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Study Claims $41.5 Billion In Portable Game Piracy Losses Over Five Years
Gamasutra reports that Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association conducted a study to estimate the total amount of money lost to piracy on portable game consoles. The figure they arrived at? $41.5 billion from 2004 to 2009. Quoting:
"CESA checked the download counts for the top 20 Japanese games at what it considers the top 114 piracy sites, recording those figures from 2004 to 2009. After calculating the total for handheld piracy in Japan with that method, the groups multiplied that number by four to reach the worldwide amount, presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market. CESA and Baba Lab did not take into account other popular distribution methods for pirated games like peer-to-peer sharing, so the groups admit that the actual figures for DS and PSP software piracy could be much higher than the ¥3.816 trillion amount the study found."
Yeah, that must be accurate, because I'm sure they factored in things like:
1) People downloading way more than they could ever afford to buy
2) Multiple downloads by one person
3) Downloads of games that were already legitimately purchased by the individual but unusable for some reason
This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.
Saying one download is one lost sale is idiotic. It has never been true and never will be. It's probably off by at least a factor of 10. And haven't many studies already shown (well, at least with music) that the people who pirate are also the people who buy the most?
I don't care what the publishers say, a pirated game is not necessarily a lost sale, quite the contrary, I've found most pirates to be lazy bastards who wont pay for anything if they can help it. When one of those types pirates it's just a copy in circulation that shouldn't exist.
On the other hand, there is a type of piracy that is a lost sale. I still love the Gameboy Advanced system, and of course they no longer make games for it, so I turn to eBay and the like. More than once I've gotten outright pirated cartridges off of eBay. I always make sure the sellers have some history to prevent that, but occasionally one slips through. Some of the pirated games I've gotten off of there were really high quality, I spotted the fakes, but I don't think most people would have. On more than one occasion the seller disappeared while my game was in transit, when they don't disappear I tattle to eBay. I then have a moral dillema of what to do with said pirated copy. I paid for it, I didn't know it was pirated until it got here, but it is pirated... Hurricane Ike settled that for me on my older cartridges, but I actually did get a pirate cart off of Amazon since then.
I'm of the opinion the MPAA and the RIAA need to police flea markets and sellers like the above, go after file sharers, but leave downloaders alone. The video game guys need to do the same thing. The big difference between the movie and music people and the video game people is when a new format comes out movies and music usually transition to it. Not until recently have classics been commonly re-released on newer systems and they still don't re-release all of them legally.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
I wanted people to give me a trillion dollars last year, but they didn't. They're so greedy and unthoughtful!
Just for comparison, Nintendo has been making around $2billion a year total profit over that period. So either these game companies would have been a lot richer, or these numbers are off.
Qxe4
Indeed, I'd call it $41.5 billion in free advertising for your games.
Wow, that is an amount of money they have lost in fantasy world...
No money is lost to the economy due to copyright infringement as some MAFIA groups try to argue. It is just not given to publishers for those movies/songs/games that are pirated. But it is spent on other products. This is the broken window fallacy, that a child who throws a rock through a window is stimulating the economy.
I download movies and tv shows because I don't like watching broadcast TV. Any that deserve a repeat viewing get bought on DVD (which is probably about 80%). If they shutdown illegal downloads they wouldn't get more money from me because I have little to spare, they are more likely to get less as I would just shift to other forms of entertainment or free to access media (I have started watching local legal tv streaming sites, which has dropped the amount I illegally download and later purchase).
This isn't the 1990's where the big publishers had little competition. There is so much free or cheap content out there that I don't buy before I try.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Considering the ESA claims the whole industry was worth $11.7 billion in 2008, and that was 22.9% growth form the year before, this does not seem to be a very plausible number, since it nearly amounts to the sum of the value of the whole industry over the five years of this "study".
How much did the industry lose in paying for these studies?
By the same argument, I'm almost 100% sure the industry lose a lot more potential profit from second hand sales and/or rentals, since without them, technically people would have bought the games first-hand... right?
Notice how *some* people will get utterly smashed when attending an event with an open bar? They're quite eager to consume far more than they might usually have...
I still don't see how that could possibly represent a tangible "market" with any credibility. However many servings were had (for free) has no relevance to sales you could've had on a normal night.
For the last bloody time, a download does not equal a lost.... you know what. Fuck it. Fuck them. I hope the CESA paid a lot of money for this study.
If those numbers were even close to be real they would have managed to stop piracy long ago. I mean, who in their right mind will sit and idly watching billion after billion trickling out of their wallet and all they manage to come up with is some bizarre DRM schemes that never works. One would think that with such amount of money involved investing more in stopping piracy should be well worth it. Say a billion dollars or so.
It's all BS. We know it and they know it.
From my teens through my 20's I was a profligate game pirate and I still have stacks of burnt CDs of late 90's and early 00's titles that I dig through every once in awhile. It is nice to be able to play Master of Orion or the original Fable for a sense of nostalgia but now in my early 30's I've begun thinking longer term storage and instead of trying to roll my own I'm going to trust Steam so I can play the few new games I play each year in the old folks home. Until I can get a nice Raid + backup solution for 10-20 terrabytes of games and growing, Steam or something like it seems the way to go.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Free advertising to whom? Advertising to people who think of games as something you download to a flashcard isn't going to help at all.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
So, to bankrupt Sony and Nintendo I can simply write a script that downloads one game from each company over and over again... After all, if downloads equals loss, enough downloads would bring both companies to their knees. In fact, I'm sure that the entire entertainment industry could be brought to their knees with wget...
It's just made up numbers and made up words, told by the princelings of lies and falsehoods.
The thought occurs:
who in their right mind would buy any game for the PSP anyways? I can count on one hand the number of good titles for it, and none released in the last 3 years qualify...
Smith: Fourty-two Hugillions lost to pirates...
Miller: But... but there isn't that much money in the whole world!
Smith: Yes, that's right. We... Create!
Addendum: That figure is based on PBay trackers alone. It could be higher with other trackers, but also could be lower considering some ADSL users here don't use static IPs and switch around, but meh. It's just illustrative purposes only and to be taken with a spoonful of salt.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
According to Wikipedia there's 129M DS units sold, and 60M PSP units sold.. that's $220 worth of pirated games for every handheld in the world. Keeping in mind that a lot of people bought multiple revisions of the DS, replacement units, units that aren't in use, and so on, it's probably more like $300-400 per handheld owner.
Sorry, but that number is completely ridiculous and not credible in any way whatsoever to anyone owning a calculator.
You can't prove that a pirate was willing to buy a game so you can't prove you actually lost anything, but Gamestop flaunts their second hand sales to their stockholders, so you know exactly how much people were willing to pay. But now instead of the publishers getting money and making more games, it goes to Gamestop so they can make more...money.
I think most slashdotters are in complete denial about how massive it is. ... or not. I don't pirate stuff, nor to I know anyone who does. I used to pirate stuff when I wass much younger, and I knew people who pirated stuff when they were students. Now I and the people I spend much of my time with are older none of us pirate any more.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Interestingly, it also shows the price point people are willing to buy games. I don't know what is the usual price second-hand sales are usually sold at (being in one of those countries which does NOT have a significant second hand sale market), but I'd think publishers would have a lot more profit selling goods at 2nd hand prices.
Of cause there's the point of packaging, but that's what online distribution is for.
Another study claims money that wasn't made yet can be lost. Better stop downloading pirated games and don't buy them either. Surely the game companies will be grateful because the nonexistent losses are now gone!
I was shocked this morning to read that Foxconn employees are paid 113 euros per month.
It might seem irrelevant to this discussion, but it is not: the global elite is pushing for bigger profits, either through studies that claim loss from piracy or from other means.
I hope /. readers don't get the bait that the global elite ix losing any money. They don't; they are filthy rich as a result of exploiting people in 3rd world countries. Don't make them a favor and think that piracy hurts them; it does not. It simply doesn't make their wallets extra-ultra-humongously fat.
With the DRM, the criminalization of their customers, and the big fat lies like this one, I don't see why I would want to give these people money at all.
I'd rather play my old games that I actually own than feed this devolution of the business.
(NB: dupe comment because I posted the previous one "Anonymously", and it's apparently invisible without a parent)
We are all God's parents.
Gamestop sells 'em at 5$/€ below the regular retail price. I think people who accept that discount will always buy used, no matter how low the regular price goes (since GS will always undercut it).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Well, that is because they gave it me.
With kind regards,
The banking and automotive industry.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I wouldn't have bought four Nintendo DS's if I hadn't been able to get a device that let me run anything I wanted on the things.
I also feel no remorse at all in showing small children how to circumvent copyright on those devices.
WTF people, a business group releases a study and we all get to waste our time shooting down a ridiculously absurd figure regarding piracy for what, sport? It seems anyone can release a study these days and it will get examined by every nerd on the planet! Obviously not all studies, only ones that support the existence of an economic system that is splintering under the weight of its internal contradictions, viz the attempt to turn digital content into private property. Will you all PLEASE all get an anti-capitalist consciousness from somewhere, anywhere! -- this FOG you all seem to live in is driving me nuts!
for lost time, productivity loss, loss in morale, etc...
Because if they were true, then ipso facto, we be wrong. Since that's unpossible, the figures must be a filthy lie. So-called facts must not be allowed to interfere with our principled objection to rewarding creators for their work. Quod erat demonstrandum.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I wrote a really good version of Hello World 2.0, it was so great in fact that i tried to market it as really fucking expensive enterprise version of hello world; I put the price at $80 billion billion.
Despite the excellent software quality no one bought it, but as my sister pirated it to see what i was raving about i've suffered losses of more than the entire earth GDP of the last 20 milennia or so. And you dare to say software piracy is okay!
There is a few comments on here about free advertising and I can honestly say that of the games that I have bought none of them would have been bought if it was not for the fact that I played them before either on a friends computer or a demo version (I can not publicly admit that I actually downloaded games illegally :-) ) But the fact is that downloads grow the games market.
I'm actually very interested in seeing what the excuse is going to be in a couple of years for bad sales ... Cutting of your nose to spite your face is not a good policy.
If you are a smart games publisher you keep your mouth shut and allow the games industry to spend millions copy righting and preventing copying. Once they have done that you publish games with open copyright similar to the freedoms we have today and simply kill the competitions.
Ssshhh..
Consider the fourth option where these numbers are just freaking made up by people who don't care to use statistics correctly.
If, for perspective of scale, you consider that this the entire national debit of the US went up from 9 to 12 trillion USD, or 3,000 billion USD, and this claim is covers 45 billion USD, that would mean that the loss claimed by this study is 1.5% of the increase of the US national debit. And this isn't for all "content", nor all software, nor all video games, but just the _portable_ video games. And not the hardware either. Just the software part. So if we say that for every person who just has to have a DS there are 10 who had to have a PS/3, and for every one who had a PS/3, there were 10 who wanted to watch movies or use software in general, then the entire unadjusted dollar increase in the US national debit would be overshadowed by "content".
Yea, that's a "straw man" if I were going to attack it, but lets just skip that. The above was for perspective on the magnitude of the bald-face claim.
Now, when you consider everything that people can and must spend money on, "entertainment" is nothing compared to food and shelter and food and medicine and food and education and food and insurance so on. (did I mention food?) In 2007 there were 116,011,000 "households" in the us. If the US were to shoulder the burden of paying for all these "lost sales" each household would have to pony up 50 thousand ($50,000) above whatever they already spent on, well everything, including "portable games" they actually bought. That's a full working adult making a very reasonable, or even "nice" living added to each household in the US _just_ to pay for the portable game software.
Heck, there are six billion people on the planet. To recover the sales these people "lost", e.g. 45 billion just in portable gaming software, and we spread that out to every single person uniformly, regardless of their ability to own or use a portable gaming device, everybody has to go by an $8 bargain-bin super mario cartridge.
And they each have to do it while still spending 100% of the money they are already spending to live and do something other than play dominoes with their cartridge (surely there are not 6 billion used DS units available so these people can actually run the content...).
Redirecting that kind of money into the phantom sales scenario needed to back up these numbers literally flies in the face of economic reason. Food would have to come free from space aliens every day for the rest of the economy to support this pipe dream "lost sales" figure.
That is, in the same sense that "if pigs could fly, bacon would be super expensive" it may well be true that if everything these people dream of happened, and each possible download represented a lost full price sale, well then sure, with those "ifs", these numbers work. But without those preposterous ifs, the results are ridiculous.
Insupportable, criminally ridiculous claims should be met with thrown stones and brandished pitchforks. Until that happy day when people really think about what these numbers would _require_ as a founding assumption, we will be sucking swill from the teat of political fantasy.
There exists no mathematical world where the portable gaming industry could have "lost $45 billion 2010-valued-USD to piracy".
Its like asking what would happen if _you_ had all the money in the world. (hint: whatever it was you had, it would be useless). You can model and dream about the scenario all you want, but it has no foundation in possible reality.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I'm a poor university student.
DRM, DRM, DRM, DRM i will NEVER buy a DRM protected game. Will they work in 10 years? 20, 30, 40?
Constant internet connection is required to play Ubisoft games, c'mon... Will their servers be up and running forever?
Windows... Microsoft breaks your games every few years by releasing a new version of winbl0wz which does not include the library runtimes required to run old games.
Signup required to play the game.
I do have a few retail games.
Half-life 2 is an good example, i bougt the game when it came out a few years back, i'm unable to play it today... why? Because in order to play the game (in singleplayer) you must install STEAM and assign the game to your steam profile, right? Install steam, choose user\pass and check the remember me box. Now 6 years later I have a new email account and i forgot my steam user\pass. I contacted STEAM and they are unwilling to help me. THEY stole MY game.
I've also forgot my password for Red Alert 3, so i cannot play it online.
A few weeks ago when i wanted to play half-life 2 i had to DOWNLOAD A PIRATE COPY in order to workaround my forgotten user\pass problem.
It's more easy to install and play pirated games.
It's more easy to watch pirated movies, no IF YOU STEAL YOU GOTO JAIL warnings followed by 10 minutes of trailers.
If the spent so much time and effort doing this study they could have surely come up with a more accurate figure than 25% for japan. $41.5 billion is little more than a large random guess.
And you folks have adequately proved my point. I say "All the people I know pirate", and even explain the basis of that, and nothing. Servi merely says "Well, the people I know don't", and he's marked +3 insightful. Now, I'm not complaining about the moderation system at all - I've had my share of + and - mods, but you can't deny that there's the general mood of the replies to this article are completely biased.
Nobody's even read the article. They've read a biased summary, taken from another gaming site, borrowed from a third gaming site, which links to the article without translation and says "This is what we think it means". And by the time it hits Slashdotters, you're all foaming at the mouth to disagree with anything anyone suggests that "Hey, you know, you downloaders are actually doing something wrong y'know..".
I don't have to tell you how many times I see folks around here pull out the "It's not physical so it's not stealing" english-semantics argument as if it makes any difference. :p
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
Sony claim to have sold about 60 million PSPs over the lifespan of the machine. Assuming that a third of them were either sold to people with another machine (I know plenty who got the thinner, lighter update to replace the big heavy version, or just broke one) that's about $1000 per person. At $40 a game list, that's 25 lost sales per owner. I can't even think of 25 PSP games worth getting for nothing...
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
You think you know their business better than they do? If they would make more money selling cheaper, then why don't they? Are they stupid?
Not really, you'll have a small subsection of players who have $1-3k+ at retail price worth of pirate DS software (and the study assumes absolutely anything pirated is a lost sale), and others with none at all. Usually people who pirate games for a portable will fill up the largest microSD card they can lay their hands on with anything that looks remotely decent. 8GB is a *lot* of DS games.
That's probably true if you get games one at a time, but the only time I've seen a pirated game on a DS was when it was loaded onto a flash card, with around 40 other titles. Unless DS games are $10 each, $400 per cartridge is hardly pushing it.
I agree that it won't be per owner of the device, but just putting an relevant figure out there based on my own experience.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I'm sure the heavy pirates have many thousands of dollars worth of pirated games, which might actually average out to $220 per handheld. But there's no way those pirates would have bought a significant portion of those games had they not been available for free, and that's why their $41 billion is accurate but ultimately quite meaningless.
I am just smiling when I see report after report from the interest organisations. I am sure the first major publisher that embraces the "new" audience will be this centuries huge winner.
My guess is that it's one of those 'If you hadn't downloaded it, you would have bought it' kind of study.
I have spend so much energy in this subject that all that I have left to say about this matter is: 'This study is silly'.
The only information in this post is that the site www.gamasutra.com publishes very stupid articles. They should try to read before what they intend to publish and think a bit by themselves to understand how crappy this is.
Accepting to publish such bullshit is complicity in disinformation. This is bad.
I can name a bunch. Taken from my article on the topic:
Prinny, Killzone: Liberation, GTA: Chinatown Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics, God of War: Chains of Olympus, FlOw, the Loco Roco series, the Patapon Series, Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony, GTA: Vice City Stories and Liberty City Stories, Dissidia: Final Fantasy, Lumines, Wipeout Pure, Space Invaders Evolution, the Monster Hunter series, LittleBigPlanet PSP, and more.
Living With a Nerd
The people that piracy, DONT BUY GAMES, is that hard to understand?
Wen you see 99 downloads, is because 1 piracy download 99 games, and 10 honest gamers, buy 10 games.
The people that piracy, don't want to buy games, thats why piracy games. Maybe have a ethic like that: "If you can steal something, or get it for free, but you choose to pay, you are a idiot, and you are a bad person, you fail at life". But even if MAGIC operate here, and you make so the piracy people want to pay for games, will NOT buy these 99 games. The typical game consumer buy 4 games at year, you can't turn the pirates into people that buy 900 games at year. Is stupid.
Creating the expectations that the game industry has lost 900 sales / pirate, is creating false expectations. If you are into the industry, and and you buy into this type of stupid studys, YOU are a idiot too.
-Woof woof woof!
It's always interesting to see how the companies automatically assume that someone who wasn't taking it for free from a download site would certainly be buying it otherwise. A large contingent of pirates fit in the "I'm getting it for free or not at all" category, which makes their figures take a huge dive.
Spending that much on games is perfectly reasonable but the idea that piracy causes every single person that owns a handheld to buy 3 less games per year seems a little farfetched. I don't have any stats to back me up but I'm going to guess that the average DS owner isn't very tech-savvy and wouldn't know how to pirate a game. The figures are probably inflated due to a relatively small group of people who pirate nigh on every single game that is released, in every language that it is released in. I'd be willing to bet money on the number of DS owners who have never pirated anything being well over 90%. I'm not so sure about PSP but I'd imagine the figure would still be well over 80%.
The DS is delicate.. I'm on my 4th.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
40??
Last time I saw one of those cards it used SDHC minis and the guy had EVERY DS title made on it including Japan only releases.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You've kind of missed the point entirely, most of the people who pirate games can't afford to buy all of the games they pirate, so they never would have bought all the games they pirated. However, if these pirates interact with people who are not pirates and talk about the games they pirated and liked, they are providing free advertising.
As the iPhone study showed about 10% of iPhone owners were responsible for over 90% piracy rates on games. That means the 10% of pirates go through games voraciously, at a rate far, far beyond what non-pirates do. This means any comparison between piracy rates and money lost is going be vastly overstated.
The true cost of piracy would probably be better estimated by figuring the average purchase rate for game players and then multiplying that by the percentage of people who pirate games. It gives much lower but more accurate and realistic numbers.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
People who download the game to a flashcard don't want to pay $29.95 or even more for plastic, circuitry, manuals and packaging they don't get.
They just want to pay a reasonable price for a game, which in these days of online gaming where even $5 can give you a full month of gameplay (more than probably any cartridge), and with ongoing updates to the game, who in their right mind will pay 29.95 for a fixed game, not online, that might turn out to have 3 hours of playability.
Imagine if those $41.5 billion losses (*cough* numbers, ass, *cough*), could have been REAL genuine online sales at a price that the prevailing market will bear.
The days of selling you physical items loaded with preconditions and expectations are gone, adapt or die is the name of the game now.
A guy I used to work with had a collection of pirated DS game files he showed me once; there were easily 60 of them if not more.
At maybe 30USD per game at full retail, that's >1800USD just for his collection - and that's assuming he had them all with him at the time (we were actually at work).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I suggest that from now on, articles about far-out piracy number thrown out by special-interest should include a link to Wolfire's excellent analysis of video game piracy. Choice quote:
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.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
From reading the article, I don't think they're even claiming that if there had been 0 downloads, then they'd have an extra $45 billion. Rather, they're looking at the retail value of those downloads when compared to a sale
What relevance does that number have to anything? If they're not saying "this much money is lost to piracy, give it to me", what's the point of bringing up the number in the first place? I would easily believe that the face value of pirated software is 10 times the face value of purchased software. But, so what? What are you going to do with that number? Are you going to try to recoup those costs? Because you're crazy if you do. If you're not, why did you bother figuring it out in the first place?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
and we are reporting that the Beaverton flood has killed 100 billion people. We havent verified that, we are only REPORTING it.
Spending that much on games is perfectly reasonable but the idea that piracy causes every single person that owns a handheld to buy 3 less games per year seems a little farfetched.
Ok, when you put it that way, if "every single person" includes those who do not pirate, it does make a little more sense. It just seemed at first like michaelhood was saying $90 on games per year is a completely unrealistic value. I'd missed that he stopped just short of saying something like "and that assumes that 100% of DS owners pirate games".
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
RE: "They just want to pay a reasonable price for a game,..."
When I was a teenager I had friends that had hundreds of games for their Commodore 64.
I ask one of them if they had played all of them.
He told me he barely played any and that he spent most of his computer time copying the games themselves.
That's when I realized that for some, copying games is "The Game". Collecting them, sorting them in alphabetical order, showing them off to your friends, trading with your friends and strangers, talking about the difficulty of copying some games. Nobody would pay for any of this but just "having them" was the thrill. The fact that it was "bad to copy" just adds to it.
In the end it's like pokemon: Gotta catch 'em all.
The companies should worry more about the guys who only copy one or 2 games and play the FSCK out of them. THOSE are the REAL lost sales.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
However, I still download the ROMs since it's far easier to do so than to dump my own cart (which AFAIK requires some kind of slot 2 device
As I understand it, the new technique involves starting the sender on a DS and receiver on a nearby PC, hot-swapping from the flash card to the Game Card, and taking a few minutes to send the ROM through Wi-Fi.
that I have no interest in buying).
You can't play Game Boy Advance homebrew without a SLOT-2 device.
If I download 100+ Nintendo DS or Sony PSP games, this does not equal 100 lost sales. The same applies to music, movies and anything else. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just smoking a wad of rolled up bills.
Ultimately, since infringement requires intent
Since when? I thought Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music eliminated any requirement for mens rea in civil copyright infringement cases.
But I do pirate and I do buy. So where does that fit? I don't buy from companies that screw me anymore. EA, die already. Bethseda, get stuffed with your horse armor that needs a credit card. Turbine/Code Masters, same thing (latest Lotro expansion).
Sometimes I make an exception, for Bioware but I pirated Mass Effect 2 because the DLC for Dragon Age sucked donkey balls (which I did buy).
Frankly the game industry has managed to make piracy the only way to tell them that you don't like their business practices anymore. Nice game, lousy sales force. So how do you fight back? By hoping that the company goes bankrupt and the creative people start over under smarter management.
Here is a simple hint game makers everywhere: DO NOT SCREW WITH YOUR PAYING CUSTOMER OR HE WILL NOT PAY YOU.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
When somebody is pirating, say, iPhone games that cost $1.99 to buy [...] We're talking about a pathetic cheapskate.
Or we're talking about users in countries where the App Store does not operate. I don't know much about geographic limitations on Apple's App Store, but Google Checkout isn't available in a lot of countries that have Android phones, which means only $0.00 apps show up in Android Market. DSi Shop is region locked as well.
Absolutely correct! Piracy may well have caused a huge portion of the sales of product simply because it advertised the product in its own unique way.
I also wonder how, in hard times, so much game software could be sold.
I pirated I am Rich for my iPhone, so I guess I'm responsible for about $1k of this.
The people, through their elected representatives, have chosen to break these windows by expanding the exclusive rights granted to authors, ostensibly "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
The guys at CESA are just stupid. Their numbers are so far off, that it is ridiculous. I think for them to measure money lost to priacy in this way is bullsh*t. Like come on, it's obvious that not all downloads could have been purchases, about 5% could have been. So maybe they lost 2 billion. But wait! Their numbers are, at best, uneducated guesses. They only guessed the numbers for Japan, and guessed how that compared to the world. So obviously they don't know what they're saying at all. To top it off, piracy is free advertising. Yah, maybe I'll pirate a game for the PC and never buy it, but there are a few that I liked and bought the console version, or bought the console version and pirated a version for my laptop, to take on trips. Either way, lots of the downloads are copies, either being downloaded twice (bad torrent), downloaded by someone who has or will buy the game, or count as free advertising for similar games, which is an acceptable expense.
...is that despite all the wild claims of lost revenue, the *made* revenue continues to be more than enough to R/D new hand-helds and continue the dev of new games for both older and newer hand-held systems. I think that speaks much more loudly than these retarded arm waiving FUD campaigns about piracy. Clearly piracy isn't hurting anyone that bad, clearly business is more than good enough to continue being a market worth creating for.
But what about the losses due to pirates who talk badly about games they didn't like? How will these companies ever con unsuspecting gamers into paying them money?
My friend, let's call him Futeroot, had bought an R4 card for his DS after someone stole about a dozen of his legitimately bought games (Probably double that $220 value). Not wanting to repurchase all those games again and with no new decent games out, the DS unit got shelved and forgotten. Then one day a friend of Futeroot's told him about the R4 card and Futeroot thought 'Great! Now I can play Mario Kart again and not have to pay twice!'
The DS got dusted off, and later a shiny new DS was purchased, and despite the availability of thousands of games for free, several games were purchased in this revival (New Mario Bros, Zelda, Guitar Hero, etc... easily over the $220 value)
In the end you could say that the piracy of some of those games created a positive value of several hundred dollars, but if you were to look at the files downloaded, you would conclude that piracy in this case created a loss of at least $10,000. That's a pretty big discrepancy.
Now, this is a single case in millions of different cases, but it illustrates that the situation is far more complex then a simple 'lets look at the download numbers and multiply' scenario. In this case there are a few things worth pointing out:
-Futeroot couldn't dream of affording the $10,000 worth of games, so in no way, shape or form should that be considered lost sales.
-When files were downloaded they were downloaded in bulk for two main reasons
1) It is easier to download a big torrent with multiple games than having to track down and find individual game files and
2) There are a lot more seeders for torrents that contain multiple games than ones for individual games. As a result a couple hundred games might be downloaded when only a dozen or two are even wanted. Sorry EA, Futeroot didn't want a copy of MySims, but keep dreaming.
-Additionally, while engaged in this DS revival, Futeroot had convinced 3 people directly to get DSes of their own, who each went out and bought games for their new DSes.
I came to this thread expecting a story about 41 billion dollars worth of DS games being taken at gunpoint on the high seas.
Here's the easy debunking question for the gaming industry: if 41 billion dollars was truely lost, where did it go? What did those crazy kids spend it on, if not your video games?
This is of course, a ludicrous question, because the downloaders never had the 41 billion dollars to spend. This isn't a loss, it isn't even an opportunity. It's the gaming industry burying it's head in the sand to the true reason sales are down: a lack of innovation and sequel after sequel that the next generation is getting tired of.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
If the gaming industry really lost those 41 billions and assuming that they didn't go entirely into savings, which other industries earned those money instead? Whatever they were the overall economy should have benefited of those expenses.
However my assumption is almost nobody got them because people pirating games don't want or don't have money to spend so those losses are purely hypothetical. I'm pretty sure that if we sum up all the potential losses of all industries due to piracy (fashion, cosmetics, pharma, movies, songs, games) we end up with a figure greater than the GDP of their customer base.
Imagine the loss due to the number of people who never purchased OR pirated the games. Imagine how much income is lost to the game industry due to lack of game consoles and iphones in developing countries! Imagine how much money has been lost because we haven't found a way to sell game consoles to polar bears!
Our planet's economy is practically BLEEDING money because alien civilizations never buy ANYTHING from us!
Well, that just proves my(their) point. In that case, only a few thousand, maybe tens of thousands need to have these memory cards in order for the values to be reasonable*.
* Reasonable in a world where possession of a game without paying is a lost sale and not just opportunism, i.e. I won't buy it, but I'll have it if it's free.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I ordered a copy of a DVD series. The series was created in Japan, ordered from a different country, and shipped to Canada.
What I got came shipped in a nice little DVD box, with nice DVD silkscreen, and a nice little hologram stuck to the box proclaiming it as being legit.
However, the content is pretty bad. On some discs, you can see a faint scan-line moving through the background, as happens when you copy through a cruddy analog connection. The subtitles are absolutely horrid, and inconsistent. The spelling varies between discs on things that should be consistent (names of characters) and often is just outright wrong or uses terrible grammar. The quality of the subs rivals some of the worst fansub jobs I've seen. The tracking/skipping is also completely messed. Every episode has an intro, content, and an ending. Sometimes pushing skip-forward on the intro will go to the content of the episode, then the ending, and other times it just skips right to the next episode.
So I've contacted the producing company, trying to find a decent way to verify what a "legit" copy would be. In Japan the series is produced by "Sunrise," which seems to be part of Namco. They have a US distributor for dealing with N American licensing issues. In trying to find the distributor for Malaysia (place where the damn thing came from), the US company said "we dunno who that would be" and the Japanese branch just didn't reply
So I say to the media companies. Go F*** yourselves. If you can't be bothered to help a dedicated customer in avoiding "piracy" and tracking a legit copy of your merch, but would rather go harass downloaders and what not, then screw off. I've seen tons of malls etc that sell nothing but pirated DVD's, games, music, yet they're happily churning out burns for a profit - essentially screwing both the producer and the consumer - while the media companies are milking Joe Average with lawsuits for piracy.
GTA: Chinatown Wars
That one was on DS and iPhone too.
Lumines
Also on GBA.
There was some leg-pulling going on. Either he was pulling yours or you're pulling ours. The "Official" max size (per standard) of an SDHC card is 32GB, and most of the SDHC Flash carts I've seen won't go higher than that (if you're lucky. If you're not, they just hang up/crash/etc...).
You can get a LOT of games in 32GB, yes. But the only way you could fit them *all* on there would be to compress them and even that's a maybe, and I don't think any of the cards support that (unfortunately).
The way they gathered the figured show an ineptitude in mathematics, Complete ignorance in the pirate community, and simply doesn't makes sense when you apply the math to the market.
You don't seems to understand the piracy market wither.
" 390 downloads were picked up reaching Australian IP addresses."
You don't see the problem with that number? Do you seriously thing the there would have been 390 people standing in line to buy that game?
Do you even know how bittorrent and P2P works?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wouldn't be the first time that happened.
However, if steam released anything that could resemble and asset in anyway, they would get into a lot of trouble. When you are going out of business and show up in bankruptcy court, the judge looks at your activities , and will want to know why you gave away your key asset before going into bankruptcy. It could end up meaning the the owners private assets get seize to help pay the debts. Really anybody who's name is on anything the resembles controlling an asset.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm not sure that the primary points people are making are that piracy isn't as rampant as that shows, and indeed the semantics argument is silly. The argument that's being made is that 1 download does not equal 1 lost sale. It's not realistic to say that every download would have translated into a sale.
The morality, right/wrong, stealing/not stealing, etc etc doesn't really enter into it. It's not a realistic number. Just because there were 1000 downloads of Hot New Game 2, it's not realistic to say that the company suffered losses of $50,000 (assuming a $50 purchase price) because it doesn't follow that were that download not available, there would have been 1000 more sales.
Is piracy a problem? Definitely. Is it wrong? Absolutely. Is pointing it out with studies like this accurate? No. They're doing more harm than good by doing it this way precisely because of the frothing that goes on on gaming and other sites from it. There are two separate issues that often get mixed together - The impact of piracy and the ludicrous numbers that get attached to it. They really should be handled separately. People get too caught up on what piracy is and isn't, whether it's justified based on DRM/etc, and such when the real issue is that studies like this get used to the detriment of legitimate gamers.
Now a regular guy who shells out actual cash for most or all of his games is going to feel more obligated to at least try to play the bad game, hoping to get some redeeming value out of it. This probably means more exposure to the game, and a far greater sense of disappointment when that expensive purchase fails them. Those are the people who will really complain about a bad game. Allow me to demonstrate:
For instance, take Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for the PS2, which is possibly the single worst game I have ever played, and complete waste of money. The other versions (PS3, Xbox, etc.) are about what you'd expect from a movie knockoff -- not that great, but entertaining enough for someone who grew up thinking space robots were the coolest thing he'd ever seen. The PS2 version, though, is an absolute travesty of a game in every respect, from the horrendous graphics (even for a PS2) to the absolutely linear progress of every single level, the scripted boss fights that require a Simon-Says button pushing sequence, to the fact that half of the levels are simply duplicates of each other, and the basically zero connection to the movie or its plot (weak as the movie was, you still expect the game knockoff that shares the title to pretend to be about the same thing). I don't just want my money back, I want them to pay me double for my lost time, and they have to pay triple if they'd like me to stop telling everyone who will listen just how horrendous that game actually was. Zero stars, seriously. Zero.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I agree with the parent. $41.5 Billion is fictitious number...a political ploy for purposes of FUD. it's a number that governments will be concerned with, and have an incentive to step in, whereas, say, $41.5 million is just a cost of doing business. People still have an incentive to write books even though all books are available for free in libraries.
It's also important to reiterate that the "10% users who account for 90% of piracy" download many times more games than they would have otherwised purchased... and they don't have time to play them all anyhow.
What about the billions that I didn't earn? I think lawmakers should do something about that.
That's why I generally borrow a game from the library before I buy it.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
What's that? The IRS doesn't accept that as lost revenue?
Neither do we.
"its not depriving someone of the use of or value of some item, and so is not theft/stealing of software, because copyright infringement is not stealing. "
When someone takes all of your personal info and takes out loans and ruins your credit. We call it identity theft, yet nothing is physically stolen. Should we rename it to identity infringement?
I read an article recently about someone that installed a skimmer on an ATM machine. He was getting copies of debit card numbers and also taking money from those accounts. The accounts are just numbers that represent value, similar to software. Would we not call this theft?
"for instance it is well known that microsoft has happily tolerated copyright infringement of their operating systems over their history, as the value of having a larger market share is greater than allowing someone to possibly choose from the competition."
Is that kind of like saying we should look into the positive aspects of rape? (hey, she might have enjoyed it). Microsoft is one of the largest software companies in the world. They might be able to take a loss in revenue due to piracy. The smaller companies are a different story.
"then there is the free advertising that musicians, other artists, and copyright holders, obtain through copyright infringers."
Free Advertising. Right. So those copyright infringers tell all of their friends how they got something for free and where to get it (or they will give it to them). I'm sure this has many benefits to a company trying to sell legitimate software.
often what is sought is a differentiated response, where certain hub individuals have a greater influence and stronger social connections, this might intersect with the set of people who are more like to have the technical proficiency to circumvent drm.
"in certain situations the copyright holder knowingly benefit from copyright infringement, or greater leniency in the presence of drm. such as when a game publisher releases patches sometime after a release removing drm such as the requirement to have the dvd in the drive or to be authenticated online, etc. now this is the smart thing to do, and it shows _recognition_ that from the consideration of purely maximizing profit, some degree of leniency and provision of copyright infringement is beneficial. so while publicly the MAFIA loudly protest that they economy is suffering so much that draconian laws are required, their members show that privately they recognize and acknowledge the benefit to be harnessed from copyright infringement, and it cannot be both ways. so their actions betray the truth, that they pragmatically make more by harnessing copyright infringement than if it was completely eliminated."
How is it really helping the RIAA? It's really only hurting consumers in the long-run. Before piracy, if something wasn't making any money, companies would know that their product must not be good and they need to make changes. Now, they don't know if it's due to piracy or a bad product (song, software, game).
"i propose that we think hard about a falsifiable way of measuring the difference between the amount consumed when something is obtained at zero cost vs the amount when its not. there would exist psychological studies into this human dynamic, it would be interesting to see if they apply to the situation of copyright infringement."
If something is free, it's going to get downloaded more than if it costs money. What will this prove?
"With the DRM, the criminalization of their customers, and the big fat lies like this one, I don't see why I would want to give these people money at all."
DRM is only a result of mass pirating...not the other way around. If you want to blame someone for this, blame many of the people on this forum who have no problem downloading and sharing software that they didn't buy.
DRM is only a result of mass pirating...not the other way around. If you want to blame someone for this, blame many of the people on this forum who have no problem downloading and sharing software that they didn't buy.
most of the people who pirate games can't afford to buy all of the games they pirate, so they never would have bought all the games they pirated.
Of course not all but they could have bought some of them.
However, if these pirates interact with people who are not pirates and talk about the games they pirated and liked, they are providing free advertising.
Only if they don't advertise how to pirate them at the same time.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
So these numbers are totally bogus even at first glance. I find it ridiculous companies claim such excessive damages when based on the most flawed assumptions. Piracy is a reality. Game/media designers need to deal with it, but "deal with" doesn't equate to trying to thwart piracy to the point of restrictive DRM schemes and inconvenience of the customer. At the same time, looking at the music industry, I am all for better legislation concerning intellectual property that reflects such realities so companies can stop coming up with excuses to blackmail the little guy.
However, I don't really understand the moral justification of the "pirate" in downloading their games/songs/movies/whatever. That person may or may not have paid for it in the first place, so their consumption of the product is not necessarily a lost sale, sure. Yet, I have not heard a convincing argument justifying this person's -right- to consume the product at all. If they are unable or unwilling to pay for it, why should they be able to enjoy it gratis? This mindset isn't visible in any other industry--that if you can't afford the product, since you're not a lost sale, you have the right to consume it anyways? If a person does not want to share their idea, be it embodied in a game or song or whatever, unless shared for some profit, what gives you the right to say hey, I can't afford it anyways but I feel the need to enjoy it so I'm taking it? I mean, you can't go to a restaurant, select an item, then decide you don't like it and forfeit your obligation to pay; you can't just leave without giving any compensation simply because you did not enjoy it if there was no problem with it otherwise. Though this does apply to a physical object, the premise is similar.
I am genuinely interested in how people can justify this, as I myself cannot. Would love a response!
You have a library in your town/county? Neat. I thought those were a thing of the past in New York. I have to pay about 10x as much (since I'm not in that district) for a membership and then drive about 30 miles to get to the nearest one. Again, not everyone lives in a large town or city.
If that was it then why would people pirate iPhone apps? Those are 5$ or less, often with constant updates and whatnot yet they get pirated anyway.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I dont understand why someone would equate a pirated download as a sales loss. There is no cost in replicating data other than the bandwidth, so there is minimal if any cost to the industry. The reason people pirate are due to convenience and having limited money. I would wager maybe 50 percent of people who pirate any one item would pay for it if they couldn't pirate it, and I would also say that its probably a safe bet that its less than that.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
The problem with these studies is they equate 100% of downloads with sales, when more likely 5% at best would have been sales, more likely lower. Especially since portable games are such small files, the people who pirate them feel encouraged to download every single game that comes out, no matter how awful and even if they never even intend to boot it up, just to "collect" them.
The stricter the DRM, the more reason to get a pirated version than a legit one, because it will be more user friendly.
DRM only prevents large scale piracy until someone cracks it. Heavy DRM doesn't make more people buy something. Those that wouldn't buy in any case, wait. Maybe even some that would buy also wait, because they might prefer to buy it but use the cracked version for reduced hassle.
We are all God's parents.
You have to PAY for using the library?
I have a DS and a flash card for it. I only own three games, but then again, I never really play the DS. Most of my pirated games are Japanese versions of weird things I hear about on the internet. 2 of the 3 I own I had pirated copies of before buying the real copy.
I have about 15 games for the 360. They're all legally purchased (although about half were bought used, which many publishers would consider piracy anyhow...)
I've also got a PSP, unmodified, with about 10 games. Every one of them was bought at the recommendation of several friends who had pirated them.
OK, so I'm a outlier on the graph of video game players...but you can't say no one buys any games. At the very least, there's myself and my friends.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
... look how easy it is to screw up when you are using imaginary numbers in fantasy settings to demonstrate nonsense. It's really quite easy to drop a few zeros... (my bad... math fail. 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
$41.5 billion is many things, but not "free"...
This message was brought to you by Sarcasm and Troll Feeders United (STFU)
$41.5 billion is a lot of things, but "free" is not one of them...
This message was brought to you by Sarcasm and Troll Feeders United (STFU)
"The true cost of piracy would probably be better estimated by figuring the average purchase rate for game players and then multiplying that by the percentage of people who pirate games. It gives much lower but more accurate and realistic numbers."
But thats exactly what industries DO NOT WANT... accurate and realistic numbers. It is far easier to throw out a 5 trillion dollar amount out there because the dartboard said so than to actually do work figuring it out.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Looks like the industry shills are out in force.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
I undestand perfectly. If you'd actually read the post instead of going on a superiority crusade, you would have read that I was expressly making the point that a download does not equal a purchase, and that the article authors weren't making that point either. The ORIGINAL ARTICLE, not "Gamasutra's opinion on the original article", is about the retail value of pirated copies. Ie, if you make an illegal copy of a $100 game, if that game was a legal copy, would be worth $100 to the copyright holder. The article doesn't even try to make the claim that downloaders would ever purchase the game, that's purely a spin that the western gaming sites reviewing the article have tried to put on it in order to discredit it. It's using values as a measure of scale of piracy, because telling people "800,000,000 copies" means absolutely nothing. It's about the scale of the piracy, not it's value.
As for 390:1 downloads:purchases, the point isn't that 390 people would have purchased it, at all. Again, reading isn't your forte. The remark was on the scale of piracy. MW2 was the best-sold game in Aus this year. And there were almost 400 copies of it downloaded for every copy sold. SCALE. OF. PIRACY.
Don't worry - you're not alone. Nearly every idiot on this thread has been making arguments against statements that the original article never said. Instead, debating against comments made by commentators who never knew what they were talking about in the first place.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk