Nintendo Blocks Flash Carts With DSi Software Update

[Royas]

I know the arguments coming well a person that pirated the game would never have spent money on the game in the first place. While this may be true for a majority of the pirates even if say 5% of 100,000 people who downloaded the game would have actually bought it if it was not so easy to download. That is 5000 more copies of the game sold which can be significant in some game releases. Also on that note if the person would never have bought the game then why does said person think they should get to play the game for free. Why can they not just pass it by as a game that they will just not play at this point in time and move onto one that they will pay for.

The only real experiment done on this subject showed something like a 1 in 1000 or less conversion rate once pirate copies were cut off. I can't find the article itself (sorry!) but I know it was covered here on the Escapist at one point. So, from your 100,000 people, you now have 100 new sales. Given that in order to force pirates to buy, you have to use DRM and the courts, I'd think you are losing money at this point.

Hmm sounds like it would be an interesting read if you can find the study I would love to read it. It could be that you get a 0.1% of those who would buy the game if piracy were not available. I would think it would be higher then that though. This would be a hard thing to test as there is no real way to have a good sample size where you can actually limit access to pirated copies. And even then if you look at something like spore that 0.1% actually ends up being 1700 sales if you go off the estimated figure of 1700000 pirated copies.

As for the DRM and courts it is not so much to try and force pirates to buy it is more about trying to stop the pirates from being able to pirate said product so if they wanted to actually play the game they would need to buy it.

All in all it comes down to if you want to play a game then pay for it. If you do not think it is worth the price wait for the price to come down. If you do not think the game is worth playing for any price then don't play it. If you do not have the money to buy the game then save for it and in the meantime there are loads of good games out there that developers are giving away for free. Is this really that hard to do? I have been down to only enough money to pay for housing electricity and a 5 dollar crate of ramen noodles. Guess what I did for gaming I played games I already owned. Asked friends and family for games for christmas/birthdays, traded games with friends(not copied), and played a bunch of open source games that the developers are giving away.

I happen to agree about paying for the games you play. I have no pirated software on my machine, period. I may have a couple of pirated discs from the 80's, but I'm not going to count those. I too have been down to almost no money, and I too played games I already had and ignored the games currently coming out until I had the cash. I'm certainly not saying that piracy is a good thing, it generally isn't.

Found the link for the experiment in question. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 takes you right to it. This is specifically a casual game, not a hardcore AAA game, but still it's about the only concrete figures we have to date on piracy. Everything else has been conjecture and WAG's (that's Wild Assed Guesses).

I'm going to have to disagree with you on the purpose of DRM. DRM is not primarily to stop the pirates from pirating, it's to increase sales. That's the only thing a publicly traded company cares about. Sales, profits, show me the money is all the investors give a damn about. They can't afford to pay the great expense of developing or licensing DRM without hoping for a return. Using your figures for Spore, 1700 sales is not a good return for the investment I'm sure the programming cost them. That's not even enough to be worth the time it takes for an EA executive to think about it. Actually, let me correct myself, DRM isn't about increasing sales, it's about creating the perception of increasing sales to make the (usually technologically ignorant) investors happy. That's the real bottom line, smoke and mirrors.

 

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I happen to agree about paying for the games you play. I have no pirated software on my machine, period. I may have a couple of pirated discs from the 80's, but I'm not going to count those. I too have been down to almost no money, and I too played games I already had and ignored the games currently coming out until I had the cash. I'm certainly not saying that piracy is a good thing, it generally isn't.

Found the link for the experiment in question. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 takes you right to it. This is specifically a casual game, not a hardcore AAA game, but still it's about the only concrete figures we have to date on piracy. Everything else has been conjecture and WAG's (that's Wild Assed Guesses).

I'm going to have to disagree with you on the purpose of DRM. DRM is not primarily to stop the pirates from pirating, it's to increase sales. That's the only thing a publicly traded company cares about. Sales, profits, show me the money is all the investors give a damn about. They can't afford to pay the great expense of developing or licensing DRM without hoping for a return. Using your figures for Spore, 1700 sales is not a good return for the investment I'm sure the programming cost them. That's not even enough to be worth the time it takes for an EA executive to think about it. Actually, let me correct myself, DRM isn't about increasing sales, it's about creating the perception of increasing sales to make the (usually technologically ignorant) investors happy. That's the real bottom line, smoke and mirrors.

Thank you for the link it was actually a very interesting read. While not the definitive data it definitely is the best I have seen. Also thank you for showing me that people can have real debates/conversations about piracy without it turning into a yelling match (this is why I love the escapist).

I think on the subject of DRM we are sort of saying the same thing while still disagreeing on the particulars. Which without actually working in the professional game industry I can not really give a definitive answer I know of the few developers that I know and what they believe about DRM. But none of them are publicly traded and I can definitely see that it could be different reasoning between each company or even persons at companies. The couple of devs I know basically have said in the event that their game makes it big enough where they are charging a retail price and not just donations they would hope that their DRM scheme would keep the game off of the mass torrents long enough for a few more sales.