ya got a few aussie friends i play a lot of games with, and there always capped out on there monthly bandwidth usage, so when ever they get a new game on steam they need to wait till next month or pay huge amounts for going over there bandwidth cap, which to me seems so foreign since i dont think there are any Canadian isp's that have monthly caps on broadband usage.
a lot of people in countries with good Internet infrastructure dont relise what it is like in other countries.
Almost all major ISPs in Canada have bandwidth limits now.
my argument is that they are related but it's not worth doing because they'd gain sales but lose revenue.
Exactly. So let's assume by your logic that a reduced price on crysis 2 would have converted a small portion of the nearly 4 millions downloads into real purchases. Your argument is that it still wouldn't be enough to be profitable for ea and crytek. So what would that potential number be then? It must be really really small. We are talking tens of thousands at best. So what does that say in a grand scheme of 4 million downloads? The relationship is nearly negligible.
Even if every 10th pirate paid for it, that's nearly half a million launch week sales. Convert that to 200 000 full price sales. That is a LOT of profit on a game that sold enough to pay for itself and then some. So you are aruing that it won't happen and I agree. Where is the relationship then ?
Steam simply gives developers more direct access to legit consumers market it doesn't convert pirates.
I'm going to come out as a complete hypocrite here to refute that. In two different ways. I for the first time ever bought some Steam games during the recent sale, because of the great service and prices as well as great indie game packs.
This is from someone who is a sworn hater of digital distribution. To the point that I considered it WORSE than piracy (not for the developers obviously, but for the consumer) simply because you were paying for exactly what a pirate could get for free... wait! That's not some kind of pirate-praise! I have an antiquated attachment to retail boxes, something to do with a false sense of ownership...
Regardless, my point remains, while it is unconscionable here I (like anybody else) could simply choose to be a pirate but didn't because the option of paying for something that I usually detested became wholesomely attractive.
Piracy is not black & white. There are shades of gray. Somebody who got a speeding ticket broke the law could be labelled a 'speeder' but it does not mean they always speed. Nor would many spurn them as a criminal even if it is true. One of the most ignorant ideas that I have ever seen is to assume that somebody who pirated is never a consumer: That they never buy anything that they could steal.
I was reading the little story about IL and felt sad. I would never support the idea of pirates leaking games early,it's something I would/could not justify. But when the bulk of the story was about users (illegitimate or otherwise) grappling with terrible DRM it became a message we've all heard before.
Remember, piracy (and physical theft I suppose) is the only illegitimate way to deprive publishers/developers of money out of many!
You could buy second-hand, you could wait till the price drops (not a victimless action!) you could borrow it from a friend, you could just rent it, you could just not even buy it... I'm sure the company's representatives eyes would just light up if you told them you were considering any of the above over buying it full-price new-release at retail.
Many of us say making good games is the key but are reminded of the good games that were left-behind. I suppose what we should say is make games so good and market them so much that it is almost impossible for them to fail. Not an easy task I know. But what I can say is that for all those forgotten gems with bad sales? Now imagine their sales if they were bad games too...
Like Spore.
*edit* Forgot to mention the other way good games/good service has prevented a theoretical "lost sale" from me. Skyrim, yeah I know so cliche but I am notorious for waiting for games to be cheap... Years of waiting. So when I couldn't afford it I waited. But damn I wanted this game: So much hype and I was constantly reminded of the fun others were having with it. As always the knowledge that I could pirate it was there, even more attractive knowing I would endeavour to buy it anyway. So I just caved in and bought it... Everything the developers/publishers did to make the game an attractive product WORKED.
I'm referring primarily to this: " Piracy is not a pricing problem. Piracy can't be eliminated or turned or prevented." This is an extremely strong statement.
You call that a strong statement? LOL, it's a real fact you don't want to see
One example, Do you know about Apptrackr? Apple attacked them, they put captchas in their "service of piracy" and the moved servers to another country (i imagine china). Anyone could tell me which would be the best solution to stop that people? ISP block? i'm figuring out that too many would say, "hell no!, i still want to have all what i want for free, they can't do that! they will kill my liberty!"Err, Rage Anarchy edtion is now for 12 euros, a bargain... LINK HERE
And a fact is that they don't sell... so in order to sell the stock, they do huge price cuts. But you know what, especially for you, teaandcigarettes, People don't pay 12 euros for RAGE because they can download the game for free, you don't want to see it? or you are blind=?. And that's a problem, because the society with the internet is customed to have all for free. Remove their robbery and they will bite like dogs... :poly122:
A smoker can't stop smoking in one day. A pirate can't stop stealing in one day. Piracy is a problem of conscience. If you are customed to have all your music, films, and games for free, you won't see with good eyes the SOPA Law.
Most people want ALL, with the internet they have ALL what they want, and "without piracy", with their money they only could afford a few games. Another point.
Prices are not the problem. DRMs are not the problem, pirates destroy them.
There are too many excuses pro-piracy, but not too many solutions for the problem. I would like to see SOLUTIONS, not arguments defending piracy, just that.
Blazer, you hit the nail on the head. Shitton of games were at insane discounts on steam over holidays. Hell even amazon would ship you a boxed game at a discount.
It had nothing to do with piracy. Here are your discounts people! When have you ever seen discounts like this in history as gamers. You have no reasons to bitch and whine.
You want your launch titles at a discount? You must be way out of touch to think that's sustainable on launch week. But hell they even do that sometimes. Bundles, $5 off, $10 off. What the hell do you want ???
How long will it take until you stop blaming the developer indirectly for piracy and start realizing that we, as legit consumers, are seeing more and more better gaming experiences on a wide gamut of price points and distribution models than ever in history.
Prices are not the problem. DRMs are not the problem, pirates destroy them.
Price is a part of the problem. You're competing with FREE. Free things are outside of the Value <> Cost Decision Scale. You'll probably choose to buy a better burger than a Big Mac, hell you may even pay more for it. Free Big Mac? Yes please. (Your opinion may differ, but do you think the public masses wouldn't feel the same?)
DRM is a part of the problem. People here are looking for solutions to piracy, we should start with eliminating things that give them any imaginable excuse to do so, especially things that turn pure-buyers into first-time pirates. Seriously how is it reasonable or a display of any form of trust from the manufacturer for something that you know you own to check for you that you own it? Not for any benefit to you at that.
There are too many excuses pro-piracy, but not too many solutions for the problem. I would like to see SOLUTIONS, not arguments defending piracy, just that.
That's because all the arguments that appear 'pro-piracy' are from people who have realised that there may never be a solution. Instead these people are focusing of solutions to things that contribute to piracy.
Dude, i totally agree with you that drm on the whole doesn't solve piracy. It's a knee jerk reaction from people that are too short sighted. But hind sight 20 20.. But if doesn't prevent it is surely as hell doesn't contribute to it on a significant scale. Repeating pirate won't be stopped from cracking drm nor will it's existence suddenly turn him from being a legit consumer.
People who claim that they pirated due to drm are full of shit.
People who claim that they pirated due to drm are full of shit.
That's a gross assumption. You simply cannot know that. When it comes to understanding the nature of your consumers all you can go on is their feedback, if they say they pirated your game due to DRM, then you must take it as truth. The customer is not always right, but in this case you would gain nothing from accusing them of lying.
I would say that the reaction of Ubisofts DRM and stance on PC gaming in general has become a fitting example.
I truly do believe that the DRM is an un-ignorable blow in the story of IL. It would be conjecture for me to say that they would have gained that 10% in sales it the DRM was not there, but it wouldn't be for me to say that the game would have no sour reputation because of it. A negative effect created by something that is not even the product they were selling.
@Blaizer you got good points but you should leave SOPA out of this, since yes there is a off chance it could help curb piracy, but most likely it wont, what it will do in destroy the notion of Fair Use, and will prolly be used as a beating stick on any upstart companies that try to push into the market.
The whole idea is stupid, attack the isp's and sites that have gotten copyrighted content put on them by users.
if someone commits a crime and evades the police in a car, do you go after the car company Hell No.
if someone gets shot do you go after the gun manufacturer NO, so why is it different with this?
drm that only soured the Pirate's experience!!!! How can you not understand the root of the problem. You are being dismissive and ignorant to the plight of a game developer.
I'll tell you this much. The horseshit theory that drm directly results in piracy is passed around ironically by actual legit consumers. There is no evidence of that, it's just an ignorant assumption from a disgruntled consumer who had to put up with shit drm. Consumers have every right to be disgruntled but not ignorant. Meanwhile pirates continue pirating regardless.
So let's assume by your logic that a reduced price on crysis 2 would have converted a small portion of the nearly 4 millions downloads into real purchases. Your argument is that it still wouldn't be enough to be profitable for ea and crytek. So what would that potential number be then? It must be really really small. We are talking tens of thousands at best. So what does that say in a grand scheme of 4 million downloads? The relationship is nearly negligible.
This doesn't prove that the relationship is negligible, all it proves is that the game is already priced on the bell curve where it is most profitable.
Using your example, Crysis 2 sold 3 million copies as of July 2011 (not including digital sales) and it had been pirated 3.9 million times by the end of December. Unfortunately I can't find a more recent sales statistic but given 5 more months of sales and inclusion of digital copies I think it's fair to say it probably sold another 900k units so for the sake of argument let's just say they had 3.9 million sold, with 3.9 pirated. Basically 50% of the people who played the game got it for free.
If they had cut the price in half and seen a 90% conversion rate among pirates, 1.9% increase in adoption for every 1% decrease in price is not by any measure a negligible statistic, however it is still less profitable than leaving the price where it is and accepting that half the people are going to get the game for free because you'd need to convert 100% of the pirates at 50% price in order to break even.
Right but how on earth do you assume 90% conversion rate of pirates. It just doesn't happen. Like I said before they are not your consumers. They should be, but they aren't and won't be.
Pricing a game is not a bell curve I've explained the business model time and time again. You are neglecting to understand how much of that $60 price goes where. Once you do, you wi realize that pricing a AAA game is not at all flexible on the market.
One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.
Allow me to apologise for how I read this strange paragraph. The wording should have included whether or not this fellow was complaining before release. I mean the solution to his problem makes no sense, but regardless the structure here made it easy for me to believe that they had a payer accidentally tripping the DRM, while they continued to accuse him of being a pirate. Of course if that's not even a thing then I may be wrong.
Of course that's not the point, this is:
word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game.
Something that wouldn't have necessarily happened if this DRM wasn't in place. Not that I support the pirates, pre-release leaks are unjustifiable. I would prefer people spreading positive things about my games or not much at all over anything negative.
I'll tell you this much. The horseshit theory that drm directly results in piracy is passed around ironically by actual legit consumers. There is no evidence of that, it's just an ignorant assumption from a disgruntled consumer who had to put up with shit drm. Consumers have every right to be disgruntled but not ignorant. Meanwhile pirates continue pirating regardless.
So you can't even hypothetically imagine one of these rightly disgruntled consumers may have bought a game with DRM and when it failed and made him upset that he could not play his game, he might y'know decide to get a pirate copy? Or even when he sees another game he wants but then discovers that it has that same DRM he remembers how upset he was and how much easier pirating was and grabs that game the same way? You simply can't believe such an event is possible?
Demand for products does not change across from paying consumers and pirating consumers, even if the sales do. Buyers don't hate the GAMES that have DRM they hate the PEOPLE who put it there.
Right but how on earth do you assume 90% conversion rate of pirates. It just doesn't happen. Like I said before they are not your consumers. They should be, but they aren't and won't be.
Pricing a game is not a bell curve I've explained the business model time and time again. You are neglecting to understand how much of that $60 price goes where. Once you do, you wi realize that pricing a AAA game is not at all flexible on the market.
You're seriously diluting this. Where the money goes from the box price of a game is totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the developer gets 2 dollars or $1,000, this is a discussion about whether or not price affects piracy. Not who gets what or can you adjust the price or whatever. For all I care all the money is going directly into the trash and the prices are rigidly set by a socialist government. It makes zero difference to me. Perhaps you should just tell me why it even matters how things get priced instead of repeatedly stating "I'm not going to explain this again!" as if it has anything to do with what I'm saying?
The numbers I used were arbitrary, as are yours. The point of my post was to illustrate that you cannot measure how "negligible" the relationship is that way because just because something is unprofitable doesn't mean the relationship is negligible. Pulling numbers out of your ass proves just as much as me pulling numbers out of mine.
Allow me to apologise for how I read this strange paragraph. The wording should have included whether or not this fellow was complaining before release. I mean the solution to his problem makes no sense, but regardless the structure here made it easy for me to believe that they had a payer accidentally tripping the DRM, while they continued to accuse him of being a pirate. Of course if that's not even a thing then I may be wrong.
Of course that's not the point, this is:
Something that wouldn't have necessarily happened if this DRM wasn't in place. Not that I support the pirates, pre-release leaks are unjustifiable. I would prefer people spreading positive things about my games or not much at all over anything negative.
So you can't even hypothetically imagine one of these rightly disgruntled consumers may have bought a game with DRM and when it failed and made him upset that he could not play his game, he might y'know decide to get a pirate copy? Or even when he sees another game he wants but then discovers that it has that same DRM he remembers how upset he was and how much easier pirating was and grabs that game the same way? You simply can't believe such an event is possible?
Demand for products does not change across from paying consumers and pirating consumers, even if the sales do. Buyers don't hate the GAMES that have DRM they hate the PEOPLE who put it there.
One ? Ten? Hundred? Thousand? Out of 4 million who torrented crysis 2? You have to remember, I do agree with all of you that drm is not a solution.
drm that only soured the Pirate's experience!!!! How can you not understand the root of the problem. You are being dismissive and ignorant to the plight of a game developer.
I'll tell you this much. The horseshit theory that drm directly results in piracy is passed around ironically by actual legit consumers. There is no evidence of that...
What about UBISOFT announcing that their PC sales were down 90% after the inclusion of their drm.
Where is your proof that drm either raises or doesn't affect sales/piracy rates.
You're seriously diluting this. Where the money goes from the box price of a game is totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the developer gets 2 dollars or $1,000, this is a discussion about whether or not price affects piracy. Not who gets what or can you adjust the price or whatever. For all I care all the money is going directly into the trash and the prices are rigidly set by a socialist government. It makes zero difference to me. Perhaps you should just tell me why it even matters how things get priced instead of repeatedly stating "I'm not going to explain this again!" as if it has anything to do with what I'm saying?
The numbers I used were arbitrary, as are yours. The point of my post was to illustrate that you cannot measure how "negligible" the relationship is that way because just because something is unprofitable doesn't mean the relationship is negligible. Pulling numbers out of your ass proves just as much as me pulling numbers out of mine.
Because no amount of price cuts, ease of delivery, steam bundles affected piracy in any significant manner. How many times can I say it???
You say price cuts will result in less piracy... How do you figure? Is it the 25% that still pirated humble indie bundle instead of paying a penny? It also doesn't include pirates who downloaded outside of steam. Or is it 4 million pirates who played crysis 2 despite that game selling pretty well?
And remember we are talking launch figures, where a game makes or breaks. These crazy holidays day deals post release on steam are fine and dandy. But people still pirate the living shit out of valve games. Unfortunately few companies have the capital, mindshare, loyalty and alternate revenue streams like valve does. They need to recoup their investments quickly at launch time, pirates or no pirates.
I feel I have to say something about this use of the words "stealing" and "theft". It's a complete misuse of the terms. To steal something is to remove it from the owner's possession and deprive them of use of their property. This is how the law sees it and that's how it should be. What people do on the internet is infringement of copyright by copying. Copying is not stealing. It's the violation of a legal privilege granted by congress. Copying happens on a level of scale that you don't even realize. Computers are devices the can't function without the power to copy. To prevent copying is to prevent computers from functioning at all.
Think about how illogical that is. If I buy a copy of "Modern Combat Shooter XVII" and then I rip the disc to give to a friend, have I stolen something? Really? Does the publisher have one less copy in their possession from my act of copying? Do they have less money now than they did before I made that copy? The fact is, lost sales do not count as theft. You can't cry that you lost what you didn't have to begin with. It's the kind of thinking that you're entitled to money for every potential copy that exists.
If you can't make a profit this way, it's not the public's fault. It's your own. You failed to realize that you're selling an abundant good that is non-exclusive and non-rivalrous. Everyone can have a copy if they want it, so long as they are willing to use their own tools to copy it. Do you really expect people to pretend that these games aren't easy to copy and distribute? Trying to stop the public at large from infringing on copyright is like trying to prevent people from speaking out against the government. It's censorship. You're telling people what information they can't transmit on the internet because it invalidates your massively flawed business model. Since when should someone's profits overrule civil rights? (Yeah yeah, how dare I claim freedom of speech. I'm such a dirty pirate. But I'm not defending "piracy" I'm defending the progress of the arts and speech. Art begets more art.)
Materials covered by copyright are not private property either. They are the common property of the public domain, but the author is given a one-time, temporary (it's supposed to temporary) distribution monopoly on their works in order to give them an incentive to add more works to the public domain. They are granted an opportunity to profit, but not the guarantee to profit. Why isn't it their property? That's a two-fold reason. First, to grant ownership of works to authors would deprive others from the ability of creating works based on similar ideas, thus locking up culture and stunting the progress of art. Secondly, all creative works are derivative of everything that came before it. Every new work of art is built on all the art that came before that. To claim ownership of your works is to claim ownership of all the works that came before that which it's built on. Ideas don't belong to any single person and therefore your artwork is not yours (physical medium it's fixed to is, but that's different). It's everyone's. Your time is yours and your labor is yours. That is all.
I'm sure you'll unilaterally disagree with me, but these are the facts and these are the reasons the framers of our nation's laws hesitated to even include copyright and patent granting powers in the constitution. In any case, stop calling it stealing. It's not stealing by any real definition of the word.
All that said, the key to turning this issue around for developers it to admit they need to change the part of the production chain they are selling to the public and inject new services that people will pay for. If you wait for the project to be completed and then expect people to pay for copies they know they can get for the cost of their own bandwidth, you're not selling them what they will pay for. So what will they pay for? Lots of things I can't even yet imagine, but it's going to take some risks and I know how risk-adverse the investors are. They want a sure thing. So you can continue to beat people on the head with laws that don't work and call them thieves (insults really do well to help people to see your point), or you can try selling something they will pay for and can't get elsewhere. They may be infringers, but obviously they are also passionate gamers. The point is to change your business model so that infringement is ineffectual to your profit. The government can't make that happen, DRM can't, and online tethers can't either. There is an entire generation growing up knowing that they can get all the media entertainment they want for free. What model are you going to use to profit from them?
Because no amount of price cuts, ease of delivery, steam bundles affected piracy in any significant manner. How many times can I say it???
Can you back it up though?
I also don't understand your reasoning that a pirate can never be a consumer.
We'd also have to assume not every pirate is the same, of course, as some buy some of their games, some pirate all their games and some pirate a fraction of their games.
What about UBISOFT announcing that their PC sales were down 90% after the inclusion of their drm.
Where is your proof that drm either raises or doesn't affect sales/piracy rates.
Because bad experiences resulting in bad sales doesn't affect piracy rates. People still pirated their game drm be damned and they still pirated competitive titles like say crysis 2.
I already pointed out that drm is a problem for a legitimate consumer, the pirate trackers are just as popular as ever.
As for pirates... Pirates can become consumers as soon as they pay for their entertainment. But at the point of piracy they are not a consumer and shouldn't be included in lost sales or in the sales formula at all. In IL's case the damage has already been done.
I used to pirate, I made a choice to purchase all my software, music and games. But just the fact that some of us here became legit still hasn't affected piracy rates. I dont want to persecute people on their choices to pirate. But as a developer I can't help than to be upset that someone chooses not to pay for a luxury good I worked hard at. Does it affect me directly? Probably not. But I just want people to understand the ignorance of pirating.
We can't convince all people to stop pirating but we can try to convince maybe some. Combined with ways of reaching more consumers and make returning consumers maybe we wouldnt see our industry to be so unstable sometimes.
Because bad experiences resulting in bad sales doesn't affect piracy rates.
DRM crippling games encourages piracy. For example From Dust, that even Steam had to offer refunds due to customer outrage at Ubisoft. With a pirated copy giving you a superior version of the game
People still pirated their game drm be damned and they still pirated competitive titles like say crysis 2.
The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated?
The answer is simple -- the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales
Does this also apply to PC (Windows/Mac/Linux) gamers? Many PC game developers find that about 90% of their users are running pirated copies -- does this mean that piracy is killing PC games? Let's try our alternative explanation, and see if these statistics are possible even if only 20% of worldwide PC gamers are pirates. The average PC gamer worldwide only buys about three games a year, and plays them for a long time [4]. I buy many more than that, and you probably do too, but again, we are not average gamers! On the other hand, game pirates might download a new game every few days, for a total of about 125 games a year. Given these numbers, games would see 90% piracy rates even though only 20% of gamers are pirates.
Are these numbers accurate? The NPD recently conducted an anonymous survey showing that only 4% of PC gamers in the US admit to pirating games [5], a number that is comparable to XBox 360 piracy statistics [6] . However, since piracy is inversely proportionate to per-capita GDP, we can expect piracy rates to increase dramatically in places like Russia, China and India, driving up the world-wide average. Let's say to 20%.
This means that if all pirates would otherwise buy as many games as the average consumer, then game developers would be losing 20% of their revenue to piracy.
Anecdotally and from studies by companies like the BSA, it's clear that pirates for the most part have very little income. They are unemployed students, or live in countries with very low per-capita GDP, where the price of a $60 game is more like $1000 (in terms of purchasing power parity and income percentage). When Reflexive games performed a series of experiments with anti-piracy measures, they found that they only made one extra sale for every 1000 pirated copies they blocked [7]. This implies that their 90% piracy statistic caused them to lose less than 1% of their sales.
You will note the heavy use of sources that back up their claims.
and finally
However, in just the first two days, we have over 40,000 contributions with an average of $8 each! Would we have seen this much support if the games were console ports that only worked when connected to a secure online DRM server? We'll never know for sure, but somehow I doubt it.
Because no amount of price cuts, ease of delivery, steam bundles affected piracy in any significant manner. How many times can I say it???
You keep saying that, but you're providing just as much proof as I am which is basically none while having the added disadvantage of leaning on aguments that make no sense.
I can't "prove" price affects piracy because even though I can point to sales statistics that show singificant increases in sales at price reduction but you can dismiss it by rightly identifying that there's no way to know how many of those sales actually went to people who would have pirated the game otherwise.
But at the same token you can't argue that the impact is negligible because on a global scale of sales/piracy it is unprofitable because all that proves is that the impact is less than 2% increase in conversion per 1% decrease in price which is what's required for it to be a profitable change.
The only way to calculate this with any real legitimacy is to study price changes by region and look at piracy rates of individual regions as percentage of sales compared to similar areas. Which as far as I know, nobody has done and even then it could easily be discredited by regional influences like local laws or perceptions about theft and piracy. Plus unlike sales statistics you can't accurately track piracy so the piracy statistic would be understated anyway.
You could conduct a poll asking people why they pirate games or if games were cheaper they'd buy more of them, but then you could just throw that out saying "what people say and do are different things."
You say price cuts will result in less piracy... How do you figure?
To pull a page out of your book: I've already explained this to death.
Is it the 25% that still pirated humble indie bundle instead of paying a penny? It also doesn't include pirates who downloaded outside of steam. Or is it 4 million pirates who played crysis 2 despite that game selling pretty well?
Assuming Crysis 2 sold 3.9 million copies and was pirated 3.9 million times that's a piracy rate of 50% (and doesn't include anyone who pirated outside of BitTorrent!) Humble Indie Bundle alleges they're losing 25% to piracy. I could just as easily argue with these two bullshit measures indicate that a "set your own price" model reduces piracy by half compared to a fixed price tag of $60.
But then you could say well they aren't the same audiences, people are going to pirate less when they give to charity, or maybe indie game fans just pirate less because they know their money is going straight to the developer, or maybe the humble indie bundle statistic is just wrong.
That's the thing, there is no consistency. Games are pirated due to localization, popularity, etc etc. There is no direct link that cutting profit margins at launch, or omitting drm can consistently affect piracy rates positively or negatively.
Piracy is still damaging indirectly through horseshit drm, etc. Problem is that our industry is only now coming around and figuring out a way to still generate consistent revenue in a pirate heavy market like AAA PC.
On a curious note, I wonder how much minecraft was pirated did anyone from mojang investigate out of curiosity?
There is no direct link that cutting profit margins at launch, or omitting drm can consistently affect piracy rates positively or negatively.
Time for a reasoning problem!
However, in just the first two days, we have over 40,000 contributions with an average of $8 each! Would we have seen this much support if the games were console ports that only worked when connected to a secure online DRM server
Logically, would shoddy console ports with connection-based drm...
A) Increase Piracy, Reduce sales Reduce Piracy, Increase sales
C) Fund Terrorists
On a curious note, I wonder how much minecraft was pirated did anyone from mojang investigate out of curiosity?
If you just make your game and keep adding to it, the people who copyright infringed would buy it the next week, he told those in attendance.
While anti-piracy zealots would insist that Minecraft has a 70% piracy or lost sale rate, Notch steadfastly sees his cup as rather more full than the raw percentages of his sales data may suggest, particularly by those viewing them from the perspective of an outdated business model. Indeed, despite this pro-piracy stance, Minecrafts position continues to improve.
His thoughts on the matter:
"Piracy is not theft, he said to those gathered in San Francisco. If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world. With this kind of reasoning one could be forgiven for thinking that Notch has pirate sympathies but since hes a self-confessed member of the Pirate Party, that stance comes as no surprise.
There is no such thing as a lost sale, he added with a philosophy so Pirate-aligned it could be happily transcribed directly into any of their press releases. Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?
And again, it's a tough thing to predict. So many other factors are involved in such a fickle environment like a PC. A shoddy port may have still sold badly. Drm or not. Piracy or not. So there is no point in drm.
Valve games are all drm, but they are oh so profitable still. Despite rampant piracy.
Ahh yes, you see he found the way around it. But AAA games don't always have the freedom and luxury of that kind of loyalty and mindshare over a period of a year. And I think his points just go to show that despite rampant pirating it didn't affect his real customers. Maybe even converted a small few. This whole "lost-sale" idea is bullshit, but doesn't justify pirating.
Ahh yes, you see he found the way around it. But AAA games don't always have the freedom and luxury of that kind of loyalty and mindshare over a period of a year. And I think his points just go to show that despite rampant pirating it didn't affect his real customers. Maybe even converted a small few. This whole "lost-sale" idea is bullshit, but doesn't justify pirating.
It's more than just "found a way around it". It's living in the present, even the future maybe, as opposed to the past.
That's like if when the automobile was introduced, somebody that made carriages saw the potential, and started selling automobiles instead. Then when the rest of the carriage industry crumbled, people would say "oh, he found a way around the crumbling of the carriage industry". No. He just moved on.
In my mind, the same applies here. If anyone has the luxury of doing anything, it's the big AAA publishers. Yet they don't. Much like the other industries, like music for instance, that cry about piracy, AAA publishers simply refuse to move ahead with the times. They insist on selling you a boxed product at a walmart, nevermind where you are in the world. So then they suffer from piracy the most, because their games are easy to pirate.
Then comes the new generation that understands that, and you have companies making games like Minecraft, WoW and Diablo3, and guess what? They make huge profits in a pirate-infested market.
Then you have those companies that live off of rehashes of sports titles, and milking old IPs to death, and I'm supposed to feel something when people pirate their shit? I don't get this attitude that when a big business suffers, I need to take a moral stance against it. Like their existence somehow benefits my life. Funny, but when they make millions off of an old rehash, I don't seem to ever get a bonus check.
As a developer myself, as I imagine most people here are (not that I speak for them though), I really don't give a crap if someone in Russia pirates a game I worked on.
I've already brought up numerous analogies, industry examples... [snip]
So it's a matter of definition then. Yes, I completely agree that there is a group of pirates who will not buy a legitimate copy no matter what. Be it sticking it to the man, supporting the "scene" or "punishing" companies, they will come up with some bullshit reason to support it. However, I do not believe that these people constitute the majority of pirates. I find it more likely that they are a very vocal minority within thaat group.
Edit:
I should clarify that I do not support piracy. What I'm saying here might seem controversial, but I strongly believe that piracy and its moral implications differ greatly depending on the country in question and the state of its economy.
Frankly said, I believe that majority of pirates can be converted into paying customers and that in case of countries with growing economies it can actually help (crazy I know ) establish the industry.
I grew up in Poland and during the time I lived there I've noticed a massive increase in the number of people buying games. What I'm gonna talk about is mostly anecdotal evidence based on my own experience. I'm afraid I cannot present any hard facts although I do have some sources that show the current piracy rates broken up per countries: www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_sof_pir_rat-crime-software-piracy-rate As you can see, the software piracy rates are currently at around %57 precent. While that still means that more than half software users are pirates, to me it is a massive reduction from what seemed like 90% in the late 90's. When I was growing up, noone I knew would buy legitimate software/games. The prices used to be ridiculously high, often amounting up to 1/4 of the average monthly wage. Unless you were very rich, you simply would not be able to afford them. On the other hand, everyone had access to copied discs distributed at bazaars, often before they were legally released.. People were ready to pay for games, but not the amount they were legally sold for.
Another thing that contributed to piracy in Poland was the mentality. Poland and I assume other countries of the Soviet Block, had a longstandig tradition of distributing bootleg, western media among friends and family. Before the fall of USSR, western music and films were often unavailable your average Joe, through legitimate means. Some of them were banned by the government, some of them arrived several years after their release abroad and some of them simply weren't sold anywhere. For many years, the only way to obtain foreign entertainment was through illegal means. However, back then, the consensus among the population was that sticking it to the government and acting against the law was the right thing to do. In some way, it was a method of taking a stand against the regime. So when the Iron Curtain finally fell and western media companies started entering this new market, Polish people simply didn't get the whole idea of "paying for entertainment". Not only that, Poland didn't even have a copyright law until 1994.
As I had mentioned, during the 90's the piracy was extremely rampant in Poland. Back then, every game I had owned was a pirate copy and the same thing was true for the majority of my friends (even if some of these games seemed to be legitimate). That didn't mean I wasn't interested in having a shiny, legitimate disc and a pretty box to put on my shelf. In fact, there was nothing I wanted more. Getting an original product versus a knock off seemed clearly better to everyone I knew. But it took several years for the publishers to learn how to deal with this situation. Eventually, they had managed to make the games more affordable by offering localised versions of the games. This allowed them to not only offer the games at a lower price, but also made them more accessible to an average consumer. CD Projekt were one of the companies at the forefront of making these changes. In 1998 they began releasing older games sold for a lower price of 19 to 39PLN and that's when I noticed many of my friends to buy legitimate games for the first time. Around the same time, PC gaming magazines began being sold along with copies of fairly recent titles. I remember this being extremely populr for a while. They used to be pretty cheap (around 15-20PLN), but buying them had another benefit as they would often contain walkthroughs of games. Back then, I didn't know English, so getting a game with a walkthrough was worth to me more than getting a bunch of games off the market for the same price. I believe this is when the situation in Poland started to improve. It was thanks to these creative ideas that people began finding legal games worth their money.
At the same time, I do believe that without the rampant piracy Polish publishers would not be able to lower the prices that soon. When games began being more affordable, my interest in games had been already set in stone. If games were not popularised by piracy, then I strongly believe it would take much, much longer for the publishers to penetrate the market. Sure, the piracy rates are still very high, but it seems to me that every year people in Poland are buying more games. Not only that, evey time I go back home I find more of my friends becoming gamers; even thoough they might be paying only for some of their games, their appetite will eventually grow. Polish games market had grown from 520 000 000 PLN ($149 000 000) to 700 000 000 PLN ($200 000 000) in the last year alone. These numbers might seem not high when compared to countries like US, but keep in mind that Polish games market exists for roughly 17 years. If Steam were to begin offering a better service in Poland (currently games are being sold in Euros and not in PLN) then I'm sure even more people would buy their games.
I'm assuming that situtation in Russia, at least at some point was somewhat similar to the one in Poland. I realize that piracy rates in Poland are lower than the ones in Russia, but I'm simply trying to show that piracy should be dealt with on a local level and that illegal distribution can help establish the industry in growing economies. I think that's where Valve is coming from when they are saying that Russia is becoming their biggest market. After all, it has a massive number of gamers, even if majority might not be paying for their games yet.
TL;DR;
Blah blah blah, piracy, Poland and growing economies. I just wasted an hour writing something that no one will read
in need of helpful solutions against piracy without feeling the need of giving a
demo version of your game out ? here you go ,a 6 points list
(most importing things at the beginning;
1.
Don´t criminalize the paying customers anymore. (online activation,copy limitation, force them to be all the time online even for a single player
(and other stuff is going to far) calm down or "chill out" with the DRM stuff!
2.
Don´t bribe the game magazines anymore and if you say that your game deserved more than 80 % than improve the game!
3.
Don´t throw crappy console ports out and give all the hardware where your game is getting played the needed "respect".
4 or better 3a.
Less bugs (put money in the QA and keep those people happy !)
5.
Less than 15 hours of playing threw the game ? meh doesn´t make the customer happy
6.
Lower prices! (keep in mind that you are selling also to younger people so they don´t have a gazillion of $$ in their pockets...
which means you are lowering the prices and they will be on your needle like shit on a shoe)
see you don´t need to provide a huge service ..
but never ever make the mistake to relay on the customer for patching your game ! if you do this your company will go fast bankrupt and nobody
will wipe a tear for you.( yes there was a company which did this)
a proper service does always have a helpline (contact option with email/telephone etc and not too long waiting-lines)
if you don´t have a proper helpline then you might have a proper because customer happiness is really important.
;-) just a brain fart list for publishers on how to reduce/stop piracy
(and its not meant to insult by the way)
How to stop pirating? Cloud computing would certainly be pretty effective. If future games exist on servers (like with Onlive), and if they are tied to a user name and account, then that would effectively stop piracy and any type of unwanted distribution or need for DRM(since only the rendered game is streamed).
There are numerous benefits to this distribution (being able to access your games and saves on practically any devices and from just about anywhere there's an internet connection), but on the developer's side of things it helps to solve many technical headaches and adds a great deal more breathing room.
The thing to keep in mind though is that reducing piracy won't necessarily equate to much higher sales. Piracy generally doesn't happen just because people want to steal, it happens because games cost a decent amount for many people and it's not a certain investment. There have been numerous games that I've bought and absolutely hated, and there are even more games that I would have liked to try and give them a chance, but full retail was too much of an investment to just throw at them.
I think the answer for the main problem with pirating is for publishers and distributors to get more creative and flexible with how games make money. Lower the barrier to entry, sell the basic game at a reasonable price that players are comfortable with risking, and then make additional content available. Fragmenting content this way allows for people to pay the amount that they can afford (which could be more than retail just as well as less than).
Take inspiration from f2p, microtransaction, and dlc models. You won't get as many people paying the full retail price, but you would be greatly expanding the realistic number of paying players, reducing risk on the consumer's part by fragmenting the purchase and creating a stronger connection between what the player pays and what the player gets.
I'll just slam in before the thread is closed as to why this thread devolved (although yes Earthquake it is too easy for these threads to devolve.)
This thread didn't necessarily become a 'for or against' piracy debate, but the themes could easily come through in the arguments based on "Solutions to piracy" vs. "Solutions to Sales" The topic was on solutions to piracy, but many who have come to the ideal that their are none are focussed on simply solutions to bring in more overall sales, the latter easily feeling like a "for" camp. I am guilty of this launching into this debate from that angle and will make no excuses or fuss.
Replies
Almost all major ISPs in Canada have bandwidth limits now.
my still dosnt, but that will prolly change soon since bell is trying to buy them out.
Exactly. So let's assume by your logic that a reduced price on crysis 2 would have converted a small portion of the nearly 4 millions downloads into real purchases. Your argument is that it still wouldn't be enough to be profitable for ea and crytek. So what would that potential number be then? It must be really really small. We are talking tens of thousands at best. So what does that say in a grand scheme of 4 million downloads? The relationship is nearly negligible.
Even if every 10th pirate paid for it, that's nearly half a million launch week sales. Convert that to 200 000 full price sales. That is a LOT of profit on a game that sold enough to pay for itself and then some. So you are aruing that it won't happen and I agree. Where is the relationship then ?
This is from someone who is a sworn hater of digital distribution. To the point that I considered it WORSE than piracy (not for the developers obviously, but for the consumer) simply because you were paying for exactly what a pirate could get for free... wait! That's not some kind of pirate-praise! I have an antiquated attachment to retail boxes, something to do with a false sense of ownership...
Regardless, my point remains, while it is unconscionable here I (like anybody else) could simply choose to be a pirate but didn't because the option of paying for something that I usually detested became wholesomely attractive.
Piracy is not black & white. There are shades of gray. Somebody who got a speeding ticket broke the law could be labelled a 'speeder' but it does not mean they always speed. Nor would many spurn them as a criminal even if it is true. One of the most ignorant ideas that I have ever seen is to assume that somebody who pirated is never a consumer: That they never buy anything that they could steal.
I was reading the little story about IL and felt sad. I would never support the idea of pirates leaking games early,it's something I would/could not justify. But when the bulk of the story was about users (illegitimate or otherwise) grappling with terrible DRM it became a message we've all heard before.
Remember, piracy (and physical theft I suppose) is the only illegitimate way to deprive publishers/developers of money out of many!
You could buy second-hand, you could wait till the price drops (not a victimless action!) you could borrow it from a friend, you could just rent it, you could just not even buy it... I'm sure the company's representatives eyes would just light up if you told them you were considering any of the above over buying it full-price new-release at retail.
Many of us say making good games is the key but are reminded of the good games that were left-behind. I suppose what we should say is make games so good and market them so much that it is almost impossible for them to fail. Not an easy task I know. But what I can say is that for all those forgotten gems with bad sales? Now imagine their sales if they were bad games too...
Like Spore.
*edit* Forgot to mention the other way good games/good service has prevented a theoretical "lost sale" from me. Skyrim, yeah I know so cliche but I am notorious for waiting for games to be cheap... Years of waiting. So when I couldn't afford it I waited. But damn I wanted this game: So much hype and I was constantly reminded of the fun others were having with it. As always the knowledge that I could pirate it was there, even more attractive knowing I would endeavour to buy it anyway. So I just caved in and bought it... Everything the developers/publishers did to make the game an attractive product WORKED.
You call that a strong statement? LOL, it's a real fact you don't want to see
According to http://www.youhavedownloaded.com/ USA is the second country in piracy
One example, Do you know about Apptrackr? Apple attacked them, they put captchas in their "service of piracy" and the moved servers to another country (i imagine china). Anyone could tell me which would be the best solution to stop that people? ISP block? i'm figuring out that too many would say, "hell no!, i still want to have all what i want for free, they can't do that! they will kill my liberty!"Err, Rage Anarchy edtion is now for 12 euros, a bargain... LINK HERE
And a fact is that they don't sell... so in order to sell the stock, they do huge price cuts. But you know what, especially for you, teaandcigarettes, People don't pay 12 euros for RAGE because they can download the game for free, you don't want to see it? or you are blind=?. And that's a problem, because the society with the internet is customed to have all for free. Remove their robbery and they will bite like dogs... :poly122:
A smoker can't stop smoking in one day. A pirate can't stop stealing in one day. Piracy is a problem of conscience. If you are customed to have all your music, films, and games for free, you won't see with good eyes the SOPA Law.
Most people want ALL, with the internet they have ALL what they want, and "without piracy", with their money they only could afford a few games. Another point.
Prices are not the problem. DRMs are not the problem, pirates destroy them.
There are too many excuses pro-piracy, but not too many solutions for the problem. I would like to see SOLUTIONS, not arguments defending piracy, just that.
And in IL case even if a 10th of those pirated bought the game at launch it would double their revenue. Thats a scary number.
don't you dare! don't you bring no police to my internetz, no!
It had nothing to do with piracy. Here are your discounts people! When have you ever seen discounts like this in history as gamers. You have no reasons to bitch and whine.
You want your launch titles at a discount? You must be way out of touch to think that's sustainable on launch week. But hell they even do that sometimes. Bundles, $5 off, $10 off. What the hell do you want ???
How long will it take until you stop blaming the developer indirectly for piracy and start realizing that we, as legit consumers, are seeing more and more better gaming experiences on a wide gamut of price points and distribution models than ever in history.
Price is a part of the problem. You're competing with FREE. Free things are outside of the Value <> Cost Decision Scale. You'll probably choose to buy a better burger than a Big Mac, hell you may even pay more for it. Free Big Mac? Yes please. (Your opinion may differ, but do you think the public masses wouldn't feel the same?)
DRM is a part of the problem. People here are looking for solutions to piracy, we should start with eliminating things that give them any imaginable excuse to do so, especially things that turn pure-buyers into first-time pirates. Seriously how is it reasonable or a display of any form of trust from the manufacturer for something that you know you own to check for you that you own it? Not for any benefit to you at that.
That's because all the arguments that appear 'pro-piracy' are from people who have realised that there may never be a solution. Instead these people are focusing of solutions to things that contribute to piracy.
People who claim that they pirated due to drm are full of shit.
That's a gross assumption. You simply cannot know that. When it comes to understanding the nature of your consumers all you can go on is their feedback, if they say they pirated your game due to DRM, then you must take it as truth. The customer is not always right, but in this case you would gain nothing from accusing them of lying.
I would say that the reaction of Ubisofts DRM and stance on PC gaming in general has become a fitting example.
I truly do believe that the DRM is an un-ignorable blow in the story of IL. It would be conjecture for me to say that they would have gained that 10% in sales it the DRM was not there, but it wouldn't be for me to say that the game would have no sour reputation because of it. A negative effect created by something that is not even the product they were selling.
The whole idea is stupid, attack the isp's and sites that have gotten copyrighted content put on them by users.
if someone commits a crime and evades the police in a car, do you go after the car company Hell No.
if someone gets shot do you go after the gun manufacturer NO, so why is it different with this?
I'll tell you this much. The horseshit theory that drm directly results in piracy is passed around ironically by actual legit consumers. There is no evidence of that, it's just an ignorant assumption from a disgruntled consumer who had to put up with shit drm. Consumers have every right to be disgruntled but not ignorant. Meanwhile pirates continue pirating regardless.
Using your example, Crysis 2 sold 3 million copies as of July 2011 (not including digital sales) and it had been pirated 3.9 million times by the end of December. Unfortunately I can't find a more recent sales statistic but given 5 more months of sales and inclusion of digital copies I think it's fair to say it probably sold another 900k units so for the sake of argument let's just say they had 3.9 million sold, with 3.9 pirated. Basically 50% of the people who played the game got it for free.
If they had cut the price in half and seen a 90% conversion rate among pirates, 1.9% increase in adoption for every 1% decrease in price is not by any measure a negligible statistic, however it is still less profitable than leaving the price where it is and accepting that half the people are going to get the game for free because you'd need to convert 100% of the pirates at 50% price in order to break even.
Pricing a game is not a bell curve I've explained the business model time and time again. You are neglecting to understand how much of that $60 price goes where. Once you do, you wi realize that pricing a AAA game is not at all flexible on the market.
Allow me to apologise for how I read this strange paragraph. The wording should have included whether or not this fellow was complaining before release. I mean the solution to his problem makes no sense, but regardless the structure here made it easy for me to believe that they had a payer accidentally tripping the DRM, while they continued to accuse him of being a pirate. Of course if that's not even a thing then I may be wrong.
Of course that's not the point, this is:
Something that wouldn't have necessarily happened if this DRM wasn't in place. Not that I support the pirates, pre-release leaks are unjustifiable. I would prefer people spreading positive things about my games or not much at all over anything negative.
So you can't even hypothetically imagine one of these rightly disgruntled consumers may have bought a game with DRM and when it failed and made him upset that he could not play his game, he might y'know decide to get a pirate copy? Or even when he sees another game he wants but then discovers that it has that same DRM he remembers how upset he was and how much easier pirating was and grabs that game the same way? You simply can't believe such an event is possible?
Demand for products does not change across from paying consumers and pirating consumers, even if the sales do. Buyers don't hate the GAMES that have DRM they hate the PEOPLE who put it there.
The numbers I used were arbitrary, as are yours. The point of my post was to illustrate that you cannot measure how "negligible" the relationship is that way because just because something is unprofitable doesn't mean the relationship is negligible. Pulling numbers out of your ass proves just as much as me pulling numbers out of mine.
One ? Ten? Hundred? Thousand? Out of 4 million who torrented crysis 2? You have to remember, I do agree with all of you that drm is not a solution.
What about UBISOFT announcing that their PC sales were down 90% after the inclusion of their drm.
Where is your proof that drm either raises or doesn't affect sales/piracy rates.
Because no amount of price cuts, ease of delivery, steam bundles affected piracy in any significant manner. How many times can I say it???
You say price cuts will result in less piracy... How do you figure? Is it the 25% that still pirated humble indie bundle instead of paying a penny? It also doesn't include pirates who downloaded outside of steam. Or is it 4 million pirates who played crysis 2 despite that game selling pretty well?
And remember we are talking launch figures, where a game makes or breaks. These crazy holidays day deals post release on steam are fine and dandy. But people still pirate the living shit out of valve games. Unfortunately few companies have the capital, mindshare, loyalty and alternate revenue streams like valve does. They need to recoup their investments quickly at launch time, pirates or no pirates.
Think about how illogical that is. If I buy a copy of "Modern Combat Shooter XVII" and then I rip the disc to give to a friend, have I stolen something? Really? Does the publisher have one less copy in their possession from my act of copying? Do they have less money now than they did before I made that copy? The fact is, lost sales do not count as theft. You can't cry that you lost what you didn't have to begin with. It's the kind of thinking that you're entitled to money for every potential copy that exists.
If you can't make a profit this way, it's not the public's fault. It's your own. You failed to realize that you're selling an abundant good that is non-exclusive and non-rivalrous. Everyone can have a copy if they want it, so long as they are willing to use their own tools to copy it. Do you really expect people to pretend that these games aren't easy to copy and distribute? Trying to stop the public at large from infringing on copyright is like trying to prevent people from speaking out against the government. It's censorship. You're telling people what information they can't transmit on the internet because it invalidates your massively flawed business model. Since when should someone's profits overrule civil rights? (Yeah yeah, how dare I claim freedom of speech. I'm such a dirty pirate. But I'm not defending "piracy" I'm defending the progress of the arts and speech. Art begets more art.)
Materials covered by copyright are not private property either. They are the common property of the public domain, but the author is given a one-time, temporary (it's supposed to temporary) distribution monopoly on their works in order to give them an incentive to add more works to the public domain. They are granted an opportunity to profit, but not the guarantee to profit. Why isn't it their property? That's a two-fold reason. First, to grant ownership of works to authors would deprive others from the ability of creating works based on similar ideas, thus locking up culture and stunting the progress of art. Secondly, all creative works are derivative of everything that came before it. Every new work of art is built on all the art that came before that. To claim ownership of your works is to claim ownership of all the works that came before that which it's built on. Ideas don't belong to any single person and therefore your artwork is not yours (physical medium it's fixed to is, but that's different). It's everyone's. Your time is yours and your labor is yours. That is all.
I'm sure you'll unilaterally disagree with me, but these are the facts and these are the reasons the framers of our nation's laws hesitated to even include copyright and patent granting powers in the constitution. In any case, stop calling it stealing. It's not stealing by any real definition of the word.
All that said, the key to turning this issue around for developers it to admit they need to change the part of the production chain they are selling to the public and inject new services that people will pay for. If you wait for the project to be completed and then expect people to pay for copies they know they can get for the cost of their own bandwidth, you're not selling them what they will pay for. So what will they pay for? Lots of things I can't even yet imagine, but it's going to take some risks and I know how risk-adverse the investors are. They want a sure thing. So you can continue to beat people on the head with laws that don't work and call them thieves (insults really do well to help people to see your point), or you can try selling something they will pay for and can't get elsewhere. They may be infringers, but obviously they are also passionate gamers. The point is to change your business model so that infringement is ineffectual to your profit. The government can't make that happen, DRM can't, and online tethers can't either. There is an entire generation growing up knowing that they can get all the media entertainment they want for free. What model are you going to use to profit from them?
I also don't understand your reasoning that a pirate can never be a consumer.
We'd also have to assume not every pirate is the same, of course, as some buy some of their games, some pirate all their games and some pirate a fraction of their games.
Because bad experiences resulting in bad sales doesn't affect piracy rates. People still pirated their game drm be damned and they still pirated competitive titles like say crysis 2.
I already pointed out that drm is a problem for a legitimate consumer, the pirate trackers are just as popular as ever.
As for pirates... Pirates can become consumers as soon as they pay for their entertainment. But at the point of piracy they are not a consumer and shouldn't be included in lost sales or in the sales formula at all. In IL's case the damage has already been done.
I used to pirate, I made a choice to purchase all my software, music and games. But just the fact that some of us here became legit still hasn't affected piracy rates. I dont want to persecute people on their choices to pirate. But as a developer I can't help than to be upset that someone chooses not to pay for a luxury good I worked hard at. Does it affect me directly? Probably not. But I just want people to understand the ignorance of pirating.
We can't convince all people to stop pirating but we can try to convince maybe some. Combined with ways of reaching more consumers and make returning consumers maybe we wouldnt see our industry to be so unstable sometimes.
This can also be explained by http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy
You will note the heavy use of sources that back up their claims.
and finally
I can't "prove" price affects piracy because even though I can point to sales statistics that show singificant increases in sales at price reduction but you can dismiss it by rightly identifying that there's no way to know how many of those sales actually went to people who would have pirated the game otherwise.
But at the same token you can't argue that the impact is negligible because on a global scale of sales/piracy it is unprofitable because all that proves is that the impact is less than 2% increase in conversion per 1% decrease in price which is what's required for it to be a profitable change.
The only way to calculate this with any real legitimacy is to study price changes by region and look at piracy rates of individual regions as percentage of sales compared to similar areas. Which as far as I know, nobody has done and even then it could easily be discredited by regional influences like local laws or perceptions about theft and piracy. Plus unlike sales statistics you can't accurately track piracy so the piracy statistic would be understated anyway.
You could conduct a poll asking people why they pirate games or if games were cheaper they'd buy more of them, but then you could just throw that out saying "what people say and do are different things."
To pull a page out of your book: I've already explained this to death.
Assuming Crysis 2 sold 3.9 million copies and was pirated 3.9 million times that's a piracy rate of 50% (and doesn't include anyone who pirated outside of BitTorrent!) Humble Indie Bundle alleges they're losing 25% to piracy. I could just as easily argue with these two bullshit measures indicate that a "set your own price" model reduces piracy by half compared to a fixed price tag of $60.
But then you could say well they aren't the same audiences, people are going to pirate less when they give to charity, or maybe indie game fans just pirate less because they know their money is going straight to the developer, or maybe the humble indie bundle statistic is just wrong.
This whole thing is futile.
Piracy is still damaging indirectly through horseshit drm, etc. Problem is that our industry is only now coming around and figuring out a way to still generate consistent revenue in a pirate heavy market like AAA PC.
On a curious note, I wonder how much minecraft was pirated did anyone from mojang investigate out of curiosity?
Time for a reasoning problem!
Logically, would shoddy console ports with connection-based drm...
A) Increase Piracy, Reduce sales
C) Fund Terrorists
His thoughts on the matter:
http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-is-theft-ridiculous-lost-sales-they-dont-exist-says-minecraft-creator-110303/
And again, it's a tough thing to predict. So many other factors are involved in such a fickle environment like a PC. A shoddy port may have still sold badly. Drm or not. Piracy or not. So there is no point in drm.
Valve games are all drm, but they are oh so profitable still. Despite rampant piracy.
Ahh yes, you see he found the way around it. But AAA games don't always have the freedom and luxury of that kind of loyalty and mindshare over a period of a year. And I think his points just go to show that despite rampant pirating it didn't affect his real customers. Maybe even converted a small few. This whole "lost-sale" idea is bullshit, but doesn't justify pirating.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63361
and
http://www.polycount.com/2011/03/08/polycount-piracy/
Hell, I'll even be nice and give you a warning. I'll give you guys until the end of the day before closing this thread.
It's more than just "found a way around it". It's living in the present, even the future maybe, as opposed to the past.
That's like if when the automobile was introduced, somebody that made carriages saw the potential, and started selling automobiles instead. Then when the rest of the carriage industry crumbled, people would say "oh, he found a way around the crumbling of the carriage industry". No. He just moved on.
In my mind, the same applies here. If anyone has the luxury of doing anything, it's the big AAA publishers. Yet they don't. Much like the other industries, like music for instance, that cry about piracy, AAA publishers simply refuse to move ahead with the times. They insist on selling you a boxed product at a walmart, nevermind where you are in the world. So then they suffer from piracy the most, because their games are easy to pirate.
Then comes the new generation that understands that, and you have companies making games like Minecraft, WoW and Diablo3, and guess what? They make huge profits in a pirate-infested market.
Then you have those companies that live off of rehashes of sports titles, and milking old IPs to death, and I'm supposed to feel something when people pirate their shit? I don't get this attitude that when a big business suffers, I need to take a moral stance against it. Like their existence somehow benefits my life. Funny, but when they make millions off of an old rehash, I don't seem to ever get a bonus check.
As a developer myself, as I imagine most people here are (not that I speak for them though), I really don't give a crap if someone in Russia pirates a game I worked on.
So it's a matter of definition then. Yes, I completely agree that there is a group of pirates who will not buy a legitimate copy no matter what. Be it sticking it to the man, supporting the "scene" or "punishing" companies, they will come up with some bullshit reason to support it. However, I do not believe that these people constitute the majority of pirates. I find it more likely that they are a very vocal minority within thaat group.
Edit:
I should clarify that I do not support piracy. What I'm saying here might seem controversial, but I strongly believe that piracy and its moral implications differ greatly depending on the country in question and the state of its economy.
Frankly said, I believe that majority of pirates can be converted into paying customers and that in case of countries with growing economies it can actually help (crazy I know
I grew up in Poland and during the time I lived there I've noticed a massive increase in the number of people buying games. What I'm gonna talk about is mostly anecdotal evidence based on my own experience. I'm afraid I cannot present any hard facts although I do have some sources that show the current piracy rates broken up per countries: www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_sof_pir_rat-crime-software-piracy-rate As you can see, the software piracy rates are currently at around %57 precent. While that still means that more than half software users are pirates, to me it is a massive reduction from what seemed like 90% in the late 90's. When I was growing up, noone I knew would buy legitimate software/games. The prices used to be ridiculously high, often amounting up to 1/4 of the average monthly wage. Unless you were very rich, you simply would not be able to afford them. On the other hand, everyone had access to copied discs distributed at bazaars, often before they were legally released.. People were ready to pay for games, but not the amount they were legally sold for.
Another thing that contributed to piracy in Poland was the mentality. Poland and I assume other countries of the Soviet Block, had a longstandig tradition of distributing bootleg, western media among friends and family. Before the fall of USSR, western music and films were often unavailable your average Joe, through legitimate means. Some of them were banned by the government, some of them arrived several years after their release abroad and some of them simply weren't sold anywhere. For many years, the only way to obtain foreign entertainment was through illegal means. However, back then, the consensus among the population was that sticking it to the government and acting against the law was the right thing to do. In some way, it was a method of taking a stand against the regime. So when the Iron Curtain finally fell and western media companies started entering this new market, Polish people simply didn't get the whole idea of "paying for entertainment". Not only that, Poland didn't even have a copyright law until 1994.
As I had mentioned, during the 90's the piracy was extremely rampant in Poland. Back then, every game I had owned was a pirate copy and the same thing was true for the majority of my friends (even if some of these games seemed to be legitimate). That didn't mean I wasn't interested in having a shiny, legitimate disc and a pretty box to put on my shelf. In fact, there was nothing I wanted more. Getting an original product versus a knock off seemed clearly better to everyone I knew. But it took several years for the publishers to learn how to deal with this situation. Eventually, they had managed to make the games more affordable by offering localised versions of the games. This allowed them to not only offer the games at a lower price, but also made them more accessible to an average consumer. CD Projekt were one of the companies at the forefront of making these changes. In 1998 they began releasing older games sold for a lower price of 19 to 39PLN and that's when I noticed many of my friends to buy legitimate games for the first time. Around the same time, PC gaming magazines began being sold along with copies of fairly recent titles. I remember this being extremely populr for a while. They used to be pretty cheap (around 15-20PLN), but buying them had another benefit as they would often contain walkthroughs of games. Back then, I didn't know English, so getting a game with a walkthrough was worth to me more than getting a bunch of games off the market for the same price. I believe this is when the situation in Poland started to improve. It was thanks to these creative ideas that people began finding legal games worth their money.
At the same time, I do believe that without the rampant piracy Polish publishers would not be able to lower the prices that soon. When games began being more affordable, my interest in games had been already set in stone. If games were not popularised by piracy, then I strongly believe it would take much, much longer for the publishers to penetrate the market. Sure, the piracy rates are still very high, but it seems to me that every year people in Poland are buying more games. Not only that, evey time I go back home I find more of my friends becoming gamers; even thoough they might be paying only for some of their games, their appetite will eventually grow. Polish games market had grown from 520 000 000 PLN ($149 000 000) to 700 000 000 PLN ($200 000 000) in the last year alone. These numbers might seem not high when compared to countries like US, but keep in mind that Polish games market exists for roughly 17 years. If Steam were to begin offering a better service in Poland (currently games are being sold in Euros and not in PLN) then I'm sure even more people would buy their games.
I'm assuming that situtation in Russia, at least at some point was somewhat similar to the one in Poland. I realize that piracy rates in Poland are lower than the ones in Russia, but I'm simply trying to show that piracy should be dealt with on a local level and that illegal distribution can help establish the industry in growing economies. I think that's where Valve is coming from when they are saying that Russia is becoming their biggest market. After all, it has a massive number of gamers, even if majority might not be paying for their games yet.
TL;DR;
Blah blah blah, piracy, Poland and growing economies. I just wasted an hour writing something that no one will read
demo version of your game out ? here you go ,a 6 points list
(most importing things at the beginning;
1.
Don´t criminalize the paying customers anymore. (online activation,copy limitation, force them to be all the time online even for a single player
(and other stuff is going to far) calm down or "chill out" with the DRM stuff!
2.
Don´t bribe the game magazines anymore and if you say that your game deserved more than 80 % than improve the game!
3.
Don´t throw crappy console ports out and give all the hardware where your game is getting played the needed "respect".
4 or better 3a.
Less bugs (put money in the QA and keep those people happy !)
5.
Less than 15 hours of playing threw the game ? meh doesn´t make the customer happy
6.
Lower prices! (keep in mind that you are selling also to younger people so they don´t have a gazillion of $$ in their pockets...
which means you are lowering the prices and they will be on your needle like shit on a shoe)
see you don´t need to provide a huge service ..
but never ever make the mistake to relay on the customer for patching your game ! if you do this your company will go fast bankrupt and nobody
will wipe a tear for you.( yes there was a company which did this)
a proper service does always have a helpline (contact option with email/telephone etc and not too long waiting-lines)
if you don´t have a proper helpline then you might have a proper because customer happiness is really important.
;-) just a brain fart list for publishers on how to reduce/stop piracy
(and its not meant to insult by the way)
Report: Crysis 2 named most-pirated game of 2011
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/39461/Report_Crysis_2_named_mostpirated_game_of_2011.php
Pretty much.
There are numerous benefits to this distribution (being able to access your games and saves on practically any devices and from just about anywhere there's an internet connection), but on the developer's side of things it helps to solve many technical headaches and adds a great deal more breathing room.
The thing to keep in mind though is that reducing piracy won't necessarily equate to much higher sales. Piracy generally doesn't happen just because people want to steal, it happens because games cost a decent amount for many people and it's not a certain investment. There have been numerous games that I've bought and absolutely hated, and there are even more games that I would have liked to try and give them a chance, but full retail was too much of an investment to just throw at them.
I think the answer for the main problem with pirating is for publishers and distributors to get more creative and flexible with how games make money. Lower the barrier to entry, sell the basic game at a reasonable price that players are comfortable with risking, and then make additional content available. Fragmenting content this way allows for people to pay the amount that they can afford (which could be more than retail just as well as less than).
Take inspiration from f2p, microtransaction, and dlc models. You won't get as many people paying the full retail price, but you would be greatly expanding the realistic number of paying players, reducing risk on the consumer's part by fragmenting the purchase and creating a stronger connection between what the player pays and what the player gets.
Hmm maybe it correlates to how dissapointing a game it was? :P
This thread didn't necessarily become a 'for or against' piracy debate, but the themes could easily come through in the arguments based on "Solutions to piracy" vs. "Solutions to Sales" The topic was on solutions to piracy, but many who have come to the ideal that their are none are focussed on simply solutions to bring in more overall sales, the latter easily feeling like a "for" camp. I am guilty of this launching into this debate from that angle and will make no excuses or fuss.
ah good thinking then we can move onto music piracy after.
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