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