Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately

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."

Comments

Hardcore players

[sopssa]

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.

However that still doesn't change the fact that they are using a product they have no right to. It's not even the old "they just download it for the sake of it, they don't actually play them", since these are measured by submitting high scores to the game's server.

If the average pirate downloads a lot more games than an average customer buys, it just means that they're hardcore players and techies. You know, the group that here on slashdot is mad about casual games taking over more interesting games. Maybe it wouldn't if everyone would buy them? Casual people don't go pirating so easily.

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? Even if it isn't a lost sale, they haven't paid the author for the right to use it. That isn't right.

Re:Hardcore players

[QuantumG]

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 sales, that would be unjust - wait a minute, we're talking about iPhone apps right? The law *does* prohibit second hand sales. See how quickly moral arguments about copyright get silly?

Copyright isn't a moral issue, it's a legal one, and the proponents of copyright are all people with vested interests who take no care not to overstep the social contract, is it any wonder the public has no respect for them?

Re:Hardcore players

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Thanshin]

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

[Jurily]

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:Hardcore players

[morari]

Is killing people wrong?

I'm sure we could debate that one all day.

Re:Hardcore players

[PopeRatzo]

Some people DL several versions of the same game - some people buy several copies.

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

[gartogg]

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 would say it's not worth trying. Treat them as separate systems.

Is copying games moral? Probably not, but some people feel that I.P. cannot be owned, so assuming this, and assuming that intention of the creator is irrelevant, maybe it is.
Is it legal? No.

Re:Hardcore players

[The Hatchet]

In fact, in this case, according to the article, it would be like saying there are 1 million murders in the US per year, all committed by evil people with no heart, and we need to round them up, and torture them and murder them in public, and kill their families in a similar manner (as far as how badly the punishment for piracy is so much worse than the effects of the piracy. You can pirate a 1 dollar song, and cost the selling company $0 because you wouldn't have purchased it anyways, and have to pay them millions). Not to mention accepting the most ridiculous coincidence as proof of a murder. Like if you reported a gun stolen and it was used to shoot someone, you would be prosecuted in full (if someone pirates on your wifi). What a terribly fun military fear inspiring country that would be to live in.

Re:Hardcore players

[The Hatchet]

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

[Nadaka]

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

[BenoitRen]

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.

Unfortunately, when it comes to shitty digital media laws, we don't own our video games. We own licenses to play them. :(

Re:Hardcore players

[Aceticon]

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.

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.

Re:Hardcore players

[tixxit]

You are under the impression you own the game; you do not. You own the, very limited, rights to play that game. These rights are not transferable to friends.

Re:Hardcore players

[brit74]

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:Hardcore players

[AlamedaStone]

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 result in a purchase, it could easily be argued that loss by piracy is only 80% of a fair and accurate infringement estimate. And the vendor estimates are always and without deviation inflated. I can imagine a situation where piracy results in net sales increase, a la Stardock, but I assume these are outliers and not the general rule for software. Perhaps it is closer to true for certain kinds of music, but that is supposition. Of course the other side of that conjecture is that a sale gained through piracy could become a customer gained through piracy, which is worth a great deal more to a business than a single sale, and would tip the balance further towards a net gain.

Anyway, I personally rail against suspect quantification which does not account for all factors. I am strongly in favor of accurate estimated quantification - because no number will truly be accurate, of course. I would love to see an organization offering an accurate estimate to businesses, but it would be corrupt before it opened its doors, so I suppose that's just the criminally optimistic side of me.

Re:Hardcore players

[Jurily]

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 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 agree in principle, but don't do it for whatever reasons), shouldn't that invalidate any laws against it in a democracy by default? Think about it: how many people breaking the law does it take to change it, if the majority of the population is at least neutral to their cause?

If you think the examples are absurd in this context, you're right. But in 15 years, we'll remember this as the dark ages where corporations roamed the tubes hunting for dead people, and have not yet adapted their business models to reflect the inherent freedom of the internet. Or we'll remember this as the good old times, when you could modify the OS on your computer without going to jail for non-compliance with the Computing Device Copyright Infringement Monitoring Act. Which one of these lies ahead of us? You choose. We all do, day by day.

My proposed solution: a) extend Fair Use to the whole of the internet for personal use (even Hungary has that fercrissake), b) slap on an optional and reasonable Entertainment Fee/Tax to designated connection plans, to be distributed among the content creators based on measurements, and possibly c) zero tolerance among those who opt out, with fines based on the tax, not $2M for an album.

Re:Hardcore players

[gclef]

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 people with distribution systems (publishers/printers) in an enormously unfair position over the painter. Hence, some system was necessary to re-balance that equation.

That's what copyright is all about. Whether the system has become unbalanced in the other way is an interesting discussion to have, but I really want to shoot down this pernicious idea that copyright decisions are independent of moral decisions.

Frame the argument properly, and we'll make progress...but as long as one side talks morals and the other ignores that, noting will ever get solved.

Re:Hardcore players

[Just Some Guy]

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 authorized to do anything with my game other than play it once per each time that I pay them. I couldn't care less about what they generously authorize me to do; if a law doesn't say I can't do it, then it is my opinion that I'm allowed to.

Re:Hardcore players

[liquiddark]

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.

Jailbroken

[Anonymous Coward]

Jailbreak detection?

Are they admitting that they spy on their users phones outside their running apps?

In some countries that might get them jail without possibility of jailbreaking.

Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

"only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."

That's just as wrong as claiming that every pirated copy is a lost sale. 10% of potential customers isn't the same as 10% of the sales.

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?" Nobody can answer that question. Maybe it would have sold a lot more copies, maybe it would even have sold less as it would have remained largely unknown. We just don't know.

Re:Wrong

[Dunbal]

Still infringing IP, though.

      So is singing the "Happy Birthday" song, but everyone does it.

I stopped participating in piracy

[dontbgay]

because I stopped playing video games. I love the old keyboard and mouse. I love the PS3. I love the Xbox. I don't love how ham-fisted the publishers are getting with DRM and all the rest. If popularizing a game increases the chances it'll be pirated, I won't participate any more.

PS3

[Krneki]

PS3 is so far warez free, stop bitching and develop only for this platform.

What? You like even less Sony then pirates? Bad luck.

Re:Second post from that blog

[Thanshin]

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.

Re:I was with them until the cited Blizzard...

[Thanshin]

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.

Re:Their argument does not apply to PC games

[SharpFang]

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".

Note to game companys.

[Anonymous Coward]

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 crap i can try and waste money on. from industrys that have not fucked me over every chance they got.

<Morbo CUSTOMERS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!

[Rogerborg]

</Morbo>

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.

[Tei]

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.

Results are skewed/biased!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's a fairly good assumption that iPhone users are not a representative sampling of the whole "gamer" universe, since it is a closed platform. It seems obvious to me that being a iPhone user should be somewhat correlated with "don't mind paying for stuff as long as they are quality stuff". This correlation is not perfect, of course (hence, the 5% jailbreaks). The fact that you have to jailbreak your phone to "pirate" stuff on the iPhone "garden" (i.e. illegal, not trivial for non-technical people and may void your warranty and whatnot) probably means that one isn't going to bother with it unless you're going to pirate a lot of stuff (or, put another way, "since you took the time/work necessary to jailbreak your phone, you might as well reap the rewards"). This closedness basically splits the continuum of (payers / try-before-buypeople / casual pirates / heavy pirates) that you see across the PC "gamer" population into two sub-populations (payers / heavy pirates), which is a phenomenon that had already showed its face with the consoles (i.e. people who modify their PS/Xbox ARE going to pirate like crazy simply to "make their investment worthwhile"; it's a psychological thing). So, I say you would probably see different numbers if the chosen platform for the analysis was "PC" or "Android phones".

In the end, it may be beneficial (from Apple's point of view) to do this if most of the borderline people end up becoming "payers"; not so much if they decide to become heavy pirates or simply ditch the product/platform.

Re:Their argument does not apply to PC games

[lordandmaker]

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.

Flawed use of statistics

[Kjella]

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

[Bob_Who]

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.

Re:But...

[BenoitRen]

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.

Be Careful What You Wish For

[chill]

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.

Re:Be Careful What You Wish For

[betterunixthanunix]

Except that people still play PS3 games, and they did so even for the years before GeoHot announced his hack. Most people are still so confused by technology that they fail to understand that DRM is artificial and unnecessary, let alone that there are software vendors that are not hell-bent on restricting their users.

Re:But...

[jac89]

I think you just described steam :). The number of games i pirate has fallen dramatically since i started using steam, and i have even bought titles i pirated in the past at their awesome sales.

Re:Their argument does not apply to PC games

[TheRaven64]

Mod parent right up. If you care about pirates, your business model is broken. As a business, you should care about two things:

1. People who pay for your product.
2. People who might pay for your product.

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:But...

[DangerFace]

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 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.

Re:But...

[Thanshin]

Steam made me find out I wasn't cheap, but lazy.

Re:But...

[clifyt]

"and say that I pirate games I don't want to pay for because generally too expensive to purchase."

And that doesn't make you feel dirty at all?

You admit that these have value to you, but not the value that you want, so you take it...this is a fundamental difference between the folks that believe copyright shouldn't exist...they really don't see stored value in intellectual properties at all...but by your admission, you do see the value.

This means you are taking someones money because you find it too expensive.

Seriously, are games THAT IMPORTANT that you need to do this? It is of life altering need that one has to do this?

I'm not going to be a complete hypocrite and say I don't do this...I do...but I only do this for things that have no demos available. And I give it one day and it is off the system or it is bought. I gotta say, I've bought a LOT of shitty games because I broke my rule and forgot to pull it off within 24 hours...apparently, the game had enough value for me to keep it, so I pay the price. Kinda like a strip club, where you know the dance isn't worth it, but you keep the credit card running and realize you just dropped a few hundred (ok...the last time I was at one of these places 5 years ago, it was $350...I have friends with much higher scores!)

So I'm not saying I've never done this, and I believe that DRM and the industry do go out of their way to thwart honest customers (i.e., when I was a software programmer, I had pretty much the library book approach...you could lend the software to a friend, but you had to lend the media and everything...and not run a backup yourself...this was when you could run software straight from the media...and I included instructions on how to back things up...developers use to treat people differently...then again...users use to treat developers with a little respect).

Soooo....if something costs too much...ignore it. I certainly wouldn't try out a $1000 package knowing I couldn't afford it...I would simply find something completely different...and more often, it was better (even if it had a smaller userbase).

Re:But...

[jonwil]

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...

[PopeRatzo]

Same thing with movies. It's (mostly) not that I'm cheap

I've found that with Netflix for about ten bucks a month I have no need to pirate movies.

Re:But do you love other PC and console drawbacks?

[CronoCloud]

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, but just do something.

   

if you pick a fight, don't whine if you lose it

[Tom]

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".

Re:But...

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:But...

[shutdown -p now]

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.