And the Most-Pirated Game of 2010 Is...

[Asehujiko]

Ah, another good year playing free games. Saved a lot of money. Still had to waste 70 euros on few games though.

What about PS3?

Theres no piracy on it. I think you could pirate some games for it for a while with the jailbreak thing but im not sure if it works anymore.

It still does work and the reason you don't hear about it is because sony is taking the ostrich approach and thinks the amount of piracy is directly proportional to the amount of press releases about it, kind of what the EU is doing with it's economical problems. Which is admittedly a better idea then what the escapist is doing with their hate rallies, which only has the effect of driving away people still on the fence on the issue, hardening the resolve of the pro-piracy crowd and annoying neutrals.

 

[barbzilla]

I have to agree with Colin on this one. I disagree with devs adding so much crap to "protect" their products (as well as selling us watered down versions of games), but I disagree with piracy on a whole different level. Lets be honest, stealing is stealing. Even if you are stealing a digital copy of something, you are still stealing. Another issue is that piracy is a great route for hackers/coders to give you all of these wonderful viruses and data mining programs. I really don't know what my general thesis is here (other than piracy = bad), but I hope for the sake of the gaming community something is done soon about it...

Actually thinking about it I just hope the cure isn't worse than the problem. (see massive internet censorship)

 

[robotam]

Silly pirates with their wooden legs, stolen games, eye patches and lovely rum.

I feel really sorry for the makers of Dante's Inferno. My brother recently bought it for me..
..preowned. Sorry guys.

 

[TPiddy]

There are an unfortunately large number of people whose only impediment to stealing is the fear they might get caught, having no real concern for the hard work and livelihood of others.

So true... I shoplifted in my teen years. It wasn't until someone broke into my car when I was 21 that I realized just how bad it feels to have your stuff stolen. Now, never again. I've got the occasional MP3 on my hard drive that didn't get deleted after sampling the album, but now, so many places will let you listen to tracks for free, I don't even have a torrent or P2P client on my machine.

 

[Alphavillain]

Uggh, it's too much effort to steal games. I can't decide if those that pirate games are bloody-minded or clever. But whatever, I'm neither of those.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

So the most pirated games tend to be the most popular games? What a surprise! (Sarcasm) But it isnt really lost revenue because the people that get pirated games or download them wouldnt pay to buy them regardless how cheap they were sold officially. I think a company released a game to buy online where you the buyer chose how much you paid based on how much you thought the game was worth. So you could pay either 1p or £5. An eventhough you could have paid just 1p to buy it people still pirated it and downloaded it for free.

You may be thinking of the Humble Indie Bundle, which was completely pay what you want, partially (or entirely -- you got to divide it up) went to charity, and yet still had the crap pirated out of it. However, it also raised quite a bit of money, and the second one, which finished up a few days ago, had an official torrent tracker so that people who wanted to pirate it could do it without eating up the bundle's bandwidth. Of course, while there were plenty of people who pirated it, there were also several people who payed in the thousands for it, and it raised several million dollars in total, so again, the pirates, while scumbags for pirating something meant for charity, didn't do any real damage.

(By the way, if you're reading this OANST, I paid $10 for the second one before they made the deal with the first bundle known. The average was below $8, and I sent a good chunk of it to the devs, but of course you're convinced that I'm a dirty pirate who doesn't think the devs deserve anything...)

 

[Cryo84R]

I like how asshurt people get on this forum when piracy comes up.

Try making a game then seeing it get stolen right out from under you.

 

[TPiddy]

OT: Notice that none of the games in the top 5 for any of the systems has been a financial failure, in any sense of the word. One of these days, people are going to realize that while there may be some negative impact from piracy, it's nothing compared to what the various affected industries claim it is. And people actually believe that used sales are as bad as or worse than the imaginary bugaboo of piracy? We really need to quit buying industry spin. As consumers, the industry is not our friend. No industry is.

Umm, the post clearly indicates that both Alan Wake and Dante's Inferno suffered from tepid sales and are struggling studios. I am very disappointed, as I thought Alan Wake was such a good game, it doesn't deserve this.

 

[TPiddy]

I'm very hurt by this article, where are the numbers for PS3 piracy? No love for the PS3, how sad.

There's nothing on PS3 worth pirating No... bad troll! I suspect it has something to do with PS3's hardware being harder to mod.

 

[ShaqLevick]

I guarantee that anything I might have downloaded I would never have bought... and if nobody could afford to create games based on the current economic system I could certainly get over it. Because 69.99 is just too much for me bother with given the small window of time I actually have to play games, I might as well just get another hobby. You see I fit into the small group of gamers who have no interest in owning a game, I pirate to save the change I would be handing over to Blockbuster or maybe a Gamestop (money that developers don't see). So the thing is what's the point if the mediums I used to use were pirating the developers anyway.

 

[dogenzakaminion]

Sissies. March into a store, look the associate in the eye and demand to buy Kirby's Epic Yarn like a MAN.

Reminds of the time I bought Pokemon Diamond and asked if the man could "gift wrap it for my little brother *cough cough*".........*huddles in the corner in self-shame*

 

[OANST]

(By the way, if you're reading this OANST, I paid $10 for the second one before they made the deal with the first bundle known. The average was below $8, and I sent a good chunk of it to the devs, but of course you're convinced that I'm a dirty pirate who doesn't think the devs deserve anything...)

Hey, now. I never said that. I just think that your idea of the value for the amount of work that is put into these products is a bit skewed. It's not as if I don't understand the desire to save money, but I don't believe that the prices I pay are exorbitant or unfair.

 

[inFAMOUSCowZ]

that pisses me off that Alan Wake had that many pirated games. It wasa great game and deserves those sales. Hell I mad that any of those games were pirated past the million mark.

 

[coldshadow]

Look at how much higher the rate of piracy is on PC. Entitled geeks will steal anything if they feel they deserve it.

I think it more has to do with how easy and available it is in comparison.

 

[Delusibeta]

If you decide that piracy will always exist and nothing should be done about it, on the current pattern you're effectively saying that the games industry should be locked into mega-budget franchises, licensed games, and tiny indie devs working second jobs. Piracy isn't going to go away, but working out better ways to counteract it will help the industry avoid going all the way down the road of rational, anti-risk conservatism that says everything should be either Black Ops, Ben 10, or Minecraft.

Honestly? It's the cost of high quality graphics and demand for said high quality graphics that is causing the push to anti-risk conservatism. Piracy has little (if anything) to do with it.

 

[TPiddy]

I'm sorry, but $60 is not a reasonable price for an entertainment product. For that price, I could spend the day at Disney World or Bush Gardens instead. The equivalent product here is the DVD, which goes for something between $10 and $30, depending on how recent the film in question is and how much it comes with aside from a single cut of the film. Games may be a longer form option, so let's compare it to something that actually tends to be longer: season boxsets of TV series on DVD. Those tend to go for between $20 and $40, and are generally a minimum of 12 hours long -- in other words, much longer than the average game is today, and spread out over a larger number of discs to boot.

So why do videogames cost so much more? Greed, pure and simple. These companies piss off their customers in the process of squeezing more money out of them because they know that, whatever the internet petition might say, they will come crawling back when the next game in the series comes out. And the beauty of it is that they have no real reason to lower prices, since they've managed to set the price to the same rate across the board, leaving customers to either pay it, pirate it, or buy it used. Since piracy is illegal, they have no problem demonizing that instead of lowering prices to compete; used sales are more problematic, but if some of the discussions on this forum are to be believed, they've managed to demonize those too, and are refusing to lower prices in order to get closer to what the consumer is willing to spend. I really don't see how you can support that, or accuse me of being selfish for pointing out how greedy these publishers are.

Wow... your eyes must be brown because you're utterly and completely full of shit. Yes the price is high for a game, but how much more goes into a game? You don't have to play test a movie. You don't have to screen a movie for bugs or release patches for a movie. Movies have a much wider install base than games do. Movies also have tiered price points including pay-per-view. Games don't have these revenue generating avenues.

To compete in today's gaming landscape you will need a fairly large or fairly good (or both) team of developers, artists, animators, modelers, voice actors, script writers, game testers, marketers, print designers, motion capture engineers, etc... yes film crews have similar size but a blockbuster film, like Transformers, is pretty much guaranteed a return on investment because you don't even need to own a TV to be able to see it.

very rarely do films fail to turn a profit, and in the event that they do, the studio publishing them can soak it up and move on to the next one. I agree that a tiered level of availability for games should be put into place, much like movies have. If you don't want to pay $12 to see it in the theatre you can rent it for $7 three months later. Games should have the same thing, especially now that game rentals are going the way of the dodo. If you don't want to buy the $60 game at release, maybe 3-4 months later the game drops by $10. Nothing wrong with that.

But to imply that the publisher's are getting what's coming to them because of their greed is absolutely ridiculous. The greedy car companies have pushed the price of a car well up over $10,000 now, and yet people aren't going around stealing cars. Pirates steal software because they can get away with it. They're cowards and cheap bastards, not idealists.

 

[OANST]

LOL @ Alan Wake. Good. I hope Remedy has learned a valuable lesson here. Don't announce a game for multiple platforms then yank one just before launch. That thing would've sold very well on PC. Instead, it sells a little over the number of times it was pirated. Priceless.

Other people's misfortune is so hilarious, eh?

Usually, yes. It's funny because I don't know them.

In this case however, I see it as comeuppance for a stupid, idiotic move by both Microsoft and Remedy to garner interest in a game in the PC community, then yank that platforms version weeks before launch, making it a 360 exclusive. Thinking that it'd somehow get a serious PC user to buy a 360...just for Alan Wake (rolls eyes). As I said, hilarious. The good thing is, Remedy won't go belly-up, because Microsoft likely bankrolled the entire endeavor. So, in essence, it's Microsoft getting raped, which I totally agree with.

I don't mind platform exclusives, just don't advertise them for....6 years as multi-platform and then change your minds at the last minute. What that means, is Remedy has a perfectly viable PC version of Alan Wake sitting around their offices, and are doing nothing with it.

Ha Ha Ha, I say to them.

You don't really think that it was the ideal situation for them, do you? I mean, obviously they would have preferred to put it out for pc, but circumstances conspired against them. It just seems silly to hold a grudge against someone for something that ultimately they couldn't control. Normally, that's called being petty.