Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately 459
An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting:
"iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. 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."
Re:But... (Score:5, Interesting)
Stick that in your empirically proven facts (I know you were being facetious).
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
...forced to pirate? (Score:5, Interesting)
Android market supposedly suffers badly from piracy. Boo hoo hoo evil pirates, not giving money to developers who deserve them.
I downloaded Maverick Lite [androlib.com] recently. I decided it's a cool app and wanted to buy the full version.
Until then I was puzzled by lack of paid apps in the market. Now I saw "Maverick Pro" not found.
I checked, double checked and found:
Only 12 countries support paid apps [google.com] and mine is not one of them. I checked, Maverick Pro was only available through Android Market, not any other online store of Android apps.
I faced two options: .apk from SD card.
1. download a torrent of paid apps for Android, and install the
2. root the phone (voiding warranty), install "market-enabler", back-up the current SIM Id, spoof it with ID of one of providers that offer paid apps, then purchase the app from app store.
Guess which one I choose...
The second one. Yep, I hacked my phone and purchased the app legally.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:5, Interesting)
to take something
You've never test driven a car I take it? You've never heard a song on the radio, then bough the CD? Rather you always go to the record store and by CD's of artists you have never heard before? You always pick your doctor at random out of the phone book and never ask family/friends for a recommendation?
Let me put it to you another way: Why do software companies think that they can fork out buggy, shoddy games and expect their customers to fork over $40-50 without the possibility of complaining (or even reselling the game)?
I admit that I have "pirated". The games that I like, I later bought. However there are a hell of a lot more games that have been deleted from my hard drive, and here I consider that I have saved myself from being ripped off. For example, I OWN a copy of Silent Hunter III. I OWN a copy of Silent Hunter IV which, IMO, was not as good as Silent Hunter III. So I downloaded a copy of Silent Hunter V. After 10 minutes, I wiped it from my hard drive and thank goodness I didn't pay for that piece of crap. Had it been a good game, I would have bought it. Just like I bought every other game I like.
Re:But... (Score:1, Interesting)
In my case, they are losing a sale to fixing the price too high for too long, especially in this age of Price != Quality. On the flipside, I'll buy titles on Steam for $9 on-sale and secondary to that reason never have to worry about losing access to it because of some shady DRM scheme.
I think a lot of pirating of games is for the same reason as pirating of movies still in theatres: They simply cost too f*cking much to access legitimately on a regular basis.
Re:...forced to pirate? (Score:3, Interesting)
Should've just emailed the developer asking for a paypal address, handed him the appropriate amount of money, then torrented it.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:4, Interesting)
Copyright isn't a moral issue, it's a legal one
Nonsense. Law is simply morality that's been codified. We believe killing people is wrong, so we make a law to reflect our shared morality. We have also decided that it's right that the people who create artworks deserve some reward for that work. The system to make that reward possible is copyright. Saying the system is not working properly, and that you want to change it, is a very different statement from saying that breaking copyright isn't about morality. This is, at its core, *completely* about morality...the question is only whether the law reflects your moral view (or, better, society's overall moral view).
Your "private transaction" argument is also legally questionable. For physical things, (and in US law) if you buy something you have reasonable reason to believe is stolen you will also have committed a crime: Receiving Stolen Goods [jrank.org]. It's designed to allow the state to punish fences as well as the thieves themselves, but laws like this will be cited in any discussion of similar behavior online. If you have reasonable reason to conclude that the person you're dealing with is selling you an illegitimate copy of a game, you are not free from liability. Your liability is certainly less than the person selling the thing, but you're not completely innocent in the exchange.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hardcore players (Score:4, Interesting)
That would only be the case if I had agreed to such a limited license at the point of transfer. It would also be false advertising in that we are constantly asked to "buy" and almost never to "license" a game. These words have meaning, you can't get around that without some serious chicanery.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:3, Interesting)
DRM as a whole is a waste. You're hurting honest people, and mildly inconveniencing dishonest people.
I think the "best" way to go about such things is to go about it like Blizzard tends to: hardly any DRM, but good luck playing multiplayer without a valid key (the bnet-only multiplayer thing is an obvious extension of this).
I think that sort of thing strikes a balance between people who want to try it out, and people who are playing it to the point where they ought to have paid. The situation with the Demigod launch was terrible (the pirate's argument that more players adds value to the game breaks down when the excess of players kills the server.)
People complaining about the price of games, etc, I have no sympathy for. They get cheap, if you wait. You want it early? It's going to cost more. You don't get to pirate it just because you can't afford to pay for it.
Then there is no piracy (Score:1, Interesting)
Then there is no piracy because the only thing being sold is the limited license which ISN'T being P2P'd.