4 ms·

The game industry of Iran (2016)

84 points by 1_player 8y ago

brownbat 8y ago
> In response [to unfair competition with pirated international games], the Bonyad has devised a unique policy: It issues Iranian publishers holographic stickers they must use to seal each individual copy of their pirated games before they’re shipped out to electronics stores nationwide. Fascinating, it's like a copyright system, but where all the proceeds get diverted to bureaucracies and middlemen by design... I'm actually surprised this isn't more common.
forkLding 8y ago
China has the same issues, its why there has not been famous Chinese games breaking the international mold despite having one of the world's largest gaming markets and a couple of the world's biggest gaming companies by market value but not actual game titles (they buy a lot of games or shares of studios). Rampant copyright issues means that a pirated AAA quality Western game is way cheaper than any native Chinese game that any struggling Chinese game studio can make.
- hakfoo 8y ago
  I thought to an extent they had routed around that issue by producing a lot of MMO products. You can copy the binary; you could even set up a private server, but you can't fake the community. I think there's an interesting survey to be done of how economic factors affect game design. We have the famous example of how F2P took off because some countries didn't have the credit-card penetration to do monthly subscriptions, but I wonder if you saw, for example, C64 games being designed differently in countries where floppy drive takeup was low, or online games clustering in different genres depending on the available internet speeds.
olivermarks 8y ago
http://www.yelmjouie.com/2018/3/18/a-game-about-islamic-art http://www.yelmjouie.com/2018/3/18/a-game-about-islamic-art Also by Yara Elmjouie, interesting piece on an Iranian developer's game about geometric design. He makes the point here that there are so many ultra violent games that shape our societies, and how that deadens us to violence
- justtopost 8y ago
  Violent games perpetuating violence is an ancient far-right meme that needs to die already. That the far-left is now parroting these is beyond ironic, and just as asinine. Multiple studies have shown it to be bunk. Please stop demonizing games based on whatever your politics are.
  - RodericDay 8y ago
    nah this is incorrect what Jack Thompson proposed was an incredibly dumb and incorrect model where monkey see monkey do, and tried to blame mass shootings on videogames he was rightly refuted, but refuting Jack Thompson doesn't imply refuting every single instance of media affecting behavior. crucially media can make some things that we would normally find shocking or outrage-inducing and demanding of correction, seem instead normal and acceptable. a classic example of this is how, in tandem with torture revelations of Abu-Grahib and Guantanamo Bay, we got a slew of media action heroes who used torture to achieve their ends. 24, Zero Dark Thirty, Grand Theft Auto, and even Zootopia all feature torture in various shapes and colors. Torture went from ineffective and "that evil thing that we won't stoop so low to do", to something that ballsy heroes must just do sometimes. nobody who analyzes media seriously thinks it's unsurprising that the US is involved in like 8+ active military operations worldwide, while their videogame industry constantly features military themes and stories. a simplistic mind would posit that the relationship only goes in one direction, an inquisitive one would realize that there's a reason why the US military is always lending equipment and resources to media creators who want verisimilitude in their works (so long as the message being pushed is agreeable to them).
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  The violence in what are regularly referred to as the oldest works of literature, The Illiad and The Odyssey, could not be depicted as written on broadcast TV in the United States (at least in the translations I read in the 1980s) and we allow a lot of violence on TV in the USA.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago

84 points by 1_player 8y ago

> In response [to unfair competition with pirated international games], the Bonyad has devised a unique policy: It issues Iranian publishers holographic stickers they must use to seal each individual copy of their pirated games before they’re shipped out to electronics stores nationwide. Fascinating, it's like a copyright system, but where all the proceeds get diverted to bureaucracies and middlemen by design... I'm actually surprised this isn't more common.

forkLding 8y ago

China has the same issues, its why there has not been famous Chinese games breaking the international mold despite having one of the world's largest gaming markets and a couple of the world's biggest gaming companies by market value but not actual game titles (they buy a lot of games or shares of studios). Rampant copyright issues means that a pirated AAA quality Western game is way cheaper than any native Chinese game that any struggling Chinese game studio can make.

hakfoo 8y ago
I thought to an extent they had routed around that issue by producing a lot of MMO products. You can copy the binary; you could even set up a private server, but you can't fake the community. I think there's an interesting survey to be done of how economic factors affect game design. We have the famous example of how F2P took off because some countries didn't have the credit-card penetration to do monthly subscriptions, but I wonder if you saw, for example, C64 games being designed differently in countries where floppy drive takeup was low, or online games clustering in different genres depending on the available internet speeds.

olivermarks 8y ago

http://www.yelmjouie.com/2018/3/18/a-game-about-islamic-art http://www.yelmjouie.com/2018/3/18/a-game-about-islamic-art Also by Yara Elmjouie, interesting piece on an Iranian developer's game about geometric design. He makes the point here that there are so many ultra violent games that shape our societies, and how that deadens us to violence

justtopost 8y ago
Violent games perpetuating violence is an ancient far-right meme that needs to die already. That the far-left is now parroting these is beyond ironic, and just as asinine. Multiple studies have shown it to be bunk. Please stop demonizing games based on whatever your politics are.
- RodericDay 8y ago
  nah this is incorrect what Jack Thompson proposed was an incredibly dumb and incorrect model where monkey see monkey do, and tried to blame mass shootings on videogames he was rightly refuted, but refuting Jack Thompson doesn't imply refuting every single instance of media affecting behavior. crucially media can make some things that we would normally find shocking or outrage-inducing and demanding of correction, seem instead normal and acceptable. a classic example of this is how, in tandem with torture revelations of Abu-Grahib and Guantanamo Bay, we got a slew of media action heroes who used torture to achieve their ends. 24, Zero Dark Thirty, Grand Theft Auto, and even Zootopia all feature torture in various shapes and colors. Torture went from ineffective and "that evil thing that we won't stoop so low to do", to something that ballsy heroes must just do sometimes. nobody who analyzes media seriously thinks it's unsurprising that the US is involved in like 8+ active military operations worldwide, while their videogame industry constantly features military themes and stories. a simplistic mind would posit that the relationship only goes in one direction, an inquisitive one would realize that there's a reason why the US military is always lending equipment and resources to media creators who want verisimilitude in their works (so long as the message being pushed is agreeable to them).
stevenwoo 8y ago
The violence in what are regularly referred to as the oldest works of literature, The Illiad and The Odyssey, could not be depicted as written on broadcast TV in the United States (at least in the translations I read in the 1980s) and we allow a lot of violence on TV in the USA.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago