
The game industry of Iran (2016) - 1_player
https://www.polygon.com/features/2016/1/14/10757460/the-game-industry-of-iran
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brownbat
> 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.

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forkLding
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.

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hakfoo
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.

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olivermarks
[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

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justtopost
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.

