5 reasons to not use a cracked version of Fusion 2.5

I'm going to give my opinion

For a long time Clickteam did not have a free version
Clickteam had a demo version that expired in a space of time, this was clearly a big mistake

People wanted to try the product without a time limit, so what they did was search the internet ... a way to skip that limitation
I think that launching a free version that does not expire has been a success

Another good idea is to launch frequent updates, people who have a version of these will quickly become outdated, and you will see logical to legally acquire the software
it is preferable frequent updates that a great update every 5 months

Here is my opinion: it is NEVER justified to take software you don't have the ownership rights to use. Just because you FEEL entitled to use something, the fact is that if you can't afford it, you shouldn't take it and use it. Period. No exceptions. You don't walk into a store and take a candy bar off the shelf and eat it when you don't have the money and intention to buy it. You just go without. You save your money and plan to buy it when you can. I hate to generalize here, but a large contingent of the online world operates on the assumption that because you can get something for free (when you should be paying for it) with a simple click, it is ok. It is not. There are negatives to not offering a trial version of software, but that is going to hurt the developer, who might learn and change their approach by creating a trial version. But in no way does that translate into "take something that isn't yours" just because the world is not fair to your particular situation.

If you are patient, you could get Clickteam Fusion for a lot less then full price. There is always a way to get a discount, Steam sale, store sale, Humble Bundle etc. There is no reason to pirate it.
Last add-on on sale I got was the Firefly. I don't have plans to use it yet, but if sometime, in the near future, there is a support for Android, I'll be there ready to go. (We do need more tutorials for the Firefly).

dangerous topic! XDXDXD

my only reason for wanting to crack it wud be to test if its worth getting. but seeing as there is a free version, there is no need. & clickteams actual price points r very reasonable. plus i luv the clickteam staff & community & want 2 support is as much as i can (u all r making my dreams come true :D)

but honestly, i really dont like wen ppl r held back or stunted from building there skills on a package because of finance, life is too short. i wudnt hav all the skills i hav now & wud hav missed lots of opportunities if i didnt crack loads of packages wen i was young & had zero money. for example 5 year old boy shows a gift for making 3d models in 3dsmax at an exhibition where they hav it on display, but his poor family cant even afford a pc, so he doesnt learn it til say hes 12 wen they finally get one, hence 7 years of wasted skills development. obviously yh, i get it, he shudnt just steal it (or shud he >:) lol) but, i just hate that stuff. & a lot of the games developers of whose games hav given us great joy built their skills using cracked software.

as i said this dont apply to fusion coz there is a free version, but thats my personal opinion on these things.

in an ideal world all wud share all & there wudnt be any money eh? XD

Thanks for the comments Shinbaxter. I agree in an ideal world people wouldn't be held back because they couldn't afford things, but as a species we're not quite there yet alas! What a lot of people seem to miss is that every time someone pirates a copy of Fusion or any of our products instead of buying it, that's one more dent in our finances and potentially one or more features we don't have the funds to add to Fusion 2.5 or even Fusion 3 for that matter. It is literally as simple as no sales = no company, and whilst some people seem to think everything can just be allowed to slide, we just cannot operate in that way and I don't know a whole lot of small companies who could.

clickteam r like my best friends that ive never met they hav given me so much joy over the years, heck, they pretty much MADE my childhood with their amos basic program & r still giving me that same childlike excitement to this very day. so i hav to support them...i owe them! lol.
& i'm gonna support clickteam in an even bigger way in the future! ;D (just keep the bug fixes coming XD)

The people who feel strongly that some poor person is entitled to free software.. the onus is on them to pay and provide the software to poor people.. the onus is not on Clickteam.

It's like if a farmer has grown all this food and there are lots of poor hungry people who need that food.... We don't let them steal the food (and ruin the farmers livelyhood) instead we more fortunate people either donate money or food directly to those who need it.

Sounds like it could be a good charity idea actually - providing access to software/tech for young people with potential talent etc.

Look, you can never stop people pirating your software, it's inevitable. But here are my suggestions.

- Add an always be online feature to the program (A lot of people don't like this but hey ho).

- Make your software cheaper and charge for each big update to it. (So you get version 1.0, you get fixes and stuff free on that version, then you make version 1.1 and charge a small fee).

- Make quarterly serial number changes for customers via email, and make a call to Fusion to tell the user your serial code has been updated please enter the new one sent to your email phone or profile in the forum)

- Every time a user builds an app they have to enter a code that is sent to their mobile phone number.

- If Clickteam servers detect an app has been built on a torrented version of Fusion, Fusion then builds the app fully, but in every frame, there is a massive pirate sign so the user cannot play the app.

- Make Fusion a rental app, implementing a fee to use it ever year.

That's about it from me.

Kreedem - most of those suggestions just punish legitimate users and can all be circumvented by pirates anyway.. it's still entirely possible to crack "always online" protection

If my internet cuts out I can no longer do any work? No thanks.

Quote from DaveC

The people who feel strongly that some poor person is entitled to free software.. the onus is on them to pay and provide the software to poor people.. the onus is not on Clickteam.

It's like if a farmer has grown all this food and there are lots of poor hungry people who need that food.... We don't let them steal the food (and ruin the farmers livelyhood) instead we more fortunate people either donate money or food directly to those who need it.

Sounds like it could be a good charity idea actually - providing access to software/tech for young people with potential talent etc.

i hav been very charitable in the past & handed out many a cracked version of software 2 those who cud not afford XD

& i don't believe they anyone is "entitled" to it. ppl do wat they gotta do (its a jungle out there).
by watever the means, the hungry must be fed. (i'll just then put in sum extra hours helping the farmer :))

Quote from kreeddem

Look, you can never stop people pirating your software, it's inevitable. But here are my suggestions.

1 Add an always be online feature to the program (A lot of people don't like this but hey ho).
The only way for this to work would and guarantee pirates do not crack it to remove/block the online checking, is if the product was only run "in the cloud" in some way. This would be a bad option for users as you would not be able to use Fusion without an internet connection.

2 Make your software cheaper and charge for each big update to it. (So you get version 1.0, you get fixes and stuff free on that version, then you make version 1.1 and charge a small fee).
Possible, but our software is already very reasonably priced and we've offered many sales and bundles where you can even pay what you want for it, so this doesn't really add up.

3 Make quarterly serial number changes for customers via email, and make a call to Fusion to tell the user your serial code has been updated please enter the new one sent to your email phone or profile in the forum)
This would obviously work to an extent, but the inconvenience to customers, not to mention the opportunity with such a system for things to go wrong, emails to go missing etc. would be enormous. Besides, all it takes is one person to hack the software to remove the protection, and then the serials are irrelevant anyway.

4 Every time a user builds an app they have to enter a code that is sent to their mobile phone number.
This would still be inconvenient, however a version of a per-app licensing system could be possible.

- If Clickteam servers detect an app has been built on a torrented version of Fusion, Fusion then builds the app fully, but in every frame, there is a massive pirate sign so the user cannot play the app.
There is already a pirate version available on the net, so this wouldn't work as users will still be using this.

- Make Fusion a rental app, implementing a fee to use it ever year.
Construct 3 is doing this and the outcry from the user base was deafening. This is not something we wish to do.

That's about it from me.

Display More

Ultimately, no matter what we do with Fusion 2.5 now, there is still a pirate version out there and we've seen a steady and significant decline in sales since it hit the internet. We've been soft on pirates for years, even allowing users to upgrade at reduced cost and other such measures at times. It just hasn't worked, sales continue to fall and pirate users continue to rise, so all of the arguments about just letting them use it, they'll buy eventually are just not borne out by the figures.

There are other hidden costs to the company caused by pirates too. The pirate versions are all massively outdated and so lack years of fixes and feature updates. This does frequently result in wasting support staff time, which costs money and keeps us from other tasks, and helping other users. Also, because the pirates hack out all the online elements of the software, the in-product advertising of ClickStore and other sales/promotions is removed, so we lose a whole bunch of people who might otherwise be seeing these things. You might argue they weren't going to buy the product anyway, but microtransaction payments for ClickStore items are far more likely when someone has limited cash, and we lose a critical channel for communicating with these people.

Finally, frustrated with buggy older software, we get pirate users going off around the web complaining about how unreliable the software is, or "this hasn't been fixed and it was reported x months/years ago" kinda stuff, which hurts our reputation and risks customers not choosing our products.

Piracy isn't a simple issue, it is multi-faceted and complex and it affects us and other companies in many different and often hidden ways - most of which just cannot be understood unless you have a handle on the figures and trends our data show us.

Quote from SHINBAXTER

i hav been very charitable in the past & handed out many a cracked version of software 2 those who cud not afford XD

& i don't believe they anyone is "entitled" to it. ppl do wat they gotta do (its a jungle out there).
by watever the means, the hungry must be fed. (i'll just then put in sum extra hours helping the farmer :))

I don't know if something is lost in translation here.. but this is nonsensical.. it's not charitable to hand out pirated software.. people "do what they gotta do" means nothing... no one *has* to steal Fusion.. there is no fundamental difference stealing from one group or another.. stealing is stealing.. if you'd put in extra hours to help the farmer - you need to put in extra hours for the software developer too.. or they'll go hungry.

danny's site need traffic? why werent the 5 reasons just listed here?

I tried a Fusion 2.5 crack and it killed my dog.

@ Dave C - no nothing was lost in translation, im just a nonsensical joker XD

& i'm not asking anyone 2 steal fusion as clickteam r a very honest company ( i actually see clickteam like the poor hungry people XD), but it doesnt matter if i did or didnt, the ones who r gonna steal r gonna steal anyway & i also wont blame clickteam for "doing wat they gotta do" to survive.

but i do not believe all farmers r the same, certain farmers fatten themselves up with ridiculously high prices for their food that the poor civilians simply cant afford. i mean come on, who charges £1,644.00 for a 1 year subscription?.....a fat farmer thats who! XD

& sure, i'm all down for putting in extra hours to help decent software devs.

Quote from Simon

Ultimately, no matter what we do with Fusion 2.5 now, there is still a pirate version out there and we've seen a steady and significant decline in sales since it hit the internet. We've been soft on pirates for years, even allowing users to upgrade at reduced cost and other such measures at times. It just hasn't worked, sales continue to fall and pirate users continue to rise, so all of the arguments about just letting them use it, they'll buy eventually are just not borne out by the figures.

There are other hidden costs to the company caused by pirates too. The pirate versions are all massively outdated and so lack years of fixes and feature updates. This does frequently result in wasting support staff time, which costs money and keeps us from other tasks, and helping other users. Also, because the pirates hack out all the online elements of the software, the in-product advertising of ClickStore and other sales/promotions is removed, so we lose a whole bunch of people who might otherwise be seeing these things. You might argue they weren't going to buy the product anyway, but microtransaction payments for ClickStore items are far more likely when someone has limited cash, and we lose a critical channel for communicating with these people.

Finally, frustrated with buggy older software, we get pirate users going off around the web complaining about how unreliable the software is, or "this hasn't been fixed and it was reported x months/years ago" kinda stuff, which hurts our reputation and risks customers not choosing our products.

Piracy isn't a simple issue, it is multi-faceted and complex and it affects us and other companies in many different and often hidden ways - most of which just cannot be understood unless you have a handle on the figures and trends our data show us.

Simon, the greatest method how to fight with piracy is close sites where people stole your software, just search it on youtube on in google on russian and english version and on Youtube send strikes to theese videos, close theese sites some way.

probably the drop in sales is due to the humble bundle that occurred in 2016, it was a bad marketing move in my opinion

IMO there's no excuse to pirate software, without exemption. In the end, it all comes down to managing and acquiring resources. Game development is freaking expensive, and it always will be. However, the price of Fusion is only a minor point in this calculation. I'm using CT's products since my childhood (got K&P on CD from my parents) and I don't think I've spend more than about 600 USD on CT products in 20 years, although I almost exclusively used their software. This year I've spend about 3000 USD from my Kickstarter campaign on freelancing work. Next year I'm going for 3 months of full time development before releasing my game, which will cost me about 6000 USD of my personal savings to cover my families burn rate, now that's a lot of money. If you can't buy a simple laptop and a product like Fusion, you simply can't make games as a business.

I think CT should continue to provide a free version of Fusion with no capabilities to create standalone apps and limited features for pure hobbyists that want to try gamedev or just make some nice prototypes in their spare time. There also should be a trial with full functionality for about 30-60 days, I want to try before I buy a product, ... wasted to much money on software that over-promised without trying.

Coming back to the piracy topic, I think it will be a good step for our community to grant full access only to users with registered products. One one the outstanding strong points of CT has always been the community-driven support and without access to it a pirated copy of Fusion becomes a lot less attractive.

I'm not a programmer and I don't know if it's possible. But if I were CT I would flood the market with faked pirated copies of Fusion that corrupt every single .mfa you edit in them forever. Like the faked ripped .mp3 you can download that rip your speakers in the middle of a song.