StarCraft 2 Sets New Mark for Piracy

[Jodah]

See, to me this is exactly how you counter piracy. Make the game so good that even when you have record amounts of piracy you can take the hit and still turn a profit. Blizzard is one of the few companies that can do this atm but if some others take the hint maybe we will start getting quality games...A man can dream anyways. Now lets just hope Activision and their evil overlord who shall remain nameless don't try to force Blizz to use overly intrusive DRM for Diablo 3 and future games.

 

[lacktheknack]

You don't pay, you shouldn't get to play online with everyone else.

assuming the numbers in the article are correct, you'd only be playing online with about 66% of all other players, the remaining 44% are pirates. Last time I checked a half wasn't a whole.

And last I checked, 66 + 44 = 110.

Sorry, I had to.

 

[deth2munkies]

Speaking as a former pirate, there are 2 types of people that pirated this game:

1) Guys that wanted to know whether or not it was worth $60 before they bought it.

2) Guys that wanted to know what the campaign story was/beat it once and forget it, with no desire for multi-player.

I don't really care either way and I honestly doubt Blizzard did either because you have either a potential sale or someone who never would have bought it in the first place, so piracy on THIS type of game would only increase sales due to category 1 rather than cause lost sales.

You forgot the third type - those who pirated it because they think they're sticking it to the man.

If you don't think anyone did it for that reason, you haven't been on the internet long enough.

True, but it doesn't change the point that it's still not a lost sale.

 

[thublihnk]

snip

How many, two? Anyways, this wasn't about you or your friends. This is about my uneducated guess about some sales figures which have 10 years of a headstart.

I've already covered this. Read my post again. A business model which offers the consumer a chance to get the product for free will result in poor sales numbers, end of story.

I am not saying everyone who pirated it did so to protest, are you saying none of them did?

I'm pretty sure quite a few did. And by "quite a few" i'm putting the numbers in the hundreds. There is no alternative to battle.net out yet that i know of, and even skirmish mode is off for most people. So if you want to play with ANYONE human, you go buy the game. Boycotting seems foolish at this stage.

Do you have any idea how easy it is to pirate the original Starcraft? Easy as piss is the word you're looking for. I used to play a pirated thinstalled version on school computers, we were doing it so we could play during lunch. And that had a pretty robust LAN based multiplayer that you could use without activation. (I had already bought three copies for me and my friends, so don't go looking down your nose at me)

What the hell did that have to do with anything?
Starcraft I =/= Starcraft II.

Interestingly, the original Starcraft had multiple installations per disk reserved for multi-player only. Making it so that pirates didn't have an excuse to pirate multiple copies "for LAN parties".

Right, I guess I didn't really make my point in there-- Piracy doesn't hurt game sales nearly as much as people think, the Ten mil purchases didn't come out of thin air, and the game, again, is insanely easy to pirate.

"Piracy doesn't hurt game sales" is a generalization. It certainly hasn't hurt Starcraft 2's sales. It hasn't hurt MW2's or Black Ops's sales. Because these 3 games have something in common: a multiplayer mode reserved only for internet play, which is very hard and time-consuming to pirate (read: "make a private server out of"). Online modes seem to be the answer to piracy nowadays. Ubisoft saw this, and i believe Brotherhood is simply the more advanced stage of their DRM. But enough about that.

I'm pretty sure that games which lack a (compelling) online mode are much more hampered by piracy than SC2 or other multiplayer-focused titles.

Right, so what I'm saying, and this is my proper thesis against the insanity of anti-piracy that gets thrown around on the Escapist (though let me make it very clear I do NOT pirate): We shouldn't be fighting Piracy by locking up the product and making it harder for the legitimate consumer to get in. Piracy is not a moral problem, it is an economic problem.
See, through torrents and internet distribution, the supply of any certain video game is infinite, and if anyone knows econ 101 that means that it's price is at a big, whopping zero. Now, does this mean we shouldn't pay for video games? No. Certainly not. But developers can't just sell the game, they have to sell some kind of *scarcity* which brings the price back up from zero, because the supply is no longer infinite. There are, ironically, an infinite number of scarcities that could be attached to a game. Access to online multiplayer is just one of them, we've seen a billion great examples that absolutely cannot be reproduced by pirating. Special editions with cool boxes and fancy doodads are always awesome. T-shirts! Lots and lots of t-shirts. (If anyone gets that joke, you know exactly where I'm coming from. What this boils down to is not just fighting piracy, a consistent losing battle that hurts both customers and publishers and developers alike, but competing with piracy and creating incentive to buy.

Oh, and there will always be douches who just pirate everything with no regard to anything cool. That are a fact. An inescapable, ugly fact.

 

[syltman]

I played the hell out of SC1. If you think SC2 is the same game, you either don't know RTSes or don't know SC2 half as well as you think you do.

I beat the Hard AI in 3 days after having not played SC in over a decade...That's either poor AI, or the mechanics are too simple. At £35, it shouldn't have any of those problems.

SC2 would have been decent 5 years ago, but not today. It introduces zero to the genre making it too simplistic for anyone who isn't brand new to the genre (And if they are they may as well save their money and just buy Dune 2, Total Annihilation, or splash out £1 more and get Supreme Commander...), the missions are terrible - spam new unit, and the storyline is gash, an overplayed cliché at best.

Try it on brutal and say the first part again, also read the description on each starcraft 2 difficulty.

Also in my opinion sc2 major fail was battle.net 2.0, it was supposed to be so good that people wouldn't want to pirate sc2.

 

[JerrytheBullfrog]

Haha, you antifanboys are just so cute

SC2 is fantastic. I can live without Bnet2.0, but I don't have the time to drag my old gaming friends together for LAN parties anymore. It does exactly what I need it to do. could it do more? Sure, but for what I use it for it works perfectly.

Chat systems and a better custom map browser, and I will have no complaints.

Don't try patronising me kid =P, I've followed RTS since command and conquer through to today, and can tell you that SC2 is one of the worst RTS' in the last decade because it does nothing new, and is already dated because of that.

Try playing all the RTS' that have been out since SC1 and you'd see what I mean, but with almost all SC2 fans, you haven't touched an RTS for more than 5 minutes that doesn't have the Blizzard logo stamped on it.

Kid? Oh, that's adorable. I've been playing games since you were in diapers. I've been playing RTSes since Dune II.

I want innovation in new series. I want SupCom to be new. I want Company of Heroes to be new. That's where innovation should come from. When you have a game as tried and true--and as good as the original StarCraft, I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I want StarCraft, but better, with the annoying flaws fixed and with some cool new stuff and mechanics.

And guess what I got?

If you're going to insist that the only people who like SC2 are people who don't play RTSes, you're laughably wrong. But I guess that's not new for you...

 

[SinisterGehe]

Yes but these people wont be able to play via battle net on-line im guessing?

That's correct.

Which, frankly, I'm perfectly okay with. You don't pay, you shouldn't get to play online with everyone else.

I shall go and admit the single-player is awesome! But starcraft is just a bit more than just a single-player game.

And btw...
Why isn't Blizzard screaming in the global about this issue, like every other studio is? (granted they have money, but so seems every other developer who's screaming about pirates)

 

[Something Amyss]

I agree!

Now, to find a way to make the pirated games blow up their computer...

But aren't you a pirate? >.>

On topic: DRM totally works. MIRITE?

What makes you think that?

Just a strange feeling I can't put my finger on. Are you, at least, a kitty? Because I'd hate to think my preconceptions were ENTIRELY wrong.

 

[Jodah]

snip

The way you counter piracy is the way Blizzard used to for SC, Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. You should really look up the way those worked. As it is, nothing at all changes besides the customers being fucked in the ass and the pirates not giving a shit about the multi-player, although, they didn't care about it anyways.

You mean by making a game so good that they can absorb the hit...exactly as this article says and exactly as I said...

The only thing that they made difficult for paying customers is that there is no LAN. You have to log on ONCE to register the game, and you do not even need the game installed on the machine you log on to register it with. If anyone has a computer but cannot log on to the internet in this day and age they are doing it wrong. I'm sorry but there is absolutely no reason someone can't go to an internet cafe, school, friends house, use their phone, etc to log on a single effing time. There is an offline mode, for some reason people seem to forget this. I can understand some of the anger at the lack of LAN use but that really is the only legitimate complaint from paying customers. Anything else is just b****ing and moaning.

 

[Wicky_42]

Yup, piracy is definitely an industry-killer.

Definitely - I mean, that's like a gazillion dollars Bliz lost right there. They should go to everyone's computer and check if they've got pirated files on them, and then sue them for the losses - each!

 

[thublihnk]

Yup, piracy is definitely an industry-killer.

Definitely - I mean, that's like a gazillion dollars Bliz lost right there. They should go to everyone's computer and check if they've got pirated files on them, and then sue them for the losses - each!

I think you're the first person who's quoted my post and rolled with my sarcasm. Thank you. I'm starting to think we really do need a sarc-mark on the internet.

 

[John Funk]

I played the hell out of SC1. If you think SC2 is the same game, you either don't know RTSes or don't know SC2 half as well as you think you do.

I beat the Hard AI in 3 days after having not played SC in over a decade...That's either poor AI, or the mechanics are too simple. At £35, it shouldn't have any of those problems.

SC2 would have been decent 5 years ago, but not today. It introduces zero to the genre making it too simplistic for anyone who isn't brand new to the genre (And if they are they may as well save their money and just buy Dune 2, Total Annihilation, or splash out £1 more and get Supreme Commander...), the missions are terrible - spam new unit, and the storyline is gash, an overplayed cliché at best.

The main thing that gets me is the price tag. And it's 1/3 of the game. They could have easily removed some of the missions and put all the species together to give the missions less of a extended tutorial feel, but which is going to make more money....When quality is sacrificed to milk money, then that's when I can't really argue that pirating is wrong because no other media suffers from this problem. (that i'm aware of)

Are you really basing a multiplayer game around the AI? Seriously? Go watch some high-level tourney SC2 play and tell me that there's nothing new. The strategies that people come up with using the new units and the new mechanics are often mindblowingly cool.

It's the same price point every blizzard game has had since WC3 not counting WoW, and if you *seriously* believe that the mission design isn't some of the best we've ever seen in an RTS, then I don't know what to tell you. I look at the singleplayer modes in Dawn of War 2, Company of Heroes, Supreme Commander... there's absolutely no comparison there whatsoever.

It's a third of a game in the same way that Fellowship of the Ring is a third of a movie. (Or a book). This is such a silly complaint in my mind, all the more so after the game came out and had 16+ hours of brilliant singleplayer mission design.

 

[syltman]

I played the hell out of SC1. If you think SC2 is the same game, you either don't know RTSes or don't know SC2 half as well as you think you do.

I beat the Hard AI in 3 days after having not played SC in over a decade...That's either poor AI, or the mechanics are too simple. At £35, it shouldn't have any of those problems.

SC2 would have been decent 5 years ago, but not today. It introduces zero to the genre making it too simplistic for anyone who isn't brand new to the genre (And if they are they may as well save their money and just buy Dune 2, Total Annihilation, or splash out £1 more and get Supreme Commander...), the missions are terrible - spam new unit, and the storyline is gash, an overplayed cliché at best.

Try it on brutal and say the first part again, also read the description on each starcraft 2 difficulty.

Also in my opinion sc2 major fail was battle.net 2.0, it was supposed to be so good that people wouldn't want to pirate sc2.

Very Hard AI (hardest in skirmish) simply gives the AI 1.5x resources. That is just a very, very lame way to challenge the player, especially when you consider the price of the game. Instead of improving tactics, it just gives the AI more resources.

You sure it's 1.5x resources? I remember hearing somewhere that sc2 would be the first blizzard rts game where AI doesn't cheat.

Also sorry, I meant that you should try the campaign on brutal, it's not just spamming the new unit you've received.

 

[Hexdaemon]

Its actually funny that these arnt even anywhere near as high as the actual pirate numbers are for sc2. Im quite sure alot of those downloads they were looking at are multiples from the same person and some are unfinished. The big thing that they are refusing to look at it the fact that for the first 3-4 days a very very large number of people were pirating the game from blizzards own servers. The battle.net downloader was actully the main source of getting the game. The only things the torrents actually included was a couple of hacks and instructions on how to get it to work properly.

I do absolutely love it when somebody creates a shitty drm scheme and it gets pirated this many times though. Especially when its such a shitty game as well.

Starcraft 1 was Korea's national sport for a reason: because a HELL OF A LOT of people were playing it. In internet cafes. In LAN mode. With pirated copies.
As proof, note how slow the transition is now that internet cafes have to pay money for each copy.

That has nothing to do with it at all. There was actually an article on here mabey a week or two ago about why sc2 was such a failure in Korea. Its pretty much because the lack of LAN and the extra expenses they would have to pay to actually host tournaments.

OK, so think about this a second, why is SC1 still so popular in korea... duh! hardware costs for SC2

Also, blizzard won't really care about the 'lost' sales to piracy, look at how much money SC2 got them in the first month of purchase and compare it to their monthly WoW income.
They'll just sit on their giant pile of money and preach 'piracy is wrong' to us

Note: I'm not for/against either side, these are all my own observations of the situation.