit the vehicle so the countdown just slowly ticks down and you explode. Good times.
TODO : Make a pirated version of my own game and have a download link to it. But mention that it is a pirated version and they don't have permission to use it. I am just putting it here.
@@0ia I would never sue for something like that . But what I will do is .... . . . . . . Figure out where they live and send them photos in the mail of me giving them very dis-approving looks . Then , I'll go figure out where their mom lives and... Send them photos of... . . . . . . . > > Both of us giving them very dis-approving looks . -KanjiCoder
Game Dev Tycoon did that. They put a version on pirate sites, and changed the code that the games you make in the game get pirated a lot and you lose money. Was fun to see comments on the forums "pirating is too much in this game!", not seeing the great irony in it.
I've always wondered how much trouble a dev could get into if they embedded a crypto miner in a fake pirated copy they release themselves, along with an in-game message that pops up when their first 'payment' has been earned.
I love Blow's games and I can't wait for his next one but I seriously couldn't get into The Witness and I really wanted to. Maybe it will click on replay. I get what he was trying to go for (2deep4me) but I can't for the life of me spend hours just tapping around on screens (get it?)
Reminds me of Game Dev Tycoon (where the whole point of the game is that you create games) and the developer released a cracked version of the game themselves, but added in a 'feature' that after a certain point in time, people would start cracking the games you create, causing you to lose increasingly high amounts of money over time, until you run out of money and lose.
This is the type of person that goes full vigilante mode on the internet doxxing someone’s address because they were rude and insulted your favorite game, and then someone else uses that address to swat them which gets them inadvertently killed in the raid
@@jonessii I have to admit I was anti piracy until ten to fifteen years later with every prediction the pirates made having come true, it was time to admit they were right It is counter-initiative but when we remember to keep in mind both that piracy isn't theft and that corporations conduct piracy all the time (recently Microsoft had to pull a planned Call Of Duty DLC because it had someone else's content in it, the very definition of piracy) then we realise that the main voices pushing the anti-piracy narrative are the ones simply seeking to have a *monopoly* on piracy 😅
The unfortunate thing with personally made art of arbitrary iteration as a business is that it flies in the face of how memes spread by word of mouth. Piracy IS that word of mouth practice. Single iteration physical art is the only market, and it’s high altitude and saturated
I wish I did, because The Witness is an absolute mess It is simultaneously really good and _extremely_ bad. I cannot understand how people like it so much
I'm not defending pirates, but when your DRM is so awful that legitimate purchasers prefer to play the cracked version: that should be a huge red flag that your DRM is atrocious.
@@Chemieklo Most people do not think of violent criminals when you say pirate. They instead think of swash buckling adventures with treasure chests. The music industry failed horribly, if they indeed coined it as propaganda, to make to sound bad. There's a reason why pirating is often advertised with "sail the seven seas", "arrr", and not to mention one of the most famous pirating sites being named Pirate Bay. Because it all sounds cool, fun, and good.
My favorite genre of video is devs roasting the people who cracked/pirated their game
@@ashsessions911 No, he explains it perfectly. The original pirated copy involved significant changes to the code, one of which was hardcoding the language to Chinese. Afterwards, other folks took that existing pirated copy and swapped the data files to change the language back to English. Your suggestion that the "original chinese reversers" "swapped the fonts" is flat out wrong. Had they merely swapped the font/text files, then the subtitles in their Chinese-only copy would be spaced incorrectly (which they weren't.) I find that it helps to listen to the clip first before inventing your own headcanon.
Also, hardcoded is absolutely the correct term. They took something that was conditional and made it unconditional. They hardcoded the language to be Chinese by modifying the game itself, not the data files associated with the language. (We know this because the subtitle spacing is correct and that apparently comes directly from a manual offset the game's code.) The subsequent English copy didn't fix the fact that the language was hardcoded. Instead, the creators of the English copy just manually replaced the hardcoded Chinese language's data files with the English versions of those same files.
EDIT: I'm not sure if @ashsessions911 deleted their comment or if RUclips is just being silly. Regardless, I just wanted to say: Ash, wherever you are, I hope you're having a good day. Your comment was factually incorrect, but that doesn't mean I hate you or anything. I'm just another crank in the RUclips comment section.
@@justsomeredspy nicely explained, this guy is delusional, probably envious haha. Imagine saying "he doesn't know what he's talking about" to a game dev that took part in making one of the most popular puzzle games of the last decade haha
Remember everyone! It's always morally correct to pirate Ubisoft games!
@@DarthLeo1000YT Why's that?
@@treypoling their DRM is invasive and runs on a Kernal level and sometimes prevents legitimate people from playing the game.
They sometimes remove games that you've purchased from your library without refunding you.
The best devs actually tell you to pirate their games if you can't afford it yet and buy it later. (E.g. Notch (Minecraft) and Toby Fox (UNDERTALE). That's what I did and I appreciate them for that. I own both games now.
I love how the based Chinese pirates take the extra step to hardcode the game in Chinese 😂
They're pirates but they're still good little brainwashed CCP drones.
I doubt it was a dedication. They’ve simply removed steam’s hooks, so provided a hardcoded solution instead. Sure they could choose English or smth instead, but why?
@@Ant3rn yeah you're probably right, I just find it funny imagining Chinese hackers specifically cracking it so wide-eyes can't enjoy
That's not based. It's a sign of a small and fragile ego.
@@ClokworkGremlinor maybe it's a sign that people prefer to play games in their native languages
It's actually so shameful that a STREAMER, who is MAKING MONEY FROM PLAYING THE GAME ON STREAM, decides to pirate it lol.
I mean how much money do you really make streaming, if you're not an extreme outlier. youtubers with millions of views make like 500 bucks a month. 2 games is about 120 bucks.. yeah I would be suprised if they didn't.
@@mycollegeshirt The Witness is $40 regular price, currently $10 on sale, it's not $60. That $20 difference would be enough to buy a whole other game, or even multiple (through sales or bundles). Twitch streamers (and likely the same for RUclips Live and other platforms) with moderately sized audiences who stream daily or semi-daily will make far more than $500 a month, especially if they have a strong community. There are channels I watch with less than 5k subscribers on RUclips who make hundreds in donations in just one or two livestreams, because their content is engaging and entertaining. If you're only making $500 or less a month from streaming or making videos about games, it's obviously not your full time job anyway, so you can probably afford it regardless of the fact that it would pay for itself. In no scenario is it a problem of affordability. And even regardless of that, they have an ethical DUTY to pay the creators of a game if they are actively using it to make money from playing.
@@9hoot789 Okay, let's do the math...
There are approximately 7.23 million active streamers on Twitch... Not viewers.. streamers... in April 2024... This is down from 9.89 million in January 2021.
So, according to Twitch, Twitch has about 240 million active viewers.
If we spread that equally over all 7.23 million active streamers on Twitch, that is well, I guess on average 0.1-0.25 subs per viewer (Notice how many unsubbed in every major channel)... Considering there is literally ZERO, zilch, NADA data on this (Twitch doesn't really wanna share), the 0.1-0.25 is pretty darn generous. This would be 10-25% of viewers.
Considering when you watch a major channel, easily 95 to 99% of the viewers would be subless, and there doesn't seem to be a major trend of subscribing to literally every channel you watch (even when you do sub), I still personally believe 10-25% of viewers is generous.
On the lower end that would be between 723 000 to 1 807 500 subs to go around. You know what, let me extra generous, let's double it and say 1 446 000 to 3 615 000 subs.
Let's even be so generous to say that everyone who subs, subs at tier 2.
10$ per person.
That would be somewhere between 7 million and 18 million dollars worth of subscriptions...
Now it is a 50/50 (An announced 60/40, doesn't make it better, not going to look further into that frankly) subscriber share of the money with the creator.
This would be about a dollar to two dollar per active streamer. Obviously it is not just a dollar to two dollars SOME streamers earn, and the VAST VAST majority will earn literally nothing. Even if we go SUPER generous, and double and triple these estimates, we still only end up with millions, vs. millions of streamers, and we know that there are streamers who literally became millionaires through streaming... obviously some had outside help (like sponsors), but overall.... it isn't much.
Your "moderately sized" audience based on anecdotal evidence (Twitch ain't gonna release the stats), is seemingly around 200 followers... or very dedicated followers... that is like 500$ a month...
If someone doesn't really have the money to buy a game before, they likely wont really be super likely to afford it after spending their (if lucky) "salary" on other expenses, and chance are that they don't have the time to actually earn the expenses if they are attempting full time streaminer.
Anyway, it might seem simple at first, but we don't have the numbers, and the only numbers that makes sense, still puts the amount of people capable of earning, to a RIDICULOUS small amount.
@@mycollegeshirt You are extremely mistaken lol
@@mycollegeshirtThe witness is currently on steam for 9 dollars
i was expecting him to mention the loading zone chunk in the middle of the map where it would try and load like 4 areas and severely chunk performance every time you walked through
How wretched it must be for a creator to go, today I want to watch people experience my game! and then hop on twitch to see that half of them had so obviously pirated it. Totally sucky.
this is jonathan blow, hes made enough money from braid, im sure he doesnt care that hes not getting paid, just that theyre playing and experiencing his game
It's to be expected
@@BalsamicJeebs well sure, except that The Witness cost a lot more money to make and he went into debt doing it. And I'm pretty sure he's said he's gone into debt again on the next game. Which, fine, that's not unusual for a business I guess. But if the next game fails it's not like he has fuck you Braid money to fall back on. That was all invested in The Witness. And then Witness money was all invested in the next game. You want more games, you pay for them. That's the only way it works
@@1337pianomanMost game pirates at least used to say, "If you enjoy it pay for it." There was and is an understanding that most people pirating a game are doing so for financial reasons, so they remind people to buy it legitimately later if it's still viable.
Man. Gamers don't deserve good games. Let them have a hundred more assassin's creeds
idea: When deving a game, make it so that cutting off/failing Steam handshake produces a subtle visual glitch. Implement this stealthly.
Even better, do what Arkham asylum did and upload a bespoke version of the game to trackers yourself. If your game is even semi popular it will absolutely be cracked and pirated, even tiny indie games. Maybe even make it so you’re locked out of endgame content and make it easy to transfer save files over, might win back some people who enjoyed the game
Settlers 3 released in 1998 and had something like this. If you were playing on a pirated copy it would play like normal, but when crafting gold bars you instead got pigs.
That would take 30 seconds to patch out once reported
Serious Sam 3 also had something like that. About 20 minutes into the game, if you were playing a pirated version, you would encounter an unbeatable enemy that locked you from continuing forward on that level. It looked like a bug, but since it was deliberately hard-coded, the devs were able to just dismiss bug reports of that kind with "buy the real game" because it was obvious which bug reporters had an illegal copy of the game
cracked games use steam emulators, that wouldn't do much
Batman Arkham Asylum had an anti-piracy "bug" where the grappling hook wouldn't work but it takes about two hours to get to the point where you'd get it, otherwise the game works perfectly until you reached a wall you can only pass with it.
A lot of users online were hilariousu complaining that it was broken as a result.
The Godfather game had a bug were pirates copies had inverted aiming with weapons but normal aiming for moving around and also wouldn't let you enter or exit vehicles. The shooting was manageable to a limited extent but you had to run everywhere and the game map was pretty big. I think the fourth game mission you're driving a car(the game loads you into the car in a Cutscene) with a bomb in it and you can't enter or exit the vehicle so the countdown just slowly ticks down and you explode.
Good times.
The measure in arkham asylum was that you couldn't glide
@@MemoryVague Damn, you are correct.
Oh, interesting! Thank you for clipping that!
love how this is all just really an excuse to diss the programming skills of the western hackers in comparison to the chinese ones
or the willingness to steal stuff and a complete lack of moral compass (y'know, the chinese)
TODO : Make a pirated version of my own game and have a download link to it. But mention that it is a pirated version and they don't have permission to use it. I am just putting it here.
lol. "sue ya later!"
@@0ia I would never sue for something like that . But what I will do is ....
.
.
.
.
.
.
Figure out where they live and send them photos in the mail of me giving them very dis-approving looks .
Then , I'll go figure out where their mom lives and... Send them photos of...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
>
>
Both of us giving them very dis-approving looks .
-KanjiCoder
@@KANJICODER ;)
Game Dev Tycoon did that. They put a version on pirate sites, and changed the code that the games you make in the game get pirated a lot and you lose money.
Was fun to see comments on the forums "pirating is too much in this game!", not seeing the great irony in it.
Repella fella did this, there's an official pirated edition
I've always wondered how much trouble a dev could get into if they embedded a crypto miner in a fake pirated copy they release themselves, along with an in-game message that pops up when their first 'payment' has been earned.
how he was like "wtf is that shi" when he first witnessed it and then realized what really was going on lol. I admire Jon Blow now this was funny
He truly ended up being "The Witness". Sorry, I saw the opportunity for a pun and I took it.
What are there subtitles for in the game? I don't remember there being any dialogue.
I think it's only when you find recordings and other hidden/bonus type stuff.
Make a game that sucks no one will pirate it
I love Blow's games and I can't wait for his next one but I seriously couldn't get into The Witness and I really wanted to. Maybe it will click on replay.
I get what he was trying to go for (2deep4me) but I can't for the life of me spend hours just tapping around on screens (get it?)
Reminds me of Game Dev Tycoon (where the whole point of the game is that you create games) and the developer released a cracked version of the game themselves, but added in a 'feature' that after a certain point in time, people would start cracking the games you create, causing you to lose increasingly high amounts of money over time, until you run out of money and lose.
Emacs users represent ✊
represent people who buy a bad system and then brag about how it's so bad that it's not worth attacking.
after 5 years of no posting...so random
But a quality post
They say this explanation is still going to this day
your comment is too long and technical can you please write a summary for normal people like me, thank you.
Damn...
Why wouldn't he call out those streamers? No need to even judge them, just point out they pirated the game, and let the people judge for themselves.
Sounds like you want to judge people for pirating…
@@ThePlayerOfGamesYou think it stops there? Bet they judge every little thing the same way from their nasty room they never leave.
This is the type of person that goes full vigilante mode on the internet doxxing someone’s address because they were rude and insulted your favorite game, and then someone else uses that address to swat them which gets them inadvertently killed in the raid
lmao pirates try not to be hyperbolic drama queens about their cheapness challenge level impossible
@@jonessii I have to admit I was anti piracy until ten to fifteen years later with every prediction the pirates made having come true, it was time to admit they were right
It is counter-initiative but when we remember to keep in mind both that piracy isn't theft and that corporations conduct piracy all the time (recently Microsoft had to pull a planned Call Of Duty DLC because it had someone else's content in it, the very definition of piracy) then we realise that the main voices pushing the anti-piracy narrative are the ones simply seeking to have a *monopoly* on piracy 😅
If you're actually profiting off piracy, then you should absolutely get slapped around by the law.
It's not piracy. You aren't stealing anything or depriving anyone of anything.
@@JohnSmith-fq3rg I think the word you're looking for is "theft", they're literally talking about piracy.
@@RitosMtheft is wrong, copying something released to the public is not
@@divinecomedian2 didn't say it wasn't, the way he said it made it sound like piracy IS stealing.
All of you missed that OP shat on people who are *profiting* from piracy. Self-respecting pirates never profit from piracy.
The unfortunate thing with personally made art of arbitrary iteration as a business is that it flies in the face of how memes spread by word of mouth. Piracy IS that word of mouth practice. Single iteration physical art is the only market, and it’s high altitude and saturated
Yet another confirmation that most streamers are cancer
If that's your confirmation, idk what to say about your biases, just saying
Pure bigotry. Plain and simple.
@@stefanalecu9532Xctly
Nah, I'd pirate his game.
Okay? You want a trophy you weirdo?
I wish I did, because The Witness is an absolute mess
It is simultaneously really good and _extremely_ bad. I cannot understand how people like it so much
you wouldn't download a car...
@@hundvd_7 i liked it because i got to draw •==8 for the painting puzzels
@@hundvd_7What's bad about it?
I'm not defending pirates, but when your DRM is so awful that legitimate purchasers prefer to play the cracked version: that should be a huge red flag that your DRM is atrocious.
the term "pirated" is wrong and propaganda.
why
I'm a proud pirate. stop being a little weiner
How
@@mangocane8977 There is an implication of violence in this term. You can use "theft", but "pirated" is just music industry propaganda.
@@Chemieklo Most people do not think of violent criminals when you say pirate. They instead think of swash buckling adventures with treasure chests. The music industry failed horribly, if they indeed coined it as propaganda, to make to sound bad. There's a reason why pirating is often advertised with "sail the seven seas", "arrr", and not to mention one of the most famous pirating sites being named Pirate Bay. Because it all sounds cool, fun, and good.
Isn't the game free? How would you pirate a free game, like does The Witness have microtransactions or something?
Not a free game, no micro transactions. It’s just a single player game that has a one time purchase price.
??? Where tf did OP get the idea that The Witness was free?
@@AexisRai it is in my library but i know for a fact i didn't buy it
@@kefpull6676 I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news: You bought The Witness.
@@kefpull6676 Epic gave it for free, but they pay the developer of the game for the keys (at a discounted price)