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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!'"
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.
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.
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?
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.
Football Odds
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
So what?
The "piracy rate" is a totally bogus number. It doesn't mean anything. Most importantly, what it definitely not means is "lost sales". You can't do mathematics with an illusionary number. It's like me saying the Bogeyman number is 12.5 - it doesn't mean anything. You can't say "oh wow, that means for today (8h), I earned (8*12.5 = 100) a hundred dollars!" Uh, no. Same thing, taking a "piracy rate" number and multiplying it by another made-up number (say, "potential conversion rate") and then multiplying it by an arbitrarily set number-with-unit (sales price) to arrive at a totally made-up number and then call that "loss due to piracy" is just dishonest.
I'll be interested in the results of this guy, but my guess is any additional sales have nothing to do with piracy and everything with advertisement.
Do yourself a favour and step away from this movie-and-music-industry created phantom that piracy == lost sales. There is something called "structural unemployment", to use a non-car metaphor. What it means is that you can never, ever, have 0% unemployment. There are always people without a job, even if there are a hundred open positions for every person looking for one. You have people on the move, people who just quit and haven't yet signed up for a new one, some people are just impossible to employ, and so on. You always have some unemployment that you can not get rid of no matter what you do (aside from playing statistics tricks).
Same thing with piracy, just on a different scale. No matter what DRM you use, no matter how low the price, no matter what else, there will always be people who don't pay for your game.
I've said this before. Think about your players as being in three groups:
1.) the ones that will certainly buy your game
2.) the ones that may or may not buy your game
3.) the ones that will certainly not buy your game
where 3.) includes the pirates. People who download your game from a torrent have all sorts of reasons to do so, most of them you can't do anything about. My advise is to ignore them and focus on the undecided bunch. The ones who may buy the game if you can catch their interest. Which you more likely do with more polish than with better DRM.
And yes, I do sell stuff online. I don't care about pirates. The extend of my "anti-piracy" measure is that you get the download link after paying, and that's it. Any and all DRM is a waste of time and money.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
needless to say, Koreans are in the right here
you don't pay royalties to the manufacturer of the hammer you used to build a house and sell it with profit. You paid for the hammer - that's it.
KeSPA did all the legwork to set up everything and now blizzard comes in and says 'pay up, bitches, you use our game'. Yeah, but they don't sell a game, they sell competition between players. Game is merely a tool, 50 bucks a pop.
It's distasteful because greatly Blizzard benefited from increased sales for years thanks to the tv coverage and didn't have to pay a dime for that. Easy money. They got the best marketing possible for free and now they want the cut on top of that.
Someone needs to step in and smack the software industry hard. They do anything they want because they can put whatever in their EULAs and ToSes and with no resistance circumvent common sense, basic user rights, first sale doctrines and whatnot.
http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
I haven't played the game, nor purchased it, but I have a big problem with their statistics: They basically took the unique IPs and divided by the number of sales. That might have been somewhat accurate in the 1980s.
It's utter rubbish. People often have laptops. Today, my laptop will have at least 2 IPs. There are days that I've had 5 different ones, from different locations. (Actually probably more than that, considering that the university likes to subnet by building, which probably means that there are another 2 IPs. (possibly per day, unless their DHCP assigns the same one))
So if I'd purchased the game, and played it on my laptop at various times throughout the day, over a week, I could very easily account for 10 IPs alone. The same methodology applied to Steam, could easily lead to Steam being well over 50% pirated.
I 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.
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...
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