Last December, asynchronous multiplayer strategy game Battle Dungeon hit the App Store. Less than a week after the game was released, an .ipa file surfaced on the internet and illicitly obtained copies of Battle Dungeon caused a huge amount of stress on the game's servers.
The team behind Battle Dungeon, Hunted Cow, was forced to shut it down after the server load caused technical difficulties that the team did not have the resources to fix.
Hunted Cow did not give up on Battle Dungeon and has today released a new version of the game in the App Store. Battle Dungeon: Risen is a redesigned single player version of Battle Dungeon that features a number of improvements.
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Battle Dungeon: Risen offers up all new content, along with improved graphics and a lower price. The game has also been stripped of in-app purchases, allowing all upgrades to be obtained with gold earned in the game.
We've integrated our AI code in to the game and developed a complete single player campaign. Along with all new maps and enemies, so don't be surprised if you see a skeleton or two wandering our new and improved dungeons. We've also gone over all our levels with some new tools that should give it much more vibrant and realistic lighting. In addition to this, each mission now includes a 3 star challenge rating and we've implemented Game Center leaderboards and achievements.
As a turn-based strategy game, Battle Dungeon: Risen features 12 different scenarios to play through with several different classes, massive battles, and an array of items to earn.
Battle Dungeon: Risen can be downloaded for the iPad and the iPhone from the App Store for $1.99. [Direct Link]
Top Rated Comments
(View all)Yes, some multiplayer games succeed anyway. Others fail for a stupid reason like this, and it shouldn't be that way. Small developers are the most vulnerable.
Pirates: you are stealing actual money from the people who make what you seem to love playing! (Because if you weren't playing, the servers wouldn't be overloaded.)
If you like someone's creative work, pay them for it.
Well said Sir.
On a side note, I hate people who say "I download stuff to try it out. If I like it, I'll buy it." The logic is so stupid, it's like stealing a car for a weekend, and then going back to the dealership, or driving it off a pier.
Just buy stuff, or look up reviews. Save the economy, and small businesses.
No it's not. 1. When you steal a car, you're not leaving the original car behind. 2. You get to test drive cars.
If you like someone's creative work, pay them for it.
Well said Sir.On a side note, I hate people who say "I download stuff to try it out. If I like it, I'll buy it." The logic is so stupid, it's like stealing a car for a weekend, and then going back to the dealership, or driving it off a pier.
Just buy stuff, or look up reviews. Save the economy, and small businesses.
So it's okay to steal somebodies time, because it is their time and not their property? These developers spend 100's of hours building these Apps in the hope that they get paid. They usually don't have the backing of a huge company like EA or Microsoft.
I don't know what their server side looked like, but I can tell you from experience that if they are using some sort of cloud hosting you usually pay per server or per transaction. They developer would need $X number of dollars per user per server. If a large number of those user's have paid nothing, then they can't afford to bring up more servers.
A decade ago I could see why people would pirate games. $60 for a game can be pretty expensive for a lot of people. But the majority of these types of games cost less than a gallon of milk.
Finally someone on the internet who can think with his brain instead of his emotions.
Scarcity is the root concept you seem to be getting at. Concepts of property arose to avoid conflict over scarce resources. Almost universally, moral norms and justice systems across humanity stem from concepts of property in scarce resources. This development is automatic, spontaneous, a necessary fact of the human condition, across almost every culture throughout different times on different continents. To my point, for concepts of property to be valued and respected in society, a class of people calling themselves "government" isn't required to invent the concept and impose it on society. Free markets, religious folk, justice systems, families, communities, naturally develop and value property due to it's capacity to reduce conflict over scarce resources.
Property is wholly separate from government grants of monopoly privilege. These do not arise naturally in society without government inventing and imposing them. Examples of these are copyrights and patents, and the fact that their supporters refer to them as "property" no more makes them so than a random guy becomes your father just because him and his friends refer to him as your father. To be clear:
A) government grants of monopoly privilege have utterly nothing to do with property
B) by definition, free markets don't automatically value and develop government granted monopoly privileges
C) government grants of monopoly privilege fly in the face of property based moral norms and justice systems, because they rely on violence to restrict what peaceful people can do with their own actual property
So no, copying files has utterly nothing to do with theft. When you steal a car, it's theft because the car is scarcethe owner can't control it while you do. When you copy a file, it isn't theft because the owner's of control over his scarce resource (data on a computer chip, or something) isn't violated.
Do you like getting paid for the work you do? Don't you think a worker should benefit from the fruits of their labor? Copying files is not paying a worker for their output. I would think a person with your views wouldn't want to shaft their brother worker.