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."
But... (Score:5, Funny)
It's an empirically proven fact.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's an empirically proven fact.
Don't be so restrained, you know it's a fudamental truth.
I am.
Every download is a lost sale.
About everything else, I doubt.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You know, I think that actually works better without the extra "n" given the smoke being blown around this by **AAs et al. +1 for inclusion in the next update of the OED.
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
You know, I think that actually works better without the extra "n"
Ok.
Do't be so restraied, you kow it's a fudametal truth.
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fudamental
Wascawwy piwates, steawing my intiwectuwal pwopewty.
Or maybe I misunderstood, and the word is a contraction of the acronym "FUD" and the word "MENTAL". :)
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Cool. Them I'm going to download 100 games a month, and thereby earn $6000 simply by downloading. I'm going to be rich.
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Stop it. Now your post will be cited in some lobbyist's report to some congressvermin and worked into the justification for ACTA secrecy. Thanks a lot asshole.
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It strikes me that perhaps the numbers show a sharp skew twords cost per unit being too high for sufficient market penetration, but that's just me =) I mean 5% is a really bad conversion rate of potential customers.
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Every. Download. Is. A. Lost. Sale.
It's an empirically proven fact.
So true, and by downloading this comment to your browser for display, you deprive me of my god-given right to get money for free.
My lawyers will contact you shortly.
However, you do have the option to settle this before the court and lawyers get involved, for a mere tenth of the sum it would otherwise cost.
Just dial 555-I-IDIOT and follow the instructions, and the problem will be out of your world in a couple of minutes. Remember to have your credit card and IP address ready.
Re:But... (Score:5, Interesting)
Stick that in your empirically proven facts (I know you were being facetious).
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I have a related experience. See, sometimes I import video games because either the US version is superior (true 60Hz mode), or the game was never released in the EU.
Now, when it comes to the Wii, there are no boot discs available that work thanks to Nintendo locking them out through firmware updates. So what do I do? I hack my Wii so I can play the games I legally bought through a home-brew launcher. Yet in the eyes of Nintendo I'm just yet another pirate, even though I haven't pirated anything.
Re:But... (Score:4, Insightful)
I bought several DVDs from the USA a few years ago. 2 of the items I bought have STILL not been made available in Australia (and one of them, Young Einstein is an Aussie cult classic and one of the funniest Aussie films of all time IMO)
I also have a large number of items in my music collection that I downloaded from various sources simply because there was/is no other way to acquire that particular content.
The number of people who pirate because the content they want is unavailable for them to legally purchase is likely a significant part of piracy, one that the copyright holders need to recognize (and reduce/eliminate by making content available to the entire world in a timely manner and by keeping content available for longer)
Just ask many Australian TV viewers with tech skills about "Channel BT" (i.e. BitTorrent downloads) and how many shows they have downloaded simply because they have given up waiting for the local network to show that particular episode.
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
Young Einstein is an Aussie cult classic and one of the funniest Aussie films of all time IMO
I had no idea it was so dire.
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As funny as it is, it is actually kind of true.
Why? Even pirating costs something. User has to find copy, download it and get it working (also, he must have lerned how to do each of the three things). His time is not "free". Hell, even intent of pirating something means it is worth at least something to downloader.
Problem is that this worth is way, way below current pricetag and soemthing that typical gaming comany does not "get".
Make service that beats pirating in ease of use and security, be modest with w
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Actually, most DRM in games is such that installing, activating and dealing with potential problems (connection problems, CD-
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I agree (if I understood your post correctly). People don't want to pay $50 for a game that is, more likely than not, shit. I think the only games I've ever bought were bargain bin spur-of-the-moment purchases, and a few bought online (on Steam, WoW, etc.) where convenience combined with my want for some entertainment right now trumped my innate cheapness.
I can either:
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Steam made me find out I wasn't cheap, but lazy.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Steam made me find out I wasn't cheap, but lazy.
Same here. In fact, when some game I had pirated in the past came up on Steam, I usually bought it.
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I've found that with Netflix for about ten bucks a month I have no need to pirate movies.
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of particular concern to the GAO was the “substitution rate,” the rate at which an illegal copy would have been otherwise legally purchased had it not been available. The MPAA and RIAA always use a 1:1 ratio to boost their figures and make the problem seem far worse than it actually is.
Okay, so that's music and film. Still, they are claiming that every download is a lost sale. In fact, more than that, they have claimed in court [wikipedia.org] that every download is several thousand lost sales. Oh crap, I accidentally used matters of record instead of just stating my (incorrect) opinion as fact. Oops.
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Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh drinky...you know I'm not an astroturfer...or an idiot. Over the time we've both been on here, you've tagged me as a fan and then later as a foe...and I really haven't been inconsistent with my beliefs.
I probably object to some of your beliefs, and not others. Becoming someone's fan brings more of their comments to my attention and gives me opportunity to decide that someone is stupid, or morally bankrupt. I don't know if either or both of these apply to you in general, but right now, I'm pretty sure one of them applies to this particular conversation. You might simply have the particular kind of stupid that makes you adopt views contrary to reality and then defend them at all costs to prevent having to admit that you're wrong. People change their views all the time. I used to be pro-death penalty, for example. Now I'm not; that's a pretty big shift.
I never said that this wasn't copyright infringement...but copyright infringement IS considered a form of theft (theft of services) by most law professors.
It's easy to sit in an ivory tower of tenure and make pronouncements, but since law does not consider it to be a form of theft (including theft of services, since no service is performed it's quite irrelevant what some very seriously misguided individuals think. Whether you want the legal definition or the dictionary definition, copyright infringement is not theft, because no one is deprived of anything. It really is as simple as that. The question then becomes whether you are naturally or deliberately obtuse, and why.
As I've said, I am much more gray on the actual implementation of all of this...if I borrow something from a neighbors shed and return it before he notices, well...the police will just laugh it off (and I do just this)...however, if I borrow something and the police get there BEFORE I return it...different matter. Why? I don't know...maybe the first situation is proof that you weren't planning on stealing it, where as the second, one has to make an informed decision on your motives based upon past experience of others in a similar vein.
Wow, you are so far off base that you're not even vaguely close. If you return it then there's no evidence, and there's no point in the police doing anything. Unless you're one of their targets, in which case they'll run you through the system as a convenient form of legal harassment.
I look at copyright infringement and think...do I want to put up with the bullshit when there is so much other awesome stuff out there? And sometimes I say yes, and sometimes say no...but I always assume there is value in others works and I'm not going to demean them by saying that it should be any less than they believe it should be.
Disagreeing with the valuation of a work doesn't demean the creator.
That's about respect for the person, not about any law...
But it still doesn't address or change the question of whether copyright infringement is theft, and it is not. We have a whole separate body of law because it is not! Trying to prove theft when no one is denied anything became impossible, so new laws were created to punish a class of [ostensibly] undesirable behavior; further, the laws were designed not just to control the behavior, which never really works, but also to provide for remedies. So the law does include an inherent statement that copyright infringement affects income — just not in the way you describe. If it were a theft of services, then we wouldn't need copyright law; you'd prosecute copyright violators for theft of services. And this is where your obtuseness becomes offensive to the point of being flamebait. Everything about copyright infringement is different from theft, even the law.
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Well, they certainly cause a tremor in my pants.
Second post from that blog (Score:2, Troll)
That's the second post from that blog in as many days - they were the ones that did the Humble Indie Games Bundle, weren't they?
Slashvertisement?
Re:Second post from that blog (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the second post from that blog in as many days - they were the ones that did the Humble Indie Games Bundle, weren't they?
Slashvertisement?
No, Slashvertisement would be me saying: "I bought the bundle yesterday, Gish alone is worth half the 15$ I decided to pay, and having played gish and WoG I'm pretty sure the rest of the pack will easily be worth the other half."
For example.
I stopped participating in piracy (Score:2, Insightful)
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I don't quite get your point.
You stopped playing pirated games because of DRM in the unpirated version?
You stopped supporting publishers you weren't supporting before?
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I've told you a million times, you really can't do a good console game as a one man in a garage setup. You do a prototype, using Flash, pygame + SDL, whatever. That, you put in your portfolio to show off to potential employers/ dev houses/ publishers/partners. Then you do that, and that either gets you money or access to a devkit.
If you want to be a console developer you actually have to DO stuff rather than whine about the barriers to entry all the time. Take vacation time to interview if you have to,
pirates?! blah... (Score:2)
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How much of their potential customers are ninjas?
You'll have to extrapolate this to the sales charts for Pirate Gaiden and Teenage Mutant Pirate Turtles.
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Well, ninjas are peasant folk who have taken up arms against oppressive socioeconomic conditions, and pirates are (largely comprised of) peasant folk who have taken up arms against oppressive socioeconomic conditions, so...
All the pirates are ninjas?
I was with them until the cited Blizzard... (Score:2)
I was with them until the cited Blizzard...
Blizzard isn't more successful because they are better games developers, it's successful because they require use of a subscription service for the game to be interesting at all. In other words, it's because they are tied to external content that remains under their control.
-- Terry
Re:I was with them until the cited Blizzard... (Score:5, Insightful)
Blizzard isn't more successful because they are better games developers, it's successful because they require use of a subscription service for the game to be interesting at all.
Please elaborate about how are Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft not interesting at all without paying a subscription service.
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They are not tied to external content significantly more than any other MMO or multiplayer game publisher.
PS3 (Score:3, Insightful)
What? You like even less Sony then pirates? Bad luck.
Sony's barrier to entry (Score:2)
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Why don't you ask other indie developers who make PS3/PSN games how they did it?
ps3Phone (Score:2)
Especially the model you can slip in your pocket and make phone call with.
Note to game companys. (Score:2, Insightful)
i will NEVER EVER buy another game that i do not pirate first.
you bastards have just burnt me way too many times to be trusted ever again without heavy investigation on my part.
now, if you change the policys that say i can not return a game that i've bought. well, i'll think about it.
you lost my trust long ago. if you want it back you'll have to EARN it.
and if by some chance you come up with the unpiratable game. i guess i'm just done being a gamer.
i'm getting kinda old anyway. and theres lots of other
...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.
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Yep, I hacked my phone and purchased the app legally
If the purchase involved spoofing a SIM ID, you most definitely were not purchasing it legally...
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Should've just emailed the developer asking for a paypal address, handed him the appropriate amount of money, then torrented it.
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I didn't ever even think about pirating games. Now I'm curious about how to do it. If anything, their complaints pushed a legitimate customer to investigate piracy. That, and I got a good Sudoku when it was free, and it got deleted and I can't download it again without paying (I thought they stored what I own, but they don't save the free apps past a certain point or something like that because it's not there in my li
<Morbo CUSTOMERS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! (Score:3, Insightful)
</Morbo> [youtube.com]
Magic 8 Ball says: Just a different aroma of bullshit.
"Potential" customer are not equal. Someone who has expended effort to get your product is a lot closer to being a purchaser than someone who's never heard of you. That's why demos exist. That's why marketeers aren't all out on the street giving handjobs for crack.
10% lost "customers" is just as ridiculous a metric as 80% lost "sales". Adding another bad metric doesn't inform the debate, it just gives the other side mud to sling as well.
Piracy is unimportant. Is rocks juice. (Score:5, Insightful)
These that don't want to buy something, don't need to.
Yesterday "Pay what you want" 5 games pack has made to the authors $342.000.
The money is not on the people that don't have money (students that piracy his games), the money is on the people 35 years old, with childrens, and a love for gaming. Tryiing to extract more money from these students is stupid. Is like tryiing to extract juice from rocks, having a river nearby. GO AND FUCKING FORGET THESE ROCKS, AND GO TO THE RIVER!.
The river is fucking awesome, or maybe I am stupid and $342.000 is nothing. Also, the owners of Steam must be stupids too, and seriusly, It a system that is probably losing a lot of money. Sure? nope. It just don't work that way. Steam is good for these that want to pay for his games. Hence, is making money. All these systems like SecuROM, Ubisoft cracked DRM, and GFWL ... are misguided and stupid,.. "don't get it".
You will not make money from the pirates, these people is not your public. Is a public, but one that don't want to pay for stuff. Your public is the people that have money and want to use it to buy nicenies things. Give the awesome to then, and forget the pirates.
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Indeed, its a 'donation' system, but thats about as close as you get to 'Pay what you want' without the same words.
Flawed use of statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
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."
This is only true if there's no connection between wanting to game and having a jailbroken iPhone, which I assume is very false. Very many people don't care about jailbreaking because they use it with no, free or few applications, the value of jailbreaking to them is very low. On the other hand, if you want to play lots of games (where lots of games * money = lots of money) then jailbreaking has a high value. The data presented doesn't preclude the possibility that 80% of your market is within the 10% that are jailbroken.
Its only PIRACY if you BOOTLEG and SELL contraband (Score:4, Insightful)
PIRACY involves the true (not imaginary)loss of actual monies specifically spent on the the stolen product, with cash from a real customer that goes to the PIRATE in exchange for stolen treasure, thus PIRACY.
Downloading media that is not generating revenue, nor taking actual cash dollars in exchange for stolen or counterfeit inventory, is just listening to tunes, like last century "hearing the music on the radio" was free bandwidth with copyright material that could be recorded off the air, sold the license or suggested piracy. It was Fair Use.
I have heard zillions of "stolen" songs on the radio and paid for zero - it never cost anyone a sale. However, I have spent many tens of thousands on music and concerts and media and swag and fashion, audio gear, etc... Nowadays, no more "old style" radio worth hearing, I use the streaming web, or mp3s or rip off ipods, which function like 20th century radio..like the free radio. I don't make disks, or duplicate and sell it, and it ain't piracy no matter how many times the greedy corporate scum executives of the entertainment industry rape and pillage, and have been robbing artists and customers revenue for years. Its their only skill. This is why nobody believes the whining of rich assholes anymore - they never cry when they grab the cash, only when they can't get everything from a supersaturated market.
Be Careful What You Wish For (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish the RIAA, MPAA and BSA all had magic, unbreakable DRM that made it impossible to use their products at all with paying. I want to see their reactions when their revenues go down as people just DO WITHOUT their unnecessary crap.
FOSS software and CC media would go thru the roof.
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How do they identify that your game is pirated? (Score:2)
if you pick a fight, don't whine if you lose it (Score:5, Insightful)
Unauthorized copying (remember: "Piracy" is that thing done on sea where people get killed) has been around forever, and will be around forever. Consider that a fact.
How you act with regards to facts of the outside world says a lot about your personality. Basically, you can accept them, you can cry and whine about how unfair it all is, or you can try to change things. Usually, you don't fall into one extreme but a mixture with one dominant trait.
The music, movie and computer games industry largely falls into the second, with a slight bit of the third. The problem with people like this is that the feeling of "the world is soooo unfair" is close to "I am entitled to be treated better". Which leads to irrational and counterproductive actions (the 3rd trait).
For example, copy protection has long since left acceptable territory and entered ridiculous. And in many parts, has already crossed ridiculous and entered offensive. If you hit Google with "SecuROM" and a few terms of your choice, you'll find it fucks up people's machines, causes crashes and sometimes makes the entire system unbootable.
As a legitimate customer, I've long tired of being treated like at the airport in the privacy of my own home. No, your stupid game is not important enough that I'd give up the confidentiality or integrity of my entire work environment. No, you can't have root access. You want to be sure I am a legitimate customer, fine. But I want to be sure that this is still my computer, which means not handing you the keys. I don't give the TV people access to my fusebox either, just because I watch their program. I don't give my car keys to the guy washing the windows. Know your place, then we can have a business relationship.
As it is, there's a good number of games that I would buy, but don't, because I'm not putting up with this shit.
And, quite frankly, there's a lot of times where I'm happy the crackers got it done, just because maybe, just maybe, the stupid fucks who put money into pointless, evil DRM schemes may learn that it's not worth it.
Use some customer-friendly, easy copy protection, that's ok with me. Unique key, ok. Some CD checks on the installer, fine.
Having to have the CD in the drive to play? Have you idiots heard of notebooks?
SecuROM, Starforce, any-other-DRM-crap? See above.
Limited number of activations? I'm sorry, if the doctors don't consider you insane, the doctors should hand back their licenses
Most importantly: Make good games. There is still a short list of companies out there where I know I'll buy their next game for sure. Because they've never let me down, and they don't fuck with their customers, they please them. And you other stupid gits in the industry better learn that fucking and pleasing are only the same thing in a different "business".
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Because that isnt how they see it, duh! And it's not even how the law sees it. It's a private transaction between me and the previous owner, if he makes a copy before selling (or giving, which is just selling for $0) it to me then that's not my problem. So if you want to make it a legal issue you need to look at the unauthorized copying by the seller (or gifter) and once you start doing that you're immediately going to run into the second hand market. Think about it, if the law prohibited second hand sa
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.
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You claim that law is morality, instead of say, perhaps more accurately, that it should be based on morality. In complex systems, there are unpredictable effects, and the legal system is about as complex as systems get. Effectively, this means that most results of the legal system are reified rules of what morality might say (if it was codified badly.)
The system is broken. We can argue all day about whether this or that is moral, but it's nearly impossible to map those ideas onto what the laws say, so I wou
Re:Hardcore players (Score:5, Insightful)
The image that immediatelly came to my mind was that of a painter selling a painting.
Note that copyright was not required or involved in any way and yet the creator of the artwork got rewarded for that work.
In fact, the only way copyright would be involved would be if someone made a copy of the painting. Even in that situation one could argue that the work of making the copy (say it's one of those painting making shops in China) is the one deserving of a reward.
Here's another one: do you know that if you whistle a tune on the street it can be considered as an unauthorised public performance?
The natural law is that people freely exchange ideas. That includes telling others about ways of making things, singing, whisteling and playing music, telling stories and jokes that you read/heard-from-others and more.
Copyright actually goes against the natural law of free exchange of ideas - it assigns ownership to ideas and restricts exchanges of ideas to require (often paid) authorization from third-parties.
In fact, even though it's perfectly possible for a copyright owner to do so, they won't charge someone for whisteling the tune they own the copyright for in the street because:
a) They can't catch you easilly enough to make it worth the trouble.
b) The public outcry on such heavy handed uses of copyright might very well kill it.
The only reason Copyright exists is because some thinkers in the 17th century decided that a time-limited mechanism to reward the makers of new ideas would promote creation and exchange of ideas more than it would hinder it. This fine balance (assuming it ever worked) has been thoroughly broken in the last century.
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The image that immediatelly came to my mind was that of a painter selling a painting.
Note that copyright was not required or involved in any way and yet the creator of the artwork got rewarded for that work.
In fact, the only way copyright would be involved would be if someone made a copy of the painting. Even in that situation one could argue that the work of making the copy (say it's one of those painting making shops in China) is the one deserving of a reward.
Interesting that you should bring up selling copies of a painting...a moral question for you: is it fair for someone to mass-produce copies of a painting, making significant money from them, and not recompense the original artist? is the Chinese painting clone shop (or the simple mass production of prints) fair to the original artist?
From your example, the original artist would only make money from their sale of the work once...we, as a society, decided that this situation was unfair since it puts the peop
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Even in that situation one could argue that the work of making the copy (say it's one of those painting making shops in China) is the one deserving of a reward.
Fun Historical Fact: People making and selling copies of original artwork nearly bankrupted working artists in the 17 and 1800s, which is part of the reason we have copyright laws. If you want art in your society, you don't want to encourage copying of that art in a way that bankrupts your artists. Of course, most people really are too ignorant to understand that art is a desirable quantity for reasons other than simple entertainment.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is arguing it's right to pirate games. What's being said here is that the methods used to get the numbers in the statistics published are wrong, and the actual numbers are much, much lower. Whether this is on purpose or simply honest mistakes is left to be seen.
Is killing people wrong? Certainly. Shouldn't we call out people that say that there are x murders per year, when the actual number is much lower? Bloody hell yes. It makes your country (or state, or wherever the numbers came from) look bad, and portrays an inaccurate reality, which is the opposite of what statistics are about.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:5, Insightful)
Is killing people wrong?
I'm sure we could debate that one all day.
Re: (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 Demig
Re:Hardcore players (Score:5, Informative)
Nintendo have: [edge-online.com]
Nintendo has blamed piracy for a 45 per cent drop in DS game sales in Europe between April and December 2009... Last June Nintendo monitored ten overseas websites that allowed people to illegally download software. It found that games had been pirated a total 238 million times, translating into one trillion yen ($10.7 billion) in lost sales.
And Sony, EA, Activision, Microsoft et al have all claimed the same thing at one time or another. They seem to be smartening up nowadays, though.
The statistics that have been published are how many pirates vs. customers the game has, and those have been accurate.
And the numbers are almost certainly not accurate, anyway. Some people DL several versions of the same game - some people buy several copies. Some people lend games to people, thus making customers into pirates, and some people lend copies to friends, making a single pirate into a counterfeiting ring. The actual numbers are completely impossible to determine by any means other than watching what every single person in the world is doing every second of every day.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:5, Insightful)
And some people buy the game but have to download the RAZOR1911 crack to make the game work properly or to avoid having to install some toxic DRM software.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:5, Informative)
I've had to do this. When I bought Mass Effect for a friend for his birthday, we couldn't get it work on his PC no matter what we did. We ended up having to download the crack off ::name redacted:: so he could play the game that was LEGALLY PURCHASED.
Insanely stupid.
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Re:Hardcore players (Score:4, Insightful)
I have been legally entitled to 3 versions of autodesk inventor, not to mention several different games and other software. The DRM has always been so terrible and messed up that it would destroy itself, and all the files I made using it after a couple weeks or so. So now I have just stopped buying software, it just isn't worth losing all of my data. If I feel a game is worth paying for, I buy it to support the developers, but install a pirated copy so that I can be guaranteed it will actually work.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:4, Insightful)
Hold on there. Lending a game to a friend is not piracy. That may be what the media companies want you to think, but the first sale doctrine supports the right of the owner of the game to lend or sell his own property.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
The courts seem to disagree with you. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars
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You are under the impression you own the game; you do not.
When a game studio can produce a contract that I signed agreeing to that horridly twisted concept, I'll agree with it. Until then: hell yeah I own the game, just like I own the toaster and book I bought at the same time with the same debit card at the same cash register. I obviously don't own the copyright to the game and can't make illegal [1] copies of it, but it's otherwise mine to do with as I please.
[1] I'm dropping "unauthorized" from my vocabulary. If it were up to the publishers, I wouldn't be autho
Re:Hardcore players (Score:5, Insightful)
The more interesting question is, why do these people think they're somehow obligated to take something that doesn't belong to them and without pay?
Why is it more interesting?
I find the difference between the imagined and real economic impacts on gaming industry much more interesting than a debate about why people would rather not pay for things.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:5, Insightful)
I find the discussions about which part of the mental masturbation is more "real" interesting.
Hint: if it costs you nothing that I copy your game, you didn't lose jack shit. If you don't like it, make your game more entertaining than the pirated version.
You can play World of Warcraft on a nearly unlimited number of free private servers with the client you download from Blizzard for free; you can even roll your own. But in terms of quality, they're at most marketing for the real thing.
If Blizzard wanted, they could make it impossible for the private server developers to keep up. Nobody would bother to reverse engineer an encrypted protocol that changes with every patch. What do they do instead? They add content to their own and swim in the money it generates.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you distinguish between an imaginary downloader who would have paid for the game and one who wouldn't have? Until you can prove that your imaginary friends are more real than mine, we have nothing to talk about.
We can't distinguish between them. However, we're pretty sure it's above 0%. People often get mocked for claiming every act of piracy is a lost sale - implying that 100% of the pirates would've bought. But, pirate-defenders make a bold claim: that 0% of them would've bought. It seems to me that both of these positions are wrong, and you'd have to know exactly what's inside the heads of every pirate in order to make either of those bold claims.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if only 10 people out of the 1 million who pirated would otherwise have purchased the game, the company has still lost money to piracy (about $600). The goal is to quantify that cost accurately, and determine what is acceptable and reasonable. It seems most people on /. are angry that the game execs are being unreasonable with the numbers, yet mistakenly rail against any quantification of them.
Although I am a filthy pirate, I tend to agree with most of your assessment. The problem, to me, is twofold.
First, there is no method to accurately determine how many pirates have also bought the software in question to avoid particularly draconian DRM (Venn diagram!). This happens at least some of the time, and there is no way of which I am aware to quantify that behavior.
Second, there may be an advertising component to piracy. If, picking a number out of my.. hat, one in five copyright infringements resul
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't say you're entitled to have that copy and have any legitimate basis for that claim, regardless as to the cost to the business.
And you are in no way, shape or form, in any hypothetical or actual fashion, entitled to tell me what I can or can not do with my computer, and what subset of the base 256 representation of pi [wikipedia.org] I can or cannot download with the internet connection I paid for. It cost money to create it? Tough shit. Sue the guy who uploaded it. If you can't find him, that has nothing to do with me.
Also, if the number of pirates is as high as these companies suggest (which would also mean that there are also many people who ag
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.
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I could imagine a few ways... WoW has zero piracy for example...
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Ok, so if the game I did some years ago (LK-Shoot for GP32, you can look it up on the google) had not be pirated, I'd have 15 million subscribing customers paying me $12 a month?
Damn pirates!
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong.
http://www.google.com/search?q=wow+private+servers [google.com]
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That's like saying people who go to burger king instead of mcdonalds are somehow "pirates".
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That's like saying people who go to burger king instead of mcdonalds are somehow "pirates".
I agree. Still infringing IP, though.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Still infringing IP, though.
So is singing the "Happy Birthday" song, but everyone does it.
Re: (Score:2)
(about people running WOW on private servers not being pirates) That's like saying people who go to burger king instead of mcdonalds are somehow "pirates".
I disagree. Your McDonald's/Burger King analogy would match better with people playing Age of Conan rather than WoW - something that is clearly not piracy, just choosing another vendor. Running WOW on private servers would be more like having someone tape a cinema showing of a movie, then showing that privately to a large group of friends.
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Or, like ridding a badger to the state fair..
(idiot)
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Slashdot users have really gotten more stupid... think for a second.
WoW has no piracy (no, fucking private servers don't count you assholes).
All I have to say about your thinking is Wow.
PS3 isn't pirated yet (Score:2)
Lost sales are impossible to measure accurately because they are a hypothetical scenario: "What if the game couldn't be pirated, what would have happened?"
It's not so hypothetical when you consider video games for the PLAYSTATION 3 console. It just got cracked, and the crack hasn't yet been weaponized for mass infringement.
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We can't answer with 100% accuracy, but we can come really really close. There's a certain percentage of people who are never going to buy a particular product. Never. If they can get it for free they will take it, otherwise they will simply do without it. The amount of sales lost to "piracy" is very close to zero.
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Ya, that always bothers me. It seems the vast majority of "pirates" are typically kids who can't afford to buy these games. I know I pirated everything left and right when I was younger, cause I didn't have any money. Now that I can afford it, I drop $60 for another crappy PS3 game every couple weeks.
An English professor I once had did her dissertation on piracy (the kind with boats) and what drives the common person to become a pirate. It was almost always economic factors, typically due to political issue
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"Lost sales are impossible to measure accurately"
Lost sales CANNOT be measured PERIOD. Lost sales are an industry fiction, people that know how to pirate will just wait for the crack or for the price to drop, the whole point of getting something for free means you didn't intend on paying for it in the first place unless the thing you were pirating was genuinely good and you want to support the developers.
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Lost sales CANNOT be measured PERIOD.
What if you measured them before you lost them? Duh.
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If the likes of Steam, PSN, XBL etc. are anything to go by, prices for legit copies would go up. Piracy rates on these platforms must be so insignificant they don't even matter, yet the price of new titles is MSRP even when few retailers ever sell at MSRP.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure over 90% of your -players- pirated the game. That's clear.
Now what percent of your -potential customers- pirated the game?
Because from that 90% likely less than 10% would buy the game if they couldn't download it. The rest would simply "do without".
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Your aim is to make sure that people in category 1 stay there for your next product, and that as many people in category 2 move to category 1. Anything else is a distraction.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, you've identified that only 150,000 out of 2,000,000 users paid for the game.
You can't identify how many of the remaining 1,850,000 would have bought the game had they not pirated it, which is kind of the point.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
If you read the article (yeah I know) he uses higher piracy numbers for PC than iPhone, but the conclusion is still the same.
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