Piracy Numbers

[NoNameMcgee]

Try before you buy? It's called a DEMO buddy. Most if not all games have them.

Bullshit, Demo's last half an hour and all they tell me is exactly that: what the first half an hour of the game was like. Games can and often do take a sharp turn down shittyness-street after the first quarter/half of the game.

"developers would get less of my money if I didn't pirate"? hahahahaha. What if you couldn't pirate? Would you stop playing games? Stop buying anything? No, of course not. You'd still buy games. Maybe more, maybe less. You'd buy shitty games sometimes, but in the end you wouldn't be playing anything for free. Want a free game? Go to a flash site. Go play that crap RTS with the lingerie ads. Ebony.

Like I said, back when I didn't have the knowledge to pirate anything I would buy the games I was pretty sure would be good. These days I buy games I'm pretty sure will be good, download games I'm unsure about and buy them if they turn out to be good. Therefore, I buy more games in the end thanks to piracy. So please explain to me how anything I said there was flawed, assuming you believe I am being honest with you. (there is no reason I wouldn't be on an internet forum where none of us even know each other right?) I have bought so many more games in the past couple of years thanks to being able to test them out beforehand.

Also, in case you want to bring up rentals, I'd like to note I'm primarily a PC gamer, therefore renting is not an option.

See you accuse the naysayers of being too snobbish, as in "I'm better than you pirates". But you're doing the same thing! "I buy what good games I pirate, I just don't buy the shitty ones, but at least I buy some. And once in a blue moon, I even buy a game WITHOUT PIRATING it! Wow I'm so great, not like those other guys."

How am I putting myself on a pedestal like you seem to believe? I don't consider myself better than people who take the risks and buy everything. Good for them I suppose, I'm merely trying to add to the discussion and show people how many different variables there are so people will stop lumping me into the same category as people who don't give a shit about the games industry and never buy anything.

I have bought a tonne of games. I have 51 games bought on Steam (hell, just check my account profile; the link is in my escapist profile) and probably about twice that amount in retail disks (and that's just for PC, I have some console games too). Almost all of those games I can keep proudly in my collection and believe they were worth every penny, because I pirated most of them beforehand.

To be honest I'm really glad the developers who make terrible games don't trick me out of my money.

 

[Arcticflame]

Not all pirates are jerks...

Why yes.. yes they are.

They're taking the product of somebody else's labour, without asking permission, nor providing compensation. They're not only jerks, they're engaging in a form of slavery.

Somebody above said that not buying the game is the same as pirating the game, however, the one key difference is that the one is availing themselves of the developers time and resources for free, which is a huge disrespect to said developer. Monetarily it may be no different, but morally and philosophically, it's a huge difference, and is the difference that makes the pirate a jerk.

So basically you are talking on emotion rather than logic. Nice.

I fully agree that a pirate can justify their own actions incorrectly using the arguments we have all heard a million times before, even when they don't apply to their own case. But what you seem to fail to realise is that their are genuinely people who pirate and yet benefit the industry by doing so. The world isn't black and white, therefore not all pirates are jerks.
For example, a guy I know who has (roughly, actually a bit over) a terrabyte of music. 90% pirated. Of course if you then realise this means he has 100 gig of non-pirated music. (All of which is mp3 v0 encoded)

With a generous estimate to how big each Mp3 file is, and how much he paid for each album, that leads to him having paid 15 grand on music. And this guy isn't very old (in his early 20's).

He has pirated more than he has bought, and yet has most definitely contributed more to the music industry than most people would spend in their lives. And here's the kicker. None of his piracy came at a cost to the music industry. Whether or not his piracy led to him being such a music buff is another debate of course (My own belief is that piracy has contributed a lot to his enthusiasm for buying records).

 

[DoctorObviously]

I have an idea, maybe they should up the price just a little more, video games don't cost enough yet, maybe it'll help. If piracy is growing more and more, it's their fault.

 

[Tharwen]

Has anyone successfully pirated WoW yet? Maybe that's why Blizzard gets so much money.

 

[AzraelSteel]

I have this amazing thing I do that sounds just like piracy, apparently - I get to use someone else's hard work without paying anything. There's even a building to it - called the library. Weirdest thing? Funded by the government. Not sure I buy the, "Piracy is killing the game market." More of a possibility that the game industry itself has some pretty bad systemic problems to it, seeing as books have been doing fine for some time with a startling similar form of distribution to them.

 

[Goenitz]

How many pirates are jerks?

100%

Ouch, your a jerk.

 

[Arcticflame]

Actually, this case is black and white. A lot of slave owners made great contributions to their towns and cities too. This doesn't make their actions in owning slaves any better. It just means that they were decent in other respects.

Except slavery is the act taking someones freedom. Piracy is the act of making a duplicate copy of a copyrighted material without the owner's consent. The anology is terribad.

So yes, he is a jerk for taking other people's work without asking their permission or giving them the compensation they request. That being a jerk has also lead him to provide 10% support to the artists he's enslaving doesn't lessen it.

He doesn't enslave them. Your analogy is terrible. If you stole my muffins every day from my duplicate muffin machine I would be irritated that you were taking my business. However I would not continue to make the muffins irregardless of whether I was making money or not. If I found I was losing money. I would stop the business. This is not slavery, at worst it could be construed as damages. With your logic if I stole your car, you are a slave.

It's very simple. He has no right to it. He is therefore disrespectful to the artists who create the bulk of the music he has. And being disrespectful to the people who make the things you enjoy is really a classic definition of being a jerk.

You seem to have made a flawed logical progression with having no right to do something with the action being bad.

And that isn't a classic definition of being a jerk. It's an opinion of what makes someone a jerk coming from you, but hardly a definitive explanation of what a jerk is. You are once again talking frome motion rather than logic.

And besides those points (again). How do you know he even enjoyed the 90% I mentioned? For all you know that 90% is all trash he listened to once and never touched again. Whether or not he pirated the music is moot when it comes down to the magic muffin machine argument. I know for a fact he has gone to stores and purchased discographies based upon pirating one album of a band on multiple occasions. Not to mention the tons of festivals and concerts he attends where he buys merchandise almost as prolifically as he pirates music. (Ok he doesn't have tends of thousands of T-shirts, but he does have hundreds.)

Effectively, in my eyes this is black and white to me. You value emotion over logic and end result. I value results and logic over emotion.

With your opinion, the bands get less sales, but aren't "disrespected". (?) He sticks to the "rights" of music industry and therefore the industry get less sales from this case.

If he follows through with his "jerkish" behaviour, the music industry gets "disrespected", but makes more money.

In my view this rather negates any means of calling him a jerk.


Of course I'm not for a second suggesting he would stop purchasing music all together if he stopped pirating. But he certainly would find it a lot more difficult to find music he is at all interested in.
Bringing it down to my personal opinion here, he pirated music since a rather early age, at that stage of cours he couldn't afford music at all, so it was pure pirating. But as he got older, got a good job and yet his enthusiasm brought on by his prolific pirating in the early years of his life, his want for music remained, but his wallet was larger, and hence now he constantly buys music.

Of course all this said, I still stress that this is one single case, I don't by any means beleive that pirating like this occurs commonly.

Has anyone successfully pirated WoW yet? Maybe that's why Blizzard gets so much money.

In a way, yes. Private servers.

 

[zauxz]

Ugh, You again.

Pirates download because they dont want to spend money on gaming. If piracy would disapear half of us I mean them would stop playing.
I asked every pirate I know if they would buy games if they couldn't download them.

One person said yes. ONE. ( I asked more than 50 people.)

You know what they should do? Make games free, but with ads in them. You get a free copy, but the pause menu has mountain dew or something written all over it.

 

[yoyo13rom]

How many people use the pirated version as an extended demo?

Actually, back when I pirated things (I don't anymore) that's pretty much exactly what I did. I pirated games, and if I liked them enough to keep playing them, I almost always (I'd say 94% of the time, depended on how easy the game is to acquire) I bought them, usually digitally.

I wasn't using that as an weak excuse either, I'd say of all the games I downloaded, roughly 150 or so, about 75% of them ended up getting liked by me and bought at a later time.

And I never seeded.

Just another anecdote to counter yours, it isn't data as you said, just making sure both sides of the argument are represented. I'm not condoning piracy either.

And I'd still be termed a pirate by the industry, although I gave up on it last year.

Am I a jerk?

*weeps*

Nice to see a comment coming from an ex-pirate such as myself.
For me pirating was relatively inevitable until 2003. Let me explain.
When an ex-communist country turns democratic, there will be many that present the capitalist world in a different(profitable) way. The only way games could be brought into the country was through pirates. Not that the old fashioned way didn't exist, just no one new about it.
So the pirates would steal the game from the internet, then sell it as an original. So you wouldn't quite think that what you were doing is immoral(you were buying the game, so you weren't pirating it; what the hell is this pirating thing you speak of?). The only thing was that you were paying a pretty weird distributor. Hmmm, that raised some questions.
So as time passed people became aware that they could pirate the game themselves and make profit from it. And there were no other ways to get the game. Only from 2003(or at least then I found out about it) international distribution was available for Romania.
The short version of the story is: gaming distribution is several decades behind the USA here.
We still don't have used-game stores(and therefore project 10 buck has no value here).

OT: Good article. Really like your writing and comics.

 

[Fearzone]

Piracy is stealing only if you accept the concept of intellectual property.

Breaking the law is still breaking the law regardless of whether you agree with the law or not.

 

[JeppeH]

... I know for a fact he has gone to stores and purchased discographies based upon pirating one album of a band on multiple occasions. Not to mention the tons of festivals and concerts he attends where he buys merchandise almost as prolifically as he pirates music. (Ok he doesn't have tends of thousands of T-shirts, but he does have hundreds.)
...
With your opinion, the bands get less sales, but aren't "disrespected". (?) He sticks to the "rights" of music industry and therefore the industry get less sales from this case.

If he follows through with his "jerkish" behaviour, the music industry gets "disrespected", but makes more money.

...

Of course I'm not for a second suggesting he would stop purchasing music all together if he stopped pirating. But he certainly would find it a lot more difficult to find music he is at all interested in.
Bringing it down to my personal opinion here, he pirated music since a rather early age, at that stage of cours he couldn't afford music at all, so it was pure pirating. But as he got older, got a good job and yet his enthusiasm brought on by his prolific pirating in the early years of his life, his want for music remained, but his wallet was larger, and hence now he constantly buys music.

Of course all this said, I still stress that this is one single case, I don't by any means beleive that pirating like this occurs commonly.

I couldn't agree more.

The industry should have a bigger intrest in getting their IP exposed than to stop copying. There are many accounts of when an IP gets exposed the sales increase. See Monty Python for examble, When they published their material on youtube their sale of DVDs rose.

Its a common know fact, than when you are in the highlight you sell products. Thats why they try to hype a game, thats why they do marketing and advertising.

What they should do is:

A. make it DRM-free and easy to download from a paid service. The faster and easier the better. Maybe couple it up with extra goodies like avatar images, ringtones and backgrounds to make it more appealing. Maybe items posted to your adress like posters or T-shirts.

B. make the off-line version more tempting. Make 'ordinary edition' more like 'special edition'

C. thank their paying costumers in the intro and credits. Make it personal - have a group-pic of happy waving employees, because nothing rubs it in pirates faces than seeing their victims.
I ask you, What would be hardest to kick? a angry little puppy or a cute one wagging its tail?
Do you want to give the happy puppy a biscuit? I bet you do!

So make it appealing to buy the game, and treat the illigal-copying hoarde like its advertising.

 

[Fearzone]

There are 3 options available to gaming consumers.

1. Buy the game with money
2. Don't buy the game
3. Pirate the game.

In the long run options 2 and 3 are exactly the same for the industry as a whole. Yet people who claim to support the industry have no problem telling consumers to just not buy games instead of pirating.

(Yes, its supposed to sound as stupid as it does)

I hate to be on the side that justifies piracy (and the majority of these walls of text trying to defend illegal behavior I skipped over TL;DR) but I think an argument can be made that #3 is actually better than #2 for the industry. There is nothing that kills a game faster than nobody playing it. If there is a population playing a game, even if a lot of them are pirates, the community has a chance to build upon itself and may have a better chance to sell more copies to legitimate customers.

 

[AzraelSteel]

Breaking the law is still breaking the law regardless of whether you agree with the law or not.

I think the argument has been less about legality and more about morality and rationale. One is easy to define, the other, not so much. Not only that, but illegal does not translate to immoral. A perfect example of this is traffic laws. Is it immoral to speed? It's hard to argue that, but it is illegal? Yup.

As a side note, I'd personally like to see more people trying to understand the other side of issues like these than just spouting off their own morality system toward the other side. A conversation means nothing if you can have the same thing talking to the wall and pretending it disagrees and makes you angry.

For me, I am still unconvinced by either side, really. Should I always pay for things I have no way to verify the quality of? I'm not so sure. Is it okay for companies to put out junk and advertise it as quality, and then say that is more moral than the other side stealing the same product? I think intention has a lot to do with morality than cold, hard facts would have you believe.

Edit: And yes, I can see reading that my bias is pretty apparent, but more than anything, the anti-piracy rants are the ones that bother me the most and are probably the ones I get angered by more than anything. A "you're wrong" based on the arguments that many of these posts have tend to set me off pretty easily.

 

[Asehujiko]

Assuming someone tries a game and then goes out and buys it, they are basically indistinguishable from the previous group who buys it and then "pirates" it. They're just doing it in a different order. In any case, these two groups combined simply can't account for more than one in nine downloads.

You made an error in your calculations of how many pirates can be attributed to "full demo" users. According to your post, full demo's cant be attributed to more the the total sales of the game itself because of your assumption that everybody who gets the full demo, also buys the game. The entire point of a demo, normal or pirated is to try out the game and then deciding to buy it. So a significant chunk of those who pirate the game as a demo don't buy it, just like they wouldn't with a regular demo yet they are lumped in with the "jerks". There's also the case of legal customers pirating twice, once to try the game, once to get rid of the drm of the game they bought.

Personally, I buy about 20% of the games i try demos for and the rest of them is uninstalled by the end of the day. Assuming that all developers suddenly stopped making their own demos(i use those when available), 80% of my contribution to your statistics would be in the "jerk" category.

For example, Napoleon: Total War. I have a sort of history with this series, since I bought everything from Rome onwards, including Empire, which is the game that convinced me to always play a game before buying it by buggy piece of shit not worth electricity needed to have Steam fetch the 15gb worth of bad game over the internet instead of just reading the disks but I digress.

I downloaded, I played, I hated, I uninstalled, I made a mental note to never trust CA's marketing staff again. All in the space of a few hours. By your logic, I'm a jerk since I didn't buy the game after trying it. Am I? No. I'm ex customer driven away by bad products. While there is a "jerk" here, it's not me. The jerk here is called Kieran Bridgen, works at CA and tried to scam me out of my money with false promises and a bad game.

Finally, it seems that our definition of a "pirate" differs. To me, a pirate is:
1, a 17th century sailor raiding ships in trade rich areas like the americas either for profit or under employment of a foreign government.
2, an east african fisherman who had a few barrels of toxic waste dumped in his favourite area and has to resort to ransoming ships belonging to those that ruined his main source of income either for sustenance, keeping his kids out of child armies or avoid being execued by the local warlord's militia.
3, a multimedia user who acquires his media via file sharing programs, in the most technical sense of the word with no moral implications.

To me, a jerk is somebody who justifies his actions that harm others with the fact that it advances himself and views that as the most important result of those actions. They are not unique to pirate communities, nor do they make up 100% of the pirate population. They are not uncommon in anti pirate groups either or anywhere else. Websheriff, StarForce, Brein, all organizations with a higher jerk to normal person ratio then The Pirate Bay.

 

[minus_273c]

Digital distribution isnt hack proof either but since it cuts the cost of producing and distributing the disc entirely companies like Steam can sell you a game at ultra low prices and still make huge profits for all involved by the AMOUNT they sale since there is no actual money being lost to extra overhead.

I now purchase virtually all my games via Steam and Impulse, and nowadays generally won't buy a game not on digital distribution. The main reason for this is that I have no CDs/DVDs to keep track off, which makes starting sessions much easier. I have even purchased package deals off Steam where I already have the main part in DVD form (case in point, Fallout 3, which I had on DVD, but bought off Steam when it was released as a package with all the DLC included. I also consider Steam by far the most acceptable form of DRM from a user perspective, which is another major incentive.

CJ

 

[dochmbi]

Next I think we need an article on political philosophy and the basics of ownership and how it relates to intellectual property.

 

[dochmbi]

I just realized that paying for games is already optional and yet people still continue to pay for their games. If we abolished intellectual property rights not much would change, right?