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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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pirated software has an opportunity cost. When the legit cost of your app is cheaper than the time opportunity cost of finding the pirated version, you will make a sale to all but the stupidest of pirates.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
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)
That thing you mention doesn't happen in countries where piracy is high. I live in Argentina, and I WISH I could get the matrix trilogy for $9. Or even $50 (the trilogy would cost me $100). I know they don't have $5 bins (except really truly bad crap like a macarena remixes CD).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 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.
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.
Is a song worth a dollar?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Pirated software is free. There is no way to compete with that at any price.
Yet plenty of games, music, and movies have been quite successful despite pirated copies being available before the official release.
Face facts: People are willing to pay for stuff. If we were the big stingy tight asses these industries all thought we were, Starbucks would never have been a massive success and iTunes would simply be a bit of trivia only Slashdotters would be aware of.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Why should we throw away communications freedom just to support an industry pricing plan?
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
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
It's not only the price, but the ease of use. If it is easier to buy something at a relatively cheap price (to most people), then they will do that.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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
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.
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.
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 ----
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.
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.