Everyone seems to be talking about fellow indie game developer Cliffski and his request for pirates to tell him why they pirate his games and his summary of everything that he learned.  There were a lot of valid issues raised about games (mostly mainstream).  I'd just like to chime in that some of us (and this is fairly common for indie companies) have already tried to take many of these issues into account.  Below are many of the issues raised and how we handle them.

Too expensive: Currently Depths of Peril is selling for $19.99.  Personally I think this is a great value and much better than the typical $50-$60 retail game.  We also have tons of players that have characters with days of playing time.  That's way less than $1 per hour for just one character.

Tech support: We support our games quite a bit through our forums and over email.  Just read a bit of our forums to see how often I post helping people out.  This even includes strategy and mod related stuff, so we try to go further than just tech support.

System requirements: We purposely try to keep our systems requirements reasonable and they are much lower than mainstream retail games.

Too derivative/gameplay issues: We try very hard to release games that are very different.  This is something that I plan on doing for all games that Soldak creates.  For example, Depths of Peril's competing covenants and dynamic world makes it a very different game than the typical action RPG.

Demos too short: Our demo only has a portion of the world and has a level cap, but you can play it as long as you want.  I have heard from many people that have played our demo for 5+ hours.  That's more gameplay than some full games.

DRM: We don't use any real DRM.  The only thing we use at all is a simple activation key on some versions of Depths of Peril.

On top of all of this, we offer a 30 day money back guarantee, so there really isn't any risk of buying a game from us.

If I am missing anything that we should change, free feel to speak up.  I don't always do what people suggest, but I do always listen.

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