Independent Dev Reports Over 80% Piracy Rate On DRM-Free Game

An anonymous reader writes "Developer 2D Boy has written that they are seeing an 82% piracy rate for everyone's favorite DRM-free physics puzzler, World of Goo . Surprisingly, this rate is in-line with what they were expecting. The article also features a fascinating comparison with the piracy rate of another game that was shipped complete with DRM, at 92%. There seemed to be no major difference in the outcomes of the rate regardless of whether DRM was used or not ... well, no difference other than the cost to implement such nonsense."

Comments

Only sane conclusion

[Xiroth]

Which is all just proof that the DRM that the other game shipped with clearly isn't strong enough.

Or at least, this is how I'm predicting most industry execs would interpret this. There's always wriggle room for those who'd rather not face reality (particularly those who have their livelihood staked on it, such as StarForce).

Re:Only sane conclusion

[AKAImBatman]

Which is all just proof that the DRM that the other game shipped with clearly isn't strong enough.

That's far from the only sane conclusion. The problem with World of Goo is that the "honest" customers may take advantage of one of the more convenient and easier download options. These additional options that do a better job reaching the target audience may artificially inflate the piracy figures for PC downloads. i.e. It's not that the game is heavily pirated, it's that the PC version is less popular among paying customers and thus at a statistical disadvantage.

Re:Only sane conclusion

[AKAImBatman]

A quick search at PirateBay easily shows how full of shit your reasoning is.

That doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense. Either you don't understand the argument, or you think that Pirate Bay somehow tracks the number of copies pirated. Either way, there's no way that searching Pirate Bay disproves the argument I just made.

Just for fun, let's make up some numbers to demonstrate. Let's say I create a game for only the PC. Let's say that 500 people buy it. Later on I'm able to prove that 500 people pirated it. What is my piracy rate on the PC version? 50%.

Now let's say I create a game that can be distributed via the Wii, Steam, or a PC Download. Let's say that the Wii version sells 1500 copies, the Steam version sells 1000 copies, and the PC version sells 100 copies. Later on I'm able to prove that 500 people pirated the PC Download. What is my piracy rate on the PC download? 83%.

Except that in the second scenario, we can see that many of the previous customers shifted to the alternative content streams. If we assume that those other streams are well protected, this means that the ratio between pirated copies and PC Downloads is now out of whack with actual sales. Overall sales are great and piracy rates have not changed. Yet through some interesting misapplication of statistics, we have managed to create a 33% increase in piracy.

What that suggests is not that piracy kills all video games and that they should be destroyed. What it suggests is that the PC Download stream is far less profitable when alternative streams are available.

"There are three types of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" --Mark Twain

Re:Only sane conclusion

[lysergic.acid]

just because you don't understand what objectivity is doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. and just because people are inherently biased doesn't mean that we are incapable of being objective, or that everyone is equally biased. that's like saying that just because people aren't 100% rational all the time that logic doesn't exist, or that a creationist is as rational/irrational as an evolutionary biologist.

some things subjective, but not everything is. and it's certainly possible to be objective when it matters. adherence to sound scientific principles helps one to be objective in the search for truth. after all, objectivity is the fundamental measure of scientific & intellectual integrity. if objectivity doesn't exist, then all you have is useless rationalization/sophistry.

for instance, if i want to determine the effectiveness of a particular drug treatment, i can choose to conduct controlled experiments in a fair and aboveboard manner, or i can choose to accept bribes from pharmaceutical companies and fudge the data to fit predetermined results. similarly, if i'm conducting an experiment in which i know that my personal biases could affect the results, i can design double-blind tests to negate such biases whether they are conscious or subconscious.

the whole "everything is relative/subjective" played out cliche is just intellectual laziness.

Re:Only sane conclusion

[HadouKen24]

It may be a sign of intellectual laziness, but "everything is objective" is just as much.

Think about it for a second. What does it mean to say that a statement or a position is "objectively true?" By what standards could one make such a statement?

One common way to define it is to say that the objective is what is in accordance with reality as it is, but this renders "objective truth" entirely unreachable. We can only perceive the world through five meager senses. We can certainly infer beyond them, but even then we are limited by our own mental capacities. It is impossible for us to know--and must always remain impossible for us to know--whether or not there might be critical defects in our reasoning process which cause us to make errors which we cannot ourselves spot.

So let's move down to the next most rigorous definition of objectivity: what independent, intelligent, unbiased observers can come to agree on based on all the information. This, too, is plagued with problems. A group of people can only come to agree on something insofar as their faculties and mental processes are in accord.

This definition works very well for small things. We can easily come to objective agreement about, say, whether or not there are tigers in India or whether or not Mattel makes toys. It tends to break down where differences in faculties and mental processes become too great. Whether or not one believes in a God depends on what kind of rationality one uses to answer the question. It's not entirely clear how the "objectivist" (not to be confused with an Objectivist) will adjudicate such questions.

Compounded with this problem is the question of empirical underdetermination. It does not ever seem to be the case that there is only one possible explanation for a series of events. There may be only one explanation worth taking seriously, but this, again, is much easier with small stuff, and very difficult with big stuff.

And that's not even getting into the question of what it means to say that science is objective. Every serious experiment is designed based on theoretical principles, and thus all experimental results are inherently theory-laden.

The twentieth century made it very clear that dramatic conceptual shifts and reinterpretations of previous theories can occur. We cannot say that they will not happen again. By the second definition of "objectivity" it seems to be the case that what is objective changes with time.

Recognizing the inherent subjectivity in just about everything is not an excuse for lazy thinking, however. We can still say with a degree of certainty that certain ideas are self-contradictory or in direct contradiction to experiential fact. And indeed, the task of navigating between, correlating, and interrelating various viewpoints becomes much more difficult. The answer is not to give up on thinking, but to challenge oneself think harder and more incisively.

Re:Only sane conclusion

[Goldberg's Pants]

I "pirated" World of Goo. I downloaded it when a friend raved over it, tried it for five minutes, thought "Is this it?" and deleted it. I wonder what percentage of this "piracy" is actually people just trying the game after hearing about it, since I wouldn't have bothered had someone not raved about it. (I don't even know if there is an official demo available.)

I wouldn't have kept the game even if it had been free.

Far too many companies assume one pirated copy is one lost sale. (Unless you work for Starforce who once claimed one pirated copy was MULTIPLE lost sales.)

My attitude to stuff I've created is so long as you don't pass it off as your own work or make money off it, go nuts and copy it all you want.

I guess a lot of the attitude depends on why you create. Do you do it because you enjoy it? Or for the money? Sure, you can do both, but which is your primary motivator? I think attitudes toward piracy will be influenced by which side of the fence you fall.

Re:Only sane conclusion

[William Baric]

Just out of curiosity, why didn't you download the demo instead of pirating the full version?

Re:Only sane conclusion

[trytoguess]

"Cause I don't know if I'll like till I played the whole thing!" Well, that's one rationale I heard...

Re:Only sane conclusion

[Goldberg's Pants]

Did you not read my post? I didn't even know if there WAS a demo. Friend raved over it. Saw it on a torrent site, gave it a go, deleted it.

Re:Only sane conclusion

[NickFortune]

I think the point the GP wanted to make was that, while Objectivity as an ideal is necessarily absolute, objectivity as a human trait is a relative quality.

As an example, consider the case of the physicst who times falling objects all over the earth and concludes that the acceleration due to gravity on the surface of the earth is generally 9.81 m/s, with given margins for regional variations.

Now let's suppose he has a colleague who claims the true value is 11.0 m/s, because that was the value revealed to him in a dream by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Since the first physicist's observations are mediated through his own senses, it's possible to claim that they are therefore subjective, and therefore that neither researcher is being objective. On the other hand, I think most reasonable people would agree that the first physicists work, (being grounded in careful observation and reproducible by anyone who follows the methodology) is considerably more objective than that of the second.

All IMHO, obviously :)

Re:Only sane conclusion

[Draek]

Think about it for a second. What does it mean to say that a statement or a position is "objectively true?" By what standards could one make such a statement?

That the experiment leading to such conclusion is easily reproducible. If I state that 70% of people weight over 200 pounds, then all one has to do to corroborate my statement is to weight everyone, and calculate the percentage of people over 200 pounds themselves, or they could do it in a smaller sample and accept some error margin based on statistics, etc. And of course, anything that can't be proven or disproven by experimental results (such as the existence of God) becomes a subjective matter.

Re:Only sane conclusion

[cliffski]

"My attitude to stuff I've created is so long as you don't pass it off as your own work or make money off it, go nuts and copy it all you want."

Interesting. Is this stuff that took you two years hard work, full time, which you did as your primary way of paying the bills and putting food on the table?
Because thats what 2DBoy did. And yet you seem to be equating this with something you might knock up for laughs in your spare time.

Theres nothing magical about creative 'entertainment' works which means the people making them do not have to pay rent and buy food. I bet you don't have th same carefree attitude to your employers paying your salary "as long as you admit I did the work, I don't mind how much you pay me".

CORRELATION != CAUSATION

[yincrash]

there are more variables than "has DRM" and "does not have DRM" that could influence the steal rate. selling price, metacritic rating, marketing to name a few.

DRM is not about prevent piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

DRM is about preventing sharing. I don't mean BitTorrent sharing. If you purchased a copy of a game from Walmart and want to lend it to a friend after you are done, DRM is designed to prevent that. Most (if not all) DRM solutions are bypassed before the game hits the torrents, making DRM worthless at preventing piracy. But a limited number of installs prevents honest customers from lending each other games. It also makes re-selling the game difficult if not impossible.

The game companies would certainly do this for consoles if they could (I believe Sony has a patent associated with it). It's one of the reasons why downloadable games are very popular. I've purchased the first two episodes of Penny Arcade Adventures for the Xbox 360. I have a friend who would like to give them a try. The DRM doesn't prevent an illegal download of the PC version of the game, it doesn't prevent me from lending a legal copy of the game to my friend.

These numbers are misleading

[Jimmy_B]

The problem with using a per-game statistic for measuring piracy is that a pirate can play far more games than someone who doesn't pirate, but will play each of them less. If you have 25 pirates and 75 people who pay, and each paying person buys five games but each pirate downloads fifty, then each game will be pirated more than 75% of the time. (All of these numbers are pulled out of the air; I don't know the size of the effect, but economics dictates that the number of distinct games per person is at least somewhat higher for pirates.)

Counting IP's? Fail.

[Presence2]

They're counting IP connections of users who opt to check a box within the game as the foundation for their argument. It's difficult to take any Piracy/DRM conversation seriously when developers are using sensationally hyped math as a starting point. Pirates vs. buyers, static vs. dynamic IP's, and those who choose to check the box to upload their scores or not; three wildly oscillating figures they're saying = 90%.

odd math

[socsoc]

TFA: we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources by the total number of unique IPs in our database, and came up with about 0.1. thatâ(TM)s how we came up with 90%.

Heaven forbid a legit user installs it on his laptop, takes it to the library, starbucks, work, university, a few friend's houses and whatever other wifi signals he comes across.

This math seems pretty flawed.

Re:odd math

[IceCreamGuy]

FTA:

it's just an estimate though... there are factors that we couldn't account for that would make the actual piracy rate lower than our estimate:
* some people install the game on more than one machine
* most people have dynamic IP addresses that change from time to time
there are also factors that would make the actual piracy rate higher than our estimate:
* more than one installation behind the same router/firewall (would be common in an office environment)
* not everyone opts to have their scores submitted
for simplicity's sake, we just assumed those would balance out. so take take the 90% as a rough estimate.

I think they make it pretty clear that their math is flawed and based on shaky assumptions. If you scroll down further in the article there is an update, too, with much more detailed math and the final conclusion of an 82% piracy rate.

Awesome game

[mrsteveman1]

I only heard about this game because of the piracy story here on slashdot, went and played the demo, and loved it. I'm gonna buy the full version now.

Hows that for irony?

Nothing to see here...

[L4m3rthanyou]

I don't see how such statistics are even useful, anyway. Piracy is an unfortunate market force, an inevitable cost of doing business. We all know that. Clearly, it hasn't stopped games from being profitable.

I think that even the most thickheaded publishers are starting to figure out that trying to stop piracy is futile, at least for single-player games. It would seem to me that most developers releasing their stuff DRM-free have simply stopped worrying about what's being "taken" from them, and refocused on maximizing their income. In the ever-expanding world of online gaming, where authoritative control is actually possible, the DRM makes sense and will continue to be used. It's all about the benefit against the cost.

In other words... DUH.

Re:Piracy != Lost Sales

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Here's an odd question: What is so horribly wrong with the demo that you refused to download it?

Because you can't trust demos. Over the years, demos have been the subject of just about every anti-consumer dirty trick you can think of from polished demos for hastily finished games to significantly different game play. If the real thing is available, why even bother with a potentially misleading demo?

Terrible study

[RichPowers]

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/

The flip-side

[SpeedyDX]

Of course, if we were to look at the flip-side, 18% of the people who got their hands on World of Goo purchased it, whereas only 8% of those who got their hands on the other game purchased it. That's over DOUBLE the rate of purchase.

It's all a matter of perspective.

"Pirate"

[AlpineR]

I "pirated" World of Goo. I downloaded it when a friend raved over it, tried it for five minutes, thought "Is this it?" and deleted it.

Yeah, and I sneaked into a showing of Quantum of Solace at the movie theater. The opening scene wasn't very impressive so I left. But if I decided to stay I would have bought a ticket afterwards. Really I would!

By the way, did you opt in to the global scoreboard and set a high score during your five minutes?

Re:Piracy != Lost Sales

[cliffski]

If I had the option of not paying for restaurant meals at the end of them, suddenly no food would be up to my *standards*.

A pathetic excuse.

The real purpose of DRM

[rabtech]

The real purpose of DRM, especially the EA "limited installs" kind, is to shut down the resale market. The publishers look at that market and think "they're selling my games for free! those bastards...".

Like the telcos who talk tough words about "using my pipes for free", they fail to acknowledge that We the People own the land, and our government has graciously granted them access to right-of-way on our behalf, to run their lines and deliver their services. Like a renter, the furniture (pipes) may be yours, but the building (right-of-way) belongs to us. We can easily terminate their access if we decide it is in society's best interests.

Copyright is (was) a balance between encouraging creativity and our natural right to share, duplicate, and/or dispose of our own personal property however we see fit, regardless of its content or the desire of the creator. Blatant attempts to alter the balance in your own favor cannot be tolerated. We've seen what happens when the financial sector is allowed to have the very ropes with which to hang themselves, we can't let the rest of our society go down the same path.