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

[Omega Pirate]

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

You know I didn't even think of the PS3 when I read this article. Even though I own one, playing Demon's Souls on it as we type. But its probably because PS3 games are on Blu-ray, making then harder to pirate. Since their generally bigger in size (Well at least I think they are?) they are harder to download. In adding of the need to buy Blu-ray discs, you also need a Blu-ray burner to write onto the discs.

 

[OANST]

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.

 

[John Funk]

Either way, it doesn't change the truth of what I said: It really does suck to see more pirates playing your game than actual people. That's an observation, not an argument.

Okay, I'm well aware that pirates are thieves, and we don't like them here. That's good. I still think they qualify as actual people though. Or is it the Escapist's official position that pirates are subhuman?

(Sorry, I just thought that was a really funny thing to say.)

Sorry, that should've read "actual paying customers." Maybe it was a slip

 

[Balimaar]

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

For the cost its the most effective form of advertising.

 

[OANST]

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

For the cost its the most effective form of advertising.

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

Ultimately, word of mouth is very expensive. It involves actual marketing to begin with, plus you have to provide exemplary service to get the person interested in spreading the word. That type of service is expensive.

 

[Kukakkau]

This has actually made me burst out laughing - what kind of person pirates Kirby's Epic Yarn??!

Also 1million more people pirated black ops compared to mw2 - activisions gonna be piiiiissed

 

[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.

 

[SinisterGehe]

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 guess 0.2%. Certainly, most people pirating anything is doing it because it costs £0.00.

I disagree, I know a community of people (and they are a community, forums and all... Very little effort goes to making a community now days). Who call them selfs (Translated) "Test drivers", they download and test any media before buying it. I knowing how Internet is there are more of these communities.

But as mathematical truth is, X can be anywhere between Infinity and Infinity

I would say, 35% of people Downloaded and the bough the game. Specially in case of games like starcraft that you really need just to buy the license to play online. The game itself can be installed from whatever medium you want.

 

[lacktheknack]

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

Fix'd.

This list hurts me inside.

 

[Exterminas]

I am sorry to repeat myself and probably many other people:
A common missconception in debates about piracy is that every pirate is a lost customer. Most people pirate games, because they don't have the money.

I don't know if the memo has reached everyone by now, but 50 Euros for Call of Duty 2 with a bunch of addional stuff is fucking expensive. I spend less money per week on my food.

These pirates, however, still visit the games website and see advertisement there. Buy magazines about that game. Visit the Escapist.

Now imagine a world without piracy. It would be a world with a damaged video game industry as a whole, because only a tiny part of all pirates would become actual customers.

It's the same with music. Musicians make the most money with concerts. You can't pirate them. But you can become a fan via piracy and then visist a concert.

 

[lacktheknack]

Glad to see StarCraft 2 made the top 5. It's funny how the most pirated things of the year, movies and games, are never really the best ones that came out. It's always the ones people "might as well go see", but they're still willing to cough-up the dough for a quality product. I hope it stays that way to be honest with you.

My question: Did they include the downloads from Blizzard's own torrent?

 

[Balimaar]

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

Ultimately, word of mouth is very expensive. It involves actual marketing to begin with, plus you have to provide exemplary service to get the person interested in spreading the word. That type of service is expensive.

Or there might just be freaks like me who enjoy a good game and persuade a dozen friends to buy the game who convince at least 2 or 3 people each. 12 + 12*3 = 48 copies sold and we aren't going to go any further discussing how many those 36 people will convince.

Make a good quality release and people will talk about it and buy it.

 

[Nouw]

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

I laughed.

Is it safe to say the majority of them are Dads downloading for their kids? I think it's also safe to say that a fair amount of people bought the game after downloading it.

But I am disappoint with the fact that more people downloaded Alan Wake than people bough it. Cheap, filthy basterds!
[sub]Well according to my reading anyway...[/sub]

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

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.

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 in 2010. 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.

 

[OANST]

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.

 

[for example john]

This sums up a lot of things I feel about piracy. I originally pirated Fallout 3 and loved it so much that I bought the collectors edition for both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. I'm planning on doing the same with Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Alot of the games I play I cant buy because I don't have the money for it. The most recent game I bought was Minecraft and only because it was such a good buy. I'd even go so far as to say that video game piracy help promote awareness of the game, and promoting the sales of people who would buy it.

 

[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.

 

[Captain Pirate]

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. While every pirated download isn't a lost sale, that's both hard to quantify and even harder to prove.

I know an unfortunately large number of working professionals who don't see anything wrong with stealing music, movies and games that they claim to like and want to support, even though they drop more on their nightly bar tab than it would cost them to pick up a game.

This, through and through.

I was having a discussion about Pendulum with my friend; we're both really big fans. I've bought nearly all their music, I've only downloaded songs that aren't available for purchase. I've seen them twice and paid double the original price on the second go because I love them that much.
So we got into talking how much of their music we had; both having nigh-on every track available. He then casually quipped that he'd downloaded every single one, bar their live album which was a birthday present.

I proceeded to say how he can't be a real fan if he doesn't even want to support the band for their hard work, and he just said "Yeah but I pay to seem them live, so..".
"Well surely that's because that's the only option available? You can't download a ticket. Surely if you made music, got successful, and expected people to pay to get your CDs because of the hard work you put in, how pissed off would you be if you found out half your so-called 'Fans' illegally downloaded all your music, claiming to support you yet not paying a single coin?".

He shut up after that.
I'm just worried about how this is now the norm. One of my other friends downloads all his music, and he seemed like a really good, morally-upright guy. In every other respect he is, but it's as if downloading music isn't even considered stealing anymore. I'm especially pissed that these two I've mentioned easily can go to their parents and borrow, I dunno, £5 to buy an album off iTunes or a cheap CD from HMV.
I have to earn the distinctly smaller amount of cash I get, and I still buy all my music.
Yet these guys, who could easily pay without batting an eyelid, don't.

Another thing is that I bet a good number of those people who downloaded Alan Wake want a sequel because they enjoyed it. However, Remedy is still arguing their case to be given the green-light, last time I checked, because, ignored due to the timing release of the superior RDR, Alan Wake wasn't selling too well.
Here's the deal, pirates. Buy the fucking game, and you'll help get the sequel.

Whoa, I've ranted on a tad.

 

[OANST]

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.