> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.