World of Goo Experiences 90 Percent Piracy Rate

[Nathan Meunier]

World of Goo Experiences 90 Percent Piracy Rate

Yarrrr! Get yer greasy mitts off that goo and nab yer gaming booty the proper way!


There's not much of a dispute to be had, every gaming household should get their hands on the much adored and critically acclaimed hit World of Goo. However, having players actually pay for the game is likely more along the lines of what indie developer the creators [http://2dboy.com/] of World of Goo report the title has a massive, 90 percent piracy rate.

The vast majority of the work on the addictive, physics-based puzzle game was done by game designers Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler - the two core members of 2d Boy. Apparently, the game, which is available for PC and WiiWare, has popped up on torrent sites, Carmel told Joystiq. He confirmed the incredibly high piracy rate has reached about 90 percent for the game.

"We're doing ok, though," said Carmel. "We're getting good sales through WiiWare, Steam, and our website. Not going bankrupt just yet!"

For those who are secretly cheering along the basement development scene, it's very exciting to see an independently produced title turn into a runaway hit. A quick look at Metacritic places World of Goo as one of the highest rated [http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/wii/worldofgoo] titles based on critic reviews. It ties with The Legend of Zelda and is only two percentage points shy of matching Super Mario Galaxy. That's impressive. It also makes the fact such a huge amount of players are sticking it to the little guy by ripping them off particularly frustrating.

Indeed, the title is of such a high caliber [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/5459-Review-World-of-Goo] anyone who calls themselves a gamer - and even those who don't - should at least give it a shot. That said, show some damn support for future indie development; procure your copy through means that are not uncouth.






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[L.B. Jeffries]

*sigh*

They ***** about the awful DRM laws with one hand while the other fans the flames that makes companies use them.

 

[LucanDesmond]

Whatever the percent is, its pretty terrible. These guys made a pretty good game. I bought it and I have not shared it with anyone. I never thought pirating was that big of a deal, but this shows that it really can effect designers. Of course, DRM has gotten out of control with some games. We need to find a good middle ground. Something that restricts access to those that didn't buy it, but doesn't restrict the legitimate buyer, only the pirate.

Someday we'll figure it out.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

This is an indy game! Pirates stow your holier than thou shite, they throw you a DRM free bone and you abuse it!

 

[NeedAUserName]

Never even heard of this game, but honestly, how can they tell how much it's pirated. Oh, it's been seen on Limewire and Bittorrent, guess we'll call that 90 percent?

Its been on both, its gotta be at least 99%

 

[Elurindel]

That's pretty awful. I understand when it's huge companies like EA that make it increasingly hard to play the game, but how hard can it be when it's an indie developer releasing it on Steam? I might give this a try, and if I do, I'll definitely pay for it.

 

[edinflames]

I don't think we'd have much of a problem if people only pirated EA releases . When i was too young to afford games (no job) I downloaded a lot of stuff illegally, it was quite easy then without the security you get today - case in point: freelancer, it had a unique key generated on install, mighty foolish since all u had to do to get it free forever was borrow someone else's disc - but you had to really seek it out before bit torrent came around and changed the rules again.

Even Valve's excellent steam system only really protects the MP games, being updated regularly enough to catch pirates out, although I have been told that Crysis, Bioshock and Fallout3 are all very hard to obtain illegally when compared to the 'old days'.

I'd be interested to know how they[2dboy] obtain this data, but it suggests to me that perhaps it is now the indie developer that will truly suffer from loss of revenue. I doubt that

 

[Landslide]

Never even heard of this game, but honestly, how can they tell how much it's pirated. Oh, it's been seen on Limewire and Bittorrent, guess we'll call that 90 percent?

The game accesses servers for a portion of the gameplay. I'm sure if they have a record of 10,000 sales, and 100,000 people accessing the servers, then it's easy math. Piracy is an extremely detrimental problem to the industry we love. Being part of the industry whose job it is to observe, it's really sad watching how much damage software piracy is causing. And how little attention people pay to it. Or in this case, outright disbelieve it's an issue.

 

[edinflames]

The game accesses servers for a portion of the gameplay. I'm sure if they have a record of 10,000 sales, and 100,000 people accessing the servers, then it's easy math. Piracy is an extremely detrimental problem to the industry we love. Being part of the industry whose job it is to observe, it's really sad watching how much damage software piracy is causing. And how little attention people pay to it. Or in this case, outright disbelieve it's an issue.

I'd say that as a former practitioner of the dark arts, its a serious problem. These days I only download the odd album or rare/old(er) movie, but, as far as I have seen from one particular friend of mine, piracy has grown in proportion to the distribution of high speed internet access. People can download, so they will.

So now its up to some clever-clogs to sort out this mess with an effective method of halting piracy while still appeasing the fact that a lot of people don't have enough money to buy the level of digital content to which they have now become accustomed.

 

[ukslim]

Before we can make any rational conclusions about DRM, we need to know what kind of piracy rates a comparable DRM'd game. Likewise, indie vs major comparisoms.

For all I know (and I don't), it's typical for a PC developer to make their money on the 10% of installs that are not pirated.

It's not good for this to become common knowledge though - who wants to be the chump that's subsidising a bunch of freeloaders, by paying for games?

 

[fyrh56]

That's pretty awful. I understand when it's huge companies like EA that make it increasingly hard to play the game, but how hard can it be when it's an indie developer releasing it on Steam? I might give this a try, and if I do, I'll definitely pay for it.

You'll shudder when you see the $20 price tag. Seriously, 20 bucks? World of Goo is good, but it's no Portal ffs.

 

[Lvl 64 Klutz]

Never even heard of this game, but honestly, how can they tell how much it's pirated. Oh, it's been seen on Limewire and Bittorrent, guess we'll call that 90 percent?

The game accesses servers for a portion of the gameplay. I'm sure if they have a record of 10,000 sales, and 100,000 people accessing the servers, then it's easy math. Piracy is an extremely detrimental problem to the industry we love. Being part of the industry whose job it is to observe, it's really sad watching how much damage software piracy is causing. And how little attention people pay to it. Or in this case, outright disbelieve it's an issue.

See, when you put that last bit of information in there, then I can get all pissed at pirates instead of wondering if the developers are just gabbing bullshit about piracy like EA does.

So I guess my next question would be, is there a way to ID legit purchases versus pirated copies? And if so, can't they just do the old Blizzard move of blocking the duplicates?

You'd think, but it wouldn't stop people from nabbing the game since the online feature only represents a tiny portion of the game.

 

[Landslide]

It's actually easiest for PC games that have some kind of online element. An ID would be some kind of multiplayer key (some FPS and RTS games do this, or did this). With a game like Goo though, that's hard to do - even moreso if they're a small company. They probably get their numbers exactly how I described.

Imagine how demoralizing that would be. Your sales department lets you know you've sold 10,000 copies of your indie game. Woo! Exciting! So you check with your server guy to see how many people are logged in tooling around with their goo tower. He tells you there's 50,000 at the moment. That's 40,000 people who just grabbed your game and are playing it. And some of those will even post on the official forums, asking for tech help if the game doesn't work.

My numbers are imaginary, but the situation isn't.

 

[chwynn]

As far as I am aware, there is no may to purchase it on steam in the UK, so everyone from the UK that wants to play has to just steal it.
Also, they can tell how much it has been pirated by comparing the amount of copies sold vs. amount of players online.

 

[adamandkate]

The game only connects to leaderboards, one connect does not equal one person. a legit copy could connect 50 times in a day. does that mean one person bought and 49 pirated it?

thier figures as always are rubbish and full of holes. anyway, 90% of people who are apparently pirating it... probably played 2 levels and deleted it.

 

[Mr.Pandah]

That sucks. I have never pirated a game and most likely never will (I never figured out how to "torrent" or whatever). It is terrible that these guys pour their hearts and souls into a game like this and people basically slap them in the face when they pirate it. I can understand pirating some games (even though its still wrong) but an indie game? Show at least some dignity people...

 

[Zer_]

This article shows how cruel piracy can really be, but it also shows how some major developers are over-reacting to piracy *cough* Epic *cough*.

Here's what I get from this article:

- The 90% piracy ratio is bogus, but I'm quite certain that the real ratio is almost as startling.
- The article does emphasize how cruel pirates can be.
- The article tells us that some of the major players in the gaming industry are over-reacting to piracy, or outright lying.

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

I heard this was exaggerated but their claims of piracy are still accurate. More high-scores are posted than from people who actually bought the game, but seeing how easy it is to connect to the leader boards it's not exactly as accurate as you think.