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!'"

Comments

Next step to prevent PC piracy

[odies]

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.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[rotide]

All I want to know is, how many copies of this game has the company sold? Now, how many copies would they have sold if there was 100% unbreakable DRM? Obviously that data is impossible to gather... But I'd bet that most people who pirate games weren't going to buy them anyways. I have a job and when I want something, I just go to the store and get it. I don't bother with Warez anymore as it really is just kind of a pain. But those with no financial resources to buy whatever they want? Piracy is sometimes their only choice. I'm not saying that's right, but if my fictional next door neighbor who lives paycheck to paycheck and has no disposable income pirates a game, I don't consider that a loss to anyone.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Elbereth]

Hellgate:London (the next game from the developers of Diablo 2) didn't have a LAN play mode, which made a lot of gamers really pissed off (including me). The single player version of the game was treated like crap. It frequently lagged several patches behind the online server (which was essentially an MMORPG). The final patch, before the game was abandoned, didn't even get ported to single player.

I don't think that anyone is even going to bother with a single player version, if they can get away with it. There's still a market for games like Civilization, but they'll probably get DRM'd to hell, like Sacred 2.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Hatta]

The sad thing is that PC publishers will destroy their own gaming platform by breaking their games, instead of catering to their paying customers. Good example is Modern Warfare 2 which was heavily "consolised" and you have to admit, not having dedicated servers and everything else sucks.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Pharmboy]

How many of those "pirates" live in places where $20 is a more than a whole day's wage? I know it is impossible to get a metric on it, but piracy by people in countries entirely too poor to ever pay retail for games is a wholly different animal than a much of middle class kids living in the burbs of the U.S., and there are plenty of computers in these countries. Also, what about those of us that download cracks or entire cracked games that we actually purchased but don't want to have to insert the damn CD in every time we play? I probably have a dozen games that I bought but cracked via download that they would count as "pirated", even though I have the box. This is the main reason why I try to use Steam for all my games now. I don't mind paying, but I don't want to have to keep up with all the disks and boxes, etc. just to play something I already paid for.

Part of the piracy problem IS the DRM. Pirates deliver a better product than the distributors of the game, as it takes less hassle to simply start the game.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

90% of the copies were pirated. NINETY PERCENT. If only 10% of people who pirated the game would have bought it instead, this small consumer-friendly company would have almost DOUBLED what they made from the game. ... and piracy is not their "only choice". Since when are people entitled to have whatever they want no matter their ability to pay - especially things that are merely entertainment?

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[bjourne]

You enumerate only two of three concievable groups of customers; those that buy games because piracy is a hassle (you) or do it out of the kindness of their hearts. According to the article, only 10% of all those who aquired the game are like that.

The second group are those who pirate the games because they have no money. They are a large part of the games audience. The third group are those who have money, would have bought it but preferred to warez it instead. Those two groups together are 90% of the games market. If the game had strong DRM, so that you could not pirate it, people in the third group would be enticed to buy the game. Assuming as little as 10% are in the third group, using DRM would almost double the number of sales the game makes.

Ergo: it makes perfect sense for game publishers to use DRM.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[TheTurtlesMoves]

How many of those "pirates" live in places where $20 is a more than a whole day's wage?

Probably not many. Since they also probably won't have an internet connection or a PC in the first place. Think about it.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[rotide]

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).

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Tridus]

And you think that group is bigger then the group who would buy a game if they couldn't get it for free from a warez site instead?

I call bullshit. Most pirates are just cheapskates, nothing more.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Tridus]

With a 90% piracy rate on DRM free games, clearly catering to your paying customers is working out pretty well. What was the successful piracy rate on these very locked down games again?

These excuses don't hold up in the market anymore. The data is conclusive: people are cheap and will pirate it if there's an easy way to do so.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[onefriedrice]

Good point, but I don't think your group is nearly as large as the other. Your anti-DRM group is comprised mostly of us nerds who have a problem with our computers not being completely under our control. Most gamers, I've found, are not nearly as savvy or idealistic. While DRM issues are becoming more and more publicized, it's still very unlikely that your average Joe is going to forgo the latest shoot-em-up or whatever just to try to make a point about DRM.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[rve]

The second group are those who pirate the games because they have no money. They are a large part of the games audience.

I call bull poopie on that. Someone who built a $2500 overclocked gaming monster has the money, and someone with a $300 PC from Walmart probably doesn't know where to get pirated games. The average gamer is over 18 and has a job. Even a school kid without a job could buy a few games a year by cutting down on candy.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Technician]

To support that argument, I bought a Laserdisk player when VHS movies were about $40 each. Laserdisks were promised to be cheaper than VHS because they could be stamped out like records.

The high quality of the video was attractive along with true NTSC video wouthout the jitters and rolling from Vidoeguard and Macrovision copy guard.

Due to the high quality, studios were afraid to release onto the format for a long time. What few movies were released were boutique priced. Affordable titles were things like "NFL How To Watch Pro Fotball"

http://www.discountlaserdisc.com/read.php?list=3&sort=SPF&sort3=name

Due to the high prices and poor selection, my lifetime collection of Laserdiscs is still in the single digits. Anybody want to buy a laserdisk player?

On the flipside my collection of under $10 DVDs number in the hundreds.

Many PC games are priced like Laserdisks. They are not priced, then lowered in price a year later like DVDs. Some DVD movies are classic films. Some I didn't remember if I replaced my VHS copy with a DVD, so some titles I have purchased twice.

Just think, who sold to me? The $65 copy of Fiddler on the Roof, or the two $5 copies?
At over $15, I'm unlikely to buy a movie or game. At under $10, good ones are considered. At under $6, it becomes a possible impulse buy.

Are you pricing to sell many copies, or are you charging the price of a new bicycle for my grandson?

More quality games need to be priced for mass markets instead of selling a few at boutique pricing of over $10-15 per copy. A small selection of a couple dozen games is a serious budget buster. Due to the average selling price, I no longer browse the game isle. This is the same reason record stores closed. The didn't price for mass market sales and impulse purchases.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[PopeRatzo]

The 90% piracy rate is quite much the norm with PC games.

Oh? And exactly how do you know this? We have the word of game developers, like this Jakub Dvorsky and that's about it.

Assuming that they are correct (which I'm not willing to do), how many of those "90%" would have bought the game if it had DRM?

I get the feeling that a lot of these claims from developers arise out a mediocre game (though in this case, a good-looking mediocre game) not doing as well as the investors hoped and the developer wants to divert attention for his so-so game by saying "It didn't sell well because of piracy" hoping that the investors will buy it and give him money to make another game. What's he going to say when his next game doesn't sell? They're basically claiming that if their games had DRM they would sell almost ten times as many games. Does that pass the smell test for you? Whenever I hear one of these claims, I like to go read some of the reviews of the game to see if it would have sold so much better with DRM. And you have to look at the user reviews, not the ones written by the websites that take advertising money from the game industry. I've always marveled how critic's reviews are so often way ahead of user reviews. Critics: "8 out of 10" / Users: "4 out of 10". Your opinion of a game is somewhat different when you've pulled that $50 out of your own pocket. If you're the one spending $50 for example, 3 1/2 hours of gameplay is not quite as impressive as it might be to a critic who received the game gratis from the marketing department.

There are limited dollars in this world economy for people to spend on video games. I don't believe for a second that if every game suddenly had DRM that sales would jump through the roof. Even sales of Playstation 3 games are soft right now, so what's their excuse?

All it takes for a loyal gamer to become a big fan of bittorrent is for him to spend >$50 a few times on a game that stinks. Try to bring that game back to Best Buy for a refund.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Andorin]

Ladies and gents, let's play Let's Count The Fallacies:

1. The tired comparison of piracy to theft of physical objects. Don't do it.
2. Implication that piracy is killing the industries because "everybody" just downloads instead of buying. That's not happening until someone comes up with indisputable proof that it is.
3. What is "100% DRM"? Are you in favor of a certain amount of DRM? Are you aware that -all- DRM by nature is customer-hostile and ineffective? It doesn't stop people from sharing.
4. "I buy all my DVDs and buy all of my music because I want to support those actors or musicians I like." If you're mostly buying mainstream, which I assume, then you're supporting the record labels and movie studios that make digital life hell by pushing for stupid copyright provisions and by suing people... but you're doing practically nothing for the actors or musicians.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[ultranova]

Your anti-DRM group is comprised mostly of us nerds who have a problem with our computers not being completely under our control. Most gamers, I've found, are not nearly as savvy or idealistic.

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.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Hatta]

With a 90% piracy rate on DRM free games, clearly catering to your paying customers is working out pretty well. What was the successful piracy rate on these very locked down games again?

Making a game attractive to paying customers makes it attractive to pirates as well. The piracy rate tells you nothing important. A super effective DRM could reduce the piracy rate by 99%, but if it costs you one paying customer it's worthless.

These excuses don't hold up in the market anymore. The data is conclusive: people are cheap and will pirate it if there's an easy way to do so.

And if it's not easy to do so they're cheap so they'll just pirate something else instead of buying your game. Paying customers are cheap too, and if they see that the cracked version is better than the DRM'd version (as is often the case) there's a good chance they'll pirate it instead.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Draek]

People, especially PC games pirates, want to play the games that are hot right now. They don't sit down and say, well gee, pirating Call of Duty is kind of hard so I guess I'll download Bubble Pop instead. They sit down and say, well gee, pirating Call of Dity is kind of hard so I guess I'll buy it.

Citation needed, as it doesn't match my personal observations.

The assumption that every CEO of (nearly) every games company is an idiot is amazing. They use DRM because they have accumulated lots of evidence that it's worth the cost.

So I guess the CEOs of game companies that *don't* use DRM are the idiots, right? and again, Citation needed on your "evidence", because IIRC Ubisoft's sales of AC2 were considerably lower than the first one, and (according to reviews) it's a superior game in every way outside of its DRM, and after Spore et al EA has actually pushed *back* on the DRM, preferring to spend their time fighting the second-hand market instead.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[morari]

Since when are people entitled to have whatever they want no matter their ability to pay - especially things that are merely entertainment?

Exactly! Especially entertainment! Entertainment has no inherent value, as it is not needed to survive. Thus it cannot command a price.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Bigjeff5]

You've missed the point: did they sell more than they would have without the piracy, or less?

It's nearly impossible to answer. I've never heard of Machinarium, but I've heard "World of Goo" is incredibly addictive. Still, how many, if any, of the 82% who pirated World of Goo would have bought it on their own?

The World of Goo guys had an 82% piracy rate, and it's pretty much expected. Another, similar class game with DRM had a 92% piracy rate. So what's the difference? 10% lower piracy rate and none of the cost to implement the DRM.

Frankly, the piracy rate doesn't seem to change at all unless the DRM is insanely complicated. Implementing such a DRM scheme is incredibly expensive, and still won't eliminate the piracy.

World of Goo also has a $20 price tag. How many of those pirateers would have bought it instead if it were only $10? Valve showed that by dropping the price in half on the right game you can quadruple the sales, doubling your money.

It's a tough call to make, but it's my gut feeling that the high piracy rate is an indication that their prices are too high, not that non-DRM games are doomed to failure. I'll bet with a $10 price tag they'd have gotten more than a 100% increase in legitimate sales.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[VGPowerlord]

Point-and-Click adventure games may have dormant, but I wouldn't call them dead.

TellTale Games is starting to push them back to the fore. I would say "LucasArts and TellTale," but LucasArts reentering the Adventure game business was due to LucasArts President Darrell Rodriguez, who resigned back in May. Thus, LucasArts may leave the market again, without having produced anything new (only the 2 Monkey Island remakes).

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Spad]

Hypothetically, what if NONE of those 90% would have bought the game if they hadn't pirated it?

The problem with a "90% of copies are pirated" statistic is that there's absolutely no way of knowing, as was pointed out by the GP, how many people would have purchased the game were it not piratable.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[SETIGuy]

Maybe if they had reduced the price of the game to 1/2 what they were charging then the piracy rate might have gone down to 60%. That would earn them twice as much as well.

There is an optimum price that delivers maximum profits in the face of piracy. I doubt anyone in the gaming industry has tried to find it.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[jaymz666]

> Many PC games are priced like Laserdisks. They are not priced, then lowered in price a year later like DVDs.
No, games generally come down in price 6 months later, on the PC anyway. Then a while after that you get the game, all the expansions and patches for $20.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Nadaka]

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.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[interkin3tic]

Even a school kid without a job could buy a few games a year by cutting down on candy.

nom nom nom nom...

But without my gold-leafed hershey's kisses, I won't have enough energy to fight the zerg! ...nom nom nom nom

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Vaphell]

valve experimented with game prices and they made most money on -75% off.

Last weekend, Valve decided to do an experiment with Left 4 Dead. Last weekend's sale resulted in a 3000% increase over relatively flat numbers. It sold more last weekend than when it launched the game. WOW. That is unheard of in this industry. Valve beat its launch sales. Also, it snagged a 1600% increase in new customers to Steam over the baseline.

Worried retailers, fear not. The weekend sale didn't canabalize sales from retail. In fact, they remained constant. Well, constant isn't a 3000% increase, but it's still pretty good, right?

6:56 PM - Looking at a third-party game, it saw increases of 36,000% with a weekend sale. Oh. Em. Gee. Okay, Gabe is starting to convince me that PC at retail is going to die very soon.

Oh, more data. I'm such a data nerd. Here's some data!

During the Holiday sales:

        * 10% sale = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
        * 25% sale = 245% increase in sales
        * 50% sale = 320% increase in sales
        * 75% sale = 1470% increase in sales

At 75% off, they are making 15% more money than they were at full price.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Tibor the Hun]

Why is it always assumed that people who spend $2500 on a computer have an unlimited amount of money?

We hear far too often, "If they have money for a hummer, they have enough for gas" too.

Maybe they got a $3000 check for tuition and they blew it on a computer, and otherwise don't have a dime to their name.

Sure, a small minority of people have an unlimited supply of $$, but I wouldn't be surprised if vast majority took out some line of credit to buy a $2500 "multimedia" PC for their college kid, simply because a highschooler from BestBuy told them that that computer will totally help them with photos, and movies, and homework...

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[SlurpingGreen]

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.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[MakinBacon]

Popularity doesn't pay the bills when 90% of your players aren't paying for the game.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[TheRaven64]

You seem to be arguing against yourself. Why would cheapskates pay if they couldn't get it for free? Wouldn't they be more likely to just play a different game that they could get for free / cheap?

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[TheRaven64]

preventing cheapskate pirates with a sense of entitlement from playing things they didn't pay for is still a worthwhile cause.

If you feel that way, then please feel free to spend your money on it, but don't be surprised when I decide to give my money to a company that will spend it on producing a better product than on a moral crusade against freeloaders.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[smallfries]

DRM is inconvenient. At the minimum, you have to insert a disc

Nah, doesn't work like that. It used to be the case that DRM had to work that way, but then Steam came along and changed things. I've always preferred to buy games than pirate them, but then I value something that wasn't on your list of features: honesty. I prefer to make sure the developer gets paid instead of ripping them off.

Steam is convient and reliable: I can find the game that I want instantly and it downloads at line-speed regardless of how old or popular it is. I know that there are no trojans in the download, something that you can never be sure of with a torrent.

Blaming DRM is an excuse, it's an excuse to make your conscience feel better about ripping off the developer and taking their work for free.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[masmullin]

You're side-stepping the question. How many of those 90% would have bought it if it had had unbreakable DRM (and, on a related note, how many of the 10% would have not bought it if it had unbreakable DRM)?

I think you're STILL side stepping the question.

If you could eliminate piracy from ALL games, how many people would start buying?

If a single game is uncrackable DRM'd, pirates will simply move to a different game, but if ALL games were uncrackable DRM'd, well they'd either have to stop playing or start paying.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Fumus]

Try Poland.

$20 is 60 PLN. Minimal monthly wage is roughly 600 PLN. Your average job a young person can get out of school will pay maybe 1200 PLN. If you count that a month has 22 working days you end up with a requirement of 1320 PLN a month in order for $20 to be less than a day's wage. Add taxes to that and that the dollar is oscillating between 3 to 4 PLN in vaule and you end up with Poland being a country where your average person doesn't have an Internet connection by your standards.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[tepples]

Valve showed that by dropping the price in half on the right game you can quadruple the sales, doubling your money.

Doubling your revenue doesn't necessarily mean doubling your earnings. In some cases, the licensor of an underlying work (such as music, characters, a setting, etc.) wants a fixed royalty in dollars per copy, not as a percentage.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[vux984]

Probably the reason for the low pirate-first-buy-later rate is that the game isn't that good and people weren't impressed. You can't complain that people aren't buying your game if your game sucks.

Blow it out your ass. Seriously. The game won multiple awards. The game sold a ton of copies via Wii-ware. They eventually realeased a free trial version with the first few levels, and that prompted it to sell a pile more. If you don't like it, fine. If you didn't think it was worth X$ fine. But singling World of Goo out as a "game that sucks" is just trolling.

The reality, is that there isn't a single game on the market that has a HIGH pirate-first-buy-later rate. Go ahead, name one, name just one!

Bottom line, by your logic there isn't a single game on the market that is any good and that impressed people. And that's patently absurd.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[Belial6]

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.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[marcosdumay]

Yet, it is way better to have 10% of a 100,000 market than 50% of a 1,000 one. TFA is too simplist to get into any usefull conclusion.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[monkeythug]

If a single game is uncrackable DRM'd, pirates will simply move to a different game, but if ALL games were uncrackable DRM'd, well they'd either have to stop playing or start paying.

If there were such a mythical beast as uncrackable DRM (and publishers have been searching for that since the 80's when we had things like LensLok and that coloured card thing for Jetset Willy that you used to copy with your felt tip pens in class) - then you might be right that some extra people might start paying - but certainly not 90%, most of whom don't have the disposable income to buy every $60 game that comes out. If in addition this perfect DRM was completely transparent to users and didn't piss them off by doing things like requiring you to be online all the time even in single player mode and killing your session if there's a glitch in your internet connection ... then you might not lose any of your existing customers either.

It's just a shame that it's actually impossible for DRM like that to exist...

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[hitmark]

iirc, windows users payed the least, linux users payed the most.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[peragrin]

The reason there hasn't beem any peasant revolts is because of those damn socialist liberals and their medicare, unemployment wages, and host of other socialist ideas that keep people from losing their homes, and all of their income the moment they are laid off.

This recession proves that those policies work. Of course you will never have that point of view on Fox news ever.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[L0rdJedi]

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.

Here we go again trying to get the government involved. Why do people on Slashdot always see the need for the government to get involved in everything these days?!

I think the reality is that there is a huge portion of the population that doesn't give a shit about game (PC, console) development. To them, and I know some of them, they would rather see it all go away. To them, it's a huge waste of time. I may enjoy it and you may enjoy it, but they don't enjoy it at all. A game like Day of Defeat, which I can spend hours playing at a time, they see as simply a waste of several hours a day.

Some of these same people work with very high tech development projects and would rather just go outside and play frisbee or something else in their free time. The idea of playing a game on the computer that they just spent hours doing productive development work on sickens them.

This is exactly why having a "forced government pool" is a stupid idea. We don't need the government involved. What we need are people that consider pirating a game to be "no big deal" to stop doing it. You even said yourself that you know someone that makes six figures and still pirates because buying the game is "stupid". That person is in fact ruining the industry for the rest of us. He gets entertainment value out of all those games, but isn't funding the necessary R&D to bring new games to market. He probably pirates all of his movies too.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[RAMMS EIN]

``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.''

I think that people do agree that there should be enough funding to produce the entertainment they want. I also think that many people don't see the point in paying for it when they can also not pay for it. Both of these views are entirely rational. Which is why there is something to your idea of a forced government pool: that way, entertainment can get funded without those who voluntarily contribute footing the entire bill.

A problem I see with a mandatory pool is that when you do that, people who don't consume the entertainment are still forced to pay for it. Since I don't consider entertainment as something the government should provide, I would be against people who don't consume it paying for it (and that includes paying for it through taxes that go to creating, exporting, and enforcing things like DMCA and ACTA). I also feel that entertainment would still be produced even in the absence of government stimulation (through direct funding from a pool, or copyright, or otherwise), even if it wouldn't be as abundant and impressive as it is now. I could live with that, though - I only consume an almost immeasurably small fraction of all entertainment that has been produced, anyway. In fact, I would probably be fine if the whole entertainment industry disappeared and all I that was left were what has been produced and preserved so far.

Smarter minds than I have probably thought about this a lot more, so I would be interested to hear what other people think about all this. I'm sure economics students have done studies on the effects of various ways to stimulate creation of entertainment. Perhaps a better system has been devised already that I haven't heard about yet?

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[EvanED]

You wanna know why there is so much piracy? it is because developers are retarded! As another poster recently said it is like the entire games industry has decided that Buggati roadsters are the ONLY way to go, and they are cranking out games that are $60+ in a world economy that is so dead I'm surprised peasant revolts aren't breaking out. Nobody has any money, those that do are using it to keep the roofs over their head, and they expect folks to shell out $60+ for a 5 hour game and THEN shell out another $25-$50 for the DLC which they ripped out the game in the first place to "maximize their profit potential". Yeah right!

Except that as this article, and many others, illustrates, you're wrong. Machinarium was $20 and has a 90% piracy rate. World of Goo was $20 normally and had an 80-90% piracy rate. When the Humble Indy Bundle released their games for whatever price you wanted to pay (starting at $0.01), 25% of people downloading it from their servers were pirating it! And that doesn't count out-of-band pirating like TPB or whatever. And you could pay a penny.

No, cost is not why piracy rates are so high.

You could argue it's convenience -- you need a credit card to order the Humble Indy Bundle for example -- but not price. Personally I think it's just 'cause a crapload of people are selfish jackasses.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[RsG]

While part of me wants to agree with you, I feel I must point out a serious flaw in your logic.

The hardware needed to run 3/4 of the games offered on GOG is incredibly cheap. You could pick up an Internet capable PC able to run most old games they offer for less than the price of a Wii, and less still if you already had a monitor lying around to use.

For anyone who can run those $60 new releases, cost isn't going to be a problem. If you can drop a grand on hardware, half a hundred to buy a game is a drop in the bucket. Moreover, given the current length of the recession, and the average lifetime of PC hardware, most gamers will have upgraded since the recession began. I know I have.

As an appreciator of classic games, I applaud your efforts to use grand old games and keep yourself amused with gameplay rather than shiny graphics, but I can't agree with the logic you put forward re: new games piracy.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[vux984]

If I can play and beat the game in three hours, and it has no replay value, then it sucks.

Did you enjoy those 3 hours? I find it telling that this didn't even factor into the equation of whether the game was good or not.

Judging a game based on its length or replay-ability is as idiotic as judging a movie by its running time or the content of the DVD/blu-ray special features.

And I can only assume you despise movies and books too which tend to have no "replay value" either, and which also only deliver a few hours of enjoyment for the cost...

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[badboy_tw2002]

Its hypothetically possible but probably not true for everyone. If I only had $20 and wanted to play two games that cost , one with no DRM and one without and available from a d/l site, I'd spend the money on the first and get the second one free. So its possible that the money went to some other game with stronger DRM. Possible, but probably not true for everyone. Its also possible that the people would have purchased no games ever, and just pirated whatever because they'd rather spend money on something that actually requires it instead of games, which are "free" and easy to obtain. Again, probably not true for everyone.

The problem with all these things in piracy and DRM and people who sit on both sides of it is that there's no great way to run a controlled experiment and say "Look, 20% sold with DRM, 40% sold without" because you'd need to release the same product at the same time to identical but separate markets, one with DRM, one without. And that's just not happening. So here's reality: people will continue to pirate games, and PC games will continue to be sold as they always have. It was a small niche market before, it can continue to be that in the future. With complete, locked down hardware the console market will continue to be the leader in the big budget single player games, but you can still make enough to get along with 90% pirate rates if you can make a good product and make it cheaply. Despite all the pirates, the market is still there, its just not the market that some want it to be. Continuing to deny reality or find some technical solution where there is none won't change that fact.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[capebretonsux]

If I can play and beat the game in three hours, and it has no replay value, then it sucks.

Crysis anyone?

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[omglolbah]

To give a real world example of the issue of DRM....

I love the Command and Conquer games. To such a degree that when the "First Decade" collectors box came out I wanted to get it even though I have all the games sitting -somewhere-. Couldnt find discs etc as I've moved several times since I bought the games... mess...

I downloaded the pirated version just to have a convenient archive of isos.

A few months later I found that my local gaming store had dropped the price by almost 30% for the pack. I didnt hesitate. I bought it and have it sitting in my collection now.....

Onwards to the issue that arrose:

I deleted the pirated versions and wanted to install completely clean versions. And I did.......

What happened? "Please insert the Red Alert 2 play disc" or somesuch.... It would not detect the disc regardless of what I did. I tried a multitude of things but ended up giving up and re-installing the cracks.

THAT is why I hate DRM. And THAT is why I will continue to wait for a crack to come out before I buy a game (steam games being an exception as they just -work-). I will not be left holding the bag on a shitty DRM scheme that breaks due to unrelated software installed on my machine. If I pay the 90 bucks for a game (which they cost here..) then I bloody well expect the fuckers to work when installed...

Meh... "it is just an excuuuuuse" and "people are cheap" are also the default comebacks used for the past 10 years. Come up with something new will you ;)

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[MakinBacon]

But here's the problem: If I were to pirate a game, and then decide that it's so good my friends should all play it, I'm not going to go to them and say "Hey, this game is pretty good, you should go buy it". I'm going to give them a link to the same torrent that I got it from.

Assuming that most of the people who pirate games and then recommend them to friends will employ similar logic (I see no reason why they wouldn't), the percentage of people who actually payed for the game will go down, and there will be no increase in customers.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[hairyfeet]

Who in the fuck modded this a troll? Do you HONESTLY think that in what may be one of the worst financial meltdowns in recent history, where unemployment has to be extended over and over simply because there ain't jobs to be had, where whole blocks of houses are abandoned all over the place and cities like Detroit are being torn down, that cranking out $60+ games is a WINNING strategy? Really? Because I got some nice swamp land to sell you buddy.

As for the one who said "those with $1000 PCs capable of playing modern games can afford to buy" where the hell are you shopping at? You can build a nice AMD dual that'll play just about anything you throw at it for under $400, and that is with a legal copy of Win7! I personally thought I went a little overboard with mine, upgrading to a quad and getting 8Gb of RAM, but I still got away with less than $600 after MIR and again legal copy of Win7 HP. While the HD4650 I bought certainly isn't cutting edge, with its 1Gb of RAM it plays Bioshock II and everything else I throw at it at my LCDs native 1600x900 just fine. I have built decent gaming duals for folks for under $500, PC parts are cheap as hell if you hit a sale or two, and by the time you figure in the fact you can use it for jobs besides gaming I'd argue its cheaper than a console! Just because you have a PC capable of playing games doesn't mean you have money dripping out your pockets friend.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[hairyfeet]

Hey I gotta agree with you there buddy. I have a friend that knock on wood will be benefiting from this last unemployment extension. Is he "sitting on his ass, taking drugs and not looking for work" as I saw one conservative put it? Fuck no! But after the company he was working for downsized (managing to hit just about everyone who had been there awhile and was making a decent wage, natch) Terry found out quickly that at 50 his job prospects in this economy are slim and none.

Now his wife has had to get on unemployment because she has carpal tunnel so bad in her right hand she can't even lift a glass with it and if things don't pick up I'll be amazed if they'll be in their home this time next year. I seriously think those conservatives screaming about the "lazy unemployed" need a fucking reality check and ought to have to spend 6 months working a real job instead of sitting on their asses and collecting bribes...err I mean campaign contributions.

I live in one of the rural states (AR) and people are shopping at Goodwill and working 2 jobs just to stay alive, if they are lucky enough to find a second job that is. I think everyone in America should be fucking ashamed that we have had 7 old folks die this year simply because they were afraid to turn on their AC for fear they couldn't pay the bill. I'm only glad my grandpa who fought and suffered in WWII and Korea isn't here to see this, because frankly you could probably power half the state with the amount of revolutions that man is spinning in his grave. This is NOT the country he and so many of his generation fought and bled for!

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[EvanED]

*sigh* You don't get it. First off, the reason so many people pirate today is because of DRM.

No, that's not "the" reason so many people pirate today. You're fucking posting in a story about how a DRM-free game is holding a sale because of 90% piracy rates, and this is not the first time a similar story has come up on /. The Humble Indy Bundle was distributed without DRM and letting people pay whatever they want (down to a penny!), and a quarter of the people who downloaded the games from their servers were pirating it!

The numbers don't add up to match your anecdotes.

Except that every major studio has switched to DRM to kill used games and to nickel and dime people.

People say the intent of DRM is to kill the used game market, and while that is a fortunate-to-the-studios side effect, I'm not convinced it's the main reason. Look at consoles... the used market in console games is healthy enough.

No, I actually think that, in most cases, the people who decide to use DRM actually think it will help the piracy problem.

The fact that you're defending them for putting it in there makes you a defender of DRM.

Where did I defend them for putting in DRM? I said it's their right to make that decision, and that it's not your right to decide that you're going to play anyway, but I never said that them using DRM was a good decision or that they should do it.

If every car dealer started putting a credit card reader in the dashboard and you had to swipe your credit car and pay to start the car, would you really support the car dealers and say "if you don't like it, don't buy a car"? I doubt it.

So first of all, your analogy doesn't quite line up in a very important aspect. Assuming what you're getting at is that, in your car analogy, you would hack your car, then the analogy is more like "I'll buy the game but try to hack it so that the DRM doesn't do its job." And that I will say is ethical, assuming that you don't then distribute the hacked version. (Distributing instructions on how to do the hack is fine.) But that's not what you're trying to justify doing.

Second, in the analogous world, not every car dealer has installed the interlock, just all the big ones. There would still be a few out there, including some dealers that sell quite nice cars at affordable prices, that don't. And in such a world, why would you go to the big dealers that use the interlock? (Of course this hints at another big problem, which is that you'll probably only have one or two cars, but many games.)

The fact that no DRM has ever stopped piracy is a pretty glaring point that it's not designed to fight piracy.

That's not a very good point considering that (1) DRM by its very nature is essentially impossible and (2) there have been reasonable successful DRM schemes short-term. I mean, consider Assassin's Creed 2, mentioned elsewhere in the comments to this story. That DRM went for about a month before being cracked. If you buy the popular lore that a substantial proportion of the copies of a game are sold shortly after release for most games, then that DRM was actually reasonably successful.

I'll leave you with a quote - "We must all fear evil men. But there is another evil that we should fear most - and that is the indifference of good men". You, my friend, are indifferent. I choose to fight those who desire is to harm and take advantage of people, all while making a profit while their customers lose.

I am not indifferent -- I have passed over games because of their DRM (e.g. Spore, C&C 4). However I don't pretend that I have some right to play the games that I choose simply because their publishers implement unreasonable DRM.

To be snarky, I'm actually usually willing to accept some inconvenience for my principles, unlike you.

Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy

[dgower2]

"You'd be a Homer Simpson if you paid after that."

No, you'd be HONEST! Great! people associate honesty with being dumb. The end is near - lol.

That's cute

[Dunbal]

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.

Re:That's cute

[Hatta]

So.. the people who are willing to support the things they love economically will get games. The people who aren't, won't. What is the problem here? Sounds like the free market working.

Re:That's cute

[Anonymous Coward]

If their games are shit, why are so many people pirating it? Don't answer that.

Re:That's cute

[Bigjeff5]

The problem is with the argument that DRM does not increase sales while decreasing value.

You can still be against DRM for other reasons, but games like Machinarium and World of Goo are providing some evidence against that particular argument.

(neither World of Goo nor Machinarium are crappy games and so the argument that crappy games don't get legit sales isn't very applicable)

That seems reasonable, in a vacuum. But there is solid evidence that DRM has no positive effects on the sales, and it absolutely has a negative effect on the cost to produce the game. Ricochet Infinity is another popular casual game that did have DRM and has a 92% piracy rate, which is the same as Machinarium's 92% rate and significantly higher than World of Goo's 82% piracy rate.

With just these three games as samples, it seems that the piracy rate for DRM games is as high or higher than that of non-DRM games.

Obviously someone needs to take a serious look at the numbers - comparing similar games of similar quality and popularity and see if the DRM is actually doing anything for the revenues of the game. Also, how much piracy can be mitigated by lowering the price of the game? I for one would never pay $20 for Machinarium or World of Goo, no matter how good they are. I might pay $10 though (emphasis on 'might'). How much of the piracy is just an indication that the price is too high?

There is still no real evidence to suggest those who pirated the game would have bought it instead if they couldn't get it for free. It makes sense to assume that at least some portion of the people who pirated the game would have found a way to purchase it instead, but how many? There's no telling, and that's the real problem with the DRM debate.

It's 90% piracy for DRM'd stuff too

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's 90% piracy for DRM'd stuff too

[BorgDrone]

Mind if I come over your house and take whatever I want as long as you can still live?

No, but you are welcome to visit and copy my TV and stereo any time you want.

Missing the point

[Tassach]

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.

Re:Missing the point

[mobby_6kl]

I have to disagree here, I think the first question is correct. You know why? Because most people don't give a shit about DRM, even if they know it exists. If everything comes together just right, there might be a shitstorm of complaints and this might have an effect (like Spore, but being a bad game certainly had a greater effect), but mostly the games are sold just fine with DRM. Look at the consoles, and look at Steam - in many aspects it's actually worse than traditional CD copy protection, but people line up to get their games from Steam because it downloads updates automatically or some such shit.

Re:Missing the point

[Medgur]

DRM is working fairly well for Steam.
IIRC, when connecting to a game server with full Steam integration the Client first requests an authentication packet, based on a pub key from their client ID. The server then requests an authorization key from Valve, if that's provided, the user may begin connecting. On the client end, this dance is played directly with the Valve auth servers to even launch the game.
Yes, both avenues have been hacked, but in doing so you're left with either:
1. Playing only with other people who have hacked the client and server, without any match making support for finding such servers
2. Playing alone

Re:Missing the point

[twidarkling]

Actually, I use Steam because
a) They regularly have sales, even on relatively new titles.
b) My games follow my account, not my computer, so I don't have to worry if I'm using some random computer for some reason, just so long as I can log on to the internet for about 5 minutes (using the local backup ability means I just need to log on to the Steam service to get my list, not download the entire game).
c) I don't need to keep CDs/DVDs around. I literally don't know how many games I can't play because I lost the disc or it's damaged just barely enough, and it's not sold any more.

Downloading updates automatically wasn't even on my list, since most games have a "check for updates" feature built-in, either automatically on start, or through a menu, whatever. In my opinion, Steam is DRM done *correctly.* It offers various value enhancements to the user, rather than simply restricting rights. If you're against DRM on principle, it's not going to win you over, but if you only worry about the intrusiveness level, Steam is probably the most gentle scheme out there.

Re:Missing the point

[Derosian]

Not only does it download updates automatically, it also saves the fact that I bought the game and allows me to uninstall the game and reinstall it via download later. It is incredibly freeing, to not have to worry about a DVD, also on top of that, sometimes I don't want to have to go out and buy a game, sometimes I'm just sitting at my computer and feel the urge to play an RPG, so I go buy something off of steam download it in the time it takes to watch an episode of Family Guy or American Dad from Hulu, and then play it. I actually bought the game the article is about because it was on sale for $5 before the Slashdot article came up. I personally choose not to pirate Indie games, because I know how tight their profit margins are, I heard excellent things about this game, and felt $5 was a good deal. After playing it I can say it was a good deal. In general I would not spend $20 on a game like this, maybe $10 but my budget is rather tight as a college student who works only part time and goes to school full time. $20 is sometimes more than I spend on food in a week. Now as to pirating industry games, I have done it yes. The great games though, I end up shelling out the cash for after I've pirated it. Games like Oblivion, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, these games are worth 40-50 dollars, because of the enjoyment I get out of them and the quality of the product, on top of that I REALLY want them to make sequels because I had so much fun with the first game, so I show my support with my money after I know a game is good, not when I think it might be good or when I've heard it could be good.

Re:Missing the point

[IICV]

Most games are also pirated just fine with DRM. It really doesn't do much either way.

And I buy stuff from Steam because they frequently have the best prices. $7 for Gratuitous Space Battles + all the expansion packs this weekend? I'm sold!

Re:Queue the Arguing

[Hatta]

The numbers here really aren't in debate. The piracy rate is around 90%, so what? Deterring pirates is not the same thing as earning customers. DRM puts the former over the latter, when the latter is the only thing that matters.

Re:DRM does work

[Count Fenring]

Your belief that only a minority can pirate is bizarre. Once one person with technical skill cracks a game, generally it's a low-to-zero effort for piracy.

Starcraft 2 lack of LAN was to control pro gameing

[Joe The Dragon]

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.

Penny Arcade says it well

[phantomfive]

As with many things game related, Penny Arcade says it best. In the struggle between pirates and game-makers, only the pirates win.

Made Up Numbers

[ArcaneAmoeba]

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.

Game compaines using piracy as an excuse

[nnull]

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.

Language barrier

[tepples]

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?

Where do they get the numbers?

[KarlIsNotMyName]

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)?

Slashdot Hypocrisy

[jamesbulman]

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.

Re:Slashdot Hypocrisy

[mooingyak]

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.

I've heard this argument a few times, and while it's not completely wrong, it does oversimplify.

The focus is more around for profit vs not for profit activity, and the scale of the individual activity. Very few people here will defend someone who runs a commercial scale piracy ring, copying movies or whatever, pressing the CDs and DVDs en masse and selling them on street corners for $5 each. And in reverse, there won't be much uproar over a guy who stole some GPL code and sold it to two friends for all of $30 profit. When both scale and motive combine in the wrong way -- essentially, profiting off of someone else's work repeatedly, no one sticks up for the offender.

Re:Slashdot Hypocrisy

[bieber]

Well, if you're willing to start with a premise as flawed as "Piracy = Copyright Infringement," you should be able to derive just about any absurdity you want.

Ignoring that massive untruth, though, you're still repeating an all-too-common fallacy. "You espouse this view, which I disagree with. Other people who I connect you with because I'm incapable of separating different groups of people I disagree with hold a seemingly contradictory view. Therefore you're all hypocrites."

Aside from the fact that commercial copyright infringement and person-to-person file-sharing are not the same thing, you're making the completely unfounded assumption that GPL defenders and file-sharers are all one-and-the same. I write and use free software, and I don't download or otherwise use proprietary software, or "pirate" other content. Sorry to poke a hole in your carefully constructed fantasy world, there...

Re:Slashdot Hypocrisy

[icebraining]

For the GPL to have the power of sharing, it requires copyright law.

Actually, no, that's a myth often repeated. GPL uses copyright law because it enables its purposes, but you don't need to keep all copyright law to enable the GPL.
GPL just needs a law that says "if the author of the software wants it, all derivatives must release their code". You could scrap copyright law and enact a new law like this.
There is a nice post by a lawyer (iirc) about this, but I've misplaced the URL.

Saying sharing isn't bad, piracy is sharing, and therefore piracy isn't bad is a leap in logic. Piracy is directly ripping artists and other content creators off, making sure they don't get paid while you still enjoy the fruits of their labor. It's the OPPOSITE of sharing.

Of course it's sharing. John has a song, he shares it with Steve, now Steve has the song too. How did he not share?
The question isn't if it's sharing, it's if it's moral to share in certain cases. But the logic is solid. If the person considers sharing to be always good, then both file sharing and GPL are good.

By the way, file sharing isn't always "ripping artists and other content creators off". Sharing music of Charlie Parker (dead for 55 years) is still illegal, but hardly "ripping off artists".

Supply and Demand

[sonicmerlin]

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.

Re:Stardock does fine

[Teknikal69]

Everyone always says Stardock is DRM free but I'll never buy another game from them but only time I ever bought from them it was Galactic Civilization 2 dreadlords unplayable with bugs and it wouldn't let me patch it. It justtold me the serial on the box was invalid and my efforts at resolving the issue through emails basicly ended with them basicly calling me a pirate and refusing me a working serial, the game was bought in a shop still shrink-wrapped at Game UK and returned. I've actually never had as much trouble with any other PC game so in my eyes their a shoddy company and not to be trusted.

Define pirates

[edelbrp]

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.

Piracy and Price

[Datasage]

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.

Torrents are public information

[judeancodersfront]

They are just comparing sales with completed torrents. It's actually a conservative estimate since there are other forms of piracy like private servers.

Re:Starcraft 2 lack of LAN was to control pro game

[Seth024]

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)

Paradox

[cfeedback]

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.

illusionary numbers

[Tom]

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.

Re:illusionary numbers

[Cabriel]

In group 2, why would any of them pay for a game when they can have it for free? Isn't that the capitalist way? Paying the least for the greatest enjoyment?

The common argument is that this is a self-correcting system in that developers won't make good games, anymore, but the that always ignores the other obvious effect that we, actually, are witnessing right now: the birth of DRM. You suggest a false claim that those who may or may not buy the game would definitely do so if the game were good, but that's just not true. Why should they pay for it and worry about their next purchase when they could have both it for free AND the next purchase?

Re:illusionary numbers

[Tom]

In group 2, why would any of them pay for a game when they can have it for free?

Because it's the right thing to do, because it's more convenient, because they buy it as a gift for someone else, because they want you to make another game, because they don't care about getting it as cheap as possible, there are other criteria besides price, because they want the nice, printed manual or the CD or whatever, because because because.

Just the way people have a hundred reason to download a torrent even though they have enough disposable income to buy it, other people have a hundred reasons not to, even if they could.

Why should they pay for it and worry about their next purchase when they could have both it for free AND the next purchase?

Mostly, because people are people and on average a lot more honest and moral than, say, corporations which do not have to burden themselves with such things as culture and emotions.

I thought the financial crises would've served to drive that point home. Banks are "afraid" of people defaulting on their houses, and yet it turns out that a) banks themselves are a lot worse in handling money and risk than home owners (on average) are and b) rich people default on houses a lot more often than poor people.

It is not about money. It's about honesty and values. Funny how capitalism ignores some of the most fundamental elements of humanity. Maybe we should have realized that it is a theoretical system to describe economic interactions in an idealized thought-world, not a religion.

I presume you mean for DRM games

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

I Don't Like These Figures

[xwizbt]

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...

Re:Starcraft 2 lack of LAN was to control pro game

[Vaphell]

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.

World of Goo's methodology is flawed

[pantherace]

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.

Objectively, it sucked.

[korthof]

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.

The economics are simple.

[SETIGuy]

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.

Lost sales or gained sales? Impossible to know

[D J Horn]

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..

Re:Starcraft 2 lack of LAN was to control pro game

[Jack9]

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.

$5 is about right.

[bi_boy]

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.

once again, bullshit

[Nyder]

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.