Space Jawa said:
Hisher said:
Sober Thal said:
Hisher said:
Angry PC gamer here to say that a pirated game is not the equivalent of a lost sale.
Yeah, it's a product being used that wasn't paid for.
True but there is a good chance it wouldn't have been purchased in the first place.
Then what the frak are they doing playing the game if they never had any intention of paying for it in the first place? If you're not willing to pay for it, don't use it!
His point is that just becayse someone takes something for free, does not mean they would have paid for it. It's like a cup of pens with your company logo on them. If you put them there as free pens for advertising, everyone is going to grab one whether they are likely to use them or not. On the other hand if you sell them for $1 apiece as a souveneir not everyone is going to buy one who would have taken one for free.
This is the big problem with companies claiming piracy as lost sales, piracy tends to be an oppertunistic thing.
It's also important to note that you never see the industry talk about the OTHER side of the equasion and how piracy helps them. Largely because they are too distracted by these thoughts of huge piles of money, and desperatly wanting all those pirated copies to turn into sales as unrealistic as that is.
You might be thinking "Piracy? help The Gaming Industry, madness!". The simple truth is that the gaming industry is based around a lot of deception and demands leaps of faith from consumers from an unreturnable product. Trailers showing cinematics, or even brief flashes of gameplay are usless for something as involved as a game, and as we all know Demos do not always match what the finished product is like. Piracy lets a lot of people see the actual game and decide if they want to actually invest in the company doing this and encourage them to do more of it. Granted not every pirate will buy a game after trying a pirated copy, but a surprising number of them do. Pirates have also become an integral part of the quality control process for games given industry deception, with a lot of people who do not pirate waiting to hear what those that do have to say about a game before buying something that is unknown. This is incidently why "Titan Quest" got slammed due to it's DRM, it's own security backfiring on it, as many legitimate purchusers were not going to invest in what seemed to be a broken product.
To be honest, there are a lot of reasons why the industry is moving away from the PC. Piracy is just a cool sounding scapegoat. After all the industry was sustained by PC gamers at times when piracy was even more rampant, and grew into the current juggernaut it is now. Sure companies have fallen, but overall it's remained strong.
The bottom line is that it's not about making a profit, or making good games, but making the largest amount of money for the least investment of effort and resources possible. Like it or not PC gamers DO tend to be elitists and have very high standards compared to dedicated console users (I say dedicated because there is some overlap). Generally speaking someone who only games on a console tends to do it because they really can't get their head around the PC, windows, and a more complicated enviroment. The kind of person who uses a PC as their primary gaming medium tends to be of a higher intellectual quality with higher standards.
Consoles come with a standardized archetecture, and lots of toolkits (which also exist for the PC in some form) that make churning out derivitive games easy. You also have a less demanding audience that is willing to suck up a derivitive shooter or roster-updated sports franchise game with few questions or complaints. The PC gamers when handed similar products are more likely to go "wow, this is garbage" and not support it where console gamers will turn that junk into massive money making machines.
As a result you see an increasing tendency to want to develop things for a console, and then treat the PC versions as a second market where it either succeeds or it doesn't... It doesn't matter of the serious gamers or those with higher standards approve as long as they make their money.
See, that big, huge, deep RPG game with tons of statistics might make money, and justify itself, but it takes a lot of time and effort. The same amount of effort put into that could be used to turn the RPG into some kind of action-hybrid game with dumbed down stats, which takes less work, and will sell to more people on a console audience. Or heck, they might just put it into making another Halo or Gears Of War clone from the get go, and wait for serfs to start rolling the wheelbarrels of cash up to the front door.
You see piracy used as a boogie man when questioned, because really there is no way someone from the industry say "I'd rather make more money by selling cheaper and easier to make games to a less discriminating audience" which winds up making them look bad, and also kind of insults their audience. Blaming piracy is a clever way of trying to pass fault onto the audience hey are leaving.
In recent discussions on the topic, piracy is treated as if it's an issue that JUST started and is only affecting game development now. That's far from the truth, piracy has been around as long as personal computers and video games have. The Apple II, Commodore 64, and early PCs going bact to the 8088 chip and slow machines like that were absolutly rife with it. Companies like Sierra, Origin, and SSI who were big boys at the time all had their backs and forth with it, and made noise.... but despite it's prescence the industry didn't fall or go away, sure companies changed and disappeared, but even with it's prescence it grew into the monolith it is today. I'm not saying piracy is right, but it is NOT the major, monolithic problem that it's presented as. If anything piracy is actually less rampant now than it was when the industry was in a more fragile stage. Sure more stuff is pirated, and the techniques have changed, but it's a larger audience. Grabbing a game off of a P2P network is really just the new face of someone grabbing it out of the pirate section of a BBS run out of some dude's basement... I mean it was he same thing, call someplace else, download game someone cracked. The industry is just full of drama queens who have deeper products to put on their elaborate stage shows.
As far as I'm concerned stopping piracy is fine as long as they prevent their efforts from affecting me and other legitimate customers. I also think they should at least be more honest about why they do things rather than waving piracy around as a boogie man and get out of jail free card every time they want to misdirect things away from their own greed and exploitation.
