Your opinion on Game piracy...
polycounter lvl 9
When I was a student at my 3D program, I would see alot of student playing illegal hacked games on their computer.
For me it's basically theft..it's the same as stealing a game copy in store except there's no clerk or camera to stop you...
However, what made it even more wrong was that some of them wanted to go in the game industry and I told them that hi-jacking the game was stupid because it's like if you were hurting an indsutry ( that is already becoming crappy) in which you are going to work in.
For me it's basically theft..it's the same as stealing a game copy in store except there's no clerk or camera to stop you...
However, what made it even more wrong was that some of them wanted to go in the game industry and I told them that hi-jacking the game was stupid because it's like if you were hurting an indsutry ( that is already becoming crappy) in which you are going to work in.
Replies
Example: If there was no alternative to buying the game, would the person who pirates it have spent the money and thus supported the developers?
You can't effectively answer that question for large portions of the people who pirate games. Some people pirate because they don't have the money, some pirate because they want to try something out that they might not otherwise, some people pirate because there's no effective legal alternative (buggy DRM, retail unavailability in their country, etc.). All of them pirate because it's easy.
As a game developer, I dislike piracy because it means less money goes to developers when piracy is rampant. That's basically my only argument against pirating games. I think devs should be able to feed themselves, so I think people should pay money for the product devs produce.
Much like a lot of other people, I think piracy can be basically eliminated by lowering the barrier to entry for people who could pay you money to buy your game. Don't make them use extremely restrictive DRM, make the online shopping and buying experience quick and painless, and don't force them to use stupid shit like download managers and Steam ripoffs, and you'll get a lot more happy customers spending money on the products you produce.
You'll never eliminate piracy completely, but you can certainly reduce piracy by having a store set up that makes buying games easier than pirating them.
/my first and last comment in thread
This pretty much. There is no such thing as an unpirateable product, and that includes multiplayer games with dedicated servers whose source code has never been released (Tribes: Ascend and World of Warcraft both have pirate servers as an example).
You need to learn to work assuming piracy is going to happen, and all the better if you can come up with strategies to convert pirates. With my own projects, I would be the one to release the torrent (along with a custom nag screen when starting up the game), because I'd want people to see the game in the best possible state and without shitty malware, defects caused by hacks, having the wrong languages or anything similar. The nag screen serves to remind people that this is how I make my living and it'd be nice to eat this month - but at the end of the day it's just a button click and those that want to ignore it and never pay will continue to do so anyway.
This is of course a joke. I feel I should spell that out for some people on the interwebz :P
That would be hilarious... And put it in the legal disclaimer that everyone just accepts without reading. ha
Hahaha
"You stole my credit card info!"
"You stole our game first, now you have made a legitimate purchase."
People won't pay a cent... nor if the game is good enough. It must have a good multiplayer if you want to see some profits.
The worst thing is that devs CAN'T blame pirates at all because a high % of them are actually pirates. It's a FACT. "If you are a pirate, don't put the shout on the sky when you see your game pirated".
Don't get me wrong, but Polycount is a good nest of "pirates", like any other forum.
With Darksiders 2 and the THQ Shutdown we had a strong discussion about piracy. A Polycount user called tekoppar dared to pm me this:
Aspiring artists should never do this, and less, hide themselves behind a nickname.
I won't add anymore because this topic can be really boring. It has been discussed several times.
This does categorically not work - the aforementioned pirate World of Warcraft servers are ample demonstration that you cannot prevent piracy. There of course pirated copies of Diablo 3 in circulation. Tribes: Ascend proves that being free-to-play isn't even enough to prevent piracy.
-Make your products available through multiple outlets, at a reasonable price, and with the option of purchasing in either digital or physical (for collectors) format, if you want people to pay for them.
-If it's completely impossible to buy a game (ie. those that were download-only but were pulled from all online stores), no one should care if someone pirates it, and the ip owners have no one to blame but themselves.
This is simply not true, there is no protection for buyed anymore. Games can be marketed as great and work we'll buy when a user buys it , totally false. Take rome 2 for a recent example. You cannot return games so what is a consumer suppose to do?
TL;DR on the post below: I offer an anecdote about myself and when the last time was that I pirated something on account of finding respect for the craft, well before I ever landed my first gig nearly a decade ago.
Now then, piracy.
Unfortunately piracy is just... there. Especially in our industry, both inside and out. There will likely never be a silver bullet solution to it and will ultimately be up to the individual person and what they believe is right/wrong. As developers, our software can be thousands of dollars and the ease of downloading software will often be an easy decision for most people (spend the thousands, or click the button). But make no mistake: That in no way justifies illegally acquiring software. Fortunately the developers of our favourite software are coming around to a 'software as a service' business model, so we should see things changing for the better as time goes on.
The last time I pirated a game was in my early teens (Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 I believe?) and I haven't pirated software in a long, long time, either. I think its unrealistic for certain companies to expect young, aspiring developers to produce the high amount of money required to use their software. As I mentioned before I think the software/tools developers are coming to grips with that now, too, by offering their expensive software at very low monthly rates. That's just fantastic as far as I'm concerned and kudos to anyone doing that.
Is it right that someone illegally downloads games or software, even if they're very expensive? No, it's not. There is nothing anyone can say that'll justify doing so. But we already knew that and its still happening. Let's hope this new change over the past year is a change for the positive.
EDIT: One other thing I wanted to add is that I can recall having a moment - some time when I first realized I wanted to 'make games' - that I immediately had respect for the medium. I don't recall why I had that moment, but it happened and I remember it being somewhat profound. "What the fuck am I doing, downloading this stuff?" I had a respect for the craft... for the developer I wanted to eventually become. It was that moment when I not only stopped downloading games, but did my best to project that respect on to other mediums as well: Movies, games, comics... everything. These days it helps that most service providers offer solutions that are easier than grabbing a Torrent while not leaving much of a mark at all on your wallet. I love that about todays media distribution. Its just so easy.
I'm rambling now, but my point is, and really this is for the OP: Once those classmates of yours come around to respecting the actual craft of game development, I would imagine that they'd put a halt to pirating the very games that are inspiring them in the first place.
Steam spearheads this effort in some ways, but the change must also come from publishers. Piracy isn't right, but it's going to happen... instead of trying to get rid of it through methods that don't work, there are ways to lower it, I think.
Yeah, but if you work for a company and your salary is fixed - no matter how much money the company will earn, you still get you fixed salary, while money are going to pockets of business owners.
once upon a time there were royalties and bonus checks. Budgets have increased, the price of games haven't even kept up with inflation.
Not quite... If the company doesnt make enough money, like say 80% of people playing the games they made are pirated, then I can promise you that you will be out of a job, and will stop receiving that fixed salary of yours. When you buy a game new, you are directly supporting your fellow artists / other devs.
I personally don't pirate games. Never have. And oddly enough, it's not because I`m in the industry as much as I always just found it a bitch and a half to do. Cracking games and all that stuff. It was just too much of a bother for me. I havent downloaded music illegally in a long as time just because it's easier to buy on iTunes or whatever now. Movies, although I do still stream stuff, Most of the stuff I stream are tv shows where I cant buy just one channel. And really, in a way, I blame the cable companies for that one. I want ONE channel, but they force me to pay over $20 a month for that channel that comes with 5 other channels I don't want. If I was able to pay $5/mo for the ONE channel I wanted, I would do it without a doubt. I prefer to pay for the stuff I watch. But the companies have to make it easy enough. I know my movie streaming went WAAAAY down once I picked up netflix.
I think it all comes down to how easy is it to do legally vs illegally... And I think companies of all types are starting to realize that, as Adam touched on before. Cheaper and easier is the way to go.
This is complicated issue. At least now people are trying to optimize pipelines and make it as good as possible. If there were more money, people would relax a little bit, allow more mistakes, and at the end of the day we would have absolutely the same situation as we have right now.
Even with more money, companies would still laid off people after shipping projects, because they would be losing money on keeping those people employed. It won't change absolutely anything if you give your stakeholders 1 or 10 millions of dollars, they will still want MORE money.
EDIT: It's like those business owners who have hundreds of millions of dollars at a bank. Do their employees get lot of benefits? Not really, otherwise that person wouldn't have enormous amount of money laying there.
I used to pirate games when I was younger since pirated content was basically 90% of my entertainment, but I've always purchased things that I really enjoyed. I don't pirate games anymore and it has a lot to do with the fact that games are a lot more accessible now.
As a kid I would probably buy one game a year since I didn't have much money, and so that meant if I wanted to play the awesome new singleplayer game that would last about 10 hours, I would have no other new games to play for the rest of the year. As a result I ended up sticking to purchasing multiplayer games like Counter-Strike since they lasted longer.
That's not really the case anymore though thanks to amazing sales, free giveaways, free weekends, and F2P.
There's also the fact that the people cracking these games are probably doing it for the knowledge. A senior software engineer at my brother's company used to tell stories about how he was in a software cracking group in highschool and helped create cracks for different software including games.
It'd be interesting to see developers work together with pirates to cater to their specific needs in order to convince them to make a purchase. Titanfall did something similar with cheaters by letting cheaters play on their own set of cheater-only servers and many people end up sticking with the game even though they got banned simply because some of the cheaters don't want to be malicious, they just have no other way of playing the game unless they have cheats.
This argument is moot thanks to economies of scale - the size of the market and sales volumes of products has increased way beyond inflation.
Doom managed 1 million copies in seven years (but was estimated to have been played by over ten million people, as an interesting counterpoint to the piracy costs debate). Watch_Dogs sold a over 4 million copies in just seven days.
Having access to every SNES game for £6 a month.
A subscription service would be cool though, maybe something like cafe accounts but for regular users.
If you like them, you like them. If you don't, no big deal
Kinda off topic but that reminds me of a friend who tried to download a pirate version of Norton anti-virus, who then ended up getting a virus from the download. The irony...
Piracy, it happens, more games have benefited from it then have lost, look at game dev studio, the only reason their game got media attention was because of piracy.
You work around it, and you adapt, piracy can be a good tool to generate buzz and interest and reach an audience you might not anyway.
If you see the number of times its pirated as lost sales you are a moron, and many of these people are proud of their game collections on steam, people buy games they don't even play, because they want to have it in their library to play in the future (retirement games I call them) so sure, maybe someone pirated your game, maybe the next steam sale, or paycheck they get they will buy it.
if I made a game and it was no.1 on the piratebay, I would know I have truly made it.
Ever since I started earning a wage, I've bought every game I've played. And that was around the same time I started dabbling in 3D art for games. It made me a lot more selective about which games I purchase. I got kind of annoyed that I wasn't getting to play every game as it was released, but as I've gotten older I've had less time to play games and these days I think I probably buy more games than I have time to play all of 'em.
And these days, with gog.com, Steam and it's sales, Indie bundles... it's pretty tough to justify piracy at all. Especially tough when you've seen the result of massive piracy from the developer's side.
As for them being lost sales? I dunno, I reckon maybe 20% of pirates would actually have forked over for the thing at full price. Maybe another 30% would have picked it up in a sale if it was cheap and it wasn't sitting there in front of them for free? It's hard to put numbers or even estimates on those sort of things but I know that claiming there are no lost sales from piracy is not true.
We do have the humble bundle for this remember? With the Jumbo Bundle I got natural selection 2 in perticular, i ever would have bought it from steam for £15. Now i've spent 240 hours and some more money towards the developers.
Based on previous steam thread, people don't even play 20-50% of their games they own...
it doesn't logically make sense at all, say you run a doughnut shop, and a guy just next to you decided to give away doughnuts for free outside your shop, do you sincerely think every person who had a free doughnut would of came into your shop and bought one?
just be glad games are non perishing collectables, and people in general will pay for video games.
and if you couldn't afford the games you were pirating as a kid, once again where is the lost sale? and maybe some games don't live up to the hype, and aren't worth retail, you know what that creates? a better class of games, more substance and less sizzle.
One of my favorite movies I own 2 copies off right now (will likely get a third soon as I want a special box set version) I would have never seen if I had not pirated it, I even remember passing it over in a store because the box art was so unappealing and the back was sparse in description.
Pirated copies simply cannot be equated to lost sales, and if you are no.1 on the pirate bay, dwell on your success not your potential fictitious losses .
Think about it another way - that's around $80 a month - or the equivalent of one new release every six weeks. It's not strictly that bad a deal, especially in an age where demos don't exist and reviews are unreliable as hell.
But say you put a great model and script set up the Unity Asset Store or something. Months of work, top quality. This is how you make your living, feed and house yourself. Someone steals it puts it up on a torrent.
I would wager that any given user would take the free version if it was there. However, faced with either buying it or not having it, most users would simply do without. But I reckon a percentage of those users would just say, well, I really want it so I'll just have to buy it, and then purchase it.
I don't think you can say there are no lost sales. And I don't think you'd be basking in the glory of having the most pirated item on the Asset Store...
I'm thinking more for back catalogues of older console games. Steam and Humble Bundles are great services, and you get some ridiculously good deals. But then there are always undiscovered gems that people might have missed the opportunity to play when they came out generations ago.
This actually happened, there was a game I dont remember the name of sadly. The game was about managing and running a Game studio. and they released a pirated version of it that when you came to a certain point in the game, you started loosing money because people pirated your game instead of buying it.
I think it was a quite effective message.
Actually, that's not a great way to find games. It's the same problem with focus groups - if you don't pay for the game, you don't feel any investment in it. That generally means that the first time you encounter any friction, at all, you'll shelve it and move on. That could cause you to MISS a lot of great games because you didn't have any reason to persist as soon as the game started fighting back a little.
Just an observation...
Good point mate. But I think thats also totally dependant on the player themselves and the game itself. You will get players who will stop due to the friction, others who will keep going and push through it. A good example is Dark Souls, where the game feels more challenging rather than frustrating. It would be interesting from a statistics POV, how many people stopped playing because they didn't feel invested in it financially vs those who genuinely quit from poor game design.
Second I don't think piracy is as big of a problem as publishers make it out to be. PC users are a much smaller crowd than console user and console users definitely don't pirate as much. Also as some people pointed out those pirates really aren't potential sales to begin with. Not that I condone their actions I just don't think they affect sales that much.
Also for those talking about netflix like service isn't that what Sony is aiming to do with gaikai? At least for older games.
bro i fell in love with PS+ so hard... i can't remember where, but i got a 30 day trial (i think from Eurogamer a couple of years ago). and since then i never looked back at all.
PS4 has been slow to pick up on the PS+ success, but that's to be expected as a new console. however, today i played Trine2 Complete Story (as it's free on PS+) in 3d, and oh my god... the game alone is worth the PS+ cost as far as i'm concerned.
Game piracy.
I dont make much money but since im willing to wait for sales, I have enentually gotten every game i wanted. My steam library is so large that it would take me years of playing like a full-time job to beat them all.
So considering that, no-one can really call games too expensive. Since they haven't kept up with inflation, you could consider them huge value for the amount time 1 game can entertain.
The thing that annoys me, is when the DRM is so fucking heavy on a game, that because i paid for the game i have gotten a inferior product to a pirate.
Really there are the pirates that will always do so, but good service can go a long way into converting them as well.
Before the days of netflix and the various music stores out there on the net. I used to pirate a lot of films and music. Reason was because it was at the time the only easy way to get the said films and music, especially if i wanst looking for something popular enough to be in the local stores.
But today with all of these services, that make it easier, faster and less painless to just pay up i can see the rates of piracy going down.
Also respect, if the publishers and consumers show more respect for each other things will improve. It's currnetly too easy for some pirates to justifiys them selfs, claiming that the big bad EA's and Activisions of the world are greedy fucks that try to rip the consumer off on micro transactions and dlc.
What.
that may be true, but why is there a delay in the first place ?
I don't think a couple of days delay is that bad, if you look at some other companies it's quite excellent actually.
Ever tried to ship something to Australia?
I heard it was because of when "new game day" falls in different countries. Sort of like how Wednesday is when new comics go on the stands in the US.
Getting it approved by the rating systems of other countries, and localization. Localization can actually take a while since if the game uses a custom font, they might have to not only translate things but also add additional character sets to there bitmap fonts.
Games ship to stores well ahead of their release schedules...
Though I actually wanna know/see some stats of how many ppl who pirate a game actually beat it.(or play it longer than a few hrs.)
Is there something like Fair Use but for games/products instead of creative works ?