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Cutting Prices Is the Only Way To Stop Piracy
Stoobalou writes "The only way to stop piracy is to cut prices. That's the verdict of a major new academic study that reckons copyright theft won't be halted by 'three strikes' broadband disconnections, increasing censorship or draconian new laws brought in under the anti-counterfeiting treaty ACTA. The Media Piracy Project, published last week by the Social Science Research Council, reports that illegal copying of movies, music, video games and software is 'better described as a global pricing problem' — and the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares."
They did? That must be why jailbreaking is so prevalent. I worked for a few millionaires and they wanted to jailbreak their apple products. Want to know why? Free software.
I find it highly unlikely the ones screeching loudest about losing money to copyright violations are going to start charging less money for their stuff.
CDs were supposed to be lower the cost of music. Digital files were supposed to lower the cost of music.
These guys will push to get a law passed to ensure that everybody tithes to them long before they'd ever consider lowering their prices.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Netflix streaming is a good example of good pricing vs content offered. TV shows and movies sold on the iTunes Store is a good example of bad pricing. TV Shows in HD should cost 99 cents to own, 50 cents to stream and SD shows should cost 50 cents to own and 25 cents to stream. Movies should be priced at least half if not a quarter of the price for the DVD or BluRay version.
I am selling an iPhone game at 0.99 $ and there's still people pirating it. Does it have to be even cheaper?
The problem that I have is that many of us don't WANT to be a pirates, but the studios heavy-handedness and greed make it almost impossible NOT to. I am perfectly happy buying a blu-ray or DVD. But the studios often throw up so many road-blocks to me as a legitimate consumer as to make it impossible.
I DVR "The Color of Money" (one of Scorsese's best, IMHO) in HD and I want to buy a copy that won't disappear the second my DVR dies. But, guess what? The studio says I can't (the only legally available version is a crappy non-anamorphic DVD that looks awful on a modern TV). So I'm left with the option of Pirate Bay or illegally ripping it off my DVR (both of which would make me a pirate in their eyes). I want to buy it legitimately, but the studio says no.
I DVR "Space Race: The Untold Story" (great docudrama, BTW) in HD from the National Geographic Channel. Same deal, want to buy it. But this time the studio won't even let me buy a DVD in the U.S. (much less an HD blu-ray). It's only available in Region 2. So, even if I import it, I would now be forced to illegally modify my DVD player to watch it. Want to buy it. Want to be honest. Nope, I would have to rip it from my DVR if I wanted to own it.
Even with the blu-rays and DVD's I *can* buy, I'm stuck watching 5 or 6 forced trailers at the beginning of each (many studios not even letting me skip them). Don't want to spend several minutes fighting with your player just to watch the goddamn movie you paid for? Better go off to Pirate Bay, because that's the only way you're getting it, buddy.
To Sony, Warner, Paramount, et. al.: Stop forcing people to be pirates with your fucking DRM, your greed, your region coding, your goddamn bizarre distribution rights agreements, etc. and you'll find there are a LOT more people willing to actually pay for your stuff than you think.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I hope this statement of sanity doesn't fall on deaf ears or ears that don't see the logic in this new model.
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
You're not going to stop people from pirating (not unless you're going for a full all-controlling dictatorship). The best you can do is make a little profit on your investment.
> I rather spend $50 and have a great game than small little games for a few dollars.
Fortunately people don't want that $50 over-priced nonsense and show otherwise....
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090219/1124433835.shtml
Valve dropped the price on L4D and sales went up over 200% !
* 10% off = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
* 25% off = 245% increase in sales
* 50% off = 320% increase in sales
* 75% off = 1470% increase in sales
http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/live-blog-dice-2009-keynote-gabe-newell-valve-software/
"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."
"Apple proved you can cut down on piracy with DRM with their App store for the iPhone and iPad."
No they didn't; they did it with pricing and convenience. The somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM on Apple's wares is easily broken. What the iTunes and App stores have shown is that if the prices are perceived as reasonable, and the DRM doesn't get in their way (much), people will not bother with piracy.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This is a dupe, links to an article that links to a study that has already been posted here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/07/180210/Piracy-In-Developing-Countries-Driven-By-High-Prices
Basically, music and software are priced to USA's average wage. Since the cost of life in other places is lower, and wages are lower, then it becomes prohibitively costly. Hence piracy.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/07/180210/Piracy-In-Developing-Countries-Driven-By-High-Prices It's the exact same report. But then again, it's not like CmdrTaco closely follows slashdot or anything ;)
I'd suggest that their DRM really only works because of the low price of apps. Sure you can get around it, but if it's going to cause you problems in the future--i.e. with further updates--that are going to make you waste time and effort, and you can avoid that waste by spending $0.99, that's what most people are going to do.
I can't cite anything, but I'm absolutely certain that I read somewhere that pirated apps can be easily installed on jailbroken phones.
So a combination of low price and just-annoying-enough DRM is probably the real key.
The CB App. What's your 20?
LOL. Its not like pirated versions of DRM riddled games are better or anything amirite?
Pirated software is free. There is no way to compete with that at any price. People who are willing to pirate software will, no mater what the software costs.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
if you charge a fair price for the product (which is fair for the market concerned), make the product easily accessible to people who want it, AND DON'T TREAT THEM LIKE CRIMINALS most people will be happy to pay for your product. The ones who don't want to pay even then? You really weren't going to make any money off of them anyway.
yes. you need to drop it to zero cents. Then only a few will pirate it.
You see, we have a lot of folks who want to wax phiosophical about why software should be free, why piracy is a good thing, and hey.... information wants to be free.
The reality is people are cheap bastards that want the world to pay them well for little effort but don't want to pay for other people's efforts. Rich, poor, people are all alike in that regard. Some of us are smart enough to see our own shortcomings and deal with it in a grown up fashion. The rest troll Slashdot.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Letting users name their own prices with the Humble Indie Bundle and giving the proceeds to charity wasn't enough to stop piracy. The argument just changed to, "It's more convenient to get it from a Torrent site."
Free is always going to be cheaper than cheap. That's what piracy is all about. It has nothing to do with "sticking it to the man" or "improving the user experience" or "taking control of your purchases." It's about getting something for nothing. I know there's plenty of people out there who justify their piracy with many legitimate-sounding goals, but in the end, that's not the issue.
Obviously people that feel Apple has been successful with DRM have failed to see what the public is doing with such jailbreaking tools as Green Poison: http://greenpois0n.com/
While a jailbroken iPhone, iPod, or iPad prevents people from using the App store while in broken mode, the apps already purchased previously work just fine. Beyond this, a jailbroken device runs cracked drm-free applications just as well as the DRM polluted ones.
Where there is a will, there is always a way.
Jailbreaking is hardly the standard. The vast majority of users don't want to mess with their phones in that way.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The answer to this is cutting out middlemen.
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
Yeah and the only reason why Valve could afford to do such a discount was because they had already made back all of their money back and then some by that point so they had a greater incentive to cut huge discounts on an older title with flat sales. If you think Valve would ever do that for a new game, you'd be kidding yourself.
I've been waiting for this a long time...
Think about it: Our society has been producing high quality entertainment for about 2 decades now. Music, movies, tv shows, games, etc. These forms of entertainment don't "go bad". Jurassic Park is still an awesome movie. As time goes on, more and more high quality entertainment gets added to the pile.
Now, what is the net effect? Prices MUST come down. Which is why we see $5 bins of DVDs in Wal-mart. But now I see $5 DVDs that contain a TRILOGY instead of a single movie. I bought the Matrix trilogy, including Animatrix, for $9 at Best Buy.
This trend will continue. Soon, there will be so much entertainment available, that it MUST be free (or ridiculously cheap) in order to compete with the DECADES of high quality entertainment already in the pile.
How many times do we have to go over this? With theft, you're removing something from the owner so he/she no longer has that item - that's never an issue with copyright infringement.
They are two entirely different violations of the law, just as arson and cannibalism are two entirely different violations of the law. You can try and tie yourself up in a pretzel trying to say that oranges are just like apples, but it just doesn't work. And please, pretzels, skip all the usual straw men - copyright infringement is still a violation of the law and no one is claiming otherwise.
Duh! How dare you expect to be paid for your work. Those pirates are ENTITLED to your work for free!!
Individual songs are so cheap on iTunes I never pirate music and I'm extremely happy to pay. If I could get e-book rentals for two weeks, movie rentals a week, and episodes at the same time as they air in the USA for $1 I've give them even more of my money! Buying movies in iTunes for $5, and being able to buy them at the same time as they come out in the cinema for around $10 would be great too.
Point zero zero zero two percent of the population doesn't really constiture "the public". The public simply wants to use the device, not tinker with it any more than the public tears down their car engines for fun.
I am selling an iPhone game at 0.99 $ and there's still people pirating it. Does it have to be even cheaper?
Try selling at it $5.99 and see what happens to the app's piracy rate...
With the first link, the chain is forged.
... be a little less efficient at concentrating wealth?
Duh! Revolutions have been fought over this shit. Cake, anyone?
The easiest way to stop illicit trade is to remove the huge profits. True for software, true for street drugs, true for pretty much any commodity. Prohibition doesn't work; lack of profit does.
--- Bill
I agree, they won't ERADICATE piracy with lower prices.
I actually think the sales numbers/experiment from Steam/L4D speak more about charging first adopters a premium, then tapering off your pricing as the new hotness factor rolls off, promoting sales later on for basically free. Using that model alone, you can charge less up front, and still taper the prices off and come away with the same net income, just over a longer period.
I've been watching "Louise" (see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1492966/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_(TV_series) ) on Netflix recently. Last night I went to Netflix, and tried to cue up the next episode. Instead of getting to watch episode 10 like I had episode 1 through episode 9, it was only available on DVD, and the DVD wasn't released yet. Some time in the last week or two, they changed. So, I could either put the DVD for a season I had almost finished watching on my "Save" list, or I could go look for the same content from other distribution channels. Hum, tough choice.
San Francisco Photographers
Don't worry about the people pirating it, just make it the price at which you make the most money even when some do pirate it. If making it $0.50 would convert enough pirates to buyers than do that, if not don't.
Unless you post more information on your game it will be hard to tell but my guess is that people do not think that they their worth of money. Perhaps it just has to be better.
If someone wants to spend time playing a computer game, $0.99 isn't going to put most people off. More like people thought it was worth their money but thought free was even better. If you want a more rigorous logical argument, my time is worth more than $0.99 per hour and so is almost everybody else's. So if I spend an hour on a game, I'm already paying significantly more than $0.99 in real terms. That puts the lie to the notion that it is overpriced.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
You mean that if "a pirate" downloads it and after playing it, he sees that it's worth his money, he'll go to the app store and buy it? No, the game is good enough, and is worth more than 1 $. I was going to shamelessly promote it here... but there are too many pirates reading.
People pirate 99 cent songs. Lower prices will not prevent that. It's a dollar...seriously...how much cheaper than one dollar will something have to be before people stop pirating it? Answer: $1.
That's the verdict of a major new academic study
The reality is, this is pure bullshit. For decades pirates claimed they need only lower prices and it would be the end of piracy. And so, we can how the sub-$0.99 cent music market and piracy is still raging; if not growing. The simple truth is, far too many studies, not to mention history which completely invalidates this study before it was written, proves price is almost never (only for a tiny minority is price) a significant factor in piracy.
Why not?
If they get that level of sales for an old game at a low price, imagine the level of sales for a new title at a discount price. What they get per unit really does not matter, there are basically $0 per unit costs. So total income is the only thing that matters.
But even if they would lower prices in US and Europe, with games that pretty much leaves us with "crappy" games like Angry Birds, Farmville and indie games. You just cant have the same story, graphics quality and everything else involved with the big good games. I rather spend $50 and have a great game than small little games for a few dollars.
The real problem is that the copy-write holders are focusing on solving piracy, not managing piracy. They need to remember that their first goal is to make profit (more-or-less tied to revenue) and that one pirated copy doesn't translate to a lost sale.
Retail stores structure things knowing that some percentage of merchandise will be shoplifted. They don't like shop lifters, and take reasonable steps to prevent them. However, they don't go TSA on the customers. Like-wise, a game publisher should focus on impressing the customers who pay the $50, not eliminating the pirates who don't.
the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares
This isn't hard, nor is it novel. The cost of this media has stayed reasonably steady while its perceived value has dropped considerably. I haven't downloaded a movie in the past 5+ years, yet I've stopped buying them new. Five years ago, I'd buy a used movie for $10 as long as it had some featurettes. Now, my threshold is probably $7, which is four dollars less than five years ago (when adjusting for inflation). I bought In Rainbows for $5 and the Humble Indie Bundle for $20.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I'm jail-broken and don't have a single pirated app installed.
Gone!
the artists on these site always LOOSE, they would be far better off flipping burgers somewhere..
music artists may loose on cd sales, but they gain on promotion costs. musicians dont make alot off of cd sales anyway, even if they do belong to a label. bands make alot more doing concerts.
If you think Valve would ever do that for a new game, you'd be kidding yourself.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/630/
Free from day 1.
Also Dead Space 2: price dropped 33% in a month.
No, it doesn't prevent people from using the app store. My iPhone is jailbroken and I use the App store (for both paid and free-as-in-beer free apps. I have exactly zero "pirated"[sic] software on my phone. I use the jailbreak for:
BSD userland
OpenSSH
SBSettings (and all the free plugins)
Action Menu
Nagios (no joke - I monitor servers on the go!)
NO pirated software. I use my phone a LOT, and my very highest 3G bandwidth usage to date (on my unlimited plan) is 1.8GB, when I used netflix a lot while on a trip.
There are reasons to jailbreak which have nothing to do with "piracy"[sic].
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Reducing prices makes a big difference in how the consumer perceives what they bought. It is actually rare to have a company succeed by increasing prices by distorting the value of their product (for example, Apple). The music industry for example has super high prices and those prices have been extremely high forever. Even at $10.00 per CD the prices is outrageous.
Lately I've heard about how some book and program authors have made significantly more money selling their products at $.99 than even at $2.99. Sometimes the income has risen dramatically. The problem with the music industry is that they want to keep their old business model and sell at the same price thus keeping themselves living as billionaires. The consumer on the other hand has said "definitely no" to those prices. Music stores have gone out of business and the sales emphasis is really focused on digital online sales. But the music industry keeps pushing the numbers because they think they'll make even more if they box us into their old price structure.
The internet changes one significant variable. That is distribution. The internet gives everyone a chance to open their own stores online. Buy what you need JIT and resell. You do the shipping and maintain a minimal workforce. Contrast that with what the music industry wants--to control distribution. In controlling that channel they can determine the prices, even going so far as having the RIAA member companies fix the prices. The internet widely opens almost every market to anyone. Getting your target audience's attention or even growing your target audience is vastly simplified. This is far different than it was even 30 years ago.
The consumer knows it costs less to produce digital works and to distribute them, therefore there's no need to keep paying the high price, so they download the music for free instead of caving in to the music industry's demands. What the music industry doesn't understand is that the ability to get the attention of more people and to let them sample the music is vastly increased via the internet. That means they can continue to grow their businesses with digital sales at significantly lower prices because of that access.
So, to me, the basic premise of price reduction is spot on. Dunce-heads in various industries affected by free digital downloads are killing their own business and giving away the market to others to control (i.e., Apple, Amazon, etc.) To those dunce-heads: lower your prices because we the consumer know that your costs are significantly reduced and your access to the consumer is vastly expanded. And, while you are at it, go back and give those artists what they deserve and stop stealing from them.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
drop in prices will not help at all
Are huge packages of iPhone games/apps available on bittorrent? I have wondered whether this is a low risk area for torrents because many apps are built by smaller developers who won't have the money to chase after every/any seeder.
From there it's only a step up to some enterprising pirate creating a tool which automates the process of finding, downloading and installing any app - accessible from an extra button added to the app store, or something.
Thing is, even if you paid people to buy your app, negative price, you'd still see pirates.
Good for you. Where I live CD prices have stayed the same. A CD in 1999 would cost you USD 22. Today it costs roughly USD 22. Our income hasn't increased 4x but our money has been devaluated to 1/4 of what it was.
Back in the time, I used to buy my CDs for $10-$12 from USA. Even paying international shipping it was cheaper for me.
It's naive to think it's the only way, or to think it will actually stop it.
It will reduce piracy, at least among groups that are motivated to pirate based on the price barrier, but that's not the only type of group.
From my experience, pirates tend to be broken up into these main categories:
- People who pirate because they can't afford to be legit (at least not on everything), or simply think the prices are too high and refuse to pay the price being asked.
- People who pirate because they are digital hoarders, and they wouldn't care what the price is. They just collect data for bragging rights, to explore all the data that's out there, for trading, or 'just in case' they need or want it one day (or in case someone else might want or need it.) Or maybe it's just to be rebellious.
- People who pirate for trial purposes, to help them in making a buying decisions. Despite skepticism to the contrary, some of these actually buy.
- People who pirate in order to avoid the bad user experiences that are often associated with buying legitimately these days, and who might actually be legit if there were less hassle involved.
Furthermore, Left 4 Dead was released November 17, 2008 and the sale in question took place in early February, 2009.
A three month old game is hardly an "older title."
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
I am selling an iPhone game at 0.99 $ and there's still people pirating it. Does it have to be even cheaper?
Price does not really reduce piracy, DRM does. People will pirate if it is easy to do so.
I once had the opportunity to witness the sales of some software bundled with a freshman chemistry textbook. This chemistry visualization and modeling software was needed for class assignments. It was packaged and sold separately from the textbook so other students could use it too. The textbook included a coupon to get the software at a highly discounted price. About US$10 IIRC, US$30 if not bundled. The software contained no DRM the first quarter it was available. Sales of the software was a small fraction (5% ish - measured with redeemed coupons) of book sales. The publisher then added DRM for the next quarter, sales were close to (80% ish) the book sales, despite the fact that the DRM was easily defeated. The DRM was a well-known off-the-shelf solution with abundant removal tools. Subsequent quarters showed similar sales so the increase was not due to removal tools not being available on day 1. IIRC correctly such tools were available within a week - well in time for assignments that used the software.
The "I'd buy it if it were reasonably priced" meme is in reality largely a rationalization to justify current piracy. Only a few would follow through and go legit.
You'd be surprised how much better pirated versions of games can be due to buggy or invasive DRM. Even as simple as not needing to put in the DVD each time you want to play the game can be enough drive for someone to download a no CD hack if not outright pirate the game.
except by looking at the math.. 75% off you need 4 times the sales (300% increase) to cover the same as normal at 100%..
they managed to sell more than when they launched.. now more cash wise or more number wise is a good question.. but either way.. they would have made atleast what they already made to make it back.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
The vast majority of users don't infringe on copyright either, except when they can't get what they want.
I know I'd rather pay for a clean copy of something than hunt for it on pirate sites. Sometimes, what I want, just isn't available, like the original, unedited WKRP episodes on DVD.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Even if price were cut, things would still not be free. As long as there is some kind of price other than completely free, piracy will still occur. That's just the way things go. Even if it all cost one cent, people would rather get something for free than go digging for their wallets to get that penny. Just my two "cents". Fletcher T. email marketing solutions | email marketing services
This is what I've figured, and I have mixed feelings about it. As a consumer, of course I'm all in favor of lower prices. But as someone who hopes to create stories and art and software and other things, and to do that for a living, it's depressing. The Big Media represented by the RIAA and MPAA and a dozen or so novelists may be getting money for nothing and chicks for free, and there's the occasional two-guys-and-a-dot-com success story, but most independent creators (in various media) are already struggling to make a living at it, even with their prices "too high".
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Dead on right. Absolutely. Apple didin't even like DRM... they had to do it.
I would say you come away with more net income. I like many people consider anything sub $10 an impulse buy. I regularly check what steam has on sale at less than $10 will pick up any games that looks decent. At above that price I tend to research more and will consider borrowing said game for the PS3. I buy very few new games and me and my coworkers tend to share them for our PS3s rather than each buying them. For the PS2 I have many more games as I can get those for a more reasonable price.
I think there's more to it than that. Take the case of the "Humble Indie Bundles" - you could set your own price, down to a single cent, and much of it (buyer-determined) went to charity. And yet piracy of those games was not only prevalent, but actually increased during these sales.
This tells me that there is a significant mental barrier between "$0.01" and "$0.00". I do not believe it is the financial cost itself, but the difficulties of buying something online compared to pirating. The hassle of Paypal or credit cards or anything else is, IMO, the primary barrier. What is needed is a fast, zero-pain, minimal-set-up system for buying goods online. When buying the software is as easy as pirating it, piracy will drop.
This is probably why Steam has been successful. Once you've set up purchasing with your account, buying a game is simple - most of it consists of clicking "next" a few times. It's not perfect - it tends to assume you want to buy multiple games at once, making buying a single game more difficult than it should be - and of course there's the DRM issue, but it seems to be doing this better than most.
I occasionally do freelance work, making small game models/levels for random people online. Several times, rather than accept payment via Paypal or anything, I've simply told the client "find a game on my Steam wishlist that's about $10, that's enough payment for me". That's how difficult handling actual money online is - trading a service for a product is actually easier.
Yes, pricing is part of the problem. I haven't bought a game at release-day price since the last big Zelda game came out. I don't mind waiting a few months (or even years) for the price to drop from $50 or $60 to $20. I also haven't bought music anywhere in forever - 8 songs that came out in 1986 are not worth $15, even if it is a magnum opus of heavy metal.
So, really, the pricing is only half the issue. First is the divide between "what the product is worth" and "what the product is priced at", second is the divide between "how easy buying it is" and "how easy pirating it is". Solve those two, and piracy will drop significantly. Not to nothing, of course, but it will drop to reasonable levels.
I buy virtually no games new anymore. I just wait for Steam holiday sales and buy in bulk then. This Christmas I got enough stuff to EASILY cover my gaming for this year. $50.00 is too much. $30.00 is about the upper mean of what I'll pay anymore and it's usually much lower than that.
I pay for Netflix and Pandora too. I have no issue paying REASONABLE prices for good services. The reason I am canceling cable TV soon is because the service is mediocre and the price is NOT reasonable. The best part is, with these modern, excellently priced services I don't have to endure a bunch of crap I don't want to consume and I can do all of it at the times I want.
This guy does it: http://www.mrexcel.com/
You can download his books and read them for free. If you like them enough, he will gladly sell you a hard copy. It works so well he's been doing with every new book of his for the last couple of years.
But they made money they would not have otherwise, correct?
Piracy then did not hurt them at all.
Ahem. Alien Swarm is free because it's not very good. It's probably more valuable as a "come-on" to get people to download Steam than it is as a retail game.
Comment of the year
Back when recording sales had to support factories to churn out discs or tapes, and the trucks and brick and mortar stores to distribute them, one could argue that music should have cost more than it should now because none of that stuff is needed any more. But has the pricing changed? No- music downloads cost about the same as the same music would have cost back when it was supporting all that expensive infrastructure. Now add in the fact that most music is sold as mp3 or other lossy compressed files, so you're getting an inferior technical quality product, and then throw in the loss of convenience caused by DRM and music should be almost free.
The recording industry has decided what a recording is worth and not asked their customers what it is worth. Back when the customer got a piece of physical media they might perceive that they were getting something of intrinsic value and would be willing to pay more than someone getting a lower quality, possibly DRM riddled data file they can't see, touch, or resell when they tire of it. With the advent first of CDROM recorders in computers and later portable music players that play music saved as data files the value of getting the physical media from a record store all but disappeared. If someone knows they can download the music using a computer they already have and burn that music to a blank CD that they purchase for about 10 cents (or dump the data into their portable player), why would they go to a record store and pay $10-15 for a CD? It doesn't make any sense, yet this is the model the recording industry clings to.
The disc stores have mostly disappeared now because they have become irrelevant. The record companies are choking down their last gasps as they drown in their own tears.
How bout limiting the bandwidth between residentially leased subnets, and only offering full bandwidth to legitimate commercially owned networks? That would go a long way toward preventing piracy the way it is implemented these days (e.g. Bit Torrent, and other p2p protocols).
Dead Space 2 isn't a Valve game. Secondly, Alien Swarm is not a AAA Valve title like a Left4Dead.
I find that difficult to believe, given the draconian control Apple asserts over the app store. It's their way or the highway, so on what basis would they have had to accept DRM against their wishes?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Note: I do not defend or condone piracy. I think it's generally wrong, but I do understand why it exists;
I think it's also a matter of accessibility.
1. There is simply no legal alternative to Torrent-sites with the same range of content, at the same "same-site"-convenience and instant gratification of a download. Nomatter what price the consumer is willing to pay.
2. For anyone interested in video-content, compatibility with the media-center is key. Due to various DRM-mechanisms and special-delivery-methods of legal alternatives, formats from piracy sources are usually more compatible and "just works".
3. Geographical barriers limit the options in large parts of the world. Outside US, you just cannot get Hulu, and many other ad-driven or otherwise funded source, nomatter what you pay.
4. Release schedules. Much of the Hollywood media (TV and Movies) reaches parts of the World outside US slightly, or sometimes much later than the US premiere. Meanwhile, non-US citizens cannot conveniently access it without resorting to piracy, irregardless of willingness to pay.
While some will never accept any price, I think many of the current pirates wouldn't mind paying (many already pay for anonymity VPN services), if the 4 points above were reasonably addressed.
Supporting Example; Spotify. Before Spotify, a lot of my friends downloaded almost all music from pirate sources, even music they had already purchased. Downloading was simpler than ripping the CD, and you got it in non-DRM format. After Spotify, I hardly ever hear about anyone download pirated music. It's not worth it, since there's already a convenient legal way to get to most music anyways. In Sweden, most of music piracy is gone after Spotify. Many is satisfied with ad-driven Spotify, some purchase it, while some are still trying to get rid of the ads, equivalent of pirating it. Unfortunately, Spotify suffers from problem #3 and is not accessible throughout the world.
Dead on right. Absolutely. Apple didin't even like DRM... they had to do it.
Is that why they were claiming jailbreaking was highly illegal and it would crash the phone towers?
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/09/07/29/1440233/Apple-Says-iPhone-Jailbreaking-Could-Hurt-Cell-Towers
This space for rent.
I've been saying this for a long time. We are so inundated with content, whether it be TV, movies, books, or games, there is only so much money to go around. And as we've come to find out while spending our hard-earned cash most of that content is mediocre, or worse. The result is the perception of a glut of content that's simply not worth the asking price; the value we place upon any particular item is far below the selling price, and we just won't pay it.
Compounded the problem is the increasing avenues by which we're able to obtain content at a significantly cheaper cost. Movie, TV, and music streaming, highly-addictive and well-done app and indie games, buying single music tracks instead of whole albums, etc. We're further devaluing content as we've come to realize you don't need to pay $20 for a movie, $15 for a CD, or $60 for a game. Unless media companies quickly realize their 20th century business models aren't going to cut it anymore they are doomed to failure.
Piracy is just an extension of this new age of media devaluation. People are interested in a particular piece of content, but not enough to justify the cost, so they pirate it instead. If the item in question was more reasonably priced there is a high likelihood of purchase instead.
Yeah and the only reason why Valve could afford to do such a discount
"Afford" a discount? Did you miss the point that when they lowered prices, profit and revenue went up? It sounds like they can't afford not to do a discount.
Regardless, your post about whether or not they would do that for a new game is not relevant when we're talking about the relationship between price and revenue. The conclusion still shows that lower prices translate to higher revenue, regardless of what you think Valve may or may not do.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The reason I am canceling cable TV soon is because the service is mediocre and the price is NOT reasonable.
And this is why the ISPs are in the process of putting caps on your utilization. Their business model is heavily invested in making sure they have nice predictable recurring revenue from you every month. They are going to get that money one way or the other.
Jailbreaking is hardly the standard. The vast majority of users don't want to mess with their phones in that way.
And knowing how to find pirated games, their cracks, software for mounting the imgs, how to install the cracks is standard?
If you want to play the DRM free games on your phone you can find a way to jailbreak it.
With used dvd's for $2 at Pawnshops and Blue Rays at $8 (which I have no use for as long as they re still making $20 dvd players) I could care less if they dropped pricing as then I'd get it even cheaper second hand. I don't care anymore to support any music and movie companies. It was hard at first but I haven't been to the movies in over a year now and just wait for the dvd second hand.
As for music I don't have time anymore to spend hours at music stores seeing what is what. I'd rather go and spend the time searching for CC licensed music then spend time listening to commercial junk and then still pay for it the same price as a music cd.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I bought both indie bundles and I very rarely buy games (but then again I don't pirate them, either.) So the plan actually worked for me.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Apple didin't even like DRM... they had to do it.
Yeah. If there's one thing Apple hates, it's controlling the user's experience.
Sorry, I meant "managing their rights".
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The pirates wouldn't buy your product anyway, so you aren't really losing money. They're just free advertising if you have a good product.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I have brought games before, installed them and then can't play them because the registration server is down or because of system errors. Have to fill out a support ticket and wait 2 days before I can register my game and play. In the mean time, you can goto TPB download the patched file and play with 5 minutes. I have many paid for games that Im using pirated cracks & patches to get rid of annoying registration checking, requiring the disk to be in the drive each time, etc.... I have software to convert DRM protected movies I bought from Amazon to drm-free so I can watch them anytime with out installing a license and removing it off each device when your done. Most often, it much easier to pirate something than to get it legally then not have it work under a big list of restrictions.
I am writing my own software, and the first thing i thought of was what would avoid piracy of my software....and then i thought about it, and came up with, the App store, what if the price was so low, that it did not pay to pirate it, even for the pirates, as no one would download the pirated version because it would be cheap enough to get your own copy....I thought with a price tag like 1.99$ for a licensed copy of windows, AV software, winzip...etc....you really do not need to worry about pirating so much, and the fact remains at the start of any app's life, it was 1 programmer that wrote the code, then expanded to be bigger, as big as it is today....so I guess my point is this, I am thinking of selling my software for cheap to avoid piracy, and think not even to include a checker, maybe only to verify for updates, and check to see if a license is blacklisted, then pop up messages after x days of "you do not have a license valid for this product, you can get one for the low price of 1.99 to avoid these pop ups in the future......only I see this working for the future...piracy is unavoidable when software/games are too expensive.
I don't know much about the game, but the phrase "it's not very good" is subjective.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I think this is mostly because some of said pirates might tend to avoid the appstore entirely, or dislike having DRM on their packages (which doesn't really make sense for the end user ON their device). Their loss though, since you don't get auto-updates.
"Apple proved you can cut down on piracy with DRM with their App store for the iPhone and iPad."
No they didn't; they did it with pricing and convenience. The somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM on Apple's wares is easily broken. What the iTunes and App stores have shown is that if the prices are perceived as reasonable, and the DRM doesn't get in their way (much), people will not bother with piracy.
The somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM? How?
They reject perfectly good apps for capricious, inconsistent reasons.
See one among many http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/11/29/1633249/Apple-Bans-Android-Magazine-App-From-App-Store?from=rss
They also claimed that jailbreaking is a criminal offense. Their users are none the wiser anyway. But the upcoming forced 30% cut of all subscriptions and possible ban on Netlix and Kindle may result in users finally noticing if their prices go up or if their apps are pulled by Apple.
This space for rent.
If you really believe that, you've lost all touch with reality.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
The problem with DRM is that the original is not a "clean copy" by any stretch of the imagination. That's the fundemental problem with DRM. They take the original and screw around with it in some way as to make it less useful to the customer.
DRM only punishes the "honest customer".
It doesn't stop anything, or even really slow it down any...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I can't help but sigh when someone else comes out with a one-point item that is supposed to save creative copyright. To suggest that a lower price point will fix things is so incredibly naive, you wonder where these folks have been spending the last 10 years. Piracy has motives that run the gamut from folks wanting to make money to folks who just want more music to fill up their 2 tb disk drive. While an extremely low price point may force out those pirates trying to make a buck, it won't have a bit of an effect upon those who are happily increasing their music/movie collection for free.
While the movie world hasn't really changed all that much, the music world has been flooded with choice...so much so that there is just no way for a music aficionado to be able to keep up financially with the possible options. There is nothing the music business can do about this as it is now the nature of the industry. They must devise other revenue streams and scale back their expectations with the current streams since there is no going back. I guarantee, no lowering of the price of their goods is going to significantly slow the tide of piracy.
Some people will pirate regardless, sure.
For some it's price. It *IS* difficult to compete with free, or in the case of the mass DVD pirating that happens in some regions, the price to produce the dvd plus just a little for slim profit margins. (It would help if they'd get their act together and partner with as many streaming providers as possible...)
For many who have the money to purchase it does feel like we're being gouged. $40-$60 for the game, $15-$25 for the dvd/blue ray. But it'd be nice, if I'm purchasing a game, not to feel like I'm assumed to be pirating it.
Then there's the bother. Maybe the game or movie player requires you to have an internet connection to play, even if it's a single player only game. With movies, maybe you're required to sit through previews, or the "You wouldn't steal a" commercials that are ironically removed on the pirated content. It's sad when the pirated content is unarguably the better content. You want to watch the movie? Just watch it. You want to play that game and can't find your original CD case, box, or manual with the CD-Key, or don't have an internet connection handy? Just play it.
Lots of good comments in this thread about DRM, forced trailers etc.
One extra thing I would say to publishers is that price reductions need to be significant. £13 CDs need to be coming down to the £4 mark. £40 games need to be down in the £8-10 range. The prices of entertainment media have reached laughable levels.
But you don't spend $50. You spend that plus another $12 to $19 for each other part of the game afterwards for "DLC" that is actually part of the game to begin with.
I would stop all tormenting of tv shows if hulu plus had everything I wanted. They do not carry 90% of the BBC shows and many lesser networks AND give me a commercial free option.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't think that is necessarily true.
When everything costs from $20 to $40 and sometimes more, I tend to be a little careful about what I will spend my money on. Let's say a movie on DVD was $5 and music on CD about $3. Do you think anyone would hesitate to buy on impulse? I wouldn't and lots of people would certainly prefer buying to downloading.
While it may be more true for developing nations, it would still be true here... even moreso. In case you didn't notice, here in the US, there was a financial crisis that hit us all. The result has been long-term where consumer spending has been concerned. It only took a short while for everyone to realize that when they didn't spend a lot of money all the time, their lives weren't much different... we thought we "needed" all the crap we bought but now we know that we don't need it as much as we thought we did. In that respect, it was a healthy lesson for the greater consumer public in the U.S... and a long-term hurt for sellers of products and services.
If they hope to recapture their glory days, they has better lower those prices and quick before the consumer public decides they simply don't need them at all.
Did you miss the point that when they lowered prices, profit and revenue went up?
This is /., where people are almost as ignorant of economics as the Congress and White House.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
People are pressed for time. If they can rent a movie for a buck on their phone, they'll do it. If they have to pay $17 to "own" it and have it vendor-locked to the phone, now they're going to want to figure out how to pirate it.
Most people are not technical. "Burning" or "torrenting" is completely beyond their ken. The only time the average person will encounter piracy is when someone gives them a burn of a CD or DVD that they'll then treat exactly the same as standard media. But they're not going to do the pirating themselves. And for those who do, equitable pricing that gives more back to the creators and less than the middlemen will keep things fine.
Overcharge and people will pirate. Charge a reasonable rate and while you'll still have pirates, you'll have even more customers.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I can only imagine how impressed she would have been if I had brought in my imaginary multi-monitor i7-2600K water cooled 3 way SLI gaming rig and showed her the texture of my Nanosuit while I stood in the middle of the street looking around.
Imagine how impressed she would have been if you'd fired up Nethack!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Notice that the poster already stated that the % increases stated were for dollar amounts, NOT units. There is no conversion math necessary.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Exactly. An application that costs 5 bucks looks a lot better than a software suite that costs 250. Even if you spend 5 dollars 50 times you are perceiving that you are getting more for less. Additionally, most people don't want to buy whole albumns simply because half the songs on them are crap. Steam also has it down. When Steam does game sales, I purchase 5 times what I normally would. These companies need to realize that if you lower prices, you will make more money as evident by Apple and Steam.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
I'm sorry, I have a hard time believing this.
The study deals with "pricing problems" in emerging global economies. If the contention is that in such economies, digital media are priced out of the market, well and good. Reduce your prices, you will probably see an uptick in sales.
But isn't it a common Slashdot rejoinder, whenever someone claims to have "lost a sale to piracy," that a pirate is someone who would not have purchased your media anyway? You can't have it both ways. I live in the U.S., which I don't think would be considered an "emerging economy" for the purposes of the study. If prices here are at least more proportional to the perceived value of the product than in developing countries, why do Americans still pirate media?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the overwhelming majority of people who pirate media do so because their notion of a "pricing problem" is that the product has a price on it, period. Didn't we have a story here a while back indicating that most people who pirate in the U.S. do so because it's a way to get free stuff? Come on--technology provides people with a means to obtain what they want (albeit unlawfully), at no cost to themselves, with no apparent injury to any visible person, and virtually zero likelihood of getting caught. Do we really believe a significant number of the people who avail themselves of that opportunity do so because their acceptable price point is somewhere above nothing?
We can claim that reducing prices may reduce piracy (although, rather like the lost sales claims made by major rights-holders, such claims are difficult to back up with hard data). But pretending that cutting prices will make piracy vanish (or even meaningfully reduce it) is laughable.
Why worry about stopping piracy?
The point is too make as much money as you can, don't worry about something you can't change and only end up wasting money on.
I have no pirated any software since I was a child. I do not buy much either though, but I do buy some. I paid above the Linux average for both HIBs.
We'll see. All of these markets are currently evolving in a big way. That model probably won't work long term. Global networking is going to be a reality for basically every device at some point and the idea of caps will eventually become a joke.
They might get their money in the short term, but these dinosaurs don't seem to understand that their days are numbered.
Fortunately people don't want that $50 over-priced nonsense and show otherwise....
So you're saying no one wants $50 games? How did GTA4 make a half billion dollars in it's first week then?
One way was by not releasing it on PC for a while. That prevented a lot of ordinary people (who haven't modded their XBox) from getting a pirate copy.
I have been using a pirated copy of Ubuntu for over a year now. Even with the low price of Ubuntu, it makes me totally 1337 to pirate it.
Their thoughts, however, are that if we make pirating more difficult the rates will drop.
That is what they are thinking. However, they don't realize that it's an impossible task - you cannot make piracy itself more of a hassle, only more of a risk. DRM only succeeds in making the initial act of piracy difficult, not piracy itself. And, while they try to make piracy difficult by piling on the DRM, they aren't realizing that they're only making legitimate use difficult as well. As for their attempts to legislate a profit, eventually, some legislator or judge (or armed revolutionary, if need be) will realize that literally half the country is now considered a "criminal", and the unjust laws start crumbling.
I never said it did. The report on it actually said as much; they were more surprised than angry that people were pirating when the product was literally as close to free as possible.
DRM only punishes the "honest customer".
Does it? If you have a pirated product, upgrading it can be a pain at times. Its not streamlined into the program, and often times you have to redownload the newest version. Also if the game has multiplayer, you will have problems connecting to the official server and playing with others. If the game is popular enough there might be private servers doing this, but the player base on those will almost always be lower than the official ones.
Quite a few of my friends who I'd never peg as the pirating type have done for a few games here and there. I'd ask them why, they'd always give me the same reason.
"They expect me to (insert DRM grievence here)? Screw that."
The two that come to mind that people complained the most at me were Spore ("Only 3 installs? really?") and AC2 ("They expect me to be online constantly?")
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Is there a term or concept in English or German that's kind of like the inverse of Shadenfreude? Instead of being happy that misfortune has befallen someone, you are upset that something good has happened to someone else. That seems to be the real problem with the industry and armchair moralists here. They are too busy being Puritans to notice or care if they benefit from the situation.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The authors go out of their way to say that moral condemnation of piracy doesn't make sense but I wonder if that also applies to the moral satisfaction that some people take in "punishing" greedy copyright holders by pirating their stuff? I tend to think that people that get off on giving a middle finger to copyright holders would pirate no matter what the price and therefore their moral self-righteousness is just as much bullshit as the moral indignation of the copyright holders.
You seem confused by the term "DRM". It has nothing to do with Apple's app-approval process or their policies requiring a cut of the revenue. Go ahead and complain about those all you want (because you have a good point there), but don't confuse them with DRM.
An example of Apple's DRM are the restrictions on how many devices you can load one of the music files or app bundles onto, and the restrictions on moving files from an iPod to a computer rather than the other way 'round. By allowing users to play a music file on 5 different computers/iPods, they undercut the user's motivation to go to the torrents for DRM-free MP3s. That's what "somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM" means.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You are ignoring the fact that if Valve were to lower prices across the board these increases in sales would be unlikely. These increases sales are not due to reduced prices , they are due to discounts. There is a strong psychological motivation to buy an item at a perceived discount that does not exist with an item priced at a fair price in the first place.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Exactly. Amazon figured this out with music but I don't know why everywhere isn't figuring out that DRM doesn't work.
Take any DRM'd TV episode, song, game - whatever. You, the paying customer, have this huge list of things you can't do with it. Can't play it on a different computer. Can't play it on Linux. Can't stream it to your media center in the living room. Hard drive crashed? Sorry - even though you backed up the file there is some stupid keyring system that you didn't backup and it can't be recreated. All this bulslhit stacked on to "stop piracy".
Now, with *all of that headache* in place, go to The Pirate Bay. Type in the name of said item. Bam. Completely unhindered versions of it available with two clicks.
As a testament to how stupid it is, when I switched my music player from an iPod Touch to my Android phone, I still had some Apple DRM'd songs left over in my iTunes library. With an afternoon and a trip to a torrent site I was able to replace all my DRM'd files with freshly "pirated" (but working) copies of the songs I'd already paid for . . .
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
If there's even the slightest bit of DRM involved, even if you give the app away for teh asking, someone will crack it because it's a puzzle for them to solve. That's just the way things are.
I don't pirate games, but I also don't usually buy any either. The reason for that is I really have no idea if a game is good or not until i play it. Therefor the only games I have bought for my phone are ones that offer a good free version that can continue to keep me entertained. I assume there are at least some pirates who think the same way. $1 may not be much, but I'm not about to throw away $20 looking for a game I enjoy which I would only be willing to pay a dollar or two for.
Perhaps your entire game should be free and make money off advertising instead? Then you don't have to worry about pirates.
Yeah and the only reason why Valve could afford to do such a discount
"Afford" a discount? Did you miss the point that when they lowered prices, profit and revenue went up?
Silly. They can't afford to profit before they make their money back. After all, if they don't charge enough to lower sales, how will they ever gain enough fans to spread word of mouth? Isn't that the basic law of antiviral marketing?
The sad thing is how many retailers don't understand the supply/demand curve.
More piracy creates more sales... the statistics are simple. Google it. In fact, look at the movie industry growth over the past 5 years.
You talk better than you fool!
Actually I love the new iPad. I want one but can't bring myself to purchase a device that is so locked down. I want it to run what I want and operate the way I want. It's too bad that Apple makes such nice hardware and then cripples it with their policies.
There are two ceilings to worry about: The price for which your product is worth it, and the amount of work I have to do to actually access your product.
The first one was my primary concern as a college student. I just plain didn't have the money to buy everything that I'd want to, especially at say a $50-$60 price point for games, and a $20 price point for movies. I did, however, have a lot of time and a fat internet pipe going straight to my room.
The other side, which is more relevant now, is the work I have to do. I can buy enough entertainment at retail prices to keep me busy, so quite frankly, if your game/movie/music requires me to put a bunch of time into getting it to work, I'll move onto the next thing and not give you my money or find a crack, but if the pirates are offering a better product, why go through legit sources? If I literally can't get your product (hello everything stuck in licensing hell), you leave me exactly one option to get your series.
Basically, if you want to make more money, don't make it easier for people to pirate your shit than pay for it. Sure, this may not work for some things (no, I will not give out my credit card to some starving artist using a shady pay service who only wants a buck for his album, I probably won't get it at all at that point), and you'll probably never get college students to pay full price for everything (you can't get blood from a stone), but make it easier for people who work all day and don't want to jump through 8 layers of hoops just to play their fucking game for an hour or two a night.
Regardless, your post about whether or not they would do that for a new game is not relevant when we're talking about the relationship between price and revenue. The conclusion still shows that lower prices translate to higher revenue, regardless of what you think Valve may or may not do.
And that would be the completely wrong conclusion. Sales went up because the market perceived it to be a good bang for the buck. If the rest of the market were to follow suite, after a while we'd be back to the pre-existing market state. For your conclusion to be sound, the seller is forced to infinitely discount prices as the market adjusts each time. Which, according to you, ultimately means, they can maximum profit by giving everything away. Brilliant.
If you pay attention to Steam even a little bit, you'd know that's total rubbish. New games now sell on Steam for less than RRP, just like B&M retail stores. If you're prepared to wait a few months, you can get recently released games for heavy discounts.
The biggest sale of them all is the legendary Steam Holiday Sale. Just about every serious PC gamer I know ranks games they plan on buying as either a day one purchase, sale purchase or holiday sale buy. The PC market has already started to adjust to this new pricing reality, hence publishers renewed focus on PC gaming. They know they can make a title appeal to a relatively large range of value segments in the space of a single year; in the long run this might also get rid of the Xmas focus as more publishers put out their weaker titles in the middle of the year knowing that even though it'll have limited appeal at full price, the faithful will build word of mouth in time for the 50% holiday sale discount.
Nick
You seem confused by the term "DRM". It has nothing to do with Apple's app-approval process or their policies requiring a cut of the revenue. Go ahead and complain about those all you want (because you have a good point there), but don't confuse them with DRM.
An example of Apple's DRM are the restrictions on how many devices you can load one of the music files or app bundles onto, and the restrictions on moving files from an iPod to a computer rather than the other way 'round. By allowing users to play a music file on 5 different computers/iPods, they undercut the user's motivation to go to the torrents for DRM-free MP3s. That's what "somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM" means.
What it the mechanism by which the App-Store policies and revenue cuts are enforced? Isn't that DRM? What would you call it?
This space for rent.
Discussion in these threads always centers on cost and not value, and value is where the center of the struggle is. How does one determine the value of a copy of an artistic work in a digital format, especially in comparison to ye olden times when buying music meant buying a physical object that couldn't be perfectly, freely and infinitely copied? The industry would like to pretend that the value hasn't changed. Rampant copyright infringement results in some pretty heavy cognitive dissonance on the part of consumers: is this song worth what I paid for it, is it worth more (obviously I wouldn't have paid for it if it was worth less... right?), or is it worth nothing because it doesn't cost anything to make a copy that is as good as the original?
There is no 'stopping piracy'. You can't. "Satisfy customers", instead.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Try selling at it $5.99 and see what happens to the app's piracy rate...
I expect the absolute piracy to stay the same.
I expect total legitimate sales to fall through the floor.
Thus piracy rate will skyrocket *
Note that "Piracy Rate" (defined here as the ratio of piracy to legit sales will increase dramatically as an artifact of the legitimate sales crashing, not as a result of any increase in actual piracy.
I seriously doubt there is anyone paying for $1 apps that would jailbreak their phone to pirate a $5 one. Maybe if the app pricing overall jacked up to $5 we would see an actual expansion in the number of pirates result, but not over one app.
It is a subjective term. I think it would be more fair to say, "it's production costs were far lower than most games". Fun enough to play for a couple hours, but it doesn't offer the same level of content as L4D by a long shot.
More like people thought it was worth their money but thought free was even better.
Which people? Do you mean a few people? The purpose of this lowering prices isn't to make sure that all people buy the product. No, it's to try to get more people to buy the product. In fact, we don't even know how many 'pirates' there are (such a thing would be nearly impossible to track). All he mentioned was that there was "still people" 'pirating' his game, not how many, how much fewer than there was before, or how he can even accurately guess the amount of 'pirates'.
That puts the lie to the notion that it is overpriced.
"Overpriced" is subjective.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I think they do, they just don't want to listen to it.
Jonathanjk.com
Those poor tormented TV shows. What did they ever do to you?
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Seriously. How did these people "study" a crime and find out that punishment doesn't reduce crime?
Yes, how many times do we have to go over this? 'Theft' is a term long used for exactly this situation and it's meaning is well understood by all.
The only people trying to tie themselves up into pretzels are those trying to explain away a term used long before they were born and well understood by all as to it's meaning.
All else being equal, I would sooner trust the market research and knowledge of a company, than some random person on Slashdot., however. I would expect Valve to have better knowledge of price points and their own sales figures than the layman.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I am selling an iPhone game at 0.99 $ and there's still people pirating it. Does it have to be even cheaper?
No, it has to be fun. Notice lots of other apps are selling quite happily at higher prices?
You're still not entitled to money, you have to delight customers to get it.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You are ignoring the fact that if Valve were to lower prices across the board these increases in sales would be unlikely.
First, that's not a fact, that's your opinion. I can tell because you use the term "unlikely". There's no evidence to suggest this. The evidence I see suggests that the price point is currently too high, and that more people will buy if the price is lower. As a gamer with gamer friends, I hear a lot of people say "I'll pick that game up in a few months when the price drops." From Gabe Newell's keynote from DICE 2009, he said that a 75% price reduction for Left 4 Dead led to 15% higher revenue then when the game was at full price.
These increases sales are not due to reduced prices , they are due to discounts.
Also opinion, not fact. Valve hired a psychologist to look at trends regarding pricing vs. sales, and he didn't seem to think that this was some sort of discount impulse kicking in.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
"Apple proved you can cut down on piracy with DRM with their App store for the iPhone and iPad."
No they didn't; they did it with pricing and convenience. The somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM on Apple's wares is easily broken. What the iTunes and App stores have shown is that if the prices are perceived as reasonable, and the DRM doesn't get in their way (much), people will not bother with piracy.
It's not just the prices. If I purchase an app for my iPhone, my iPod and my iPad also gets a license for it. They've increased the value of the software by doing that, and it's a lot more fair to boot. They've lowered the risk of purchasing the software, which is the opposite of what a lot of other companies do when they get DRM involved.
Basically what I'm trying to say in support of your statement is that it's all about value. If an app costs $5.99, the actual value of that price changes depending on how long it's likely to be a useful app. I'd rather pay $60 for a game like Spore using Apple's policy than $50 for EA's "you can only install it five times" mandate.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
It will reduce piracy, at least among groups that are motivated to pirate based on the price barrier
That's the only group that matters. The other people you describe all fall under the category of "people who won't pay no matter what." These people shouldn't factor into pricing decisions, nor should they factor into product design considerations like DRM. They won't buy no matter how much you wish they would, so just ignore them.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Mate, 8 year old kids can find DRM free games on the Intertubez. It is not rocket science to find the stuff (although it *is* rocket science to perform the DRM circumvention hacks to begin with).
Obviously people that feel Apple has been successful with DRM have failed to see what the public is doing with such jailbreaking tools as Green Poison...
They 'fail to see' because there ain't a lot of people around to be seen.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I've helped all of my "the public" class of friends jailbreak their iDevice.
:D
My boss is routinely jailbreaking iDevices for his kids-friends.
In fact, I know of only 1 of my friends with an iPhone that doesn't have it jailbroken, and he can do it himself, and only doesn't because he had a bad experience with the 3G getting worse battery life when he jailbroke it 2+ years ago. (ie not because he can't).
So I think its more like 0.0003 percent
Jailbreaking is hardly the standard. The vast majority of users don't want to mess with their phones in that way.
And knowing how to find pirated games, their cracks, software for mounting the imgs, how to install the cracks is standard?
Well if you download a pirated song or a pirated computer game, you don't normally have to mess with your OS to do that. But when you jailbreak your phone, to most people that is a risk - they are messing with their phone in some unapproved way. That is where the difference lies. That's what I was talking about when I said the vast majority of users don't want to mess with their phones in that way. And I think that stands up. I don't have figures for it, but I'm confident that the overwhelming majority of people who buy a phone (usually on a contract), don't want to start downloading programs from the Internet to start fucking with the "insides". Very different from playing a pirated MP3 on that phone.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Who told you that it's not fun? I have been featured elsewhere, it's having it's rate of success, top 25 in Games in USA and other countries. No I'm not a millionaire. No, you don't have to tell me how to do my job. And I'm totally entitled to money.
...really?
But the question is why is people still pirating 0.99 $ games? Are you saying that people pirates games because they are not fun? And when will they know that the game was fun? Before or after pirating it?
Even if my game is crap, why are you entitled to enjoy the crap that took me 6 month to produce, paying everybody's salaries, for free?
Same here. It's a really nice device in so many ways, but I want to have more control over it. And really bizarrely, I quite like the Windows Phone 7 but again, have a problem with having to do everything with it via the bloody Zune software. If I buy something on a contract, fair enough. But when I pay for a product outright, I want to own it. Closed markets are risky.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
you get semi auto updates, go to pirate store and click "update".
Looking just at my interest in music, I would say that I have downloaded everything ever published that I am likely to ever have interest in. I think the music industry should make their entire catalog available "free for personal use" and collect ad revenue. They could charge a premium for new releases and milk the discount curve until it is moved onto the archive, after say a year. They could still try selling commemorative sets and artist collections; things that make nice gifts. The only problem I see with this model is that they haven't released anything I would pay for in the last three years.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
I am selling an iPhone game at 0.99 $ and there's still people pirating it. Does it have to be even cheaper?
There are people who will never pirate anything. These people will either buy the product, or simply not buy it. Price it to convince these people to choose to buy over not buy.
There are people who will buy if it's cheap enough, or pirate if it's not. Price it to convince these people to choose to buy over pirate.
There are people who will pirate at any price. Forget them. You can't get their money, no matter what you do, and they're not costing you a penny. You need to get over it and worry only about the first two groups.
At $0.99, I'd say you're probably doing just fine.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
But the question is why is people still pirating 0.99 $ games? Are you saying that people pirates games because they are not fun?
Welp, they certainly don't know if it is or not, do they? Maybe they're curious. Maybe they're not quite sold on it. Maybe they've heard about about it but not heard enough about it. It'd be interesting to know if you have a free/lite/ad-supported version. If you don't, there's part of your piracy right there. For whatever reason, they weren't sold on the idea of paying it when the idea was proposed to them. That's on you, not them. What can you do? Make the game more fun.
Even if my game is crap, why are you entitled to enjoy the crap that took me 6 month to produce, paying everybody's salaries, for free?
If the game is crap, they're not enjoying it. Why are you entitled to their money if they're not satisfied? If they didn't pay for it, and they end up playing the game a lot, they're in the wrong. I'm willing to wager, though, that the vast majority of the people that pirated your game didn't do much more than tinker with it for a few minutes. And, ya know what? The ones that DID enjoy it are most likely going to be the ones to be first in line to purchase the sequel.
Treat it as an opportunity.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
made my friends stupid.... have you watched "jersey shore"? two of my friends have lost 60 points of IQ in the last 3 months to that tv show.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yes, the fact that they made good money on it was certainly insurance on the project. They weren't betting the farm on it.
That said, it is beside the point. The point of the experiment was to see if they could get more sales on L4D if they dropped the price. They did. The fact that they already made money on it doesn't affect the experiment at all.
This is good news. It means that people like Valve can make business cases for dropping their prices, and still be able to justify the budget to produce a quality game. It is well known that you get what you pay for. The games with great art, technical innovations, well-tested gameplay and storytelling cost a great deal of money. That money has to come from somewhere. Usually, they play it safe by trying to get that all up front with a relatively high price. That makes sense when they have little information, but it makes more sense to find a lower price point where cost-sales ratio is best. This sort of experimentation is just sound long-term business practice.
It is unlikely that Valve will be releasing a new game like that at 75% off immediately (or ever), but it might cause them to drop the price significantly to try and capture even more sales on Day One. At a certain price point even "free" pirated games are not worth it if you can't use the functionality or get desirable updates from the vendor.
Also, the wider the gamer base you have playing your game, the more DLCs and stuff you can sell them. Having a bigger audience is always a good thing, if you can cover your costs and keep your shareholders from having a fit. Particularly in a network game, having a big community is key to keep people involved and paying; this is something MMOs already know.
He wrote "cut down", not "eliminate".
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
More like people thought it was worth their money but thought free was even better.
Which people?
Those pirating it.
Do you mean a few people? The purpose of this lowering prices isn't to make sure that all people buy the product. No, it's to try to get more people to buy the product.,
Agreed. My point is that $0.99 is so low to most people for a single purchase, that it's not a factor stopping them from buying something if they have even a mild desire to have the product. Lowering the price below the point where nearly everyone is already willing to pay, makes no sense for the seller and makes little difference to the buyer. My time is worth a lot more than $0.45 per hour (assuming he cut prices in half), so assuming I'm going to spend an hour playing some game, a price reduction is irrelevant to me.
In fact, we don't even know how many 'pirates' there are (such a thing would be nearly impossible to track). All he mentioned was that there was "still people" 'pirating' his game, not how many, how much fewer than there was before, or how he can even accurately guess the amount of 'pirates'.
True. I'm not debating that point, I'm just refuting the GP's slightly catty suggestion that the piracy (great or small) is because of the cost.
That puts the lie to the notion that it is overpriced.
"Overpriced" is subjective.
Actually, I'm not talking from my own point of view, but from the market's in general. We can see whether large numbers of people are willing to pay for something at a given price or not. In fact, these companies put a lot of research into such things.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Valve hired a psychologist to look at trends regarding pricing vs. sales, and he didn't seem to think that this was some sort of discount impulse kicking in.
Sounds like his opinion to me, one that runs contrary to the marketing training I have received. How about a citation?
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
I hate to say this, but those percentages aren't of "units sold" they are of "dollars sold." What this really suggests is that dropping pricing by ~25% in general would be a good thing for most games. Somewhere between there and ~50% price reduction the curve flattens out some, and doesn't improve again until you get to "impulse" prices (which are too low to be worth it as a developer).
Not all ISP's are in the business of primarily delivering television. AT&T as a single example is still primarily in the business of delivering telephone service, and I would wager about even money that their DSL subscribers outnumber their television subscribers by at least 2 to 1. Most homes have 2 copper lines running into them.. the cable line and the telephone line.
Furthermore, bandwidth demands such as those presented by Netflix are a fixed target. Netflix can ramp up quality to 1080P and then thats pretty much it. Bandwidth gets cheaper and cheaper with no real end in sight, while the costs of obtaining content for television just isnt following the same economics (its going up.)
The market is likely going to move to their being multiple Mega-Netflix style services owned by the content producers themselves on a consortium as the primary video delivery method used by people. Instead of $30 broadband + $10 netflix, it will be more like $15 broadband + $30 megaflix. The broadband provider is going to go along with this because its damn near pure profit in the future.
"His name was James Damore."
made my friends stupid.... have you watched "jersey shore"? two of my friends have lost 60 points of IQ in the last 3 months to that tv show.
Was that individual or cumulative?
Just asking for a scientific poll I'm doing.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
For that, we go to Toot Braunstein. Toot?
Furries make the internet go.
Consider Minesweeper, Angry Birds, Robot Unicorn Attack, and the myriad Tower Defense games. Sure, they don't cost a lot to make, but seemingly everyone and their mom has played something of roughly that caliber of game. That seems like the market to aim for, frankly.
Not always. Allow me to demonstrate: Shaq Fu. It's not very good. Sword of Sodan. It's not very good. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. It's not very good.
yes. you need to drop it to zero cents. Then only a few will pirate it.
Not so fast. On that very point YoYo Games CEO Sandy Duncan recently had this to say about a couple of their free games:
... we’ve had some very very interesting advertising revenue from some games that’s made us realise that ad supported games are viable.
I’d probably say at the moment that commercially nothing is viable on Android, piracy is really high, people even pirate the free games! They upload the apps to their websites and get paid from the ads on their website, we don’t even know if they rip our own ads out of the games and insert their own.
We see some weird statistics, we use AdMob for most of our ads at the moment. On the Android version of Simply Solitaire we get the same number of impressions as we do on the iPhone version and yet the game has had five times as many downloads on iOS as there been officially from the Android Marketplace. It’s a good reason to have adverts in the game because then it doesn’t matter where the game is downloaded from.
Source: http://gamemakerblog.com/2011/03/02/sandy-duncan-interview-app-publishing-process/
+0 Meh
Is there a demo version?!
I wouldn't mind paying $1 for a game (or $5, etc) but I'd be mad at paying $1 for a lousy game (I'm not calling your game lousy, but the majority of games are)
how long until
I like your reasoning, but I think there is another category: There are also people who would pirate if it was available pirated, but would resort to buying it (if it was cheap enough) if they couldn't get it free. So I think that the pirate is at least costing him some money.
I chose to end my comments, not with a rim shot, but a long decaying F#7sus4
No, that's the way autistic people are.
Yes, you are right. I can't convince pirates and I'll never get their money and I don't have the feeling of "i'm not rich because of pirates"
But I would like we all to agree that it's at least a lack of decency and respect for other people's work, there is no fair reason why you would have the right to pirate a 0.99 game.
It's not food, medicines or the right to have a house. It's a 0.99 game that you are pirating while having a 4.99 frapuccino
The only way to stop piracy is to make it legal to download all of the movies, music and games that you want.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Ahem. Alien Swarm is free because it's not very good.
What about Portal? Last year it was offered for free for a few days. And it was not only a "come-on" for me, it was a big red carpet welcome.
I think it's safe to say that anyone pirating a $1 app isn't going to be convertible. They aren't part of the potential customer pool and the only sensible thing to do is ignore them and move forward. If the app were more expensive there'd very likely be some room to address at least some pirates on price.
Small correction: Most piracy is about getting things without paying the asking price.
And the asking price for a lawfully made copy of the film Song of the South is half the market capitalization of The Walt Disney Company.
Bullshit. in case you ain't heard pal we are in the middle of a jobless recession (or I would argue it is actually the start of a long hard depression, only being softened by the fed printing money like there is no tomorrow) which means most folks out there are in "hoard" mode,trying to keep a little put back in case something goes bad so they are not buying $50 games that much and the difference in price can make a HUGE difference in sales.
Lets look at my own recent games purchases as examples: Just Cause 2-on sale $30. Just Cause - on sale $6. Price of Persia Sands of Time pack (highly recommend and price is from Amazon) $6 for all three games in one box. Bioshock 2-on sale $2.99, Half Life 2, episode 2-on sale $2. Mercenaries 2-on sale $6, Evil Genius, Spellforce Platinum, Unreal 2 SE, GOG sale $5.99 each.
Now that is roughly all the purchases I've made in the last month or so, barring one or two I may have missed. Now by my calculations the games companies made $65 off of me, which compares to how much they would have gotten if the only choice I had was $50 games none at all.
Now why if I had $65 to spend on games would I not buy a single $50 if that was my only choice? It is simple, it is because we humans are curious creatures and perceived value matters and in all of the above cases my perceived value was higher than the cost whereas with that $50 game all I have to do is remember a couple of $50 stinkers I got burned with to have me backing away. For example if I would have bought Bioshock 2 for $50 I would have been burned, as I ended up having to play the hacked version because GFWL runs like shit on my machine and rarely picks up my net connection.
So just as in TFA it comes down to find the "sweet spot" where you will get the most people to part with their money. That is one area I think PC games are smarter than consoles, as they quickly come down from the $50 price point once the early adopters have bought. I would argue if the game is more than 6 months old the correct price is $20 or less, as after 6 months all that would have bought it at a higher price has already done so but there are still plenty of people like me that would buy at a reduced price.
With a GF and a couple of kids I just can't see myself paying $50 for a game anymore, same as I can't see myself sinking $200 into a GPU like when I was single. Lucky for me the consoles have slowed PC graphics enough that you don't need bleeding edge to play most games, and my GF has a new HD4850 waiting on me at her place as her way of "supporting my inner geek". If the companies making games want my $$ during this corpse of an economy they have to give me more value for my money either in the form of much lower prices or like in the MoH and PoP bundles offer me the older games with the new. Otherwise thanks to the gaming trinity of Steam, Good Old Games, and Amazon, I have more than enough choices to simply walk right past your $50 AAA bling fest. In six months I'm sure I'll find it at my price anyway, and it isn't like there are a shortage of games for me to play. if anything I'm about 6 months behind on my games as it is thanks to life cutting into my game time.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yes, exactly. I once spoke with a rep from Macrovision who exclaimed that the purpose of their analog copy protection was to stop housewives from making copies with two VCRs.
We all know that maximum profit will not happen by giving everything away, but that does not preclude the video game industry from finding an equilibrium at a lower price point.
Clearly, you can't just lower the price of a game to an absurdly low number because particularly in the case of games, you don't derive more enjoyment through sheer bulk. One really good game is worth three or four mediocre ones, I'd wager.
However, that does not mean that you can't have a price that excludes a significant portion the market from your audience. Games have been getting more and more polished and full of content for the last two decades or more. All of that art, coding and testing takes more and more money. The conservative reaction to that increasing cost is to get the initial price as high as they think they can get away with to make sure they repay their investment up front, but that is not always the number that will give them maximum return over time.
Without good experiments and research like Valve is doing, the tendency is going to be something like the person who picks the lump sum when they win the lottery over taking the annuity. The annuity means they will definitely make more in the long run, but for various reasons like age, inflation, already existing debts, or even just the desire to be immediately filthy rich (short term thinking), they don't opt for it. Valve is trying to work out the formula that will give them the right bang for the buck, but once they have it, it definitely *can* be applied to lowering prices on new games until they hit the sweet spot of sales, profits and return on investment over time.
On the contrary, no one is forcing you to give a shit about the studios content at all.
This may be true of movies but not of music. I can't go into a grocery store without hearing major-label music. And merely hearing a song enough times is enough to get a person to want it (see "Exposure effect" on Wikipedia).
Have you tried pressing the menu button
You mean the "put the letter Ø in the corner of the screen" button?
or 'next'?
Also puts the letter Ø in the corner of the screen.
I've never ever seen trailers you can't skip.
I don't remember the title I encountered (it was a rental), but I remember it was published by Universal. Here are some examples of where fast forward works but next chapter doesn't.
Come to New Zealand.
Have you any tips for a U.S. resident trying to qualify for a visa?
Of course, the silly thing about that is that the sheer amount of time it takes to duplicate tapes was probably enough of a hindrance to "housewives", while Macrovision's protections did nothing to stop the real pirates--the ones who actually made a profit selling thousands of unlicensed copies of movies--from doing their thing.
The CB App. What's your 20?
I expect unlimited, but metered usage to become a norm, but only when bandwidth becomes a commodity by getting enough capacity in place to eliminate choke points. There is not really much that separates networks from other utilities. They all generally have only one or two ways into your house and both can eventually be centralized to the point where they become a commodity. The trick is making sure that your network utility does not become run either by an evil monopolist or a particularly sluggish and/or overbearing government bureaucracy.
Theft is not commonly defined to mean "taking such that the owner is left with nothing". It simply means taking what is not yours. In the past, this necessarily meant that leaving nothing behind was a corollary
And that means all the difference in the world. There was a time when cutting someone with a knife was a serious crime, punished with death, today people pay for a surgeon to do it. Everything is in the consequences.
Theft is a crime because it leaves the victim with nothing, an act that does not take something away from a victim should not be a crime.
Here is an account of Gabe's talk:
http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/live-blog-dice-2009-keynote-gabe-newell-valve-software/
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
You made the point I came in here to find. Let me reiterate: If piracy != lost sales, what is the problem exactly? Now we all know the media cartels will threaten politicians with lower revenues (be it taxes lost or contributions) due to piracy regardless. But from a business point of view, why lower prices to convert pirates if the current model is more profitable? The end game is always to raise prices and lower piracy. Whatever it takes.
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
That's why the copyright moguls are pushing ACTA and son-of-ACTA.
You've got it right for the wrong reason. They're pushing son-of-ACTA for the reason stated in this article -- lower prices.
But not for you. At the expense of you, as a matter of fact. They want to legislate, through another flagrantly undemocratic secret treaty, the enforcement of price discrimination. That way they can raise prices in the US and western Europe while reducing prices in poorer countries (and thus making labor here even less competitive with labor there), without anyone being able to arbitrage the difference because it will be prohibited.
So I hope you weren't expecting the corporate response to this study to be in your interests.
Add a raffle ticket to each purchase
That would run afoul of gambling laws in several jurisdictions.
Studios: If you want to add a gimmick to get me to buy, consider adding a series bible and an express tolerance of fanfic written by the owner of an authentic collector's edition box set.
Sales went up because the market perceived it to be a good bang for the buck.
Do you have a citation for that? Did you interview "the market", or are you just assuming? Doesn't this make just as much sense:
Sales went up because the price reached a level that people were willing to pay.
It has nothing to do with perception of a good deal. I have friends still playing Oblivion and Dragon Age because they don't have the money to spend on Dragon Age 2. If Dragon Age 2 was $20 or $30 instead of $60 they would buy it. It's not because they see something which they value at $60 that they can get for less, it's because the price is within their means to buy the thing. They want it, they just can't justify spending the current price for it regardless of what they think the intrinsic value of the thing is.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
that is the app store policies, not drm
the drm is very weak, there is an app that will crack other apps automatically, not sure how well it works but the fact someone tried means "loosely"
warning pointless sig
Has anybody ever considered a pay-per-play model?
Cable TV companies already do this with new release movies. Arcade games worked this way before arcades died in the west. MMO games are pay per month (like WoW) or pay for missions beyond the first few ("freemium"). Xbox 360 games reportedly have limited demos.
"While a jailbroken iPhone, iPod, or iPad prevents people from using the App store while in broken mode"
ummmmm no, not true at all
warning pointless sig
Definition of THEFT
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
(my emphasis)
You will only make more money if the distribution method doesn't add additional cost to each unit sold. For instance, selling a game on Steam or even the App Store has a fixed cost. Your percentage of your sell doesn't change with the number of units that are pushed through the wire. However, if you were to sell that same game on a physical medium, then your cost vary with your total units at the margin level, especially since you have to pay for the discs, books/instructions, box, cd case, shipping packages, and even freight.
What companies need to realize is that they should lower the price of DIGITAL distribution to combat piracy, not keep the digital copy at the same price as the physical medium. When people pirate a digital copy, they just copy the 0's and 1's but strip out all of the protection stuff, it's theft, but one could argue that the creation of the 0's and 1's could be randomized and re-created without the assistance of the copyright owner. When they take the physical medium from a store, that's unquestionable theft.
People will still pirate, Yes as the price gets up more people will pirate but dropping prices wont stop that. The best way for the RIAA and MPAA to increase there profit margins is to just ignore piracy. How much money are the sending to the search firms? How about to the ambulance chasers, Oh I'm sorry, copyright lawyers.How much are they paying in legal fees to the court? And if they do win people just don't have the money to pay the assanine amounts of the award. They just simple go underground to avoid it. Recently there were 40k John Doe lawsuits released by the court. 35 to 75 bucks filing fee for each. That would buy a lot of TV dinners. Maybe if they weren't wasting all the money on legal fees they might show a more significant profit. There is no way to stop pirates because put simply, the pirates are smarter and in greater numbers then those trying to enforce anti-piracy.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
it is VALUE that is the key. Even if its dirt cheap, if its crap, no one will want to buy it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
People who pirate in order to avoid the bad user experiences that are often associated with buying legitimately these days
I take it this includes people who pirate because lawfully made copies of a work aren't available at all in their country.
Yeah and the only reason why Valve could afford to do such a discount was because they had already made back all of their money back and then some by that point so they had a greater incentive to cut huge discounts on an older title with flat sales. If you think Valve would ever do that for a new game, you'd be kidding yourself.
Portal I: 20 bucks, and bundled in Orange Box.
Portal II: 60 bucks.
Yup. If Valve thought they could make more money over the lifetime of Portal II by starting cheap, they would do it. Deep discounting pulls more money in over the "long tail" of a game, but most of a game's income is in the first few months of its release.
This is why publishers apply DRM even though they know that eventually it will be cracked. DRM does not have to hold forever; all it has to do is to hold long enough for the critical first few weeks of a game's release. By the start of the third month, the game has made most of the money it ever will, and if DRM breaks and the game becomes widely available to pirates, it's less of an issue. The other thing is that most DRM technology, such as SecuROM and (ugh) Starforce are licensed per copy shipped; newly produced boxed games will quietly start shipping without DRM to save the DRM cost.
So as long as the DRM scheme slows piracy for as little as two months, it makes financial sense to have DRM. At least, that is the perspective of game publishers... and when AAA titles are costing up to 9 figures to produce, they'll do almost anything to protect the ability to recover those extreme development costs. Their ability to get investors on a project, or get licenses for things like songs or other endorsement often comes with a contractual "you will have DRM or you can't include our music" requirement. There are a lot of forces at work here, and it can't be reduced to bumper-sticker-grade simple-minded slogans.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
For retail games, three months IS old. By that point, the vast majority of income from a game has already been received, and people are buying the new shiny thing and ignoring the old.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Contrary to the /. spirit, I say that piracy is theft.
It's simple:
I sell a product for 10 bucks.
You buy this product. I make 10 bucks.
You pirate this product. I don't make 10 bucks. You have something I sell without me having the profit from the product.
If that is not theft, I don't know what it is. You robbed me of my 10 legally entitled bucks.
The rest are cheap excuses.
Still, statistics show that your "friends" will tend to be like you in terms of education, buying habits, hobbies, etc. They're similar to you. Not to be untrue about the jailbreaking though. I have numerous friends who aren't as technical as I am, but still understand the value of jailbreaking their devices, just not enough technical courage to jailbreak it themselves. To illustrate my point, one of my friends got an Android phone and asked me if I could jailbreak it (he didn't know it was called rooting for Android) so he could download apps off of the net. I kindly informed him that Android devices didn't need to be rooted for this purpose, unless he was on an AT&T Android phone, and that most of the apps on the Android Market are free anyway.
No, some people just pirate at "any price" because they are *** :-) and others do not hava a credit card because they are not "adults"
Other would pay, but they have jailbreaked their phone to do "X" for a "debatably ok reason", and now it's actually easier to pirate your software than to pay it.
Others do not have a credit card, or at least one that your payment processor would accept (i'm not writing this anywhere from the G20
A minority will pirate it, love it and then pay it (unfortunatelly this minority is probably refusing to use the kind of phone you wrote your program for, and they would like to have the source code also ... so it's not a very good solution for you :-))
Anothfer element to take in account is that software is NOT like music or video, I'm using probably around 100 software "that I really need" (including ed and bc :-))
I do have way more "elements of music"...
So the business models are different.
A big part of your problem, and it's worse in the music business is a kind of "prisoners dilemna", if I sell my music for 99c but most users are using a torrent because it is way easier (not to mention cheaper) than buying the music of all the others who sell it for 10$, I will sell to the "RIAA compliant crowd" but get a small ammount of money because my price is low, maybe even less because the perceived quality in comparision with the competition will be seen as "low"... (it's cheap you see...)..
So hopefully competition will eventualy drive the price down and the convenience up...
meanwhile I must confess, there is a very convenient service where I leave where I can get about any CD or DVD for 1 or 2 dollars, and a pizza for 4 for 2$ more (but then the DVD is only 1$ so it's always cheap...)
Not shre the MPAA would approuve;..
Yeah and the only reason why Valve could afford to do such a discount was because they had already made back all of their money back and then some by that point so they had a greater incentive to cut huge discounts on an older title with flat sales. If you think Valve would ever do that for a new game, you'd be kidding yourself.
Because valve doesn't spend millions of dollars developing a game that might, if they are lucky, make the money back. No, valve is smarter then that, and keeps the cost of making the game low, while keeping the game quality high, so they can make their money back quickly and make a profit.
That is smart business right there.
This is what happens when you "Hollywood" something. It's the idea that if you spend more money making something, that your entitled to a bigger profit. Only problem is, that only works on really really good stuff that everyone likes. Which doesn't happen often.
So you can bitch about Valve all you want, but the truth is, they are not only on the PC gamers side, they make quality games that aren't way overpriced, and they have no problem dropping the price on their games.
Not to mention you don't hear them bitch about pirates all the fucking time (and blaming them), and they don't demand always on DRM. (yes, you need to be online to use their services, but not to play the games).
Also, in regards to you saying that valve won't discount a new game. Yes, you are right. They won't. EA won't. Activision/Blizzard Won't. [Insert Game Company Here] Won't. Wake up and smell the real world dude.
How many other companies will discount their products for sales afterwards like Valve does? Not many, at least, I never hear of it. And EA can, since it has it's own store now. And other companies are following suit with stores, guess we might see.
Be seeing you...
You'd be surprised how much better pirated versions of games can be due to buggy or invasive DRM. Even as simple as not needing to put in the DVD each time you want to play the game can be enough drive for someone to download a no CD hack if not outright pirate the game.
Even games I buy, I usually use the crack for it. A lot of times, I just use the pirated version with my CD key.
Why? Because of the crappy DRM.
I'd rather take the chance the crack might be screwed up then run something with DRM on my computer.
Be seeing you...
So computer programs are art and the programmer should just be happy to know that people are enjoying their work? Why not just go ahead and extend that to everything? Cooking is an art, why shouldn't the people at McDonalds be happy knowing that I am enjoying their craft?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You obviously don't have a jailbroken iOS device. A lot of those bundled apps on bittorrent have some big name publishers in them. EA almost always has the top 4-6 out of 10 "top game apps" on the app store, and they get added right along with the rest of these apps. While the small developer may not have the cash to go after the seeders, EA definitely does, and they'll go after them for their own self interest while consequently help the smaller guys for a little while.
As far as finding, downloading, and installing any app, check out installous. I won't provide you the link, you can Google it, but it's what pirates too cheap to pay $0.99 for an app will glamor over to get their app fix. Installous thumpers that think the app is facilitating a "try & buy" option for iOS need a reality check. While this may be true to an extent, the app needs an automatic uninstall if they want that to stick; otherwise, they're just full of it.
I am selling an iPhone game at 0.99 $ and there's still people pirating it. Does it have to be even cheaper?
I suggest you do some history checking of software.
Piracy has been around since day 1. Sheesh, probably before that. Code sharing, program sharing, was what happened all the time.
In fact, computer software & games have probably been pirated longer then you've been alive (have no idea how old you are).
Your game is going to get pirated, no matter what. If your lucky, you made a good enough game that peeps like it, and you'll get paid by those that don't pirate. If it's a crappy game, you won't get much money.
But being surprised that your game is being pirated only shows that you did NOT do your homework on selling software.
You don't need to sell your game cheaper. Ignore the pirates, they are part of the scene. If you aren't making money on your game, don't blame it on the pirates, look at the facts. Was it one of a kind? Too hard to play? Boring after awhile? Was there way too many other games just like it? Was it a stupid game that a 5 year old would get bored with after 2 seconds?
Piracy has been here since the beginning, and will be here to the end. The companies that bitch about it now so loud, have been making millions/billions of dollars over the years even with piracy around. It is nothing but a scapegoat people use to make excuses on why their products suck.
Be seeing you...
How are the app store policies enforced? Due to what feature are people unable to installing programs off the web like they do on Macs?
This space for rent.
Couldn't agree more. You make it so easy to throw a few dollars at an album of music and you win. iTunes is the reason I don't even bother looking for album torrents and they're also the reason I haven't set foot in a cd shop in years. I can preview, buy a single song at minimal expense, or buy an entire album, all with just a click or two. Want to stop piracy, do this. Give iTunes some competitions and the consumer will win win win.
I agree, they won't ERADICATE piracy with lower prices.
I actually think the sales numbers/experiment from Steam/L4D speak more about charging first adopters a premium, then tapering off your pricing as the new hotness factor rolls off, promoting sales later on for basically free. Using that model alone, you can charge less up front, and still taper the prices off and come away with the same net income, just over a longer period.
no, they won't. Because piracy has been around since the beginning. It is a smoke screen that companies use to pass the blame from their crappy product to people "stealing" it.
If piracy was as bad as they make it, companies like EA would of been out of business decades ago. http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=443622
2010 3rd Quarter Fiscal report. Oh, look, pre xmas season, fall time, they pulled in profits. oh damn, them pirates must be slipping.
Be seeing you...
Where have you been for the last three years?
Let's see where to start?
1. Apple has been selling DRM free AAC files that can be used by any device that plays AAC since 2008 -- not just 5. And just in case you didn't know AAC is not an Apple format and its supported by every modern cell phone.
2. You can load apps you purchase on any number of devices you own.
3. You can copy any purchased music whether it was purchased on another computer or on the device by right clicking on it within iTunes and choosing "Transfer Purchased Music" (I can't remember the exact command)
As I said before: I know that there are pirates and they are pirating and will pirate forever and I don't complain like "I'm not rich because of them". I am making (a bit) of money, my game is fun and not boring, feedback is great
I only want everybody to agree that pirating a 0.99 game is LOW, indecent, unfair. Again: we are not talking about human rights, food, medicines, etc. we are talking about you pirating a 0.99 app while having a 4.99 frapuccino
The companies that bitch about it now so loud, have been making millions/billions of dollars over the years even with piracy around I'm a guy programming for 6 months, paying an illustrator to make drawings and a band to make the music. Thinking that everybody is M$, Apple or Adobe is naive. Or a reason to not to feel guilty for stealing stealing the guy next door
Where is Portal 2 60 bucks? Because accessing the Steam store from Thailand, I see a price of $49.99 with a current pre-order discount of 10% plus a free copy of Portal 1.
Are the prices different where you are?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
So I am stuck with ads in a game because people are too fucking cheap to buy a game? Thanks a lot, assholes.
That's only true if YOU are too fucking cheap to buy a game. The same interview mentions that their ad-supported games can be purchased for an ad-free experience.
+0 Meh
Hey! I thought my wife was quite happy knowing that I enjoyed the dinner she just cooked. Maybe I should start paying her for the service?
hmmm that is a excellent questoin, what would you call the base system anti-open programing?
its not "rights management" but more of a feature that apple didnt program in
in other words they weren't directly crippling software like drm does but rather did it indirectly by "limiting hacker access to the os"
hardware rights management?
warning pointless sig
And yet, here is this 3-month-old game that in the end sells more than the first week it was launched.
I don't think he is worrying about it. He is just calling out the absurdity of the article.
I sell a product for 10 bucks. You buy this product. I make 10 bucks per pound. You go catch a fish. I don't make 10 bucks. You have something I sell without me having the profit from the product. If that is not theft, I don't know what it is. You robbed me of my 10 legally entitled bucks. The rest are cheap excuses.
Go look in the dictionary for the actual definition of theft.
If the rest of the market were to follow suite, after a while we'd be back to the pre-existing market state.
If it were a zero-sum game, you'd be correct. It's not.
Yes, it's stupid to think giving it away would maximize profit. It won't. Then again, the poster you're replying to never made that claim. You inferred it incorrectly. The point is that the price point where maximum revenue generation occurs appears to be well below the typical price point being set. Anything above or below that is inefficient. It might have seemed to the poster to be absurd to need to point out that there is a floor on how low prices can go before profit is lost. This is /. though, so s/he took that as a given in error.
Something that always seems to be missing from these discussions is the fact that the content being discussed forms a huge portion of our culture. I don't mean to dismiss the importance of maximising profits for publishers and providing a small, indirect income stream to those artists who have managed to negotiate some semblance of a conscionable contract, but is there not also value in enriching the lives of millions of people? If the same profit can be gained by distributing content to more people, wouldn't that be of greater benefit to society as a whole than trying to maintain an exclusive price point?
Well, that depends. Did the owner of the candle have an offer to light your candle for $5 and then you just lit yours from his anyway without paying? This can lead to other people thinking, "well, gee, if he didn't pay to light his candle, why should I?" Of course, someone will undoubtedly see that lighting candles for money is not a viable business model and try to draw the parallel back to the music industry.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
It has nothing to do with perception of a good deal. -snip-
Exactly. I am the same way. There are simply no games I will spend $60 on. I would spend $20 on them, so I wait until there are used copies available at my price point. That means the company has lost out on my sale at $20 in order to gain sales at $60. Whether that makes for a net loss or not I can't say. I suspect, though, that there are more people like me than there are who will buy games at $60.
IANAEconomist, but those statements sound identical in the context of video game purchases. Whether the market's perception is due to the price by itself or the psychological impact of a temporary price reduction is another issue. However, nobody buys a video game if they don't think it's a good deal (where "good" is really "good enough").
That is, unless your friends are speculators who think they can buy underpriced video games and sell them to a market for a small profit. Then I suppose I could see the distinction between "bang for the buck" (profitable) and "willing to pay" (break-event).
Well, I can say you suck at marketing.
You've got us all talking about your game on a very popular forum, and you haven't even mentioned what the name of it is. I was interested, and might've bought it to try it out and give you some feedback.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Are there any statistics that show the inflation adjusted cost of music, theater movies, take home movies (DVD/VCR) over time? There have been delivery changes, such as DVD, CD and now iTunes, Amazon etc, but it would be interesting to see how the price of entertainment has changes from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, etc. You could even add broadway shows, live concerts and other forms of entertainment into the mix. I would wager that the adjusted price of pretty much everything, outside of food and energy, has decreased somewhat over time in the US. Especially non essential items. I wonder if music and movies fall into that category.
I agree. Pirating a $0.99 game is pretty lame.
By the way, I think I found your game. It looks good. I'd pay you the $0.99 if I had an iPhone, or if you had an Android version available.
Best of luck to you!
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Leave pricing up to the copyright holders, enforce copyright the way they propose, *BUT* limit copyright to 10-20 years.
Please look at the US entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries'_copyright_length - almost a 100 years compared to an average of about 50 for other countries. It's ridiculous that copyright should extend beyond an adult's working life, let alone beyond human lifespan. All these numbers, I think, were determined in a century when things moved much slower than today -- publication took years.
This is the cause of the problem, not pricing. It is said that "information wants to be free". I believe the way to do it is to give the creator a decade or two to make it worth his while and then set it free.
It isn't just cutting prices, it is making content available WORLDWIDE. Outside the US you cannot see Series and view television shows on Hulu. There is NO option for this type of service. If you use Amazon, you can't read all the books, or see all the shows, or listen to all the music. There are Region locks on everything. So even if you as a Non-US citizen WANT to pay, these companies block you.
Effectively saying we don't want your money. But then they turn around and count a download from your region as part of billions of dollars in lost sales due to piracy.
How does that make sense?
There is no physical product to move. You can charge 1 dollar extra to cover any additional bandwidth from outside the US. There are so many things that can be done, but instead there is a blanket refusal to provide the content. Whether it is books (educational or otherwise), Game downloads, Movie Downloads, or Music DOwnloads. People outside the US go through great lengths to be able to PAY for their music on iTunes for example. It's ridiculous.
Newsflash. People aren't going to say "Well I'm not from the US therefore I should not be watching these shows" . They are going to find a way to get this content. And in doing so they are going to fall prey to malware, trojans, and all manner of nasties that are embedded in blackmarket content and methods of obtaining it through websites, torrents etc. And that starts a vicious cycle.
Is it that the powers that be see a gold mine in starting a War On Piracy, the way there is a War on Drugs, and a War on Terrorism? None of which ever solve the underlying issues and have proven to be the worst way to address the problem...but they do enrich certain segments of government and the corporate market.
At any rate the goals of Governments and lobby groups does not seem to be to maximise sales and boost profits, the goal seems to be to criminalise an activity in order to support and promote bad business practice through legislation. In that scenario neither the public nor the artists win.
-Gel214th
I'm pretty much all 4. I'll pirate until thte end of days for the 3rd reason. I've bought some stupid ass PC games before, always pissed me off. I also won't ever buy a Disc Unless I know I can skip straight to the movie.
The Pirates aren't customers anyway, so I wouldn't worry about them.
I would instead just focus on the customers, especially their feedback.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
They are entitled to accept the generosity of others who wish to share with them. Didn't your mother ever teach you to share?
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
IMHO this is all about control of distribution and has nothing to do with theft. They want to lock down the internet so tight they will control how sales happen on the net.
Don't forget the people who actually buy legitimately and then also pirate to get around DRM being a pain for the paying customer.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
They are doing it because they can.
You should add some type of online authentication mechanism. Really, it is the only way to stop piracy. Slashdot hivemind might not like it, but piracy has only lead to that.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
This idea - which I suspect a huge majority of slashdotters will agree with and will argue with people who criticize it is analogous to the Laffer curve for taxation. Oddly enough the vast majority of slashdotters will disagree with that idea and argue with people who advocate it. Fancy that.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
From my experience, pirates tend to be broken up into these main categories:
- People who pirate because they can't afford to be legit (at least not on everything), or simply think the prices are too high and refuse to pay the price being asked. - People who pirate because they are digital hoarders, and they wouldn't care what the price is. They just collect data for bragging rights, to explore all the data that's out there, for trading, or 'just in case' they need or want it one day (or in case someone else might want or need it.) Or maybe it's just to be rebellious. - People who pirate for trial purposes, to help them in making a buying decisions. Despite skepticism to the contrary, some of these actually buy. - People who pirate in order to avoid the bad user experiences that are often associated with buying legitimately these days, and who might actually be legit if there were less hassle involved.
You forgot a sizable number: people who don't live in the U.S.A., and would like to watch their favorite content now rather than one year later. I think those outnumber categories three and four.
Would it be a "good thing"? Here's a different take. What Valve did was to sell to different groups at different prices. They first off sold to the people who really wanted the game at price $X, then later sold to people who valued the game less at a lower price $Y. It was good marketing because they managed to sell at the highest prices people were willng to pay to two different groups.
What you're proposing is that they just forget about the first stage and go straight to selling at $Y. The determinant for whether that is a better strategy is how quickly the number of people who would buy at $Y but not at $X falls with time. If people who would have bought at $Y when the game was released are still likely to do so three months later, then it makes sense to follow Valves strategy of selling at a premium first and then at the reduced cost three months later.
I think the perceived value of a game amongst people who want it cheaper doesn't drop off fast enough to make Valve's strategy the inferior choice. Only Valve's marketing department will be able to give a good answer though.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
And how many of those people who actually buy it, had it been unpiratable? Seriously, not every case of pirating is a lost sale. You sound like you're from 1999. Most pirates wouldn't buy it anyway. When I was a kid, I pirated stuff I had no intention of buying (I was poor, not like I could afford it anyway).
Well she taught me to share what was mine, yes...
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Well the movies people upload to bittorrent are theirs. They either purchased the original or someone else shared it with them. Sharing is just the decent human thing to do.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I'm a software developer and I consider programming an art form.
I have in the past given away small programs I've written because I take pride in what I do and want to share. Software development is now what I do for a living because of some of the programs I was willing to part with for free in the past. It worked well for me, now I get paid to do what I love.
As for people working a McDonald's, the difference is they don't necessarily like flipping burgers, having customers yell at them all day, having to put up with ridiculous request from managers or the terrible work schedule. That's the difference if you love what you do and take pride in it, it's "Art". If you hate everything about your job, but it's the only way to make a living, it's just work.
1) Send aid to Somalia to help them find legitimate work .50 cals
2) Allow civilian vessels to mount
3) Have navies of many nations patrolling dangerous waters, maybe even do some direct escorting
They recently murdered 4 American civilians. Maybe now is the time to... DO something about it.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Since you're such an expert you're no doubt aware that demand isn't just influenced by price, but also by expectation of future price changes.
Now consider what the difference is between a temporary discount and a permanently low price.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sometimes legitimate copies of things don't work, which is something they like to say about pirated stuff. I've had a number of legit movie DVDs and games not work. In the games cases it was because myDVD drive thought the CD's/DVD in the drive were counterfeit (such as dungeon keeper 2 or Railroads). The problem is the stores won't take them back once you open the package. What are you supposed to do in cases like that? I'm still rather annoyed that my copy of 'The Grudge' (Original Japanese version) stops just before the end and I have no idea how it finishes and my friends won't tell me because they 'refuse to ruin it' for me. Urgh!
If the prices were low enough I'd probably just buy another copy of the DVD 'The Grudge' and not care about good money I forked out for games that don't work (I wouldn't bother buying second ones of them, as other people reported the same issues on the net, so I'm assuming buying them again would just result in me having a second copy that doesn't work).
The ebook pricing of $0.99 they had the article on the other week here on /. was a good example of a price people are willing to pay, because as one commenter said, they'd probably buy lots of books just to have in their collection to read 'one day', even if that day doesn't actually come. The market really needs to re-evaluate its pricing. It won't stop piracy dead, but it would probably stop about 99% of it if people believe they are getting value for money.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Write off piracy to marketing coasts. Piracy is actually a very cost effective form of Viral marketing. It's free, and it can build you brand awareness rapidly. In fact, take comfort in the fact that people actually like your app enough to go to the trouble to pirate it. If your app is that good, you most certainly will be able to turn a profit from it, plus you will be able to leverage the sympathy of your existing market (including the pirates) for your next version.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
I'm sorry, but we're not talking about food, or a necessity like running clean water. This is entertainment - there is no requirement for you to obtain it, and if a DVD or blu-ray isn't available in your region, then the mature thing to do is to have some perspective and do without until it becomes available. To skip "I guess I'll have to wait until it's out" and go directly to "it's time to pirate" is like going to a furniture store, finding that they don't have the chair you want, and then coming to the conclusion that you have no other choice than to break into their warehouse.
Now, that said, has it ever occurred to you to just write to the studio and ask them to release the movies you want on DVD/BD in your region?
The reason I ask that is because studios ARE responsive to requests like that. Every time they get letter asking "could you please release X on home video," they don't assume that it's just one person wanting to buy it. They assume that behind that one person writing there are anywhere from ten to hundreds of people - perhaps even thousands - who want the same thing but are too shy to ask for it. If they get enough requests for a title, then it establishes the presence of a market for that title. And since blu-ray releases of older movies, no matter how successful they were originally, tend to sell very poorly compared to new releases (which is one of the reasons that the first three Indiana Jones movies are taking so long to get to blu-ray), a few letters asking for that title can go a long way towards getting that movie released.
So, rather than hitting the Pirate Bay while declaring that you have no other choice, perhaps you should write a letter to the studio, or get an online petition going. Demonstrate that there is a market for the movies you want on blu-ray. Not only are you likely to have an impact, but you'll also be helping all those other people who want the movie too, but are too shy to ask.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
You can't compete on price with $0.00 for a pirated copy of something.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I am a huge fan of PC gaming and find that this article makes good sense. I played a ton of games that I downloaded illegally, but now with the Steam platform, this has changed. For two main reasons : 1) The Steam platform ensures that you cannot lose / brake your CD's, as the content is downloaded from the "Steam Cloud". Purchasing a game on steam stays linked to a user. 2) Steam has sales regularly, pre-order discounts and sales on complete packs. This allows for users to purchase old games or complete pack at a fraction of the cost. The games I used to play illegally, I have now purchased on Steam. This provides the production houses with at least a fraction of the income, as the game would otherwise be played as a pirated version. Also I download a game illegally, I play it and if I like it, I buy it on Steam, so quality of the game is also a factor. So all in all, yes, piracy is theft, but you can at least try something before you buy, which is a good concept. And releasing demo's of games is not the same, as for most games, the demo is not representative for the complete game.
Same shit, different day
The difference is that there is very little currency in celebrity for software. I write software, novels and role-playing games. If people pirate either the role-playing games or the novels (I wish on the latter!) then I get exposure and the trickle down may work as you suggest. If someone pirates some software I wrote and I write more software the people who pirated and enjoyed the first program will not think "oh, this guy writes good software maybe I should reward him by paying this time" they'll either pirate it again because it's a useful thing to them or not. Programmers have no cachet when it comes to people thinking of them third-hand via the work they produce.
www.nodicerpg.com - Some RP stuff for free, some not so for free, but still cheap.
If piracy != lost sales, what is the problem exactly?
That's a big fucking "if" and is contradicted by the many posters on slashdot, who will happily say that they only pirate because the evil, greedy media companies charge too much.
You can't have it both ways.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Gabe Newell said, " "Price changes in the retail world don't allow for much freedom. Steam and other services offer flexability. In fact, users apparently respond to pricing discounts within five minutes." And what the psychologist really said was that, "He suggested one in 25 users that buy Left 4 Dead get another Valve game for free." Those statements sounds like an "impulse incentive" (your words) to the customer.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
All artists want their work to be seen/heard/read by as many people as possible, and to have as many fans as possible. They would also like to be able to earn a living by getting some money from those fans.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You're still not entitled to money, you have to delight customers to get it.
Customers are not entitled to free delights either.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The vast majority of Economists are always experts in their predictions, but wrong in hindsight. They, not lawyers, are the cause of our current litigious society; they want to settle to reduce exposure while a lawyer would happily fight to the bitter end rather than pay a troll. They are the ones who came up with derivatives and the financial instruments that have resulted in our current economic woes. The "informed opinion" that results from "an education in economics" is too infrequently an intelligent one.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
People who pirate for trial purposes
Peter Sunde?
Thank you, I'm here all week, try the cloned and genetically modified---but only to take out the bad bits---veal.
Except if you would have bothered to read his link Gabe Newell himself stated that at 75" off the made 15% MORE than the game made at the original release price because the amount of sales were so huge (1470% increases in sales is nothing to sneeze at) and you are also forgetting that once they have your product you have a possible source of future revenue by selling them more discount games as well as DLC.
For example Valve got me to try Steam when they offered the free Portal download and now I'm up to nearly 20 games, simply by picking up the specials. This is money they would have never saw because I didn't have Steam and didn't see their ads and had been shopping at Good Old Games and Amazon exclusively.
So I would say that the answer is right in front of their faces, but like so many industries pure bald faced greed is keeping them from making increased profits. Same as so many of the teleco/cableco duopolies like the one in my area could make massively increased profits by offering lower tier packages affordable to the poor, but because of their greed and their "damn everything but the quarterly earnings reports!" they constantly RAISE prices and run more and more customers out of their markets.
Sadly unlike with the black market known as piracy there is no option to escape the duopolies and in my area the cheapest dialup is now $60 and cheapest broadband is now $80 with a ridiculous contract required so a good 70% in my area simply don't have any Internet at all. But just as if the price were lowered on my net connection I would be much more likely to look at their video offers so too would I be buying even more games than I am now if the price were lowered, and not by simply distributing the same money onto more games, but because once you hit my sweet spot I'll impulse buy your game whereas at $50 I won't give it a second glance. .
It has already gotten to the point that if a game is $50 I simply won't buy, and at $40 it better have excellent reviews and be something I really want, at $20 I will give them my CC for a decent game easily, and at $10 I'm willing to take chances on games that may be stinkers. But the stage may already be set to change that, as Steam has been offering so many good games for cheap on their "midweek madness" that I doubt I'll be paying more than $10 a game. there are simply too many titles out there I haven't tried along with a backlog of games I've gotten from GOG and Amazon to keep me busy if the only games are expensive.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I suppose the following joke exists in most countries and cultures and I think fits with your description.
Three friends were granted each one wish by a genie.
The first one says "I was always very poor and now I want to become rich" and the genie produces a pit full of gold coins.
The second one says "I have always been starving to death, all I want is a goat to provide me milk every day" and the genie gives him a goat.
The third one says "I have enough money and enough food, all I want is his (pointing at the 2nd guy) goat to die"
The moral: Any and all free goats must die. Thou art allowed to drink only the industry's milk, from their cans, featuring their brand for everybody to see, even if (and most often especially when) it costs nothing. Because you are the milk, you are the can and your forehead should be marked by their brand.
That's the only group that matters. The other people you describe all fall under the category of "people who won't pay no matter what." These people shouldn't factor into pricing decisions, nor should they factor into product design considerations like DRM. They won't buy no matter how much you wish they would, so just ignore them.
Trust me, I realize that the other groups don't matter, and many others realize this also. However, the major copyright holders don't care about this distinction, and they want to stop the others as well.
Furthermore, they like to ignore the fact that those other groups don't matter in order to inflate the impact of piracy, and to justify more draconian business practices and laws.
You know, I'm starting to wonder if that isn't the entire point of those reality TV shows and making money is just a secondary goal. Think about it: What better way for a government to keep their populace docile and willing to put up with shitty service and treatment than by numbing their brains with the TV equivalent of Quaaludes?
I had friends that had no idea there was an earthquake in Japan or unrest in the middle east until it showed up on FB because their non work hours are FB and reality TV. I tried watching one for a whole 15 minutes and had to walk away, the levels of stupid were hurting my brain. Hell half the USA could have been rioting and they wouldn't know it if it wasn't in front of their house or brought up on an episode of Jersey Shore. yuck
As for TFA I simply won't even look at a $50 game anymore, even though I can afford it. There are simply too many choices and between Amazon, Good Old Games, and Steam I simply have so many choices in the $20 and less pile I could never go through them all. When I could pick up Bioshock II for $2.99 or Prince of Persia the complete Sands Of Time series for $6, why would I blow $50 on a single game?
By the time I'm halfway through the backlog of impulse buys I've gotten from sales there are new sales and that $50 game I can get for $10. For me $50 games simply make NO sense and provide me with no utility, as nobody cares whether you play a game now or 6 months from now and since I prefer single player I don't have to worry about what my friends want to play online. But by offering great deals like this Steam managed to get me as a customer and get money they never would have, all by simply offering Portal I for free. Between Steam, Amazon, and GOG I simply have no need for $50 games anymore and I'm sure I'm not alone.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Those same 8-year olds can probably find how to jail break their phone then.
.rar file which must be a virus!!11!" or "What does mounting mean." or "Whats YASU?". Even if there is no DRM there is still the barrier of SecureROM, mounting tools, proper burner settings, etc. The initial setup to get some pirated games to play requires a decent amount of knowledge and system tools that the average computer user(not Slashdot reader, but computer user) doesn't know or have.
Have things changed that much in the last few years? Forums where you find pirated PC software used to be littered with comments along the lines of "The isn't the game its only a
If you know what you are doing is it really all that difficult to play pirated games, no. But its also not all that hard to jailbreak your phone once someone posts instructions.
I still don't see how its any different than playing pirated games on a computer. Many pirated games require items that modify the OS to break SecureROM, reroute packets to prevent calling home, etc. There is also the risk of the downloaded game carring a payload that messes with the OS. How is that any different than breaking out of CHROOT jail and running an unapproved app?
Where I agree with you is that either pirating apps on the PC or mobile is very different than playing a pirated MP3, but only because a pirated MP3 has the same barrier to use on both platforms. If all you are interested in is pirated music you don't need to jailbreak your phone.
I understand your feelings but not your argument. My "stealing" your product did not induce any substantial damage to you, because you can always recreate copies of it at manufacture cost (supposing we're talking about digital goods, it's some cents, isn't it?).
If I sold the product I "stole" from you to a third party and got $10, then you could rightfully claim you have been damaged, because these $10 should get in your pocket and not mine.
If, on the other hand, I made 5 copies of your product and gave them to my friend for free, you could also claim you have potentially been damaged, because I actively inhibited my friends considering buying the product from you.
This is why everything I "pirate", I get it from direct downloads (never torrents), I keep it myself and use it myself to make sure I don't acquire the status of an accessory or even start feeling like one when reading posts using your line of argumentation.
It's the guy who uploaded the stuff and made it available who damaged you and not me. I don't have the bucks to buy it from you, I don't profit financially or otherwise from your product, therefore to you I am non-existent.
No harm meant, no harm done. Friends?
Is your goal to make money or to get a perfect sales to piracy ratio?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Oops. I mistakenly pressed submit rather than edit after a quick proofread/preview. Apologies for the various errors.
Thats what i was implying with my sarcasm. I often download cracks to games i have legitimately purchased to not have to deal with draconian DRM. Or straight up download pirated versions and use the key. I dont have a problem with steam games tho, that works out nice.
y allowing users to play a music file on 5 different computers/iPods, they undercut the user's motivation to go to the torrents for DRM-free MP3s
or amazon... they have DRM free files too -
and personally, I don't see how it dissuades anyone from torrenting or purchasing elsewhere something that they want - I can purchase or download files from elsewhere and bring them into itunes without issue AND back them up in case of a crash or hardware failure.. but I can't do that if I buy it from apple. Just being able to listen on 5 different itunes installations doesn't help that.
I still don't see how its any different than playing pirated games on a computer. Many pirated games require items that modify the OS to break SecureROM, reroute packets to prevent calling home, etc. There is also the risk of the downloaded game carring a payload that messes with the OS. How is that any different than breaking out of CHROOT jail and running an unapproved app?
True, I was talking primarily about music and movies, rather than games. Modifications to the OS to break SecureROM or whatever probably are pretty significant, though there will be plenty of people lack your understanding to appreciate that the way that. But yeah, I've never pirated a game so perhaps hadn't realised how involved this had become. But music and movies, sure.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
It still makes sense, if I understand it right: Apple utterly hates that anybody other than Apple themselves has any control over anything that happens in their iSomethings, and the DRM meant that the Crapp^HCopyright holders had some control over iTunes content.
You see, we have a lot of folks who want to wax phiosophical about why software should be free [...]
Let me remind everybody that what most of those folks mean with "free" has nothing to do with what you seem to think they mean.
Musicians don't make alot off of cd sales anyway, specially if they do belong to a label.
Fixed.
just as arson and cannibalism are two entirely different violations of the law.
Flame broiling people chops is illegal? No more happy meals??
Absolutely right, N0Man74. You see it the way it has always seemed to me, all along.
This is clearly how it functions for most intelligent, regular, broadband users. These have been the apparent facts for twenty years. Free markets are supposed to self regulate by responding to demand. But its far more lucrative to attempt to regulate markets and limit the options of the people. If the product is has a poor value, but corporate monopolies dictate access to that market, its laws, technology, and access, then we the consumer all ultimately wind up with a crappy value.
I recall when TV was free and if you paid for cable you received many commercial free channels of programming 24/7. Now I pay 10 times more than I ever dreamed for 10 times the channels, but I get commercials on every channel, and a smaller rotation of content. I pay more and get less because I only have one cable provider, and they just bought NBC, which owns several cable stations that together produce a significant chunk of the content Not only do we allow the elimination of free market competition within a particular industry segment, we permit that engorged parasite to begin dominating adjacent industries. How does ABC compete with NBC when NBC is Comcast and ABC has no transmitter in my market now? Its terrible for the consumer and free market capitalism. Its great for corporate dominance of hijacked markets. Its the way things are, for sure, but eliminating all piracy will never make their over priced shit worth buying. The market can't be regulated punitively, unless of coarse, consumers have no real options or freedom. Its this moral outrage that incites "piracy", not any real value in the media, but rather a disrespect and disdain for the market options . If nobody wants to buy your crap, then it should just disappear and be replaced by whatever the market demands. I would never pay for any of it, and I don't care if I can't demo it. But if producers can't generate sales, then I guess the next best tactic is to let the media be easily tracked and exchanged, and then threaten lawsuits. That way no residuals need to be paid, losses can be trumped up, and content mediocrity wins market dominance, just like the crappy cable infomercials that override my content program access that I once purchased.
Piracy, unfortunately doesn't benefit anyone well enough, or hurt the corporate oligarchies that spew them, nearly enough to make them stop or make any improvements. Would that were true, then at least there would be some real sense of value or consequence of these inconsequential "crimes" of indifference. But honestly, I never find any real value in any down loadable media of any kind. I just don't need it or really care to take the time to pay attention to it. I never use 99%. Its just like clicking through all of those cable channels you never watch anyway, even though you bought them, like it or not. Its there, but you can't eat everything on a menu, even if its all available to you. The value of all of it is just not that high when most people in the economy can barely get buy, and the stuff that really matters can't be routinely forgotten on a hard drive.
In my Steam login splash page, I saw it as a 59.99 USD preorder. I'll be waiting for it to hit 20. :)
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Um. no. This is NOT what most folks mean when they mean free. Ask the average person and they will tell you that it means zero cents. The average person doesn't give two shits about open source.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Here's the thing - the digital hoarders were never content customers to begin with. In the pre Internet era, they would've just gotten by without the stuff they're 'stealing'. So it's useless to consider them as lost sales. They might as well not exist.
The popularity of iTunes should show that if pricing is done right (along with hassle free transfer of songs to your device in this case) people wouldn't mind paying what is a reasonable amount for them rather than torrenting albums.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."