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

[sneakypenguin]

Yes, you got it, PC gamers are entitled. It has absolutely nothing to do with how much easier it is to pirate stuff on a PC than it is on a console.

Seriously, man, if it were as easy to pirate stuff on the consoles as it is to pirate stuff on the PC, the numbers would not only be equivalent, but the console numbers would be higher, since more people play on the three consoles combined than on the PC alone.

Piracy on the 360 is literally as simple as plugging in a usb drive and/or burning a disc, Wii you can do it with an SD card or harddrive and play the games off that. Not sure if somoene pointed that out already if so my bad.

 

[TPiddy]

I never implied that companies were geting a comeuppance from piracy; what I said was that they were blowing the problem out of proportion. It was someone else who said that, and he was referring specifically to Alan Wake's failure after advertising for the PC, but canceling it at the last minute. If you'll check my post history, you'll see that that tiered release schedule is exactly what I think needs to happen, but it isn't going to happen as long as the publishers have convenient excuses like piracy and used sales to blame for their poor sales.

As for the comparison to film, let's look at it for a minute: according to <link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_development>Wikipedia the average devlopment cost for a videogame was $20 million. It's tough to find a current source on the average cost of a film, with the last solid number I could find being from 2003, but <link=http://articles.latimes.com/2003/mar/05/entertainment/et-munoz5>that one claimed $59 million as the average at the time. Current estimates seem to range from $69 million to $100 million, but again, nothing specific, because the MPAA no longer publishes that specific number. Going off of this, even if the average cost of a film hasn't gone up since 2003, which is a patently ridiculous notion, films still cost a whole lot more to make than videogames, meaning that, even with the lack of additional revenue sources, games shouldn't have too hard a time remaining profitable at a more DVD like price point.

So, why are game so expensive? I said in an earlier post that it was due to greed, and indeed, it is. But there was a time when higher prices were justified. That time ended when the industry switched from expensive to produce cartridges to incredibly cheap optical media, and is completely irrelevant in the world of digital distribution, where physical media isn't even a factor. Bascially, as the unit cost to actually print a game has gone down, the cost to buy one has gone up, because consumers, being used to paying a certain amount anyway, didn't really notice when the media itself became cheaper to produce. Even with the increased cost to develop a game compared to what it used to be, the cost for consumers should be much lower than it is.

First, allow me to commend you for a well-structured reply. Was almost half-expecting this to descend into pointless name-calling . Now, to counter your points:

1. I still think any software company has the right to complain about their products being stolen. It's hard to not see their point when you see numerous studios closing up shops and tons of lay-offs at even the major companies. Between used games and piracy, it's a tough job getting your money back on these things.

2. Film development averages are largely skewed by big-budget blockbusters, and a big chunk of that is taken up by the actors themselves. You cannot readily compare the two mediums as they are inherently too different. As I've said before, films have a massive, massive install base, while games, if you target every single current-gen platform, only have an install base of about 120 million globally. Much smaller market to get your money from.

3. Can't really argue this point. They have gone to cheaper distribution mediums but the cost savings have kind of been eaten up by the development process that has naturally grown into a large, bloated money hole, mainly due to the expectations of gamers going up. Did Avatar set a new standard for films? People can still watch a $10 million rom-com without demanding that the effects look as good as Avatar, but the effect it has on the gaming industry is slightly less so. Yes you'll get games like Dragon Age, World of Goo, etc that succeed in spite of being graphically inferior, but the expectations have been raised.

 

[Zannah]

Again with this discussion... No, piracy still doesn't harm sales in any significant way. Yes, the devs making shitty games, charging way too much, not porting properly, not fixing bugs, not treating their employees properly, not releasing demos and rarely if at all supporting their products have it coming.
(Oh and for the record, if I worked in the creative industry (which I do), my opinion wouldn't change. Fun thing is, I can't afford the entertainment I'd like to have, because the entertainment industry doesn't pay me enough)

 

[Mahha]

How do they know all that? There are loads of pirate servers all around the globe and they can't possibly know all of them... or can they? It's 1984, I tell you what.

I downloaded ME2 once because I forgot the disk at home. That whole experience made me thankful of steam.
I also cracked it so I don't destroy the DVD within 2 months.

 

[Zenn3k]

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

I'm pretty sure that because its much easier to PLAY a pirated game on the PC than it is on other systems. You don't have to "mod" a PC to play a pirated game.

 

[AwesomePeanutz]

I've been reading through this thread, and I hate it when people use the excuse "I can't afford it so it's ok for me to pirate." That's like saying "I can't afford to pay my mortgage so I won't have to worry about it."

Games are usually $5-60. And if you own a $300 console then you can surely afford a game. Either shell out the $60 or don't buy it.

Again with this discussion... No, piracy still doesn't harm sales in any significant way. Yes, the devs making shitty games, charging way too much, not porting properly, not fixing bugs, not treating their employees properly, not releasing demos and rarely if at all supporting their products have it coming.
(Oh and for the record, if I worked in the creative industry (which I do), my opinion wouldn't change. Fun thing is, I can't afford the entertainment I'd like to have, because the entertainment industry doesn't pay me enough)

Perfect example. Firstly, you can't prove that pirating doesn't affect the developer's profit in a significant way. Second, stealing something "shitty" still means you stole something. If a game is crap, then don't play the damn game. Finally, not being able to afford something doesn't give you the right to take it (see my original post above). We don't live in a communist country, numbnuts.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

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.

It isn't stolen, you still have your copy. Quit being melodramatic. You might as well say as well call individual copyright infringement "baby rape" because that has just about the same level of relationship to what is actually happening.

 

[mchlmicy]

I seriously doubt that CoD was the most pirated game of 2010, mainly because I think everyone forgot about the iPod and iPhone. Studies suggest that 10% of iDevices are jailbroken and assuming a meager 10% of those have installous, I could still say that Angry Birds would be the most pirated. Though it doesn't amount to nearly as much in money, I know more people who pirate apps than people who pirate video games.

 

[Khada]

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

Or if they cant afford it? Or if its not worth it? 'If' i D/L'd COD-BO its because I would never spend more than $15(AU) for the 6 hours of SP I knew I was getting. I don't care for CODs MP. Better for them I play the game and tell others it was good than not at all. Ive spent literally thousands of dollars on video games alone (Then there's the PC, consoles, peripherals). So If I pirate a game every now and then because there's nothing out that I'm into and anything that is out has a price 3x its worth, then big whoop. Piracy has been the cause for more than a few pieces of software becoming popular. Adobe Photoshop would not be where it is today without it. Good software will always make more than enough return.

 

[for example john]

I've been reading through this thread, and I hate it when people use the excuse "I can't afford it so it's ok for me to pirate." That's like saying "I can't afford to pay my mortgage so I won't have to worry about it."

Games are usually $5-60. And if you own a $300 console then you can surely afford a game. Either shell out the $60 or don't buy it.

Again with this discussion... No, piracy still doesn't harm sales in any significant way. Yes, the devs making shitty games, charging way too much, not porting properly, not fixing bugs, not treating their employees properly, not releasing demos and rarely if at all supporting their products have it coming.
(Oh and for the record, if I worked in the creative industry (which I do), my opinion wouldn't change. Fun thing is, I can't afford the entertainment I'd like to have, because the entertainment industry doesn't pay me enough)

Perfect example. Firstly, you can't prove that pirating doesn't affect the developer's profit in a significant way. Second, stealing something "shitty" still means you stole something. If a game is crap, then don't play the damn game. Finally, not being able to afford something doesn't give you the right to take it (see my original post above). We don't live in a communist country, numbnuts.

There is a difference between a video game and a house. One can be copied an infinite amount of times with no cost added and the other is a house.

Firstly, I think you're right, what proof is there that pirating doesn't increase a developer's profits. Second, how will will you know if a game is crap. Since everyone's tastes in games are different, going off of ratings doesn't always work. Finally, if you weren't going to (or can't) buy a game, then pirating it doesn't hurt the developers and may in fact help them (see my original post above). Blah Blah Blah communist country, numbnuts.

 

[Tom Phoenix]

Something that developers often forget is that you shouldn't be wasting time chasing potential customers; instead, you should reward your paying customers. If you attempt to obtain non-purchasing customers through restrictions and limitations, all you will end up doing is driving those customers away that are paying for your titles.

So, marketing is pretty pointless, eh?

Word-of-mouth is the most effective form of marketing. A fellow gamer telling another gamer that a certain game is awesome is more effective than a thousand billboards and TV/Internet advertisements.

I think that you will find that you are wrong about that.

Right, beacuse Minecraft and Super Meat Boy had massive advertisement campaigns behind them...

Don't misunderstand, a bad game with a large advertisement campaign a.k.a fake hype will sell (at least initially, until people realise how bad it is...then they will sell their used copies in droves and the word-of-mouth will ensure that the product doesn't sell long after its release). But a good game will sell even when it doesn't have a multi-million dollar marketing campaign behind it.

Super Meat Boy was pretty well advertised. In that type of situation, you have to include the free flash game as part of the advertising. There are always exceptions to every rule, of course, but the reason that people continue to say that word of mouth is the best advertising is because it sounds like it should be true. It just isn't in most cases. In most cases you need to spend the money on television and print, and if you don't, or if you don't do it effectively, you will fail.

I think that you will find that you are wrong about that.

I think that you will find that you are wrong about that.

Believe what you will. Just remember that the bedroom programmers of old, the very people who made the game industry possible, didn't have massive advertisement budgets to work with. They didn't even initially create games for profit. They just made a game for themselves and friends just for fun and it exploded from there. Why? Thanks to word-of-mouth.

There are examples among companies as well. When Pong was created, Atari was a young company who could absolutely not afford to advertise (Bushnell started Atari on a budget of $500). In order to test the viability of their arcade machine, they set it up in a local bar. Very quickly, the machine got jammed....with quarters. After that, the demand for Pong rose to astronomical heights and Atari could not keep up. How could this be? Beacuse of word-of-mouth.

Before he developed Minecraft, you could not be faulted for not knowing who Markus Persson is. Afterall, he was just a random bedroom programmer hoping to develop games independantly, just like every other bedroom programmer. Now he is starting his own gaming company, he is famous and he is rolling in cash. What made that possible? Word-of-mouth,

In essence, this industry was founded upon word-of-mouth. If word-of-mouth was ineffective, then this industry would never have existed and we wouldn't be here talking about it right now.

 

[geizr]

As far as I can tell, there are only three reasons for someone being a pirate: lazy, cheap, and a douche-bag. It takes someone with the mental maturity of a five-year-old to honestly make some of the rationalizations I've seen to justify piracy and to have such a complete lack of understanding and disregard for the total costs that go into making a game, or any product, for that matter, and there are many costs far beyond just the development(not to mention, there is an entire chain of economy that is partially supported from the sale of video games). If you can't afford it, just learn to live without it and move on, but don't go on to take it anyway because you have to have it and then try to make rationalizations that doing so is okay just so you won't feel bad about it; that's just being a child. At least have the decency to admit to yourself that what you did was wrong.

Also, I've never bought into this "a pirated copy is not a lost sale, anyway" argument because, to me, the math just doesn't add up. I have total costs C that surround making a game; this includes not only the cost of development(by the way, the salary that someone is paid is not all of the total money a company pays out for having that person in employ) but the costs of staff, distribution, advertising, storage, space rental, utilities, shareholder dividend payouts, licensing and royalty fees, legal fees, reinvestment for expansion, etc. This doesn't include the additional costs of a retail store in selling a game to you, but it has to be figured into the final cost of the product, because everyone in the chain requires their particular cut to remain in business.

At any rate, this total cost has to be balanced against the revenue received for the sale of the game, namely C <= (price per unit)*(number units sold). If the price is too low or the number of units sold is too low, then the equation is not balanced and a net loss is incurred. Before sale of the game, one can only make a guess regarding expected sales. If sales are expected to be high, then one can charge a lower price to balance the equation. If one expects low sales, then one has to charge a higher price to balance the equation. Conversely, if one is restricted on the price that can be charged, such as knowing no one will pay more than $20 for a particular game, then the business is gambling on sales meeting a particular number in order to balance this equation. Naturally, if this requisite sales number is not met, due to people simply not buying(regardless if they pirated or not), then a net loss is incurred. Essentially, the business did not achieve the sales they needed to balance the equation; those needed sales were lost.

When equation is not balanced and net loss is incurred, the usual reaction is to lower the price to achieve more sales. However, this is more a loss-cutting strategy and not intended necessarily as a means to balance the equation. Usually in such a situation, the business is forced to take a loan to cover the balance of expenses that were not compensated in sales(either because not enough units sold or the price was insufficient). However, loans have to be repaid, and the business can only incur just so many such losses before it is too much in debt and no longer able to sustain itself.

The real problem, as I see, that piracy presents is that it completely skews the ability to estimate potential sells. This causes problems with adjusting prices appropriately to respond to the market, and it poses considerable difficulty when planning the financial feasibility of future product development and business expansion.

The overall danger is that the industry, as a whole, must change and adapt to remain solvent and sustainable. Either the cost structure and business model of making and selling games has to change, or new methods have to be developed to ensure sufficient sales occur to balance the equation(this includes using DRM). If something is not done to change the situation, eventually businesses will be forced to cease operation, reducing the overall vitality of the industry.

 

[Jroo wuz heer]

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

its a lot easier to pirate on the pc

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Alan Wake is the second most pirated game on the 360? This makes me happy and angry at the same time. Happy in that it means the game is popular, and hopefully Remedy can convince whoever they need to in order to make a sequel (seriously, did you PLAY "The Writer"?). Angry because blast it, if those had been legal purchases, I think Remedy wouldn't be in the unsure camp regarding the sequel.

 

[Dastardly]

It's true that not every download is a lost sale. While it's a safe bet that some of the pirates would have bought the game were there no other choice, there's no way of knowing how low (or high) that percentage would be.

I would approximate 0.2%.

Ah. So you're a pirate.

Actually, Shamus had an article here once that talked about an indie developer that had messed around with a bunch of different kinds of DRM, and they had estimated that they gained one sale for every thousand pirates they prevented.

So that number was probably too high.

Problem: Indie games, especially the sort the have little "experiments" with DRM, aren't drawing the same attention as mega-release games. As such, there simply aren't as many people willing to buy it in the first place. An experiment like this is simply there to prove a point, but that point has to include the fact that the numbers are not to scale.

Look at Black Ops. This isn't some "indie developer" making a "niche game." This isn't an experiment to see what DRM does, where people participating in the experiment are likely aware that something like that is going on. This is a game that the market shows people effin' want. And, as such, it didn't come with an indie price tag.

This all-or-nothing crap is what has to stop. Someone may not be willing to pay $60 on launch day, but they may be willing to pay $45 a few months later. Now, since there's a free version that's easy to get, they pay $0. That is lost revenue. Not a lost "full price" sale, no, but a lost sale.

There is a period between Launch Day and the sale of the first batch of used copies. Publishers can still make reduced-price sales during that period. Piracy largely eliminates that period. So, you can add those losses to the 1:1,000 launch-price losses. Now you're getting a more realistic picture.

The problem? It's impossible to prove any non-sale was a lost sale. So what's to be done? We rely on common sense. Which of the following is more plausible?:

1. That someone with absolutely no interest in ever paying any amount of money for a product is suddenly going to want it simply because it's free? (Unlikely. If they're interested in having it, they're indicating they'd spend at least a little to get it. If they have absolutely no interest, they wouldn't even think to download it.)

2. That someone with some interest in the product, but perhaps not full-price interest, was instead sidetracked by the presence of an illegal, but free version, resulting in at least the lost of a reduced-price sale. (Far more likely, given what we know about people and their buying habits.)

 

[Zannah]

Perfect example. Firstly, you can't prove that pirating doesn't affect the developer's profit in a significant way. Second, stealing something "shitty" still means you stole something. If a game is crap, then don't play the damn game. Finally, not being able to afford something doesn't give you the right to take it (see my original post above). We don't live in a communist country, numbnuts.

Pirates hurting sales is an assumption made by people with a financial interest in the matter, and thus scientifically invalid. That left aside, I can of course only rely on the statistics made by people without said interest, and trust what I experience and see with my own eyes. That is of course no solid proof, but it's a lot more then your side has, relying exclusively on aforementioned claims.
And of course, the quality of a piece of entertainment does not justify walking up in a store and taking the product for free. Lending out a book or movie before deciding to purchase it... isn't illegal as far as I know. Thing is, there's no demos, and lending out games is a whole lot of hassle, since greedy people go out of their way to make lending/sharing/second hand selling as hard as possible. So people pirate, since it's the only way to make sure a game isn't bug ridden or shit, despite the usual review blurp.
And you see - rich and greedy people exploit my work, because... they can mainly. Of course, the law doesn't cover my demands for sufficient payment or a proper contract. A law made by and for said influential people, mind you. Now theoretically taking compensation 'because I can' might conflict with the law at times, but sure as hell does not conflict with my understanding of what's 'right' and 'just'.
(And has more to do with Robin Hood'y vigilance then with communism, really.)

 

[Rayansaki]

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

As long as I get Record of Agarest War Legendary version for x360 by mail in a discrete package I'm ok.

 

[pedal2000]

The real problem, as I see, that piracy presents is that it completely skews the ability to estimate potential sells. This causes problems with adjusting prices appropriately to respond to the market, and it poses considerable difficulty when planning the financial feasibility of future product development and business expansion.

Except that there is no 'price adjustment'. Don't kid yourself - Activision doesn't charge 70 bucks for CODBO because of piracy. They do it because they can sell it at that price and make shitloads of money.

If a game is crap, then don't play the damn game.

Please explain how I will know if a game is crap if I don't play the damn game? I'm a huge fan of picking up games after I've enjoyed them. Or donating to developers, or buying copies of games I've already beaten if I enjoyed them.

But, for example, I massively regret the money I spent buying Modern Warfare 2. It was the biggest waste of 70 bucks I've ever spent on video games.