Piracy Numbers

[JEBWrench]

I'm going to have to question this entire point.

Notice how nobody but 2D Boy ever mentioned how they got their numbers? Some of them even mentioned 2D Boy's data first... How convenient that theirs would match, especially in cases like Demigod's where it conveniently justifies and otherwise developer faux pas. I'm NOT saying their data is forged, I'm saying it's extremely unreliable at best.

Even 2D Boy never mentions HOW they identify pirates. If they have a reliable way to "flag" pirates, surely they would also disable their games, no?

Oh wait, they can't.
*snip*

Actually, 2D Boy did mention "how" they identified pirates. They compared IP addresses of versions of the game sold to those playing the game, then modified downward to compensate for multiple installs, dynamic IPs, and the like.

The reason they didn't disable the pirates from playing? 2D Boy is adamantly anti-DRM. If you have a 2D Boy game, you can play it. Period.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Just a small point Shamus. You also called anyone who plays a Spy in TF2 a jerk, does that mean I'm a pirate by association?

 

[Undead_David]

@Starke
I agree that piracy had a part to play in music industry downsizing, but thats only in the hardcopy arena, look how big Itunes shot up. In fact digital distribution idea got its start in piracy, they just legitmized it, and put price tag for it. With digital distribution, we see a lot less hardcopy music stores out there, but yet itunes is huge and a lot of indie no label bands are able to get their music out their and giving them more room to break out.

As for that piracy issue that Nintendo worried about, didnt happen did it? The PS1 exploded despite those fear or whatever amount of games being pirated and that momentum pushed right up through to the PS2. The PC market is slipping not so much because of piracy but more of the fact that there is a bigger market in consoles which has steadily been growing and the ease to program for. On a PC you have to make sure your games can run on 1,000's upon 1,000's of possible configuration not to mention other programs that could conflict with it versus programing for only one possible configuration, maybe 3 if your going multiplatform. Its a numbers game here

 

[flaming_squirrel]

I bloody hate pirates, they are single handedly destroying the PC as a viable gaming platform due to the number of developers now shying away from it. Also hate them for the introduction of intrusive anti-piracy measures, it is completely the fault of illegal downloaders that this crap is introduced.

Never have pirated games, never will.

I am totally not a jerk, I just dont have the money to buy a game every month.

Then you dont deserve to own a new game every month, that's the worst excuse I've ever heard.

 

[Nurb]

What if there's no demo at all?

But the gist here is that immediately after bitching about a user pirating the game, citing righteous indignation at this piracy being a lost sale, Tom replies "If you don't like not being able to play a demo, here's an idea, Richard: don't buy the game!"

In other words, if you pirated the game to try it out because there wasn't a demo, it cost developers money due to a potentially lost sale. But if you decide to not buy it because you can't try it out, the developers are too stupid to care, so that potentially lost sale is immaterial. The ultimate question here - which the PC game industry avoids like the plague - is "Look, do you want me to buy your fuckin' game or what?". The usual response is to inform the consumer that games are non-essential, and then subsequently complain about the dwindling sales in the PC game market when people who already know that games are non-essential decide to stop buying them because of all this. For all the hot air about piracy, people in the industry are remarkably prone to telling people to fuck off if they don't like it, as though the industry doesn't mind losing a customer anywhere near as much as they mind not being able to force people to give them money.

.....

We're supposed to have sympathy for them too, even though by their own arguments they deserve to die off. Piracy is killing the PC market, but the response to any legitimate complaint is to stop buying PC games if we don't like it. If we act rationally and refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater and download a game, we're killing them. What would they rather have us do? "Talk with our wallets" and not play the games at all, and certainly don't buy them. Which would also kill the industry, but that?s somehow the more moral solution. Either way the industry is basically daring us to kill it.

Most people are talking with their wallets, which is why the market is shrinking. And what message does the industry take from that? That they should do something different? Nope. The message is that they should simply move to consoles due to a shrinking market they surely can't be responsible for. So even when we do follow the "moral" way, nothing changes. So the decision, from our view, is between "No Games, Dead Industry" and "Pirate Games, Dead Industry".

In the end, I don't think piracy magically exists on its own as a manifestation of mankind's nature or any such tripe. I think it's largely created by a failure to adequately meet demand. If anything, piracy indicates a continued interest in games that are otherwise inaccessible for whatever reason, in most cases due to excessive prices. That's the real problem to tackle, but again people seem more interested in using copy protection or DRM to try and force the markets to do things their way, even though everyone will admit that it's only a matter of time before any DRM or CP is cracked and useless. You can ***** all you want about only being able to sell a game in China for $15 instead of $50-$100 (cry me a river, by the way), or you can shut up and actually deal with the market situations. It's called business. Did no one go over this in those University of Phoenix Online classes from which the industry's CEOs got their degrees?

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/pc_game_piracy/

 

[Shamus Young]

Just a small point Shamus. You also called anyone who plays a Spy in TF2 a jerk, does that mean I'm a pirate by association?

Just so you know: EVERYONE calls spies jerks.

And they do worse than pirate games. They steal briefcases!

 

[HK_01]

As always, you bring your point across very well.

 

[Caliostro]

Actually, 2D Boy did mention "how" they identified pirates. They compared IP addresses of versions of the game sold to those playing the game, then modified downward to compensate for multiple installs, dynamic IPs, and the like.

No, they mentioned how they got their ratio. They never mentioned how they identified their pirates.

They said "we got this number by dividing these other numbers". One of those other numbers being, in short, "illegitimate" copies. How did they identify which were legitimate and which were illegitimate?

Also remember a LOT of people gifted games around when they had the crazy "pay what you want" sale, for instances.

The reason they didn't disable the pirates from playing? 2D Boy is adamantly anti-DRM. If you have a 2D Boy game, you can play it. Period.

Anti-DRM is not necessarily pro-piracy. If they could easily isolate who was a pirate and who wasn't, why wouldn't they disable the pirates alone from playing the game? Unless, off course, they can't be sure... And they're basically eyeballing it.

 

[Crunchy English]

The greed of software pirates is the type of thing that would be written as an epic poem in another age. A warning of the folly of being that selfish and thoughtless and for attempting to steal not just money from a heartless corporation, but the hard work and pride of dozens, hundreds or thousands of individuals.

If you don't have the money, uh... sorry? Don't play games. There are more affordable ways to entertain yourself. Play tabletop RPGs, a single fifty dollar book can keep you going for years. Heck, I bought "The Batman Roleplaying Game" online for 1 cent, plus 4 dollars shipping. Pick out a few titles a year, save your pennies and buy what you can afford, prioritize.

(Edit: It just occurred to me that Tabletop RPGs require friends, another resource Pirates are short on. Still, you should be able to find something else to do.)

The bottom line for pirates is, you aren't "owed" anything. You don't "deserve" to have hours and hours of entertainment delivered to your computer for free because you had the wisdom to break the law. I can't play everything I want to, I have to make trade-ins, and yeah, I have to miss the occasional title due to my financial situation. It doesn't give me the right to steal.

 

[Undead_David]

can we just go back to the days of simple disk check drm, i swear it will save developers tons. And they will still have the same theroetical piracy ratio and not be a pain in the ars for those who buy the game lol

 

[Caliostro]

Just a small point Shamus. You also called anyone who plays a Spy in TF2 a jerk, does that mean I'm a pirate by association?

Just so you know: EVERYONE calls spies jerks.

And they do worse than pirate games. They steal briefcases!

What about Snipers? Sorry for the off topic, but I must again express my surprise that you pointed out Spies were douchebags but left Snipers out... As a "career sniper" I'm used to my favorite class/weapon being the generally hated one, EVERYWHERE, at all times, in any game. Not saying it's good or bad, just...surprising.


...Off topic yes, but I like it too.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Just a small point Shamus. You also called anyone who plays a Spy in TF2 a jerk, does that mean I'm a pirate by association?

Just so you know: EVERYONE calls spies jerks.

That's why everyone ends up with balisongs in their back.

 

[shadow skill]

You know, I find these numbers very hard to take seriously.

For one, I know a number of people who have gone from pirated to proper copy. And a number who played pirated to get past the DRM (especially the constant disc/net checks).

But let's take the bookies favourite, Mewtwo.

Now, given our 90% piracy rate, (And in Mewtwo - it's almost likely to be higher) that means that of the figures they have

4.7 million sales - and allegedly pirated 4.1 million times(PC) and nearly a million times (Xbox)

Hold on....that looks suspiciously like 50/50.

Never mind, let's look at the comeback. RRP was £55, but we know damn well that almost no-one bought it at that...best figure I can come up with was an average price of around £40.

So Infinity Ward should have made £220 million, made £170 odd million, and claim they should have made (90% piracy) £2.2 billion.

Now, figures don't really add up here, because it's fair to assume that 90% of the people who bought/pirated MewTwo (And remember it has a wonderful anti-piracy DRM that was cracked within days) were able to get online.

That means (90% Piracy) 40 million different players joined in. Which is basically the population of England, Ireland and Scotland. (UK is 62 mil)

Now if all of these games have roughly 90% piracy at all times...that means that for every new person who wants to play it, 9 pirates will also want to play it.

This seems less like hard data, and more like mass exaggeration.

I did it with the Witcher. Good game I was happy to buy it after pirate copy clued me in to the awesomeness. Would have been more than willing to rent it had it been possible. It's what I do now that I have gamefly and so many games I would play on PC come out on Xbox 360 or PS3. Rent the console version and if I like it I go and buy the PC version. Evidence Mass Effect 2. PC game publishers need to make renting PC games viable, that can and will put a dent in piracy. No one wants to spend 40-60USD out right off a game only to find out that it sucks and they can't really trade it in. At least I don't anyway.

 

[Dokter X]

DRM has only on purpose, and that is to (hopefully) slow down the crackers so much that more people buy the game before it is available on torrent sites.
And this does not seem to be working, as new releases by [insert random game publisher here] are often on torrent sites before the game is even in stores!

I think DRM is not in the games to stop piracy. I think it's there to show shareholders that they are at least trying to stop it. It doesn't take a genius to see that DRM does not stop pirates, and I think there are at least some reasonably smart executives at the publishers who have probably figgured that out already. It's just bad business to say you're not going to try to stop people who are stealing your products. Would you buy shares of a company that doesn't protect their product from criminals? I know I wouln't.

 

[krellen]

Its an email from the makers of a movie called "man from earth." They slapped it together from almost nothing and it didn't even get that much attention on the indie-film circuit. Due to "piracy," the film received pretty massive attention. They've re-released the film on bluray, they're doing well thanks to something demonized by massive corporations.

I watched The Man from Earth for free(ish) on Netflix, and immediately bought a copy to send to my parents whom I knew would love it. So anecdote verified. Getting attention = sales.

I often download no-CD cracks for games, especially simple turn-based strategy ones I can play while waiting for the phone to ring at work (so I don't have to lug my CDs to and from home). This, I believe, makes me a pirate, even though I am the only one playing the games and I paid full retail price to purchase them.

But the fact remains that DRM is provably ineffective, and thus a clear waste of resources.

 

[Undead_David]

@Shadow Skill

Thats exactly how I when I bought Wolfenstein, money wasted when a rental could have saved me so much for another pc game lol

 

[Starke]

@Starke
I agree that piracy had a part to play in music industry downsizing, but thats only in the hardcopy arena, look how big Itunes shot up. In fact digital distribution idea got its start in piracy, they just legitmized it, and put price tag for it. With digital distribution, we see a lot less hardcopy music stores out there, but yet itunes is huge and a lot of indie no label bands are able to get their music out their and giving them more room to break out.

No, it's not only in the area of hardcopies. That statistic is derived off their total sales. Now, it IS reasonable to assume that some of that loss was that 12 years ago, you'd have to buy an entire disk to get one good song, and 9 crappy ones, and now you can just spend a dollar on iTunes and get the good song without the crappy ones. But, single disks did exist back then (I might even still have some), so that could account for some of it, but not a 50% drop. Based on the nubmers I was looking at, if I had to guess the music industry would be dead today if it wasn't for the iTunes Store.

As for that piracy issue that Nintendo worried about, didnt happen did it? The PS1 exploded despite those fear or whatever amount of games being pirated and that momentum pushed right up through to the PS2. The PC market is slipping not so much because of piracy but more of the fact that there is a bigger market in consoles which has steadily been growing and the ease to program for. On a PC you have to make sure your games can run on 1,000's upon 1,000's of possible configuration not to mention other programs that could conflict with it versus programing for only one possible configuration, maybe 3 if your going multiplatform. Its a numbers game here

It actually did. Nintendo wasn't terrified of piracy in that console cycle, they were terrified of it because they got their nose bloodied by piracy back before the NES existed. By that point in time there were factors that limited or prevented piracy from becoming a major factor in the console cycle, but Nintendo hung back, in large part, because of their experience with pirated disks 20 years earlier. (The reason I'm being vague here is, I really don't remember all the details, and I'll readily admit that I might be screwing some of them up. The details I remember with certainty are these: One of Nintendo's earliest consoles, which used disks had horrific piracy rates (this was years before the NES.) When Nintendo was putting together the N64, their experience with piracy convinced/encouraged them to avoid optical disks, and stick with consoles. It didn't mean they expected piracy in that era, just that they'd experienced it and they wanted to stay as far away from it as possible.)

 

[Hurr Durr Derp]

To summarize, 90% of all gamers are pirates and 100% of all pirates are jerks. That does explain the behavior of certain gaming communities... :3


From what I know, I agree with most of your points, with a few side-notes. The 0% pirate-to-customer ratio is indeed anecdotal, but while the actual ratio will be higher, I doubt it's very high. Certainly, some games that get pirated do lead to sales (hell, I pirated Galactic Civilizations 2 out of curiosity after the whole StarForce controversy, which lead to me buying not only that game, but Dark Avatar and Twilight of the Arnor as well later on), I'm having a hard time believing many people would pay for something they already 'own'.

The amount of people who buy and pirate games is undoubtedly low as well, unless you also count people who crack their legally bought games. I download no-cd cracks for almost all my games just because I don't want to have to find the right CD/DVD every time I want to play a different game. Cracked games could be seen as pirated versions, since it's essentially the same process in most cases.

I'm not sure if it's true that most people who pirate games won't start buying more games if piracy stops being a possibility. There's no doubt that some people pirate games because they can't spare the cash to buy them (or their parents won't give them the money, depending on the pirate's age), and people who download a new game ever week will probably buy a lot fewer games than they would pirate. However, there's another factor to consider besides money: Piracy is easy. It's damned easy, which is why it's such a problem. All you need is one talented cracker or group of crackers, and millions can simply download the whole thing. It's barely any more difficult than normally installing a game, it's free, and you don't even need to leave the house. I imagine that there are certain games that gamers will want to play, and that they choose to pirate it because hey, why not? They don't care about any possible consequences so they choose the easy and illegal road, but if that road were to be cut off they would probably buy those few games they really want. The total number of games played would drop significantly, but the total number of games bought would rise.

The thing I agree most with is that DRM absolutely does not help against piracy. 'Casual' piracy as in one friend lending a disk to another is an insignificant problem compared to internet piracy through torrents or newsgroups. While I don't really mind DRM as long as it doesn't interfere with paying customers (it's a waste of resources, but if the publishers want their blanket to keep them feeling safe, so be it), the issue is that many forms of DRM do interfere with the games of paying customers. Something like what Arkham Asylum pulled was brilliant, but for every one of those there are games that mess with your system using DRM (StarForce probably being the most infamous one), or that apply ridiculous measures like Ubisoft is pulling with AC2 (it seems to me like they're expecting customers to turn into pirates after already having bought and installed the game). A simple online activation is far less likely to mess with anyone's game and is every bit as secure.

 

[Valiance]

How effective is Steam integration in reducing piracy? I've never heard the numbers on a game released exclusively through steam (or requiring steam to play online). Did TF2 or L4D have substantial piracy rates (a la Spore or Demigod)?

I know L4D is easily pirated regardless of steam integration. Basically you run a cracked steam DLL that instead of the game connecting to the steam servers, it loops back to your own machine, thinking -you- are the server.

You can still play online, too.