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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!'"
Then you are forgetting another group, those of us who purchase games but will _not_ purchase games with stupid DRM schemes. I was excited for Spore and chose not to get it because I didn't want to support their DRM. Again, impossible to tell, but who comprises the bigger group? Those of us who won't purchase draconian DRM'd games or those that would purchase games (directly or indirectly) because it _has_ DRM? If those two groups are roughly the same size, what's the benefit to the DRM? Now calculating in the cost of implementing the DRM, what is the benefit? I don't have the answers, but I have and will continue to personally boycott games with overly intrusive DRM perceived, or real (hey, I'm human).
DRM is inconvenient. At the minimum, you have to insert a disc to play a game that's already taking room on your hard drive; as the infection worsens, you start getting software that refuses to work if a CD burner or CD emulation software is installed, then installs malware (hello Sony!), then finally requires a constant connection to DRM servers.
By contrast, the Pirate Bay Edition has been disinfected and works just like any other program in your computer. It's superior value and as an added bonus costs nothing. So, the coldly rational choice is to never buy from the store, since you don't know what trouble you might be getting, and only foolhardy ideologist would do that.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
In my experience the vast majority of pirates will pirate almost everything they hear about and buy virtually nothing, ever.
Consider this thought experiment:
There is a community of 10,000 gamers, half of them only buy games, half only pirate.
There is a pool of 100 games for these guys to choose from.
Each paying customer buys about 5 games per year.
Each paying customer has a ~5.1% chance of buying your game for an average of ~255 sales.
We will pretend the unrepentant pirates will pirate half the games out there.
That is ~2500 pirates for your game.
Or about 90% of your player base.
This is all completely unsubstantiated conjecture.
But it might help put things in perspective.
Even if every unrepentant pirate would buy games if they could not be bought, that wouldn't mean that you would get 10 times more paying customers, it would mean that at best your would get 2 times with these numbers.
I personally feel DRM is kind of a side issue. The real problem here is a cultural expectation of free media. People think it's trivial to copy and therefore the cost should be zero.
I know a guy who makes six figures and refuses to buy any games because he doesn't have to. Furthermore he makes fun of me for buying games. To him the norm is pirating and you're stupid if you don't.
The consequences of this attitude will be bad for gaming, whether it's in the form of DRM, micro-transactions, or other schemes companies use to force people to buy their product.
What we need is to get closer to the root cause. We need stuff like student prices and lower prices on older games. There needs to be some education that games cost money to make, even indie games. Maybe even some kind of forced government pool. I personally want there to be a huge investment in games and other entertainment and I think if people understood the whole process they'd agree.
Your not entirely wrong. But there is more to the story than that. The culture of fee media is propagated by business. How often do you hear that something is "Free", only to find out that it really isn't. The classic example is the age old "Buy one, get one FREE!" Obviously to those of us that have a decent grasp of logic and language know that if you have to pay, it isn't free. We read it as "Two for the price of one." or "Half off when you buy two." A huge portion of the population doesn't get that though. They really think they are getting something for free. The common practice of businesses convincing the naive that they are getting things for free when they are not needs to stop if you ever want to get away from a culture that expects free stuff. The software industry is particularly bad about claiming things are free in an attempt to fool people.
Another problem is that copyright law has gotten so unbalanced that many people have simply gotten used to dismissing it. Even worse, big media will encourage people to dismiss copyright on one side, and and then cry about it on the other. A good example was a commercial that Nickelodeon (owned by Viacom) was running a few years back. They would run commercial showing 'cool kids' talking about what they do in their free time. They had a 10 to 12 year old girl, showing off her room. Her poster. Her bookshelf. Her CD wallet full of copied CDs...
Lower prices for older games would be a start. If I could buy new PS1 games at a dollar a pop, I would probably buy literally every one ever released. Certainly, a CD in a paper sleeve can be sold at a profit for $1. Unfortunately, copyright is more and more frequently NOT used to make sure that the author get paid enough to encourge further work, but instead is used as a means to make desired products unattainable. This in turn pushes people to dismiss copyright, and consider it to be a bad thing.
Lets see, I can buy this indie game I never heard of for $20, or buy the entire Freespace collection at GOG when it was on sale for $12. Which will I do? I would argue that $20 is too high, and the reason that "pay whatever" was a big fail is the kinds of folks that play indie games are the DIY types and frankly many of them just don't pay squat if they can help it.
I mean look at how many enterprise admins had a royal living shitfit when it looked like CentOS was going tits up, why? Because these DIY types were running enterprise servers on a unsupported OS that's why! It is like how I was arguing Linux on the desktop is doomed to fail. The people that Linux appeals to, the geek hacker DIY types, simply would go somewhere else if Canonical started charging for Ubuntu, yet without serious money spent on R&D and bug fixes there simply won't BE any Ubuntu.
It all comes down to finding an audience that will consider your product worthy of purchase and then giving them a good value. Hell I bought MoH: 10th anniversary even though I heard Airborne sucked! (which BTW it does BAD) Now why did I do such a thing? Because for $25 EA gave me MoH Allied PLUS both expansions, the directors version of Pacific Assault PLUS an interactive timeline of the Pacific War PLUS Airborne PLUS the music of MoH...all for $25. So it all comes down to perceived value for your dollar, and I would argue that if some indie guy isn't getting $20 for his game then the people he is marketing to simply don't consider it worth $20. Black markets will ALWAYS pop up where folks feel the price is too high, piracy is NO different, but sites like GOG and Steam have shown you can make money on goods that can be pirated, you simply have to give the user good value and make it convenient for them to pay.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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...