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DRM-Free Game Suffers 90% Piracy, Offers Amnesty
bonch writes "Independent game Machinarium, released without DRM by developer Amanita Design, has only been paid for by 5-10% of its users according to developer Jakub Dvorsky. To drive legitimate sales, they are now offering a 'Pirate Amnesty' sale until August 12, bundling both the cross-platform game and its soundtrack for $5. Ron Carmel, designer of DRM-free puzzle game World of Goo, stated that his game also had about an 80-90% piracy rate, claiming that the percentage of those pirating first and purchasing later was 'very small.' He said, 'We're getting good sales through WiiWare, Steam, and our website. Not going bankrupt just yet!'"
The 90% piracy rate is quite much the norm with PC games. The sad thing is that PC gamers will destroy their own gaming platform by doing so. Good example is Modern Warfare 2 which was heavily "consolised" and you have to admit, not having dedicated servers and everything else sucks.
This also shows that the usual argument that warez versions of games are good to get to know the game before you buy it or that you would rather support indie developers and "small guys" are mostly bullshit. These indie game developers also have a 80-90% piracy rate.
But you know what the next step to prevent piracy will be?
Fully online games. You can already see this with the Ubisoft's DRM, the recent Starcraft 2 and the movement to multiplayer, co-op (left4dead), and mmo games. Personally I actually enjoy playing with other people especially in a good co-op game, but there are those who prefer single player games. I prefer with games like Civilization too. But ultimately this piracy will lead to most serious developers just to publish fully online games like World of Warcraft. While you can play it freely with piracy servers, it's really far from the real experience. Game developers will also look more into console development, because for example you still can't pirate games for PS3.
Will these game designers grow bitter at the reality of pirate thievery, or will they grow old and poor wallowing in idealism?
Without DRM, everyone can pirate. With DRM, only a minority can pirate -- and only a minority complain.
Why ever release a game without copy protection?
And yet Paradox Interactive has managed to build a thriving company releasing buggy games with no DRM at all. Oh, they do get around to patching the bugs eventually, and their games end up pretty darned good if your into the strategy genre. But the only difference between a legitimate, registered owner and someone with a pirated copy is that the legitimate user can use a "metaserver" to hook up for multi-player. That's it. No copy protection.
For a company that's only 12 years old, they've produced or published over 50 titles.
Or wait, maybe the companies that whine about piracy hurting their sales refuse to admit that their games are crap, and that's what's hurting their sales.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Paradox. But I do enjoy their games.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Just so we can compare...
No sig today...
I'm at least in the clear. Bought the game twice, the second time on steam because I realized I won't play a game on a pc unless I own it there.
Wow, I didn't realize the numbers were that high. The best strategy seems to have the game phone home and login when starting. I don't know why they still make me dig around for the DVD to put in the drive even when it phones home. Kindof anoying.
It's 90% piracy for DRM'd stuff too. Wasn't there something a while back about iPhone apps having about 10x as many users as people who paid? That was DRM'd.
Same thing with Stereophonics too: large numbers of downloads, proportion of sales: less than 10%. But they still made a whopping big profit.
The question becomes "did I make my money back?". IF you did, then everything beyond that's just gravy. And enjoy it. Don't look at what you "could've won" because you'll only see that as how much you've lost. Look at what you HAVE.
That 90 % of the people using a game are using a pirated version in no way means that these 90 % would have bought the game if it had not been possible to pirate it, though.
Queue all the Pirates claiming for proof that the numbers are correct, proof that any one Pirate would have bought the game legitimately, and sentiments of entitlement revolving around how since Machinarium wasn't that great a game, people are entitled to steal it.
I don't know how people can doublethink away the idea that Pirates stealing 5x the number of copies being sold legitimately for a top selling game somehow DOESN'T hurt the industry.
Let's say you release a DRM-free game and it attracts 1,000,000 players, 100,000 of whom pay you. The question you should be asking isn't "how can I get money out of the 900k people who are playing but not paying" but "how many of my 100,000 paying customers would I have lost had I released it with DRM". DRM reduces the value of your product; getting rid of intrusive DRM adds value. I can't tell you how many games I've bought at full retail and then promptly downloaded a crack or no-cd patch because the DRM got in the way of me enjoying the game I just paid for.
DRM is a fantasy. Snake oil. It doesn't work. It's been proven time and time again for the last 25 years. EVERY copy protection system ever devised has been defeated quickly. You can't stop people from copying software by any means short of crippling the hardware, and (as the jailbreakers and console modders have shown) even THAT doesn't work in the long run.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
i want to know how they get this data. does the software call home and they track the number of unique ip's or mac addresses?
Stardock games are non-DRM and seem to have strong sales. Supposedly Sins of A Solar Empire has sold 100,000s of copies.
I pirated the game and enjoyed it. At times it got a bit frustrating but in general it was very good. I like the idea of an amnesty like this, so much so that I've now stepped up and paid.
civ 5 will have steam drm and open moding but online only still along way away with the usa poor high speed ISP and caps.
DSL low speeds and comcast's caps will kill onlive also. My only choices are ATT DSL or comcast cable. I also can get wow cable but there tv line up and hd line up sucks. NO MLB NETWORK, NO NFL NETWORK, NO CSN + HD and more.
Starcraft 2 lack of LAN was to control pro gameing. I think there was some kind of legal case in south korea over pro gameing and blizzard.
I've been waiting for a while now for this game to be in my price range. I did not pirate the game and I'm not buying it now out of guilt. It's just that I think this flash game is worth $5. I decided that from playing the official demo.
It just finished downloading now. I'll go exercise those neurons.
The ratio of how many people pirate the game is irrelevant. This is not lost sales, this is people who wouldn't have bought the game anyway.
As with many things game related, Penny Arcade says it best. In the struggle between pirates and game-makers, only the pirates win.
Qxe4
But gets a front page story on Slashdot and Ars Technica. Not sure what the advertising value is of that but I have to believe it's pretty substantial. Hopefully it puts a dent in however many actual lost sales that 90% piracy rate translates to.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
From what I understand, this game has absolutely no internet functionality and no DRM. How would they be able to get the percent piracy rate if they have absolutely no idea how many copies of the game are out there, only how many people bought the game? This story has appeared on every tech site I visit regularly. It's clear that they just pulled the 90% rate out of their @$$ so that they could generate interest and sympathy.
Let me tell you of a game called subspace, it was a 2d multi player shooting game with small spaceships, do a google search if you want to find more about it but i bet a lot of you remember it.
At the height of its popularity there was over 1 million player plus playing this small free game.
Then sony took an interest.
They bought the game and put it on there Sony station platform as a pay to play game and the 1 million plus players drop instantly to 100k players(im not sure about the exact number but i do know that the vast majority drooped playing the game)
Even though a lot of people did not continue to play it enough still did to make it a good business decision i guess but that is not what this post is about.
What it is about is when you offer something for free(i know it was not offered for free btw its just a comparison example) compared with with purchasing it there will always be around 10x the amount of people who would play it for free compared to the amount that would buy it.
The statistics shown in the article above just show that. It does not mean that the 90% of players who pirated it would have paid for it all it shows is that given the choice more people would play the game freely about 10x the amount that would buy it thats all.
I see game companies continue to use piracy as an excuse for the lack of sales of their utterly crap games. I can't wait to see Sega claim no one wanted to buy Alpha Protocol because of piracy. UBI claims that pretty much 99% of the time now with the utter crap Silent Hunter 5 is (It couldn't be because of the bad reviews on forums and all. NO WAY! It was piracy!). So I call bullshit on this. Yet, somehow Valve doesn't seem to have this problem nor Paradox, or even the Russian publisher 1C. Perhaps if you game companies made your games more enjoyable like these publishers I've listed, I might buy your game.
How many of those "pirates" live in places where $20 is a more than a whole day's wage?
That depends. Into the native languages of how many such places have the games in question been localized?
This Myth? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_(series)
Yeah i can see how that wouldn't be much fun if you just clicked on random things and watched what happened.
That'd be like saying chess would be a lot easier if you just flung the pieces at each other.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I will never buy a flash game. DRM free game using a ugly and bad implemented API? No way
Is there an online part to this game? Can they see 10-20 times as many players online as how many have paid?
Or did they just find it on some torrent site and multiplied the number of downloads by a 1000 (and assumed they all liked the game and are still playing it)?
We are all God's parents.
Follow the logic...
Piracy = !Bad
Piracy = Copyright Infringement
GPL = Copyright
GPL Infringment = !Bad
Well, I'm off to infringe the GPL as it's not bad to do that apparently.
The best strategy [...] until you go out of business or stop supporting the game.
One could look at this as a ploy to avoid cannibalization. If you stop supporting a product and it stops working, then your newer products no longer have to compete in the market with your older ones. EA is known to do this with its annual sports games. If your company goes out of business and its products stop working, then products from your new company no longer need to compete with those from the old.
The best strategy seems to have the game phone home and login when starting.
And then you shut out the market of laptop users. People who find that they would have spend 720 USD per year for mobile broadband service just to use your product will likely choose your competitor's instead.
This reminds me of Infantry, also bought by SOE I loved that game. It went p2p, I loved it enough to pay for it but then got stopped because it lost its 'feel'.
Apparently it's free now.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
The other 75% are pure fabrication!
So the "90% piracy" quote is attributed to a person who pirated then bought World of Goo, contacted the publisher and told them that 90% of the users pirate their game. Well, if that isn't just the most reliable number out there, they add that they found 500 seeders and 300 leechers on Bittorrent. No word on what those seeders were seeding.
A little DRM goes a long way. Since publishers, developers, indies all seem to come and go, my problem is most likely going to be with their lack of reliability and permanence than my "piracy" (non-existent). I do play games from my library dating back almost 20 years - and if a game is any good I expect to do so over the next 20 years. Without this assurance (and most DRM fails to give any), I will not buy any game until it hits the bargain bin. However, no DRM at all might be too generous, too tempting. Steam as an independent repository makes it possible to buy otherwise DRMed games with some hope of a future. So does GOG. They also make some effort to have the most recent version. Works for me so I trade with them and not the publisher / developer. I think that the various players in this market will finally figure it out and move away from boxed, weirdly DRMed and from DRM free - and use a little DRM to keep things honest.
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
It's called a price versus demand curve. As the price tends towards zero the demand increases infinitely. Since there are practical limits, demand at free plateaus at about 10x demand at the original price. This isn't about people being able to afford the games. They just don't value these games at their original prices. There's nothing you can do about it. DRM'ing the game to high heaven won't make those people who don't value the game suddenly purchase it. You're not going to suddenly increase your sales by an order of magnitude. You likely won't even increase it, unless you lower your prices. That's why those ridiculous sales on Steam are so popular. Highly rated games for incredibly cheap prices on holidays or whatever other special day comes up attracts lots of customers.
I'm not saying game prices are too high. In fact based on the rate of inflation I'm worried that the gaming market will bottom out as publishers are unable to raise their game prices to even match inflation, let alone the increasing costs of game development. But that "90% piracy rate" is totally misleading. These are not people who would have bought your game had DRM been implemented.
Those are two of the only three games that I've bought in the last year, the third being Armageddon Empires. I think, in retrospect, that I would probably not have bought those games if I could have just downloaded it, although, part of the reason why I bought it was that the money was going to support developers. I didn't bother looking too hard for pirated versions, though. I think the lesson here is that I would buy games if I couldn't find a pirated version AND if I they were independent and had an interesting premise. Then again, being unemployed with no source of income probably has something to do with this penny-pinching.
It's like an old Hypercard game, or Myth, you just wildly click on random things and then sometimes things happen.
I think the game you're think of is Myst.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Do you mean Myst? That was a great game!
I bought World of Goo and let a few of my friends copy it. I wanted to be nice and give some payback to 2D Boy, so I bought some 2D Boy tshirts (they are fairly expensive, btw). That way they got some payment for the 2-3 friends who I let borrow the game, but I get something practical instead of a few more useless discs and packaging. Technically, though, I guess I still pirated the game (or at least let my friends pirate it)?
I'm guessing that most of the 'pirates' who really are downloading the game for free and not giving anything back are folks who played about 10 minutes of the game and junked it. Or gave something back in some other way. Still though, 90% seems high. Where did they get that number from?
Anyways, it's the same old argument that's been kicking around for years. Because somebody downloaded it for free means it is a 'lost' sale? Hardly. I know friends who got obsessed with downloading gazillions of MP3s off the 'net, most of which they probably will never listen to. They never would have purchased most of them anyways.
There are far more people on the 'net that can't afford to pay full price for games than can. So why should it be surprising that piracy rates are high?
The only way to rule this out as the explanation for high piracy rates would be to sell localized versions at extremely low prices, that most internet users can actually afford. Did this indie game get sold that way? I doubt it.
When I was younger, I pirated a lot of games. I had little spending money and a lot of free time. Now for the situation has reversed, I have money to buy a lot of games, but little free time to actually play them. So with the exception of games from a couple studios (Blizzard and Valve), I only buy games when they pass my impulse buy threshold. That way if I am more likely to get value out of the purchase even if I don't end up playing it that much.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Last month it was the post about Osmos, and that was fun too. I am really liking this trend of supporting Windows, Mac AND Linux versions, AND throwing in the soundtrack as a freebie with the game. They've got my five bucks.
That was my first thought, who in their right mind would pay for World of Goo?
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
This looks like a sopssa post... creating new accounts, are we?
Your faggoty trolling finally caught up to you.
I think that it is a VERY difficult metric to determine how many lost sales this means.
For instance, I purchased World of Goo in Wii Ware but I also grabbed it for the PC without paying.
Another example is when a person would not have purchased the software but downloaded it because it was 'free'.
Adobe Photoshop or Autodesk 3DS max are excellent examples of what I am describing, the VAST majority of people who pirate these programs would NEVER purchase them because of their cost, they would use Paint.net, pbrush, buy something cheaper etc. So each person that pirates 3DS max isnt a lost sale, only a small percentage is.
With a game I would say that the 'lost sale' rate is many times higher than with a professional software BUT I doubt that they lost 80% of their income on this game from piracy, probably some fraction of that. Totally unscientific guess here would be 30-40% lost sales due to piracy.
They are just comparing sales with completed torrents. It's actually a conservative estimate since there are other forms of piracy like private servers.
Yes, Korean law states that (in non legal terms): You may do what you want with what you bought.
Kespa (korean e-sports association) ran SC:BW tournaments for many years on LAN and Blizzard couldn't do anything about that. Now that they would have to connect to the blizzard servers to play, Kespa would need to have authorization to host tournaments (which they won't get because Blizzard has already chosen GomTV to organize the tournaments)
I just bought this. Probably not going to play it for a long time though, since they don't have a .deb. yet. I bought the Humble Indie Game Bundle for $20, but the only game out of it that I've actually played is World of Goo since it was the only one with a proper install file. Hopefully I won't have to deal with weird issues like that once the Ubuntu Software Center gets proper software purchasing support.
Maybe they didn't want to fill out their phone number and address to buy the game. Which also happens to be why I didn't buy it.
If the DRM'd stuff doesn't get in my way I'll still pay for the game. While annoyed during the era of CD based copy protection due to my very noisy drive, I still bought the games. And many people, including myself, don't like to waste their time finding the right crack for a pirated game. It's a big time sink searching on the shadier parts of the internet.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
No need to pay for marketing. Just put it on Slashdot.
This is the only way to keep PC gaming platform as alive. It's better than other DRM and no-DRM solution, in fact it is the best DRM solution ever invented in the earth.
Man, I bought world of Goo.
I wish I'd pirated it first to check it out though.
The game sucks
Couldn't you have tried the demo? I thought it did a pretty good job of showing what the game was like. (Personally, I enjoyed the game so for me it was money well spent.)
Your logic may be strong but the groupthink here is stronger.
Mod me down too please.
So now downloading games that are freely available for download is still called piracy?
Such a point of view is just pathetic.
Paradox Interactive has a great system where users have to register with their serial number in order to post in or view certain areas of their vBulletin forum. There's no in game DRM. It's completely unobtrusive but there's a lot of peer pressure to register games (anyone posting in the General Discussion areas for support almost immediately gets told to register their game and post in the support area). I'm not sure how piracy rates are figured but I'd be curious to see what theirs is--I'd imagine they do better than average.
I've never even heard of this game before this article. Even visting the website, I'm still not sure what kind of game it is, let alone feeling any need to download even the demo.
Bill Gates reached the same conclusion decades ago, in 1976.
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
So what?
The "piracy rate" is a totally bogus number. It doesn't mean anything. Most importantly, what it definitely not means is "lost sales". You can't do mathematics with an illusionary number. It's like me saying the Bogeyman number is 12.5 - it doesn't mean anything. You can't say "oh wow, that means for today (8h), I earned (8*12.5 = 100) a hundred dollars!" Uh, no. Same thing, taking a "piracy rate" number and multiplying it by another made-up number (say, "potential conversion rate") and then multiplying it by an arbitrarily set number-with-unit (sales price) to arrive at a totally made-up number and then call that "loss due to piracy" is just dishonest.
I'll be interested in the results of this guy, but my guess is any additional sales have nothing to do with piracy and everything with advertisement.
Do yourself a favour and step away from this movie-and-music-industry created phantom that piracy == lost sales. There is something called "structural unemployment", to use a non-car metaphor. What it means is that you can never, ever, have 0% unemployment. There are always people without a job, even if there are a hundred open positions for every person looking for one. You have people on the move, people who just quit and haven't yet signed up for a new one, some people are just impossible to employ, and so on. You always have some unemployment that you can not get rid of no matter what you do (aside from playing statistics tricks).
Same thing with piracy, just on a different scale. No matter what DRM you use, no matter how low the price, no matter what else, there will always be people who don't pay for your game.
I've said this before. Think about your players as being in three groups:
1.) the ones that will certainly buy your game
2.) the ones that may or may not buy your game
3.) the ones that will certainly not buy your game
where 3.) includes the pirates. People who download your game from a torrent have all sorts of reasons to do so, most of them you can't do anything about. My advise is to ignore them and focus on the undecided bunch. The ones who may buy the game if you can catch their interest. Which you more likely do with more polish than with better DRM.
And yes, I do sell stuff online. I don't care about pirates. The extend of my "anti-piracy" measure is that you get the download link after paying, and that's it. Any and all DRM is a waste of time and money.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Too many people get stuck on statistics. Statistics are a way to avoid discussing real issues.
People who obtain paid content for free are always trying to bring moral and ideological justification to their actions. Just admit you pirate because you want stuff for free, you are not an activist or a rebel. If you truly believe in causes such as ending DRM or take down the recording industry's business model, get your ass out of your chair and do something real about it.
For all I know, 90% of gamers are like me. I once bought a game I hated, thereafter I *never* buy a game I can't sample first.
And no, teasers don't count. You will never convince me that the carefully prepared demo in your website accurately reflects the overall game. I download the full game from a torrent and then, if I really like it, I buy it. Otherwise I just forget all about it.
I happen to forget about 90% of the games I download, so I believe that 90% figure is about right. Only thing is it tells much more about the general crap that current games are, rather than about the ethics of game players.
I bought Machinarium... and I pirate the hell out of PC and console games:)
And ya, that's the real question. We know people pirate games, both with and without DRM. The question is does DRM make a statistically significant difference in piracy rate? If it doesn't then it is de facto worthless. After all the only reason to have it is to reduce piracy rates so if it doesn't why have it?
Now, if the answer is it does lower the piracy rate by a non-trivial amount the next question is does it increase sales? Less copies being pirated doesn't mean more being sold. You have to check it both ways. Unless you are generating more sales, it doesn't do you any good either.
So assuming it does increase sales, then the final question is does it increase sales enough to cover the costs of DRM. There are three main costs:
1) The cost of the DRM itself. Off the shelf DRM solutions cost money up front, and generally royalties per copy sold. If you develop your own there is the cost you pay developers to work on it. In both cases, there is implementation costs.
2) The cost of support. People will have trouble with it, you'll have to have support staff for it. You cannot very well sell someone something that doesn't work due to DRM and say "Oh, sorry, nothing we can do."
3) Lost sales due to people who don't like it. I don't know how big that is, but it does happen. I personally will not buy any new Ubisoft title. Both Settlers 7 and Assassin's Creed 2 were on my list until their new DRM came out. No, I haven't pirated them, I just play other games (I've got about 40 games on Impulse 50 on Steam and more in boxes).
So for DRM to be worth it, it needs to cover the costs of implementation and then some in terms of a sales increase. What I would like to know is if it does this. I don't know that any company has studied it. they mostly seem to take on faith that DRM works.
Depends if OnLive only focus on the US market or whether they sell to Europeans and South Koreans who have significantly better broadband options available.
A few things about me: I originally pirated World Of Goo as someone had ported it to the Mac before 2D Boy got round to it. When the Mac version appeared, I bought it. In fact, I own four copies now - I purchased it, and it was also featured in three separate bundles of software I've bought, and a friend also sent me a download for World Of Goo as they didn't want it in their bundle. Also, I don't have a fixed IP address, so every time I play World Of Goo it looks as though another (and why not assume it's pirated?) copy has been stolen...
Is it so unthinkable that other people may be in a similar situation - how are these developers so sure of their figures that they can proudly spurt that only 10% of their users are honest? This is nonsense...
needless to say, Koreans are in the right here
you don't pay royalties to the manufacturer of the hammer you used to build a house and sell it with profit. You paid for the hammer - that's it.
KeSPA did all the legwork to set up everything and now blizzard comes in and says 'pay up, bitches, you use our game'. Yeah, but they don't sell a game, they sell competition between players. Game is merely a tool, 50 bucks a pop.
It's distasteful because greatly Blizzard benefited from increased sales for years thanks to the tv coverage and didn't have to pay a dime for that. Easy money. They got the best marketing possible for free and now they want the cut on top of that.
Someone needs to step in and smack the software industry hard. They do anything they want because they can put whatever in their EULAs and ToSes and with no resistance circumvent common sense, basic user rights, first sale doctrines and whatnot.
http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
I haven't played the game, nor purchased it, but I have a big problem with their statistics: They basically took the unique IPs and divided by the number of sales. That might have been somewhat accurate in the 1980s.
It's utter rubbish. People often have laptops. Today, my laptop will have at least 2 IPs. There are days that I've had 5 different ones, from different locations. (Actually probably more than that, considering that the university likes to subnet by building, which probably means that there are another 2 IPs. (possibly per day, unless their DHCP assigns the same one))
So if I'd purchased the game, and played it on my laptop at various times throughout the day, over a week, I could very easily account for 10 IPs alone. The same methodology applied to Steam, could easily lead to Steam being well over 50% pirated.
I just do not see how anyone can actually say that a 90% piracy rate is an acceptable outcome. Making a popular game is nice, but in all seriousness being paid for your work is nicer. Money may not buy happiness, but I think we can rest assured that poverty wont make you happy either.
Yes, I will absolutely concede that if there were a perfect DRM system in place it is entirely possible that the game may not have sold quite as much as it has even now. I will also concede that the piracy has probably magnified the word of mouth awareness of the game. And not every one who pirates a game would have paid for it anyway.
But for anyone who is actually trying to make a living developing games, I can say with certanty that I would prefer to not make a sale due to someone not wanting to pay for the game and choosing not to play it then to not make a sale due to someone pirating the game outright. And until someone can create a truly repeatable and verifiable experiment that can compare how many people pay for a game with no DRM vs how many pay for it with effectively perfect DRM, no one is going to be able to say with 'bet your right testicle on it' certainty whether wholesale piracy is a good thing.
I am not saying that totally intrusive DRM that blocks legitimate use is the best answer here. But I am sure that allowing 90% piracy is not the solution either.
END COMMUNICATION
I went to the website, never heard of it. Played the demo. It has such a high rate of piracy, because quite frankly it is terrible. Monty Python meets Monkey Island/Sam & Max, with none of the humor or fun. It was fine when it was 8-bit. Not so fine when its 256bit and 5 dollars.
Never heard of it but I downloaded first and purchased later with Mass Effect and X3.
With Mass Effect I missed the first one but heard about the second. I downloaded the first one, played it and liked it a lot. So I went out and purchased Mass Effect 1 and 2.
With X3, I used to play X3 a lot and never payed for it. I purchased X3 Terran Conflict, saw the original during checkout and purchased it as well.
So my point is, if your game does not suck then people will pay for it.
Looking at Machinarium's website gives me a headache and I have not learned anything about this game except what I found under "About". I personally like screenshot or gameplay footage. If your marketing is as bad as your webdesign then it is no surprise that your game does not sell.
I wasn't aware the game existed, tried the little demo and it seems cool, certainly worth $5 - so I just bought a copy.
Most piracy losses are imaginary. Most pirates are people who wouldn't buy the game even if it were a nickel.
However, the economics of piracy are simple. For any game there is an optimum price for maximizing income. If the game is priced too high, people won't buy it. If it is priced too low, the additional sales don't make up for the lost income. This price is going to be different for any game, though, depending upon demand.
DRM isn't going to change that. Piracy rates on games with DRM are no lower than those without.
The problem is that indie developers look at the prices that the large developers get for games and say "Ultimate Modern Warfare Battlefield Premier Edition" is $70 so I'm going to price "Bouncing Crystaltris Supreme" at $20 so it will be cheap in comparison. The problem is that the optimum price of UMWBPE is actually around $15, but LubiArts can't charge that because everyone knows new games go for $70, and $15 is for the bargain bin. Assuming the ratio of price holds, that would put the optimum price of "Bouncing Crystaltris Supreme" at $4
Unfortunately it appears that nobody in the gaming industry ever took an economics course, so the only solution to piracy you'll get out of them is higher prices and additional DRM.
The best way of pricing, might actually be an auction scheme. Where price is associated with demand, with the seller limiting daily or hourly supply.
Support SETI@home
What the hell did that come from????
I say: Look at what you made, not what you think you lost.
You say: can I nick all your stuf
Whisky Tango Foxtrot???
Nah, you're just an asshole.
That is how much the company behind farmville makes. I don't care how much of that goes to facebook, they are still rolling in it.
WoW? 10 million paying subscribers.
Star Craft 2? Biggest seller.
So? PC gaming is dying because of piracy? Don't think so.
It is dying because there are companies fleecing customers. HOW DARE YOU release a PUZZLE game and expect to get rich of it? The times are changing. Now such puzzle games are everywhere on free to play flash sites. Sure sure, your puzzle game is different, it is more. Well fuck that, nobody cares. Casual gamers need CASUAL games for CASUAL prices. You want to serve that market, you play by its rules.
And if you don't? Then get 100 million dollars somewhere and make a triple A title that people are dying to play.
Yes, once a guy with an idea could create a game. The last one to do it was Chris Sawyer, from * Tycoon fame and he stopped doing it.
Game publishers are like horse breeders complaining about cars. If you no longer can make a living with your craft, then though titties. Switch. Yeah, so maybe copyright infringement will mean the end of game and music and movie and book production. We will see it when it happens and deal with it.
Stop whining about the fact that the world changes. Either change with it, or become a fossil.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The argument "people who pirate the game wouldn'd have bought it anyway" is bogus. Ask yourself this... If there was no culture of piracy, how big would the purchasing segment for games be versus with a culture of piracy. I bet a good percentage of the people who pirate today would be purchasers instead of non-players.
Tour and make money that way you greedy bastard !!
I've been SHARING with friends (mostly from Russia, wouldnyano) since I was 10 and I don't see any reason to change. You are the one that needs to change! Change your business method! Don't expect me to. I don't have to! I like it the way it is!!
So, I've been meaning to buy Machinarium for ages, but hadn't pirated it. If I buy it now, the developers will assume I that I did! Perhaps I should put in a comment into my order: "I'm not a pirate, honest!" (I'm still disappointed I had to give up on Limbo cos I'm too scared of spiders....)
This is something I have suspected for a long time. It is only speculation, but I am sure that they would have gained more paying customers with a DRM scheme than they would have lost. So no matter how much I might hate DRM in principle, it really is a necessary evil because it provides the incentive for companies to invest more money into better games. However, there are good and bad ways of doing DRM. I remember buying Far Cry 2 on a DVD, and the DRM was such a disaster that it wouldn't run at all simply because I had Alcohol 120 installed! From that day on I have only used Steam to buy games, and I am very satisfied. If I want to reinstall Windows or buy a new computer, Steam will completely reinstall every game I have ever bought, fully patched and ready to play. With large games like Company of Heroes that have a a gazillion patches, the price of a game on Steam is well worth the time I would have to spend getting a pirated or CD version up and running. So if I had to buy the game again, I would pass up this "Pirates Amnesty" version and buy it for four times as much on Steam. I am paying for convenience in the future.
Hey, maybe World of Goo wouldn't be pirated so much if 2D Boy kept the promises they made.
I speak of the profanity pack, an addon that was promised to those that pre-ordered. Game was released in late 2008, with pre-orders in what, mid or early 2008? So we're quite over 2 years with this promise going undelivered. They've really made no mention of it on the site or forums or anywhere, and will not respond to support requests asking about it.
Thusly, fuck them. Pirate away, I say. Actually here, have a torrent: http://www.kickasstorrents.com/world-of-goo-skidrow-t3206835.html
Firstly it is much much more complicated than that. There are in fact 4 group from which the original developper get/do not get money:
1* paying customer
2* non paying customer without money
3* non paying customer with disposable income but not that interrested in the game
4* non paying customer with disposable income but interrested in the game
5* second hand market
So where does DRM play in ? Firstly let us separate the Indy issues to the huge commercial issues. Secondly 2 and 3 are never really the problem of the company. they tell you it is, but only to justify DRM. The huge commercial outlet (EA etc...) not only money from 4 but also increasingly money from 5 is an added nice effect from DRM. At the same time they have to pay attention that the DRM isn't so much an hassle as to freak out. The wet dream of such outfit is to force as much as possible 4 to become 1 and stop utterly 5 to happen. 2 and 3 are not so much a factor due to marketing.
For indy the situation is a bit diffferent as the word of mouth do happen to increase their sales. So what if you stop 2 and 3 ? Most Indy I know of don't have that much marketing and work by word of mouth. Supressing 2 and 3 will come at a cost : it will refduce 1 as the word of mouth won#t spread as much. 5 is not an issue with Indy.
So in your hypothetical example, by trying to get back 10% more, they might actually be slashing toroughly their sale by 50%.
The result is as follow : in your business estimate on how many people will be interrested by your game, pre study and so on, slash that number by 10, to get your 10% customer. If you are still in the black ink, then pursue your business idea. If not, forget it, you will only be one of the whiner of the piracy wambulance. You CANNOT change human nature.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I have a close group of friends. One of them is an avid pirate. He pirates everything he can, even though he has a job and plenty of expendable money. If he can't pirate something, he just never plays it. None of his downloads have been a lost sale. (not saying that justifies it! just that it's a measurable fact)
The rest of us have stopped pirating in our old age, finding actually buying games to be much less of a headache, due in big part to Steam.
There have been numerous times, where our pal has pirated a game and then told us all about it, leading to several purchases that we may not have made without his recommendation. World of Goo being a recent example. I had heard of it but didn't pay it any attention, I never buy puzzle games so I never gave it another though. Then my friend told us he knew we would love it, with its gameplay and art style and music all being perfect for us. I, as well as a couple other people in our group, picked it up on Steam and thoroughly enjoyed it. So in that particular case, his download led to multiple sales that wouldn't have happened otherwise. That's not the only time that has happened. (of course the inverse is true, he's pirated games we've considered buying and warned us that they aren't worth it - Borderlands for instance)
Does that justify it? Is that a morally acceptable alternative to review sites? No, piracy is still piracy. However it just goes to illustrate some of the key things about the whole issue:
* Your game will be pirated whether it has mega-DRM or none
* Not every pirate is a lost sale
* Some pirates lead to further sales
* It is impossible to measure accurately as everyone's individual experience is exactly that, their own individual experience
I don't think this helps find some grand solution or anything, I just believe that anyone arguing piracy issues in black and white is doing it wrong, regardless of which side they stand on. Though I find myself feeling that way about almost every issue..
If that's the only way to keep it alive, let it die.
Really.
A game without DRM was illegally downloaded 9 times for each purchase. That's about all you can say. Whether those people would have bought it or not is another matter.
I even bought the vinyl soundtrack, just thought it was brilliant. now, it is very sad that such nice games are getting pirated and people apparently can't tell the difference between this little gem and megacrap games like Modern Warfare and just pirate both. I think it would be clever for PC gamers to reward refreshing and actually imaginative games by paying for them and pirate the daylights out of the boring megaproductions the market is flooded with; this would generally increase the innovation in PC gaming and allow smaller studios to keep on coding fun games without having to rely on megacompanies like EA and Activision who only see immediate and massive profit. Can't blame PC gamers for pirating, most recent games are shit, it is very rare nowadays to see anything truly imaginative from the big names...
I had never head of it until now, so the good thing for them about this (silly) 'Pirate Amnesty' campaign is that they finally reached me with news of their product; the bad thing is due to hearing about the game this way: I will never purchase it.
Cases in point:
* Indie games don't sell at $20, period. This "amnesty sale" is more of an attempt at clever marketing to advertise the game going on sale for $5, the price point at which most people would actually consider buying a digital copy of a low-budget title. If they had sold at this price to begin with, there would have been less piracy. However, the piracy that occurred won exposure to the game, leading to some sales where there otherwise would not have been any interest.
* The most successful game platforms of all time have all been easy to pirate with. The PC, the NDS, the PlayStation 1/2. How does piracy help? Simple: pirates will buy hardware if they can get free software. And once they have the hardware, there is an OPTION to buy software. Without the hardware, there will be zero software sales. Without piracy, there will be less hardware. So, take for example the NDS, the best-selling handheld of all time and is trivially easy to pirate with. If it had a foolproof DRM, millions upon millions of Chinese users would never have even purchased it. But because NDS games are incredibly easy to pirate, Nintendo sold those millions of NDS units. And every day, millions of NDS games are purchased as gifts to give to those NDS owners, in spite of the fact that millions more are pirated. Reducing the piracy to 0 for those games would also reduce the sales to 0 for those games. Piracy is a selling point for any platform.
* Look how successful Blu-ray platforms are. Oh wait, copying BDs isn't practical yet and they cost $30 for a movie to boot. Which is why BD players and movie sales are still lagging behind obsolete DVDs. And how successful have PS3 games been compared to the more pirate-friendly 360 and Wii? It's dead last in this console generation despite its predecessors being the most successful consoles of all time.
* DRM costs sales. True, the casual buyer doesn't really care about DRM. They also don't care if the game is any good to begin with. So if you release a title like Sims or Starcraft, you're going to sell millions regardless and any statistical comparison regarding piracy and sales is lost in the noise. Either way the company is going to earn millions and most of it will be absorbed by CEO bonuses. Where DRM actually matters is in the smaller games that aren't guaranteed 7-figure sales. Who plays these smaller, less popular games? Probably hardcore gamers. Who is more likely to care about DRM? Probably hardcore gamers. What does that mean for the game? It means that they're desperately looking for a sale and just talked themselves out of one.
* DRM is a vicious cycle. DRM lowers the value of any game, so people are less likely to buy and more likely to pirate or buy a console version that doesn't have DRM. In the case where the game is pirated, the publisher simply adds more DRM hoping to change the situation but it never does. In the case where the user buys a console version, they then turn it around to GameStop and it fuels the secondary market from which the publisher derives no revenue. Which for them is the same effect as piracy (people playing the game without giving them money). So no matter what steps the publisher takes, the pirates who don't pay always win in the end. The people who lose are the paying customers that get screwed, and the pirates who otherwise would have bought the game. And since neither of these people will buy games from the publisher anymore, the publisher is the biggest loser of all.
Everyone know that 69% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
The internet is full of examples of DRM protected video that is not broken either.
Any noninteractive work can be copied through analog reconversion.
Are the supposed 10% that bought the game, going to get a partial refund? Seems like a bad idea for future customers. Buy our game at full price, pirates can get it at a massive discount.
Seem to encourage piracy, or at least not buying the game initially: I didn't pirate the game, I am just waiting for the pirate amnesty.....
It seems to me these indie developers have found that it is quite lucrative to shout "Everyone is stealing my game."
Of course, they say this and then fire up a nice sales campaign to go along with it. From what I can tell and based on the last charity event world of goo didn't do too bad for a game that was pirated to hell and back. This more or less feels like a free advertising campaign and with a nice price sale to match.
Here is the kicker... regardless of the reasons there will always be piracy in the environment. Continually questioning whether or not these people will have purchased your game is entirely a practice in insanity. The questions that need to be asked are how can you increase your customers base to those who will pay.
My from my vantage this is the simplicity that I can offer.
DRM is a hassle and it doesn't work. You can choose to shit on the customers who buy your things or not. It's kinda like an omelet I had this morning. I didn't want mozzarella and I said specifically I wanted it to be replaced with pepper jack cheese. The lady came back eventually and said we have a policy regarding substitutions, but I could have my preferred cheese for a 1.50. I'm willing to pay more for exactly what it is I want, but the chances of me returning are now getting slimmer. (sic, this better be a damn good omelet). The omelet shows up and pretty much immediately it was not what I asked for. Now, I'm a bit annoyed and my waitress is no where in sight. Eventually I eat my other things and take the shitty fucking omelet I didn't want. I didn't like it and I'm not going back there. At least they removed the 1.50 charge and I saved myself some extra cash by tipping a whole dollar.
The moral of the story is... treat your customers how they want to be treated and they will return. If you feel you can make some sacrifices along the way and keep profits fairly good then you have made a "wise" business decision. (sic, you shit on your customers and they ate it up).
Obviously, this is something that cannot be implemented in a draconian fashion and as a business it requires a certain amount of agile response.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Machinarium is kind of neat. But it is not worth 20 bucks.
I intend to buy it through Steam once it is offered at $5.
Maybe if they started at a more reasonable price, more people would have gone ahead and bought it?
Machinarium was the last game I bought after I bought the Humble Indie bundle.
I haven't bought a mainstream game in years.
However, there are not many people like me.
A long time ago, after being shafted by it, I swore I'd never buy or use any software that used any form of online authentication.
I am still doing that, but I suspect I am one of very few people who do.
I remember the outcry of Windows XP's online activation, but that didn't last long.
The increasingly ludicrous levels of copy protection are inevitable because most people will take all sorts of things up the arse just to play the latest game; Heck, it's even spread to Linux - I was going to buy the Linux version of Jets'n'Guns until I discovered it needed online activation, which the Windows version (Which I had already bought) didn't!
Here are some of the games i absolutely definately would have bought off the shelf, the day it came out, at full price, but did not buy and have not played because of the included DRM.
GTA-4
Silent Hunter 5
Left 4 Dead
Half life 2
Team fortress 2
Portal
Lotsa valve on there, There would probably be more valve, rockstar, & ubisoft titles on the list, but since theyve gone to the dark side i dont even pay any attention to their new releases anymore.
Bethesda on the other hand doesnt require me to login to their server to play SINGLE PLAYER games, and so i still buy pretty much everything they put out.
...my immediate reaction was to buy a copy, downloading now. Also bought The Humble Indie Bundle (pay what you want for five awesome indie games), which has Samarost2.
My point? At $5 I'll impulse purchase it, no worries Bruce.
Could it be that people aren't too thrilled with the idea of purchasing a game and being forced to enter their address, phone number, etc? If I'm paying for the item with paypal WHY should I have to enter that information? They'll get all of that information from my paypal account. Why should I have to enter it into another database so I can get spammed later? I tried to leave my phone number and address off, but it required I enter them. I know I could enter false information, but if i'm paying for it, shouldn't I be entering the correct data.
I just squirmed a little in my seat when I saw I had to enter my address and phone number. Yes, I just spent the $5 and I've never heard of the game until today, and I couldn't get the demo figured out, but I figured for $5 I should take advantage of it.
Oh for goodness sake! forget about the pirates, they'd never buy it anyway! How much are they making and is it enough that's the real question. I've just bought it because it runs on linux (sort of) and I wanted to support it, and yes, it was cheap. I would never have paid the previous asking price but I think $5 is reasonable for a game delivered digitally. If there was DRM on it I would not have bought it, period.
Say my game would sell 1000 copies on a completely locked down system.
And my game sells 1000 copies and 9000 people pirate it on a DRM free system.
Did I lose anything?
What if my game sold 1050 copies and 8950 people pirated it?
People have a fixed amount to spend on entertainment. It costs about $10,000 to fill a frikin iphone/ipod these days.
Once joey spends his $50 a month on product, it is not costing the content creator a dime of real money if Joey then pirates other products above the $50 a month (unless it lowers his spending below $50 later).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You've just promoted a business model where there is an economic incentive for makers to produce buggy software!
Isn't blizzard in the right as well for SC2? Bliz made a game people will play, under terms blizzard wants. They didn't patch SC1 to this (although I'm sure that's been considered). New game, new rules. Nothing Bliz has implemented in sc2 is lighting up my "do not play or buy" alarm.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Ok, you don't know a thing about the laserdisc--including how to spell it--or its history:
1. The LD format dates to the 70s. VHS movies didn't hit $40 for at least a decade after that. VHS movies were boutique priced during that same period! Home video was in its infancy, with early-adopter prices to match.
2. The LD title selection rivaled or exceeded VHS and DVD for most of each format's commercial life. Many good (obscure) films are still available only on LD.
3. Early LDs as well as all too many later ones were not well-mastered nor well-manufactured for the most part, being a slight upgrade on VHS at most. [Spits in the general direction of Discovision, Technidisc, and SONY-DADC-USA]
4. LDs are the largest product manufactured in a cleanroom, so I don't know why anyone would expect them to be cheap to make. Surely you were old enough whenever you discovered LD not to believe the marketing hype. $5/side was a typical LD-making price, with 2-3 sides typically required.
5. Average LD and DVD prices were nearly equal during the first years of the DVD format's life / the sunset of LD. Short-run boutique LDs were still made (Criterion Collection), with prices to match. Your link to some predictably limited selection of closeout-priced LDs 10 years after the format died doesn't mean much about actual LD prices while the format was alive.
6. LD piracy was held in check, despite the lack of active DRM, by two methods: keeping the prices of LD-R blanks artificially high (upwards of $100 each = zero incentive to pirate v. buy legit) and the few LD-making plants keeping a close watch on what their equipment was doing.
If you were so bothered by Macrovision and friends on your VHS tapes, you could have bought a TBC or equivalent. I can't be troubled to get into the issues with your "why record stores closed" claim. Good job fooling the moderators with the comment, though.
Games are for kids. Leave you weewee alone for two minutes and get a life
I guess I'm one of those rare strange people.
I pirated and then bought both world of goo and Machinarium. World of goo I even bought twice! Once through the pay what you think and a second time through the humble indie bundle. Machinarium I bought the collectors edition from a bricks and mortar shop. I buy on average a new game each month and every single one of them I pirate first. There are also a number of games that I pirate and that I then don't buy. These are the games that fail my shareware test, usually because they are crap. You can't take a game back if it sucks and at $100 a pop it's too expensive to just say oh well I got 30 mins of play out of it thats cool.
Finally there are games that I have pirated and then wanted to buy but didn't. Settlers 7 is the most recent example of that. Always on internet connection and you get booted out of the game if it drops?!?! Not something that works for me.
So does piracy increase my game spend, yes. Does DRM stop me buying games, yes.
Finally there is one situation which truly upsets me. I have pirated a game, it works perfectly. I buy the game, I can't get it to install because of the DRM. Yes I'm looking at you Sega / Creative assembly. I bought Total War 2 and I play my pirated copy!
I actually bought both Machinarium and World of Goo. Good games, kinda makes me sad to read this article though.
I'm damn proud of it too, I'd much rather support indie devs then any of the big names.
What the shit with their website? From the article http://machinarium.net/demo/ I need Flash? Or some other non-conformant piece of fucking crap just to look into the game and the developer(s)?
Then the only way to leave feedback about this atrocity requires one of five separate accounts to sign up with, or email the retarded web site designer.
Let the pirating begin!
Saw the article, went to the website, played the demo, loved it, bought the full game.
Downloading it now.
If only everything was so simple...
I bought this game after playing the demo. I also bought the soundtrack as well. The reason I did this was to support this publisher and help them keep making great games. Most of the crap coming out of the big game houses is not worth it these days and I would rather keep an independent going then make anyone at EA richer.
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
That is, for most games... DRM laden or not, the piracy rate is probably very nearly the same. And any modest difference would not make up for the inevitable problems that arise when DRM is used.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I emailed the developers, to let them know that the fact that their game was DRM free was an important buying decision for me. They sent me this reply: ---- Hello, thanks for your feedback. We don't even think about using DRM... Don't worry. Best Zdenek Amanita Design
Take that pirate haters!
Even a pirate can recognize the importance of independent games.
I'd love to see how you can patch a game that is released with lan option included just like sc1 was. Koreans and any serious tournament totally ignored battle.net infrastructure and went for 0 latency on local network.
Yes, you can say that it's up to people to decide if they want to buy or not. Either way sc2 is everything sc1, diablo 2 or wc3 were not. Battle.net was a convenience, you could use or not - if you wanted low latency you played lan with homies. Now everything runs through servers created solely for total control, farming (deals with facebook and shit) and other forms of monetization.
You can't create sub-accounts for other people in your household on your copy even for singleplayer purposes, even if you have only 1 pc - that's 60 bucks a pop, don't forget there are 2 expansions on the way, for the total of many many dollars.
You used to be able to play with people from other regions of the world by default, now you are locked to your area (official solution: another $60 for the other region's copy)
You are into mapmaking? You agree to give all your rights away and the only way to propagate maps is through battle.net. Forget about playing them offline. Also don't forget censorship of words like black, white, trans, suicide, xbox...
Even battle.net is a poor copy of xbox live and current ladder is an antithesis of transparency.
In theory they require that every tournament has to be rubberstamped - of course they don't care about small tournaments on some campus network with $50 prize, but the ToS is there if they need it and they got you by the balls. It's up to them to decide if they want to squeeze or not.
This is what you become when you team up with Activision.
disclaimer: former blizzard fanboy
I just played the demo online. It is an interesting and visually pleasing game, but $20 puts it at the same price as Torchlight. Now, I'm not sure how the other "areas" of the game are, but the demo levels only have a few objects to interact with and a few simple puzzles to solve. So...I'm thinking $20 is a bit much. Perhaps the price point of the game wasn't optimal? Even at $5 (their advertised online price right now for a few days) I'm going to pass on this one, because even though I can easily afford the $5 and would like to support an indie developer, I know I'm not interested enough in this game to play through the full version.
As an aside, I'm not sure everyone who downloads the game does it because they want to play the game. I know I have a little of the "hoarder" in my and want to collect things I don't even need or want sometimes. I used to download pirated games just to have them, and still have a stack of archive DVDs with games on them I'll never install or play (well-rated ones at that). I also have a huge stack of games I purchased at full retail price because I knew I'd play the hell out of them.
Just another viewpoint on this whole bogus "% pirated" crap...don't think everyone downloading them is even playing them....I didn't (other games).
that stated that the FBI and GAO does not know where the movie industry and others get there numbers for claims of piracy. They claim to refer to reports that government agency's put out but even the ones they claim said they say no such thing.
Other thing i think is the game, movie, and record industry are counting their chickens before they hatch. I can put out a pong game and say ok it should sell 1 million copys and then if it dont i can blame it on piracy.
as a game player some games are all hype and over priced. AC2's DRM cost UBISOFT allot of sales just check out amazon. I refuse to buy any UBISOFT game so how many others think the same and lost sales? plus they limit how many system you can put it on i like other gamers have several systems they play games on. i have a gaming laptop i use when i go to lan parities to play with friends or leagues.
I saw this article a few hours ago, bought the game, and finished it just a few minutes ago.
$5 seems about right. While yes the music and art are very beautiful and the narrative intriguing $20 seems to be asking a bit much for a game of such short length and non-existence re-playability.
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
So basicly they are saying, that of the 100 people that downloaded the game, only 10 of them actually decided to pay it.
Cool. But that doesn't mean that 90 of the people that downloaded are playing it. How many of them tried it, didn't like it, and deleted it?
Here's a quote from the article:
"We released the game DRM-free which means it doesn’t include any anti-piracy protection, therefore the game doesn’t bother players serial codes or online authentication, but it’s also very easy to copy it," Amanita's Jakub Dvorsky explained. "Our estimate from the feedback is that only 5-15 percent of Machinarium players actually paid for the game."
They ESTIMATE, which means, they are fucking guessing.
Getting tried of this shit that is passed around as an excuse for journalism.
First off, piracy isn't news.
Second off, this isn't even news, it's fucking speculation. Shit, it's worse then that, the companies is using piracy to promote their game. They are trying to lay a guilt trip on people to buy their game.
Ya, let's propagate that piracy is really bad on PC's, so we can sell our game, even though piracy isn't hurting our game at all. Nothing bad can come out of that, right?
They just lost any future sales from me for this marketing stunt.
Be seeing you...
What about Bobby Kotick being a douche with all his insulting public comments? That and the $60 price is me not buying. Am I making a principled stand that makes ZERO difference to any company? Yes. But I don't give a shit.
I know businesses exist to generate profits, but Kotick the dick can not publicly insult those that allow him to make millions for himself and shareholders
If I actually bought the DRM game, played it, then handle the heavily DRM'd DVD to my friend, or even worse, invite him to come over to play the game that I bought, am I a pirate?
When these articles come up, why doesn't anyone ever mention it only takes 1 person to successfully crack a heavily DRM'd product to allow everyone who wants to freely play the game? That's it, 1 person. Make some insane DRM that phones home, requires a 3 synchronized USB-dongles, a fob and retinal scan... still doesn't matter. In most cases, it will be cracked before it's released. Someone reverse engineers it, bundles up a torrent and then no one else cares what had to be done to circumvent it. How do developers make people actually buy their product? Convenience. Those people that will potentially buy your product or pirate it instead are weighing cost and convenience. If the game was free, they would be downloading from the manufacture unless it was more convenient to get it somewhere else. Drop the price down under $20 range (I say in the $5-10 range), and then from there give more convenience. Faster downloads, automatic patching, cool updates, and interesting network play. This is not the only industry like this. I don't know why this is so hard for the bean counters up top to understand. They run some math based on some silly estimates and prove mathematically this it's a win, but the math they used to get there is flawed somewhere. We all know it because its common sense.
I am pro capitalization, as it makes things much easier to read, but I'm not anti-DRM.
What I am is anti-invasive DRM. I'll meet publishers half way, if they've got to have DRM I can deal with Steam or Impulse::Reactor or things like that. I'd prefer no DRM, but I won't demand it so long as the DRM doesn't mess with my game experience.
Also I'm pragmatic. I believe that DRM needs to be evaluated honestly to see if it is worth it. I am concerned that companies accept DRM on faith, they use it because they think it helps without any research as to if it does. If DRM does not help them make more money, it is then worthless and should go away. I think some companies may be losing money by spending it on DRM that doesn't help.
Can you cite this? (I don't doubt it but I'm looking for a reference for an article I'm writing)
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
I can't speak to most of your points, but the one on lack of sub-accounts is pure BS. My wife's been playing single-player happily for several days on a guest account on my copy, and I've had a friend playing on another one even while I was playing logged into my account. They've got three guest accounts built in for just that purpose. Sure, they disable achievements and multiplayer play, but they're quite playable for those of us who don't care much about either of those things.
When I was young, my friends and I pirated any game that could be pirated. Main reason for pirating back then was we were 10-15 year old, it's very difficult to convince our parents to buy a game. For games that we couldn't pirate, one of us would buy a copy (through hardwork and saving) and then lend it to the others to play through.
I pirated Civilization 1, Wing Commander 1, X-Wing, and Wolf3D. But if I didn't pirate back then I wouldn't have gone on to buy Civilization 2-4 (waiting for Civ5), Wing Commander 3,4, and Prophecy plus Privateer 1 and Privateer:Darkening, Tie-Fighter, X-W vs T-F, X-W: Alliance, and just about everything in the id collection since Quake. Without those childhood memories, I wouldn't have bought those later games. I never played X-Com so I'm not excited about the new X-Com game.
I've never even heard of Machinarium and I'm a subscriber to PC Gamer magazine.
But they just got $5 from me. I wouldn't have paid $20 for it. I also just bought Osmos, which I had been meaning to do since I played their free demo last month.
For optimal comment enjoyment, take red pill now.
It just wants to be free, and there's no stopping it. Right? ~
Thing is, I value freedom instead of copyright. So I'd follow the GPL and share with others even if that were illegal. So of course I get upset if people violate it. But copyright is quite often used in an anti-freedom way. And its value is, to me, zero. So neither violating nor respecting it matters to me at all, though, on balance, I'm against it most of the time we're discussing it, because we only bother to talk about it when someone's misusing their copyrights somehow in the informal, if not always the legal, sense of the word.
In short, this is why you shouldn't go around telling people what they should believe when you don't understand why they believe it.
Nothing Bliz has implemented in sc2 is lighting up my "do not play or buy" alarm.
Given that offline play doesn't work - or is buggy as hell - there is at least one point where SC2 needs improvement. At least if you expect to play the game in places where you have no network.
it's not new, people don't pay for shareware, people don't want to pay for games, people don't pay for anything that they can steal, and possessing data that you have no legal right to is theft.
I've pirated machinarium a year ago. With my kid we have spent an incredible amount of laugh and joy playing it over and over. I was more than happy to buy the game months after we stopped playing it, because I feel grateful. I feel loyal to the authors of this game. This was my way to say them thank you.
I agree that it is a completely different business model than expecting me to trust the authors before the purchase. But this is the only way how it can work. Receiving something as a quasi gift and then return this gift with a thank you note. Much easier to build loyalty and trust this way as well.
DRM never stopped anyone from getting the games they wanted. In fact, all it does is irritate legitamite users who actually go through the trouble of buying the games. I don't see how mentioning DRM makes any difference. Instead of me buying one and handing it over to my friend, I give my friend a link to a torrent. Wow, that caused me a lot of trouble! I'm positive if there was DRM, the piracy rate would have been higher. The reason for the percentage being so high is that its an indie game. There's no guarantee you're not paying for rubbish. People will fork out extra money for [AwesomeGame] 2 - even if it does end up being rubbish.
First of all, the claim that piracy doesn't cause lost sales is false. It's not that all the pirates of a program will buy said program if it wasn't pirated; but it's also not that none of the pirates would not buy the program. Some people would buy the game if it could not be easily found in the wild. The percentage of people that would buy a game depends on the game's quality: better games lose more sales from piracy. I know a lot of people that have played lots of games that they were downloaded illegally. Some of those games are rated as top in their categories; Half Life 1 & 2, for example. These people would certainly buy Half Life if it wasn't one click away. On the other hand, they wouldn't buy World Of Goo because they didn't like the game that much, after giving the pirated copy a try.
Secondly, the notion that piracy is not theft is dubious at best, if not outright false. If you don't buy my program but you download it illegally, you deprive me of money, which is translated to certain things I could buy with that money. If that isn't stealing, then what is? please don't insist on the technical definition of theft, because it does not include the whole proper meaning of stealing.
Thirdly, the argument that piracy is ok as long as developers cover their costs and have a profit contains a certain (high) dose of immorality. Western societies are based on equality, but they are also based on giving credit were credit is due, i.e. the more worthy people are the more they are compensated for their works. Piracy is communist: a bad game that is pirated may sold at numbers equal or close to a good game that is pirated, since both games are only bought by those who don't pirate games. If it wasn't for piracy, good games would sold in much higher numbers that bad games, i.e. the difference in numbers would be much greater that what it is now.
Fourthly, I wonder why everyone is complaining about DRM. There is stealthy DRM that doesn't affect our machines and there is shitty DRM that creates a lot of problem on our machines. The problem lies in badly written DRM software, not in DRM itself. So what if a certain DRM mechanism checks if the game you are using is legally bought? that's the correct thing to do anyway. You should complain about bad DRM, not DRM in general.
Fifthly, there are hardly any people that cannot afford any game whatsoever. From the moment they can afford a computer, there is a ton of free games out there, so not having money to buy the latest and greatest game is not an excuse for pirating it. There is also a list of games that are cheap to buy, and there is also the 2nd hand market.
Sixthly, that point that DRM does not work is wrong. DRM does work, but it can be hacked out of a program just like any other piece of code.
In conclusion, each time there is a topic about piracy on Slashdot, the Slashdot crowd tries to justify piracy with logical fallacies like "piracy is not lost sales" and that "piracy is not theft". Most of us are guilty of pirating software, and in the past we have done it because we didn't think about it twice. Now that some of us are software professionals, we see the other side of the coin and we can realize how bad piracy is about software.
I got Machinarium as a gift (I think for christmas) in a retail box. It came with an executable for mac and a free copy of a flash game ("Samorost 2"). Machinarium is a great point-and-click adventure game that has a graphical style that reminds me of "Beneath a Steel Sky" with the simple usability of a flash game. Its puzzle style is a bit like Myst, where you just click without a verbal ("Use", "Open" etc.) interface, and have a few minigame-puzzles that you must solve to get along in the game. It is not a big game (took me only a few hours to solve) but I heartly recommend it! The should have a demo version, but for 5$ you really should just buy it.
I want perfect DRM! I really do. Give it to me, please! The one that is unbreakable, always works and never messes with the rest of your software. The same for movies and music please.
Until then, kiss my euros goodbye. I'll tell you why (deliberately skipping words, grammar Nazi's go home - have no time for this)
Bought new PC couple of months ago. All software on it is legal. Win 7 64 bit.
I am into single player games. I bought years ago Morrowing on the day of release (highest price). Bought it again as Game of the year edition. Under Win 7 I have no mouse cursor. One report online - someone with the same problem. No solution found. Game of the year edition distributed by Ubisoft. Tried to get support - disaster! The NA division directs me to UK, UK directs me to Holland, Holland does not reply, try UK and America again, no reply. More than 7 mails sent. Two copies of the same game unusable. Thank you!
Bought GTA 4 and Oblivion. GTA DRM more or less OK - annoying as hell, but at least it works. Oblivion - massive problems, fixed it after weeks of struggle. Game sucks - conversion from console horrible. Thankfully the online community has tons of mods to fix all issues (1.4 GB file with all textures remade for faster machines, mod to rescale the menus, so that they are not 20% of the screen per button - bloody TV resolution - this massive FREE support is only available for PC users). Thank you people, I love you! Developers - I hate you, lazy assess!
Went to the shop yesterday. Force unleashed - warning on the box that DRM might conflict with DVD burner. Screw you! Checked Starcraft II - requires constant online connection + the same warning about burner software. Screw you! And no, I will not pirate them even if it is available. I have just erased the developers names from my head. Buy Lucas, Buy Blizzard!
Blue ray - why it takes 2-3 min to start a movie on a 300 euro Blue ray player? Online content, checking the DRM? Screw you, I will never plug the player to the network, not after reading about firmware upgrades that come with 100 page EULA that removes the last remnants of my rights as a customer. BTW, why it is that I get blur on the 400 Hz plasma? Is that the grand new High Def experience? I regret ever buying it. Other people have exactly the same problem with all kinds of combos player+TV.
BTW, I own about 500 DVD+Blue rays, I think the industry should sent some flowers home....instead they are obstructing me of making back ups and want me to spend another 5-6K euros to renew my collection? What is next - spent it again to convert to 3D? SCREW YOU!
Console - there is one and only game I wish to play on a console - GT. Bought the best steering wheel in the world. Had PS2 with GT4. Will I move to PS3 + GT5? Never! Sony also does not exist for me, not after the root kit.
Music - Apple and their crappy mp3 can go to the moon. Never owned anything from them and will never do. Everyone who claims there is no difference between FLAC and MP3 should have their ears checked. Or buy better headphones. Why do I have expensive home sound system - to play 256kbit MP3 on it? Yhea, right!
I do my own MP3 and FLAC files from the discs I buy! That is why I have legally purchased the necessary software to back up and convert, with which the DRM of most games conflict.
So, from now on, there will be no purchases of any sort. I think I have all the movies, music and games I will ever need. I go underground - back everything up, convert to few different standard, back up again on a different location and say good buy to all developers and artists. Care to come along?
From now on, only books will be bought. And they can kiss my ass with the e-books as well. No monitoring on what I read and what I do, thank you very much! No obstructions to sharing books.
In conclusion - developers and distributors - either fix your DRM once and forever or die!!!
The old spawn installs were only for LAN play. I.e, if I bought the game (I did - twice), I could play LAN games with my friends.
I've bought World of Goo three times now (Wii, As part of a bundle in Steam, and direct from their Website on sale) and would buy the iOS version in a heartbeat. Machinarium was included in the Steam bundle, but I have yet to play it.
It goes both ways if you want games to be DRM free you have to support the developers willing to put their work out in that way...
B
How do they know 90% of their players are pirates? Two possibilities:
1) They planted SOME sort of "phoning home" utility in the game which snitches on the gamers behind their backs
or
2) They're basing their guesstimate on how many people they HOPE will play when in fact the game is just not that popular.(RIAA/MPAA methodology anyone?)
You played the game and got some fun out of it! Cough up some $$$ you cheap bastards!
It's assholes like people who would blatantly pirate a game for their own entertainment and then refuse to pay that doom small and independent software development. This forces everything into the hands of corporations who spend time and resources DRMing everything and filing lawsuits. I have no love for the current corporate model of audio/video/game distribution, and it doesn't exactly arouse my indignation when people pirate $#!t from the major record labels. However, it seems like here we have a case where the developers are trying to be cool by releasing an inexpensive non-DRMed game, then see a bunch of greedy, ignorant, unsophisticated dipshits taking advantage of it.
I hope this is a case of raw ignorance trumping greed and selfishness so that I can remain hopeful about the possibilities of my ideal world view of art and music distribution materializing.
As one of those very few people who purchases every game he plays, I know I don't answer for everyone who does this, but I do want to say that there are certain things that matter to me when it comes to my purchases. First, the game has to be good. I used to buy practically every game that was released. And then games started to get really cheezy and selective. They started catering towards an audience to which I do not belong. And this is the rub. I think it started to cater to an audience that selectively likes to pirate games. Think about that for a moment. A lot of this tends to be RTS and FPS types of crowds, which on a simple psychological profile leads one to believe that if people are competitive with each other, then perhaps there's something to be said for those same people attempting to "game" the system. Now, this wouldn't translate to everyone, but having worked in the gaming industry, I used to see a lot of game designers and game staff who fit this mold, and there was a lot of stealing of games within the industry itself. But it rarely happened in other parts of the community, like the turn based strategy crowd or even the rpg crowd. What I think has happened is that the big wigs that make games have heard the most chatter from the people who tend to be more prone to pirating games, and they continued to make games for that crowd, thinking that somehow they would be able to get those guys to actually pay money when they normally would not. The gaming industry has changed a lot, and I think the more that it continues to go down the path it has is going to lead to more and more piracy because we're selling to people who don't normally buy. Meanwhile, the rpg and turn-based strategy crowds seem to be dying off because no one makes games for them, or the few that do get made or either knock offs of previous games (Civilization XIX, or whatever number), but very little strong innovation, other than an occasional title here and there, like Dragon Age or Mass Effect, which will both start becoming continuous sequels. The strange thing, to me, is that the people who do buy games are rarely communicated with and cast off as outsiders, yet the loudest, nonpaying crowd gets the most attention. A PR person would have a stroke if he had to deal with that environment, but for some reason that's the entire industry.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
I agree it is sad when people feel they have the right to pirate all games. It is like the flowers that are sold along the country roads where I live. I can buy gladiolas at about 6 for a dollar compared to a dollar each at the local store. The road side ones work on the honour system for paying and I pay every time because I would like to ensure that I don't have to buy them from the store. I have a feeling that piracy would decrease in the same way if the DRM free games passed the savings of not using DRM onto the consumer. I don't think taxation or government intervention would help though.
I actually pirated World of Goo and was subsequently so impressed that I went and bought it. I don't bother downloading games anymore but when I did most lasted about 10 minutes of play before getting deleted. The few I enjoyed enough to keep would get a sale from me.
Valve didn't seem to complain when this happened.
Valve can get away with this because it creates its own settings instead of licensing someone else's. So can any developer who licenses a setting from a copyright owner willing to take a flat amount or a percentage of revenue. But some owners of rights to a setting insist on a minimum royalty per copy no matter how low the selling price.
So what you are saying is that the actual price that the market will bear is not enough to cover your expenses
Correct.
and yet this is somehow the consumer's problem?
Correct. I've seen it happen in multiple video game stores: a relative unfamiliar with video games chooses a video game to buy for a child based only on 1. which hardware platform the child has and 2. the child's favorite television show. So in order to get picked, a developer has to license the setting from a popular television show's producer. If parents stopped relying on television show titles, developers' expenses would go down.
Every time you call copyright infringment piracy you are lending weight to that bit of manipulative misnomer. Stop it. Just stop it. Don't give them what they want.
Piracy is ship to ship armed robbery. They kidnap, ransom and KILL PEOPLE. Copying that floppy is nothing like pointing a gun at someone to demand money or loot. It's not even an apt metaphor.
Call it theft if you must, even though that's not entirely accurate either. You can't steal something that has a value of $0.00. Any product that can be duplicated perfectly infinitely and distributed at cost that's so low that it can't be measured gives it a supply of infinity. The demand for ANY digital product is finite. Only so many people will want it over an array of prices from 0 to infinity. Any finite demand divided by a infinite supply generates a value as close to zero as makes no odds.
Software is worthless. Data is worthless. Sell something else.
So who is going to flame/bury me this time? The semi-literate descriptivists or the defenders of RIAA and the MPAA?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Step 1 to preventing piracy: make a game worth more than $0.
Therefore Yahoo Chat needs improvement too. At least if you expect to use it in places where you have no network.
The nature of the game (it's listed on the box as a requirement to play), is an online experience...albeit a personal problem for people who can think of and have traditionally experienced ways to implement most of the features (i.e. Achievements/stats tracking, multiplayer, authentication) without a connection to blizz servers.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
You can't say you're not using DRM if you sell over Steam.
That said, I wish everyone would just get on Steam. I don't know how good it is at preventing piracy, but the convenience can't be matched.
Not paying for cheap games like World of Goo is disgusting, by the way. I picked that up on Steam for next to nothing. These people are blurring the line between 'pirate' and 'complete jerk'.
It sells for 19.99$ on Steam :-( I'd buy it there for $5.
I bought World Of Goo. It was $20. It was extremely fun. I want more. To those of you who pirated it: Fuck you. Fuck the horse you rode in on. And fuck your mother.
Make games suck 90% less, quit flooding the market with cake making games and other crap titles, and guess what! You'll have less piracy, because they'll be less SHIT flooding the market, confusing would-be-gamers into a buying a crap game.
Buy enough crap games, you tend to stop giving a crap about paying for more of them. Maybe instead of making 800 shooters, and releasing the same sports game every year with a new roster (and more broken gameplay), and fleecing people for $60 a pop, you can make less products, and focus on making quality stuff. PEOPLE WILL PAY FOR QUALITY.
And if you're making indie games, you should feel blessed anyone's taken the time to download your game, paid or not. You guys suck just as bad as the big companies when it comes to putting out trash.
Just wait until you open up your laptop to ease the time on a 5 hour plane trip and get a "can't connect to b.net" error followed by a "can't enter offline mode because you didn't connect to b.net error." Yeah, there may have been a work around but I was too infuriated to try to find it.
+1 Disagree
I downloaded both of the games mentioned, played them for 5 minutes, realized that they were nothing I was interested in, and deleted them. I am probably counted in their statistics. I will pay for any game that can hold my interest for more than ~1 hour. I probably download well over 10 games for every 1 I buy, but if I did not download the >10 games, I would purchase less games overall.
I am not a huge games, over the last 3 years I have bought 3 games: Starcraft 2, CivIV and Unreal Tournament 2004. The first one I purchased because I was given a chance to preview for free, legally. The other two I 'illegally' previewed, and as such purchased.
In that time I've probably downloaded upwards for 80 games. Most of them lasted less than 10 minutes. In this small unscientific sample, 'the industry' received 3 purchases, 2 of which were directly caused by 'illegal' previewing.
Theft is theft, plain and simple.
"DRM-free game reaches 10 times larger audience, offers a discount."
A few years back when GomTV was starting up english casting, they got 3 seasons of SC matches in. Gom's tourney wasn't KeSPA-sanctioned, however.
When Gom was preparing for the 4th season, KeSPA finally stepped in and strong-armed several teams into withdrawing from the tourney because it didn't conform to KeSPA rules (more directly: Gom was not paying KeSPA sanctioning fees, and KeSPA didn't like not getting paid).
While Korean law might be right, KeSPA was clearly stepping on the rights that the law was meant to protect, so Blizz did a runaround.
Is KeSPA really putting up with this? There are obvious alternatives to catering to Blizzard - like deciding to focus on other games. I'd think that would be appreciated by the contestants as well....
It's a horrible game anyways, I played the 5 minute demo and was already bored out of my mind. People are pirating it and probably playing about 10 minutes then deleting it - no lost sales, they probably would have gotten further in the demo.
you don't pay royalties to the manufacturer of the hammer you used to build a house and sell it with profit. You paid for the hammer - that's it.
Oh, so pirates get to use the "physical object" analogy when it suits them, but nobody else can?
That is how intellectual property works. You can't simply buy a CD and then use the music in commercials without paying extra. You can't even air it on the radio. You can't buy a DVD and screen it publically. You are saying this is wrong. Problem is, it is their property and they have a right to do with it as they like. Whether or not it is wrong is a philosophical debate but it is clear that IP needs some sort of legal protection simply because it takes such an effort to produce but is so easy to copy. Personally, I feel relieved that the creator of IP virtually has full rights.