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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."
Every. Download. Is. A. Lost. Sale.
It's an empirically proven fact.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except it is also easy as hell to get PC gamers to buy, it is called giving them a good value instead of squeezing them for that last penny, duh! I'll use myself for a couple of examples: 1.-I bought MoH:10th anniversary, even though I heard the latest game in the series sucked (which it did BTW) so why did I buy? Because they gave me extras that made it worth buying like the original MoH:AA plus the expansions, Moh:PA Directors Cut, plus a couple of CDs worth of soundtracks and making of behind the scenes.
Another example is Good Old Games which has gotten me to buy plenty of games I normally wouldn't have, simply by offering x64 compatibility along with no DRM and plenty of extras like soundtracks and strategy guides. They make the purchase so easy and painless that it is literally easier to buy from them than it would be to pirate the game. After all with a pirated version I couldn't be sure it would run on W7 x64, nor would I get any expansion packs, all the extras, and have it as simple as 1 click and I'm done.
So if you want PC gamers to buy it really isn't that hard. Don't try to get us to pay $50 for a 5 hour long badly ported x360 game, if you really think your game is worth $50 then throw in a couple of your older titles you aren't selling any more so we don't feel like we are getting ripped off, and make it easy to buy from you without making us jump through bullshit DRM hoops (I'm looking at you, Ubisoft!) that simply make the pirated version a better value. If you find the right price or incentives you CAN convert pirates to customers. Hell I can't even count how many guys I know that ran formerly pirated XP Pro that are now running W7 thanks to the $50 HP offer. MSFT hit the right price and many decided it was just easier and less hassle to buy the new OS than pirate it.
Ultimately though, I have to wonder if all this "evil piratez" bullshit isn't actually a cover for the fact that certain big game companies want their PC games to fail so they can stick with the consoles. Lets face it, since the days of code wheels many of the big companies have been more about control than anything else. The x360 for the first time gives them "black box computing" where they can nickel and dime the living hell out of the players and kill multiplayer for game A when sequel B comes out. Of course if they simply dropped their currently profitable PC games division the shareholders would have a shitfit, so instead they purposely go out of their way to treat their customers like absolute dogshit. When the PC gamers avoid them like the clap they can say "See? PC gaming is dead" and stick with the 360 without shareholder screaming.
So I have to wonder how much of the "evil piratez!" is bullshit seeing how companies like Valve can make money hand over fist even on old games that were probably the most pirated in history. Plus piracy makes a damn fine excuse for when your game sucks, like the company that made Titan Quest which one of the developers tried to argue with me in the forums that the fricking demo I was playing "Had to be pirated" because the shitty code would CTD after less than 20 minutes. And sorry about the length, but as a PC gamer that has watched PC gaming go from one of the greats to a bunch of shitty 360 ports for frankly crazy money with worse nastiness than most viruses I really don't feel much sympathy for the game companies ATM.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Android market supposedly suffers badly from piracy. Boo hoo hoo evil pirates, not giving money to developers who deserve them.
I downloaded Maverick Lite 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 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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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.
-Woof woof woof!
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Is killing people wrong?
I'm sure we could debate that one all day.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Nintendo have:
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.
Be smart, help people!
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Living With a Nerd
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.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
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".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.