Piracy Numbers

[slopeslider]

1. Pirates don't make money off software copying.
2. That analogy is dumb. When you take someone's money, they're missing it. And money isn't a file you can copy, it's a RECORD the bank keeps. My bank account is not full of $100.exe files for people to copy. Bioware is NOT 'missing' 50000 files. A better analogy is to say someone was photocopying my paintings. I still have my paintings though.

1. What, getting a paid product for free isn't making money? Think of it this way. Let's say you buy something that's regularly 70 bucks at a 50% markdown. Did you just save 35 bucks? Every time a guy STEALS something, they save X number of dollars. That's not making money of course, but it is PROFITING from it. Pirates profit from pirating games.
2. It's not a direct analogy no, but data is data. People are still just trying to justify the fact they're STEALING something by coming up with some bullshit excuse. Well sorry but no one's buying your bullshit.

Like I said before, keep talking, the only person you pirates are trying to convince is yourselves. And as long as you live in denial by thinking your actions aren't theft, harmful, or wrong then you'll be somewhat content.

But as Shamus said you're still 100% Jerks.

If i stole something you should be able to prove its missing. Taking a picture (copy) of the mona lisa isn't stealing.
And according to you I should have $190,000 just sitting in my bank account from pirated stuff I saved money on.
Look up the definition of 'Steal' and 'profit'
Not spending money =/= Profit.

 

[slopeslider]

If i stole something you should be able to prove its missing. Taking a picture (copy) of the mona lisa isn't stealing.
And according to you I should have $190,000 just sitting in my bank account from pirated stuff I saved money on.
Look up the definition of 'Steal' and 'profit'
Not spending money =/= Profit.

Profit:
3. advantage; benefit; gain.

Steal:
2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.


Any other requests?
Can I tell you in any other way how you're wrong? Or will this suffice for today?


Oh, and more thing. You can't take a picture of a Mona Lisa either. Most real art galleries don't allow cameras, and they certainly don't allow you taking flash photography of any of the artwork. So, would you be stealing? Who knows. But you'd be certainly thrown out of the gallery if you were caught and possibly your film/digital photos confiscated.

Then google images is killing Europe's toruism industry, as I can see all the masterpieces for free online in hi-res. With none of the annoying people.
dictionary.com:
?verb (used with object)
1.to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch.
2.to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.

They still have their games, no pirate claims rights/ownership to games, and I don't see people filing police reports for stolen games. Because it's not stealing. IT's copying without permission.

Profit:Often, profits.
a.pecuniary gain resulting from the employment of capital in any transaction. Compare gross profit, net profit.
b.the ratio of such pecuniary gain to the amount of capital invested.
c.returns, proceeds, or revenue, as from property or investments.
2.the monetary surplus left to a producer or employer after deducting wages, rent, cost of raw materials, etc.: The company works on a small margin of profit.
3.advantage; benefit; gain.
Way to leave out the majority of the definition for the example YOU wanted. You could apply example 3 to most anything there is. I 'profited' from reading a borrowed book. Do I owe the publishers money? I 'profited' from the guy letting me go in front of him in traffic yesterday. Do I owe him?

No one will be able to eradicate piracy. For music or movies or games. So why is drm getting more restrictive? It pushes more people into piracy which spawns more downloaded games and more reasons for more drm which pushes more people into piracy etc...
Lower the drm, give people decent launch games that run so no one has to get hacks or pirate a game due to restrictive drm not letting them transfer it on a newer pc they got.
Actually care about you customers too. Instead of just your stockholders.

 

[ragestreet]

This debate doesn't really matter because of two major things.
1) The government, or at least the US government anyway, has already decided what they think is best for us and made it illegal. Bastards.
2) People are going to do it anyway because when all is said and done it gets them good things for free and the people who do pirate aren't going to stop just because you think you have moral superiority.

Edit: Just curious. Are there any places where piracy is legal? And by legal i mean actually legal not illegal-yet-not-enforced-much-if-at-all. God that was a lot of hyphens.

 

[Blacker]

You cannot seriously speculate about the damage of piracy using the numbers of pirated copies the publishers and developers tell you.

Pirated games are freeeee. Only a small fraction of pirates would get the game at normal price if there was no piracy. It's a basic rule of economy that the lower the price, the higher the demand. That might explain the figure of 90% pirated copies but I still find that number very fishy.

In the same link Shamus quoted for the World of Goo 90% piracy rate, they explain they compared the number of unique ips of high score submissions with the number of sales. But further down on the same page they updated their numbers somehow down to 82% because of dynamic ips.
Suddenly they mention they also have a unique account for each high score submission. Why didn't they use the number of unique accounts in the first place? To me that number would be more meaningful than the number of ips their high score server has ever seen.

I think those numbers are very exaggerated and possibly outright forged and you need estimates from independent and transparent sources.

 

[Grey_Focks]

ok well 11 pages of comments, cba to read them all, but there is one other bit of piracy Shamus didn't bring up, and that is older games. Some older PC games are just downright impossible to get nowadays, unless you go on ebay or amazon and are willing to pay $100 for a game in questionable condition. In that regard, yes, I'm a pirate. Not because I'm cheap or I want an extended demo, but because it's the only way to get the damn games in the first place.

 

[Olrod]

Like the PC version of Final Fantasy VII, for example?

 

[Markness]

What a terrible article. Start it up with the title Piracy numbers, have the title say "hard data" then go on with figures that are clearly bullshit. 90% piracy rate? You can't just take 5 heavily pirated games, average them, then assume its the same for the rest of the industry. It just so happens that these games are the ones I've read about being pirated. What about the countless others that didn't?

Stopping 1000 pirates gives one sale? I find that amazing. The probability of this being true is incredibly unlikely. If it is then everything any anti-pirate has ever said was pointless because pirate either cant afford, or have already bought the game.

Nice touch ending the article calling 90% of all gamers (apparently) Jerks. That's presumably 90% of this sites traffic.

 

[Diddy_King]

The only games I've ever pirated I've pirated because the company failed me in the first place. Such as games for Dreamcast I had to pirate because my actual Dreamcast's motor died. Or PS2/PS1 games I had to pirate because...well let's face it, the backwards compatibility on 80 gig PS3's suck. New games I buy (a lot) I've got a pre-order receipts in my car right now for FF13 and God of War 3. Last month I bought Dante and Bioshock 2, before that was Bayonetta. And the fact is this year I decided to spend LESS on games.

The fact of the matter is, it's not going away. And it's ultimately futile for the companies to spend money on stopping it as their "fixes" tend to be hacked anyway. Like it was said, the only thing they can really do is delay the pirated copy from appearing, not stop it altogether.

 

[Downfall89]

The only games I download are games that are not worth buying. That's it.

 

[slopeslider]

Steal:
2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.

They still have their games, no pirate claims rights/ownership to games, and I don't see people filing police reports for stolen games. Because it's not stealing. IT's copying without permission.

Check my definition above again. Appropriate WITHOUT right. You don't have the legal right to own that game because you didn't buy the license. You're STEALING. Get it through your head. Stealing has multiple definitions, and they're all just as wrong.

Way to leave out the majority of the definition for the example YOU wanted. You could apply example 3 to most anything there is. I 'profited' from reading a borrowed book. Do I owe the publishers money? I 'profited' from the guy letting me go in front of him in traffic yesterday. Do I owe him?

Dude profit has multiple definitions. I simply stated the one that I was referring to. So yes, you do profit by pirating. Coming up with a bunch of inane examples isn't going to help your case any. You can come up with crap examples all day but you're still stealing and profiting by it.

No one will be able to eradicate piracy. For music or movies or games. So why is drm getting more restrictive? It pushes more people into piracy which spawns more downloaded games and more reasons for more drm which pushes more people into piracy etc...
Lower the drm, give people decent launch games that run so no one has to get hacks or pirate a game due to restrictive drm not letting them transfer it on a newer pc they got.
Actually care about you customers too. Instead of just your stockholders.

Oh please. Now its the "DRM is forcing me to pirate" and "the greedy corporations".
Did you ever stop to think, that some 'evil' gaming company like EA employs hundreds if not thousands of honest hard working people? People who love games, and love to make games? And even if EA isn't the best company to work for, many of the people who work there now will move on to other "better" game developers.

What's my point?
The point is that the revenue from game sales doesn't just go to some big wigs bank account, it also keeps regular people employed, it provides revenue for future games projects, basically it feeds a lot of normal, regular people and they ultimately are the ones that pirates are hurt by pirating games.

And "care about your customers"? Some of the people in the game industry are busting thier ass 12 hours a day to deliver their games on time. Living and sleeping at the studio so you guys can go steal their game the day its released because it's not "good enough to pay for, but good enough to play"?.

As I said before don't blame the companies for DRM, blame the pirates. If people didn't steal games there wouldn't be a need to copy-protect them. But of course some idiots will steal games and the companies will in turn try to prevent it. And for all the complaining about DRM personally I've never had a problem with it, other than getting pissed off at Steam for the first year or two after it started.

Not buying the game is the same as pirating it. They dont get money. And then they all die and foreclose on their homes because someone didn't buy Dante's inferno.
And you've put stereotypical words in my mouth.
For the record, I only 'pirate' n64 and older roms. I hacked my wii, and can put any game on my hdd in 30min. Yet the only games on it are the ones I currently own and old nes/snes roms. Dunce.
So you keep searching on Ebay and amazon for the original SMB3 cart marked up with 100% of generated revenue going to collectors pockets, and I'll continue to be a jerk and steal old games right out of no ones hands and cause the game industry to collapse. By pirating pilotwings.

 

[samsonguy920]

....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. ......And I never seeded......And I'd still be termed a pirate by the industry, although I gave up on it last year.....

Am I a jerk?
*weeps*

Don't cry. If I read Shamus' definition correctly, then since you later purchased games you had first test-driven, then it is not piracy. And with a few publishers' growing reluctance to do demos, I find that a worthy alternative. So since you don't fall under the definition of a pirate, you aren't a jerk for that. Scaring that poor guy in your avatar constantly, however...
True the industry would still consider you one, but the gaming industry has been following the same justifications for their actions as the music and movie industries. Which is really no justification at all with most of the DRM they implement. Punishing everybody for the actions of a minority is no justification at all. The readers of the Escapist do not represent the gaming industry, and anyone who does who is reading this, take a hint: go back to the drawing board for DRM and find one that doesn't bitchslap everyone.

 

[samsonguy920]

1. Pirates don't make money off software copying.
2. That analogy is dumb. When you take someone's money, they're missing it. And money isn't a file you can copy, it's a RECORD the bank keeps. My bank account is not full of $100.exe files for people to copy. Bioware is NOT 'missing' 50000 files. A better analogy is to say someone was photocopying my paintings. I still have my paintings though.

1. There are people who do make pirated copies and sell them for money on the street. Just because you or your friends don't doesn't make it true for everyone.
2. And when you want to sell that painting of yours that you made yourself, who is going to buy it when they can find a cheaper or free copy of it somewhere else? That technique has been in action for centuries now. Last I checked, it is illegal and is considered fraud in the legal system of many countries.
What basic piracy does, it takes away the creator's right to make money off of their product. True you aren't taking their money, but you are depriving them of a sale which is money unearned. That money would have gone into capital towards production of another game in the future. So if a product is rampantly pirated, nobody should be surprised when that developer doesn't come out with anything more.

 

[slopeslider]

Not buying the game is the same as pirating it. They dont get money. And then they all die and foreclose on their homes because someone didn't buy Dante's inferno.
And you've put stereotypical words in my mouth.
For the record, I only 'pirate' n64 and older roms. I hacked my wii, and can put any game on my hdd in 30min. Yet the only games on it are the ones I currently own and old nes/snes roms. Dunce.
So you keep searching on Ebay and amazon for the original SMB3 cart marked up with 100% of generated revenue going to collectors pockets, and I'll continue to be a jerk and steal old games right out of no ones hands and cause the game industry to collapse. By pirating pilotwings.

I wouldn't buy Dante's Inferno anyway. Turning a classical epic poem into a hack and slash action game? Give me a break. As a student of literature and someone who has actually read the poem recently I find the idea a little revolting.

Smashbrothers has never appealed to me and I wouldn't buy a game off of Ebay that was more than 10 dollars. Hell I got Heavy Gear, HG2, Morrowind and Oni for like 5 bucks total a month or two back. That was worth it. Oni was a decent game. Just wish I could get stupid HG to work.

Can you really sleep at night knowing each of those publishers and devs didn't get $49.99 from you?

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

Edit: Just curious. Are there any places where piracy is legal? And by legal i mean actually legal not illegal-yet-not-enforced-much-if-at-all. God that was a lot of hyphens.

Spain: [link]http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/07/07/navegante/1246959096.html[/link]

 

[xscoot]

The only reason people pirate is because of a lack of service.

Gabe Newell found that when he released his games in Russia in a timely fashion, he got a fair bit of sales from the area. Russia was known as pirate land, so nobody ported their games over, so all Russia could do is pirate. When Gabe started releasing quality ports over there, this problem has stopped.

When a game gets pirated by 90%, it's becuase the game is somehow flawed. Either it is filled to the brim with DRM, was a very shitty game, or simply cost too much. I know that World of Goo costs 20 dollars, despite the fact that it's nothing more than an overglorified flash game. I'm not paying for that. I'm not pirating it either, but a lot of people do.

When developers stop acting like morons, they'll release something: the only way to stop piracy is to make legitimately good games that people want to buy.