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Well, as the links in the article pointed out, "World of Goo" made the Top 10 Sales list in spite of (or perhaps because of) the 90% piracy rate. They got emails from people who bought the game after trying it pirated, and I'm sure there were others who did the same but didn't bother to fess up to the pirating.

World of Goo being DRM free was an experiment, and it turned into one of their best sellers, even if it was also heavily copied. It may seem a bitter trade, but pirates are also publicity. I got World of Goo with the last bundle. Would I have purchased it separately? No, probably not. It was fun, but not terribly compelling.

Brighter Minds might have gone bankrupt (due to their other business ventures) in spite of the success of World of Goo, not because of the piracy.

Amazing how they're dying while still experiencing growth, huh? We must have a different definition of "dying".

Playing in network environments not hooked up to the Internet much?

Wow, fanboy much?

The simple fact is that there are MANY times and places where LAN support is very helpful, if not outright required. Several other posters have enumerated the latter, but for the former, you need to consider scale.

Sure, if you have 4-6 people playing then maybe going over the Internet to Battle.net is an okay (if lame) solution. What about a group of 20? 50? 200? Blizzard has repeatedly said they want Starcraft II to be a serious e-sport contender, both in Asia and in the US/Europe. During the beta, people trying to organize big LAN-style game sessions have noted that their plans completely fell apart when they discovered that Battle.net limited the number of players per IP address to 12. This might have changed, but the fact that they instituted any limit should be telling.

To pull this off, they will be required to implement some form of LAN play, something they've already said they will do:

"We will be addressing StarCraft II tournament functionality in a post launch patch to the game, soon after ship. This patch will include features to address the needs of location-based pro tournaments, but we have not discussed any specifics about tournament support beyond that."

Blizzard denies the rumors of a LAN-enabled "Professional Edition", but it sure sounds like that's the direction they're heading. On one hand Blizzard claims that "No LAN because Battle.net 2 is just so amazing we can't let anyone miss out!" and then on the other "Okay, LAN play is required but only high rollers get it, not the rest of you, you dirty pirates". Anyone who's played the beta knows how bad and lacking Battle.net 2 is. Yes, it's beta, but the final release is in less than 10 days. It's not like they're going to uncheck the "Battle.net sucks enabled" checkbox the day before.

I want to love Starcraft 2, but Blizzard-Activision is making it so hard :(

Big distinction between Macs and PS3.

All the PS3 does is play games. So you could say the gaming industry has a cornered market there.

Macs do a lot of other competing things. Things their owners may decide to spend their money on instead of a new game. Also not all Mac owners play games, where all PS3 owners presumably do. Also not all macs a capable of playing the games that are the equivalent of a PS3... if fact probably most of them are not. So it isn't a fair analogy by a long shot. To make it a bit fairer, include all the PS2 to the PS3, and now I am pretty sure Sony has a lot more out there, and that is only one aspect of that equation.

PC gaming is not dying. People say that all the time. It is just wrong. That is probably the same people that say movies are dying. Perhaps in both cases they like to list piracy or consoles, etc... BOTH industries made more money in 2009 than EVER before. EVER. During a economic downturn...

http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2010/03/11/pc-gaming-revenue-tops-13-billion-in-2009-digital-downloads-now-80-of-pc-market.htm

http://news.bigdownload.com/2010/03/10/report-pc-gaming-revenues-were-13-1-million-worldwide-in-2009/

13 Billion. In JUST PC games. That's not even including console games. Also MORE games (ie. titles) are being made than ever before. Of course many of them are shitty, and by EA or something and are the yearly sport sequels, etc... However there are a lot of really good original games also. On top of that companies have realized the strength of "brand franchise" learned likely from Blizzard and Id Software among others, and are producing really good sequels to original good games. The idea being you build up brand trust with the consumer, and they will buy your games very willingly. I know I am buying StarCraft 2 as soon as it comes out LAN or no LAN... Some would argue that more crappy games are produced, and I would say that is just a correlation to the increased number of games. Most of the terrible ones can be attributed to a large corporation milking an old franchise for everything it is worth (EA), or the movie industry trying to get even more royalty money out of their movies, which has been done since Atari made E.T. back in the 80's.

Every other is dying or near death and none of made good on their promise "We are totally different from WoW, so everyone will love us".

Well, don't forget about EVE, which is perhaps the only other "truly different" MMO. Not only is it not dying, it's showing continued growth. But it is different, and by different that means not the same, so it may not appeal to everyone. But you can't ask for an MMO that's different then demand it be like WoW. Personally, I just grew tired of space.

That said there is also Fallen Earth, which is rather different as well. While it claims to be a FPS MMORPG, that sortof fades into the background as a sortof gimmick of the battle system, but it's not a bad thing---at least in principle. For me what truly sets it apart is simply the depth and breadth of content with the complete lack of necessary direction. They have big plans, and if they can work the bugs out of their client, they might actually pull it off.

They're all trying the game... if it's good and it's missing an entire city, at least 50% will go buy it :)
Don't forget it's free publicity... but you'll never make EVERYONE buy it... simply because not everyone have money to spend on a PC game. If they don't buy now, they'll buy in the future! Just see it as "free publicity" for this franchise.
(I played SpaceQuest series when I was younger (pirate version... I was poor at the time...) and guess what? I own it now!)
(Another example : World of Goo was highly pirated... and check this : http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/01/26/world-of-goo-makes-appearance-on-npds-top-10-pc-games-list/ In the top10 US sales... because it's a GOOD game).

From an economic/social perspective: piracy encourages piracy. While he may not be willing to purchase it, the "everybody does it effect", as well as his making more easily available the work (BitTorrent seeding, etc.), makes it easier for somebody who otherwise would purchase it to pirate it.

Just to be clear, that is an indirect effect, and also in contradiction to your first post, this is all about depriving the creator of something: money.

And when you accept that people who really are just trying to get as much free stuff as they can, whether they would have paid for it or not, are plentiful, then even this indirect effect vanishes. "Making more easily available" than trivially easy is a trivial effect, you see.

Piracy is disrespect: "I'm going to take this without paying because I want it but I don't think you deserve compensation for it." Why work, why spend a hell of a lot of time and money, on a project, just to be disrespected by those who want to use it?

Or another way of putting it: "I think this is worth having for $0, but not for any more than that, and certainly not for the price you're asking." I guess you could call that disrespectful. Am I being disrespectful of Andy Warhol if I said I'd take a print of one of his paintings if it was for free, but wouldn't spend $10 for one and scoff at the idea of paying what an original is worth on the market because I don't think Andy Warhol is worth nearly that much? Am I being disrespectful by looking at and enjoying art of his that comes up on a free Google Image search, but still not buying what I think is an overpriced $10 print?

I mean did you really think that their desire to have what you made should be irrespective of the price?

But if that's just what happens, as in nobody thinks what you have is worth more than $0, then maybe you should consider the possibility that they have a point!

What the fuck's the point? (And please don't give me that tired "it's art, create it for the sake of creating it" nonsense; when you come up with a way for people to make full 3D games competitive with the Unreal Engine and others on their lunch breaks, without any of the previous technology being there, let me know. Some art can't be made without enough money to live off of, and patronage is dead and never coming back.)

Well then I guess the point is nothing more than to make a buck, which plenty of artists seem to be able to do just fine even in the face of piracy.
After all at the end of the day, PC gaming is still an 11 billion dollar industry.

Because it isn't even clear that piracy is harming their sales significantly because it isn't clear how many of those are actually lost sales. After all, you don't really think that of the approximately $50000 worth of warez on a pirate's 1TB HD, that if piracy didn't exist that they'd have spent anything close to that amount. And of whatever tiny fraction of that money actually would have been spent, why do you assume that you'd have necessarily been the recipient of any of it?

So instead of throwing your hands up in the air and saying "What the fuck's the point [when everyone will just pirate the game anyway]?", maybe you should instead be asking yourself why you aren't getting any of that $11 billion dollars that the non-pirates are funneling into the industry. Blaming the people who aren't buying games doesn't really make a lot of sense, it's sort of by definition not their fault.

This study is deeply flawed. Optional checkboxes? A reliance on IP addresses (dynamic, logging in from multiple locations, etc.)? I eagerly await the technical analyses of the study's flaws.

This story is making the rounds surprisingly fast, which is fucking terrible. The study is flawed, but how many readers will see that? Will they take this 80% piracy rate at face value? I really hope not.

To those who think piracy will ruin PC gaming by making profitability impossible, I offer the following analysis of the sales of another DRM-free game: Sins of a Solar Empire.

In September, Stardock reported that Sins sold over 500,000 units: 400,000 at retail and 100,000 online. For the sake of these back-of-the-envelope calculations, I'll assume that the average retail price is $40. The online price is $40. I'll round down total sales to 500,000.

So 500,000 * $40 = $20 million. We know that Stardock took in at least $4 million by virtue of online sales. I don't know enough about retail sales to estimate how much retailers take in per sale.

Sins cost less than $1 million to make. After the retailers get their cut, and Stardock pays for Impulse's bandwidth, I'll estimate that they pocketed at least $10 million, probably more. (I'm being conservative.)

That's at least a 10:1 return on their investment. That sounds like a killing! And Stardock/Ironclad plans several micro expansions in the coming months.

Even with piracy, Stardock did quite well. Hell, even if piracy is 90% (which I think is a buncha crap), they still made plenty of dough. Why? As explained by Brad and others:

1) Ironclad/Stardock kept costs low. I hate how the industry creates these multimillion dollar games that necessitate a huge number of sales to recoup development costs. Piracy or not, the PC gaming market is simply too small to fully recoup the dev costs of today's AAA games (not enough high-end PCs etc. etc.). That's why big-budget games need multiplatform sales.

2) Relatively low system reqs.

3) Sins is a PC game. At the moment, you simply can't have a Sins-like experience on a console. Stardock's offering a game that takes advantage of the PC's strengths. Imagine that, appealing to your target audience. AFAIK, the game doesn't suffer from "consolitis."

4) Excellent customer support and relations. Patches, active forums, listening to customers. The other day, Brad left a post on a somewhat obscure topic at CivFanatics. He wanted to to clear up any misconceptions about Stardock's upcoming fantasy 4X game to an audience that's clearly interested in 4X stuff.

5) Lots of positive press. Slashdot and other PC/geek sites responded positively to the company's anti-DRM messages, the PC gamer bill of rights, etc. This probably attracted customers and overall goodwill.

Now if Sins isn't your kind of game, you probably don't care either way. What I'm arguing is that it's possible to profit handsomely in the non-MMO PC game market, provided you know your audience and release a game worth playing. Having good marketing and PR certainly helps, too.

Source: http://news.bigdownload.com/2008/09/04/over-500-000-total-sins-of-a-solar-empire-units-sold/

http://www.bigdownload.com/games/left-4-dead/pc/left-4-dead-intro-cinematic-hd/ Very cool.

Bean counter: "Hey, we're making money hand over fist with World of Warcraft! How can you justify diverting money into an expensive new project without subscriptions?"
Developer: "We could put subscriptions into multiplayer."
Bean counter: "No, that could take away from our golden cash cow."

They may be doing just that. Kind of (intentionally, I assume) vague on the subject now, but Blizzard is looking to "monetize" battle.net

Still, the schadenfreude will be most gratifying if they do and the cognitive dissonance drives this guy off the edge.