StarCraft 2 Sets New Mark for Piracy

Delusibeta

Reachin' out...
Mar 7, 2010
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ciortas1 said:
(seriously, Starcraft, a game from back when Blizzard was a relative unknown, still has 11 million sales and this will have a fucking hard time beating 5 or 6).
I'm going to object to this statement.

Firstly, Starcraft 1 sold 11 million over about 12 years. Plenty of times for selling multi-million copies. Secondly, Starcraft 2 has, over the last four months, sold an estimated 3.33 million (assuming VG Chartz are accurate in tracking retail sales, and a third of all copies are digital downloads). Ultimately, long tail argument applies. I have no doubt that Wings of Liberty will eventually top Starcraft's 11 million sales, thanks to time and the two planned expansions. Although the jist of your point, I agree with. Although, I'd argue that developers and publishers should simply treat piracy as static, and I'd also argue that download numbers are grossly unreliable (Download started =/= Download finished, especially for larger games).
 

Rayansaki

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These numbers don't represent much.

I downloaded a retail version of the game because I bought the cd key online at a british store (20+? cheaper then buying the digital version or retail version in my country).

Most of my local friends did the exact same thing, and we all count as pirated numbers, but we got the game legally, and avoided having to wait for it to arrive and paying extra for shipping.

And really, anyone smart enough from the Euro region did the same thing, stupid taxes and retarded exchange rates make buying from the uk the smart move, specially in a game like SC2 where you can get the cd key emailed to you and start playing immediately.
 

Scabadus

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Jul 16, 2009
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Well, this is sadly pretty much expected these days. 16 Petabytes though, that sheer amount is unexpected.

It's at this point I decided to boot up the calculator on my computer (I'm too lazy to find the real one) and do some sums: assuming the game's about 7 or 8 gigabytes that's 2.3 Million pirated copies downloaded. Now I'm aware not every one's a lost sale, but 2.3 million downloads is worth about £112 Million or $180 Million. That is a LOT of money!

Also, if you were to rent that much bandwidth off your ISP (assuming you have an ISP with a large but limited bandwidth) it would have costed you approximatly £1.5 Million ($2.4 Million) a month. Ok so that last statistic is rubbish because you'd be on a bulk price plan and not simple multiplying an average plan by that much bandwidth, but still, holy shit!
 

paketep

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Jul 14, 2008
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9_6 said:
Oh look it's this topic again.

We can point at the "problem" all day long but if the "cure" is worse than the illness then I'd rather try and live with it.
Good job on the region lock and, LAN and the requirement to always be online btw, blizzard.
God knows we all wanted that.
The worse thing is that after they remove all those features, they go on and on about how much they listen to the community. Yeah, sure.
 

Vorocano

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Jan 8, 2009
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I'd also be interested in knowing how many of those downloads are from people who already bought the game and didn't want to mess with Battle.net. For my part, I have almost no interest in playing the game online; outside of the occasional round of Halo:Reach I really have no desire to play online.

I for one am tempted to download it with the Battle.net workaround, simply because for some reason the game refuses to connect to the Internet. It's the same crap that PC players have had to put up with for years; while console players can be confident that just putting a disc in the system will make the game run 99% of the time, PC gamers have to do all the install crap, making sure drivers are updated, and then go through some sort of prayer ritual just to hopefully get things to run. Sure, PC gaming has its upsides over consoles (especially when your prime gaming loves are Civilization and RPGs) but man it's a load of hassle sometimes.
 

Exort

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Oct 11, 2010
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Evilsanta said:
Wow, that is some big numbers.

I am not really that big a fan of Starcraft. I like Supreme Commander more.

I hope this wont lead to some kind of stupid AC2 like DRM...
It already did, it is called removal of LAN. Ok, maybe not as stupid as AC2 DRM, and it doesn't effect me at all, but I sure some people is really mad at it.
 

Delusibeta

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Mar 7, 2010
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ciortas1 said:
Delusibeta said:
I did sound stupid there, didn't I, wanting to make SC's sales look better than they actually did. Going to semi-pull stuff out of my ass now... Did Warcraft 3 not make 0.5 million sales on its first day or something? Another game from when Blizzard was really known by only the people I'd now consider hardcore. Point was, make a good game and stop weighing people down with countless control measures and your game will be bought. Massively.
I admit that the 3.33 figure is a guess, but SC 2 did hit 1 million sales on day one, and another half a million by day three [http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/363375]. Plus, they did manage to hit 3 million in a month. [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-09-01-starcraft-ii-sells-3-million-in-a-month] So, really, my figure I've pulled out of my arse is looking very conservative.

I'd like to see how The Witcher 2 does. Rumour has it that CD Projekt is going to give it the GOG treatment (i.e. no DRM. Admittedly, this specific rumour said that it was planned to be sold over GOG, but we'll see in about two hours if that's accurate).
 

SenseOfTumour

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Jul 11, 2008
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While again, not condoning piracy, now I see that all multiplayer except Battle net is not an option, surely all piracy has done in this case, is spread a 'playable demo' around the world extremely effectively, at no cost to Blizzard, as the torrents use the downloader's own bandwidth.

If only they could have found a way to PAY for this much easy free advertising.

Of course, it doesn't work for single player games, but maybe in the future this could be an option, just release the damn game free and charge for access to the official servers.

I imagine the main market they've lost out on is people who'd buy it due to hype then realise they don't like it, also known as 'The Black Ops effect'.
 

Asehujiko

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Feb 25, 2008
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So besically, non-pirates have a 4:3 numbers advantage over pirates at the most conservative estimates? While Epic/Crytek/2Dboy/Codemasters/Capcom claim buyers are a 1:20 minority? Before accounting for duplicated downloads and people who also bought it? Somebody's talking out of their ass and I suspect it's the ones making shitty ports of already dumbed down games.

I bought it(Proof here [http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/profile/345189/1/Asehujiko/]), played the campaign on normal, decided I wasn't putting up with battle net 0.2 and all it's shit, got a crack for the campaign and am now playing the campaign on brutal with that.
 

Thedutchjelle

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Mar 31, 2009
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Hahaha.

So they remove LAN, add no region function and other crap to keep piracy down. And then they get pirated. Come on Blizzard, give us our Bnet 1.0 functionality back :\
 

Dastardly

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Apr 19, 2010
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Andy Chalk said:
StarCraft 2 Sets New Mark for Piracy
Obviously, it's because Starcraft 2 is such an awful game with such restrictive DRM. People don't pirate good games, and really it's just because they can't deal with DRM that interferes with normal gameplay. Right? I mean, that's what I'm supposed to say if I want it for free, isn't it?

Another nail in the coffin of the disingenuous claims of the "pirate nation." It's a solid game, well-developed, released in good condition. The DRM is unrestrictive and doesn't interfere with normal gameplay in any way that I've seen. We could argue whether it's enough of an update to warrant $60, but it's certainly worth more than $0. Where does that leave the answer to "Why did we pirate this?"

"Hey, free stuff."

At least they were able to get plenty of legitimate sales out of this, which will help pay for (and justify) making sure that BN is supported such that multiplayer is never problematic.
 

Delusibeta

Reachin' out...
Mar 7, 2010
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Asehujiko said:
So besically, non-pirates have a 4:3 numbers advantage over pirates at the most conservative estimates?
Indeed. And I doubt that 3 million figure in a month included Korea, whose version of SC 2 launched as an open beta [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29731/Analyst_Initial_StarCraft_II_Sales_Figures_Miss_Korea.php].

Don't forget: in some areas of the world, it's a subscription game (e.g. Korea, where it's included in a WoW subscription, and Russia's subscription experiment), thus the traditional "sales" figure doesn't really apply.