By John Walker on November 12th, 2008 at 2:56 am.
Updated below.
Good news, Euro-people. World of Goo is officially reaching our shores this December. Now, obviously you’re sensible enough to have bought the game directly from the 2D BOY site, so haven’t had to wait. But you might know someone silly enough to have not done that for some stupid reason, and now you can let them know the news.
2D BOY have rejiggled the deal they made with their Euro distributors, which has led to the game not only now getting a Wiiware release as well as retail for the Wii, but also getting clearance to be back up on Steam and the rest before the year is out. It’ll also be in actual real life shops (whatever they are) by the end of December. You weirdo anti-Paypal types will finally get your hands on a copy of one of 2008′s best games.
We’ve asked for details about the mysterious extra moon levels that were rumoured to be in the Euro version, but now will not be. And when we might see the cursing pack. I’ll edit them in when they let us know.
Update: Kyle explains that Chapter 6 is on hold, but that there’s interesting things going on in the World of Goo community:
“The elusive Chapter 6 is on hold, and I’m happy to say that all versions of the game will be identical and we won’t have to rush to finish extra content just to justify a price tag. If we release any additional content, we will make it available on all platforms, to all people, at the same time. No more of this “region” nonsense.
As long as we’re talking about extra content, it might be worth mentioning some of the amazing things our community has done. They have created a level editor, misc parameter editors, a tower viewer, and my favorite – an open translation project to get the game running in as many languages as possible. And it looks like they are actually creating an additional chapter all on their own. To support them, Ron and I are working to make the game more moddable. I’m curious and a little scared to see what they come up with.”
12/11/2008 at 03:17 Pags says:
For a second there I thought we’d entered some sort of beautiful time-warp where World of Goo was a new game and you could buy a packet of sherbert for twopence and still have enough money left over for a matinee showing of The Wizard of Oz, and where we all had to walk 8 miles every morning just to get to school.
12/11/2008 at 05:44 TheSombreroKid says:
i’m tired and read that as a manitee showing or wizard of oz, i know what one i’d pick!
12/11/2008 at 07:48 teo says:
The game is old news! I want to buy the soundtrack now!
12/11/2008 at 08:06 Nihohit says:
A manatee showing wizards? How wonderful!
And by the way, when I start to build the giant tower I’m the owner of the 150,000th (more or less) highest tower in the world – does that mean that the game has sold more than 150,000 (more or less) copies?
If so – huzzah!
12/11/2008 at 08:25 cliffski says:
It probably means 150,000 people have played the game. Sadly won’t mean they all bought it :(
12/11/2008 at 08:41 ron carmel says:
@john: a minor correction, there will be no wii retail release, just wiiware. the pc version will have both a digital and retail release.
@cliffski: exactly right. last we checked the piracy rate was about 90%.
12/11/2008 at 08:57 Fede says:
@ron: is piracy higher or lower compared to your expectations, 1 month after relase?
12/11/2008 at 09:05 Jim Rossignol says:
To be expected, I suppose. But still: ffs.
12/11/2008 at 09:15 Jelly says:
90%? Jesus, people are jerks.
I still commend the DRM-free release, Ron and Kyle. Thanks for a great game.
12/11/2008 at 09:20 Kieron Gillen says:
Christ.
KG
12/11/2008 at 09:35 Heliocentric says:
90? Ugh… Hell, just focus on what the stardock boss said, make games for the buyers, we’ll keep you in slippers and lemsip good sir.
I need to point out, more than one of those towers are from each copy. My 4 year old son has a new 2nd favourite game, nothing personal, but until you add goo cars my vehicual obsessed son will always choose trackmania united first.
12/11/2008 at 09:35 James G says:
Owch on the 90%, last time I saw your figures it was barely anyone. I mean, jeeze, what excuses are the pirates trying to come up with for this one? Selfish arseholes they are.
12/11/2008 at 09:36 Thirith says:
Things like this make me want to kick all the people who shout “Piracy isn’t killing PC gaming, so I’m not even willing to discuss this, stopping my ears now, lalala, lalala!” in the face.
Right after kicking the 90% that pirated the game in the face. And by face I mean balls.
12/11/2008 at 09:36 Okami says:
last we checked the piracy rate was about 90%
What a shame!
12/11/2008 at 09:45 The Sombrero Kid says:
i can think of a tonne of legitimate reasons why you’d pirate this game, most of them revolve around the concept that they already paid for it or are confident they are going to pay for it when it comes out in their chosen medium/country
not to say that there isn’t a bunch of stingy cunts out there not willing to fork out a tenner for the greatest game this year
12/11/2008 at 09:47 Bobsy says:
@teo:
The soundtrack is already there in the game folder, in .ogg format. I love you 2D Boy!
12/11/2008 at 09:51 Optimaximal says:
I just bought it from 2D Boy under the impression that I’d receive a code which I could plug into Steam to get that version. All I got was an .exe :(
Still, when it comes out on Steam, I’ll buy that one too, since the game is just so fucking brilliant!
12/11/2008 at 09:52 Catastrophe says:
Think i’ll be buying this for my girlfriend.
Hurry up and release in EU dammit!
12/11/2008 at 09:56 Ian says:
90% piracy on World of Goo?
That’s absolutely shameful.
12/11/2008 at 09:58 Mike_Oxtynx says:
A piracy rate of 90%? As in, 90% of the people using the game pirated it? Sorry if I seem stupid, can’t quite wrap my head around that.
12/11/2008 at 10:03 Mark-P says:
ron – Could you tell us how you came to the 90% figure? It’s appalling if there’s that even half that number of people of people who are willing to behave in such a way over a game like World of Goo.
I’m not sure whether their behaviour pisses me off more as a developer or a gamer. I can find a new job, I’m not sure if I could find a new hobby.
12/11/2008 at 10:09 Heliocentric says:
The game will cost more at retail surely? Unless they *need* a box (a tempting proposition, any chance of a special edition with a mini 3d goo tower? :D) i do and will continue do download games i own when the physical media falters and download no-cd cracks whenever i get sick of the stack of long play games on my desktop leaning like a tower… (Of Goo?) but even these explanation falls short of whats happening here.
12/11/2008 at 10:43 Jerricho says:
Is that based on the number of usernames against known purchases?
I have to admit, the complete lack of any DRM on this left me feeling more inclined to pass it among friends. I love this game and have been encouraging them to play it as I know they’d love it too.
With the pre-order I had a little code to past in and that made it more “mine” in my head. It’s such a small detail but had a signifigant effect on my view of the full release version, in that I felt less ownership at release.
Much like the GOG downloads. I’ve bought a few of those that are replacing old abandonware downloads, something I would have previously shared freely.
What are other people’s views on this?
I should add that I didn’t actually copy the exe to my friends. We waited for the demo instead.
12/11/2008 at 10:48 cliffski says:
“I have to admit, the complete lack of any DRM on this left me feeling more inclined to pass it among friends.”
Thats exactly why DRM exists. Its because without it, the vast majority of people just copy games.
90% is staggering. I’d be amazed if world of goo 2 ever made it to the PC. Why bother? just make it for consoles, or require people to be on-line to play.
The ‘we pirate because of teh drm’ argument is so clearly now total bullshit.
12/11/2008 at 11:00 bobince says:
Strangely enough PayPal decided to work for me on this one. Who can tell what their queer, random and arbitrary rules are on what card transactions to accept.
> does that mean that the game has sold more than 150,000 (more or less) copies?
I expect it would be 150,000 that have (a) pressed the sign that makes it connect to 2dboy’s servers for generating the clouds, and (b) glommed at least one goo onto the starting triangle to get a higher tower than zero. But presumably anyone using multiple profiles also counts extra towards the number of towers.
I would expect pirates not to click the connect-to-internet button, but then again we’re likely to be dealing with particularly stupid pirates in this case.
(I’d also be interested to know how the 90% was calculated before rushing to come up with explanations.)
teo: you can also grab a few longer versions from Kyle’s page: http://kylegabler.com/oldsite/contents/music/index.html
12/11/2008 at 11:01 IcyBee says:
If I had pirated this game, I probably wouldn’t have connected to the WoG server, just in case there was a unique ID in the downloaded .exe.
The 90% figure probably only accounts for people who have pirated the game and uploaded their tower.
:-(
12/11/2008 at 11:06 Heliocentric says:
This topic is depressing, allow me to rebirth it!
http://www.ebeanstalk.com/images/products/024-002-0-32.jpg
BOY DON’T KNOW SHIT ABOUT PROPER GOO MANAGEMENT!
http://www.coaster-net.com/pics/editorialsandarticles/eltoro3_brandondavis.jpg
That’s how you do it.
12/11/2008 at 11:09 Jerricho says:
@Cliffski
I would suggest it’s not entirely bullshit. There’s a world of difference between pirating a game like Spore because of highly restrictive DRM for instance (or the fact that I was never able to play Neverwinternights expansions without a no-cd crack thanks to securom black-listing my hardware) and passing around a game like World of Goo which had only an activation code.
In this instance the arguement holds no water at all but that does not preclude it from having signifigance elsewhere.
So what might be more useful to look at here is the rate of piracy of the pre-orders against that of the full release and what I’d especially like to know is if the simple requirement for the code gave gamers a sufficient sense of ownership to guard it jealously rather than existing as a barrier to free distribution.
12/11/2008 at 11:12 itsallcrap says:
Well, I bought it. Pre-ordered it in fact. Worth every penny.
Premium games, on the other hand, aren’t. Pirate Spore, kids!
12/11/2008 at 11:38 Bhazor says:
Not having somekind of protection actually causing more piracy? Who would have thought it?
Reply to Cliffski
Having second thoughts about the whole “drm free” angle?
12/11/2008 at 11:45 James G says:
Oohh, just noticed the edit, that is some good news. I might just go and check some of that stuff out.
12/11/2008 at 11:46 qrter says:
90% certainly is a lot, but it all depends on how 2D BOY came to that number and how that number relates to other DRM-free and DRM-full games with the same level of popularity.
I mean, the fact still remains that we have no idea how many of those people would ever have bought the game anyway.
If it’s based on the towers it’d be interesting to see how many of the higher towers are from pirates, indicating they’ve actually spent some time with the game.
12/11/2008 at 11:58 Jim Rossignol says:
Who fucking cares!? Why should they get to play it for free?
12/11/2008 at 12:00 cliffski says:
You tend to spend more time with a game that cost you money because you have an emotional investment in it then. I wonder how many pirates warez everything, play them all for 5 minutes and think all games are shit because they never cost them a penny.
I’m surprised you can connect to the online score table with a pirate copy though, it would seem to be a really easy way to spoil the pirates fun.
12/11/2008 at 12:03 Jim Rossignol says:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Introversion got a bunch of sales out of turning off and on the pirated Defcon key.
12/11/2008 at 12:03 Gap Gen says:
Unless maybe the average player has 10 profiles?
But yes, like cliffski says, that kind of copy protection where you limit online capabilities is pretty non-invasive, although it can be annoying when the game crashes and you can’t log back on to the server again for a while.
12/11/2008 at 12:09 Paul Moloney says:
Personally, as I’d much ask pirates on their opinion of DRM as I would ask a burglar how I should lock my apartment.
I was one of those who bought WoG off Steam in Europe; I’d presume since it was tied to a Steam account, that there _was_ the default Steam DRM involved? So presumably it’s only the direct downloadable version that has been pirated?
P.
12/11/2008 at 12:09 Bhazor says:
Just had a thought, how do we know Ron Carmel that posted here is the Ron Carmel who made the game? Why post this here and not on the website?
Does RPS have fingerprinting or some form of rectal scanning for VIPs?
12/11/2008 at 12:18 Gap Gen says:
Fact: 90% of Ron Carmels are pirated usernames.
12/11/2008 at 12:29 Dizet Sma says:
“Does RPS have fingerprinting or some form of rectal scanning for VIPs?”
I’m really hoping that’s a mis-spelling of retinal.
12/11/2008 at 12:34 subedii says:
Depends on VIP preference. RPS is an equal opportunity rectal examiner.
12/11/2008 at 12:40 Bhazor says:
Reply to Dizet Sma
Well I spelt the body part right, it was just the wrong un.
12/11/2008 at 12:41 subedii says:
I sincerely hope customs never make that mistake.
12/11/2008 at 12:43 pkt-zer0 says:
A 90% piracy rate is pretty standard, though, isn’t it? Also, as far as I’m aware, the game didn’t get pirated before release (that means more secure than SecuROM, haha), so it’d be interesting to know how many preorders were made.
Anyhow, the way I see it, DRM is not going to make people who didn’t want to spend money on the game suddenly go out and buy it. In which case, it’s pretty irrelevant whether you have 15,000 sales and ten times as many people playing it or the same sales but no pirates. In fact, the former case is probably more desirable, as long as you’re not spending a lot of extra cash on pirates, e.g. for tech support.
12/11/2008 at 12:51 Thirith says:
Anyhow, the way I see it, DRM is not going to make people who didn’t want to spend money on the game suddenly go out and buy it. In which case, it’s pretty irrelevant whether you have 15,000 sales and ten times as many people playing it or the same sales but no pirates. In fact, the former case is probably more desirable, as long as you’re not spending a lot of extra cash on pirates, e.g. for tech support.
I’m sorry, but that is so naive it boggles the mind. This isn’t a binary situation – 1 means you’re willing to buy the game, 0 means you’re not. Even if 50%, 25% or just 10% of the people who pirate a game might otherwise buy it, that’s tens of thousands of dollars that are lost. And realistically, the more pirated copies of a game there are, the more likely it is that a potential customer will take the game for free. At the very least it is likely that there’s a correlation between lost sales and pirated copies in circulation.
12/11/2008 at 12:55 Kyle Gabler says:
We arrived at the 90% figure by looking at unique ip’s that have contacted our leaderboard server for any reason, at least once. So, this should rule out “multiple profiles per computer”. Of course, there is a lot of opportunity for error, like ip’s that change, playing at work/home/wherever, multiple copies being played from the same ip, etc, but it seems like a good enough fast and decent estimate. Then we divided that number into the total number of PC copies sold, giving us the percentage.
This was a week or two ago, before we released the Mac version. I’m curious to find out if Mac users are more or less piraty! I’m guessing less?
Unfortunately, I hear the 90% piracy rate isn’t all that uncommon, even (especially?) for games with DRM. I know it sounds like a gruesome number, but we like to tell ourselves “those people wouldn’t have bought it anyway”. The good news is, some have mailed us, telling us they bought the game because they first pirated it and liked it. Hurray for (some) humanity!
Even though our game is widely pirated, I still maintain that DRM is a useless symbolic gesture, like taking your shoes off at the airport and crawling under your desk when a bomb is about to go off.
I’m just happy people actually want to play our game at all!
12/11/2008 at 12:58 cliffski says:
Well said. Its about time people stopped making silly excuses for why piracy is ok. It just plain isn’t. a 90% piracy rate is just killing PC gaming. Even if you are a starving gamer who only buys one PC game a year, you should hate piracy, because your choice of new PC games, whether you pay for them or not is shrinking all the time.
12/11/2008 at 12:59 bobince says:
90% piracy may well be pretty standard, but because piracy is essentially untrackable, all previous stats have been generated using Number Out Of Arse Pulling Technology 2.0.
The comments are assuming that the pirates are being detected connecting to World Of Goo Corp or Leaderboard, but how would that even work? Surely a copy of the game is a copy of the game… unless 2Dboy themselves have been uploading the torrents, with a special version of the game that tells the server “hello, I am pirated”.
Anyway. Great news on the Moon. 2Dboy continue to treat us proper instead of screwing us about with marketing confusion — yay!
12/11/2008 at 13:05 bobince says:
> We arrived at the 90% figure by looking at unique IPs
Ah! Yes. As acknowledged, that *is* pretty unreliable. Probably the dynamic IP is the most severe issue there — like many DSL users, I get a new IP from my ISP every day, so I’m probably accounting for a lot of pirates there already!
12/11/2008 at 13:09 Paul Moloney says:
Kyle:
“Of course, there is a lot of opportunity for error, like ip’s that change”
I know many Internet providers do not provide static IP addresses (mine – UPC Ireland – doesn’t anyway), so this means there is indeed huge scope for error in your figures. Hopefully *touch wood* your piracy figures are over-estimated accordingly.
Here’s the thing; I think it is easier for people to pirate stuff if it is either (a) from an Anonymous Corporation ™ or (b) from someone you perceive as already wealthy (Ms. Spears, for example).
If I was selling a game like World of Goo, I’d make sure to add personal details of myself to the web site, or even the game – say, a photo and bio in the About page (or equivalent thereof).
I’d also take my fight to the torrents themselves. There’s not that many of these sites, so I’d go to the comments page of the torrent itself and post there, asking people not to torrent the game or, if they have and like it, to buy it. Point out the piracy figures, point out the fact that if everyone pirated it without buying it, there wouldn’t be any more cool games. Send a message to the uploader of the torrent likewise. Sure, there are bastards who will laugh at you, but you’ll probably get some who will succumb into basic human decency.
That’s all carrot of course, sticks are appropriate too. One idea I had would be a peer-2-peer program that could be run by PC users in the background that would ping-attack torrent sites. I presume they would have absolute no legal comeback?
P.
12/11/2008 at 13:10 pkt-zer0 says:
At the very least it is likely that there’s a correlation between lost sales and pirated copies in circulation.
Going by the statistics Reflexive gathered it was, what, 1 extra sale for every 1000 eliminated pirates? At which point I’d think the fact that more people know about your game helps more than the couple of sales you lost hurts.
And whatever the correlation between lost sales and pirates may be, doesn’t change that DRM isn’t a very effective way of getting them to “convert”. Try free extra stuff for legit buyers instead (see: Moon chapter).
12/11/2008 at 13:16 John O'Kane says:
“Personally, as I’d much ask pirates on their opinion of DRM as I would ask a burglar how I should lock my apartment.”
That seems very flawed to me. The only point I think you might be making here is that you wouldn’t trust the burglar, but he’s (sexist, I know) definitely a good person to ask that question.
12/11/2008 at 13:25 MarvintheParanoidAndroid says:
Defcon definitely did a good job – I think either Introversion or some of the community members were seeding the fake pirated version, which gave you a range of amusing “Buy the game in order to play online” messages when you tried to connect to a server. And then there was this news post, heh. But of course, that was primarily a multiplayer game, which makes things a lot easier (as it says in that news post, for them, approximately 90% of players were legitimate).
And also – I was holding off buying this until it became available on Steam for Europeans again, as I didn’t want to miss out on the Chapter 6 thingy. However this news post gives me absolutely no reason to wait, so I’m buying it from the website this very minute :)
12/11/2008 at 13:29 MarvintheParanoidAndroid says:
Haha, found it: Defcon anti-piracy
12/11/2008 at 13:37 Paul Moloney says:
Marvin; not an entirely fool-proof method from Introversion, as CD keys can be generated. A few years ago I went to install an old non-Steam copy of Half-Life from CD (I also have a copy bought through Steam) only to be told the CD key was in use, and I definitely had not shared that with anyone.
P.
12/11/2008 at 13:40 Gap Gen says:
Someone mentioned that the Starcraft CD key could be broken by just repeating the same digit.
12/11/2008 at 13:44 DM says:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but can’t the demo also connect the “building a really high tower” leaderboard?
If so, I’m sure that would be contributing to that 90%
12/11/2008 at 13:55 Downloads_Plz says:
We arrived at the 90% figure by looking at unique ip’s that have contacted our leaderboard server for any reason, at least once.
I have to say that’s probably one of the worst ways to try and judge piracy.
I legally bought the game through Steam and played it for a couple weeks, but then recently moved my computer to my girlfriend’s house. So by your way of measuring piracy, that alone would be a 50% piracy rate.
Not to mention that until a couple of years ago I still had an old dial-up connection that disconnected me every few hours, and I’m sure some people still do have dial-up, so that would be a “pirated” copy of the game at least once a day, and probably even more.
I’m not saying that no one had pirated WoG, I’m just saying that judging it based solely on IP addresses and then throwing out a figure like 90% doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me.
A more accurate way, I would think, would be go to a popular torrent site and see how many times it has been downloaded, then divide that into your number of sales.
12/11/2008 at 13:58 Paul Moloney says:
John O’Kane:
There’s a difference between:
(a) asking a burglar what is the best way of improving your security
(b) asking a burglar if whether or not you should bother using a lock, since they can probably pick it anyway
P.
12/11/2008 at 14:05 Del Boy says:
If you look at the major torrent sites there are a LOT of comments from people wanting to support the developer and giving direct links to where it can be bought.
It’s a back-handed gesture though admittedly…
12/11/2008 at 14:29 Heliocentric says:
I disagree. Say i wasn’t aware of the site and only knew of it through steam, but refused to buy it from them.
For whatever retarded reason the anti steamers have (love thy corporation!) and went to a torrent site, but checked the comments to be sure it wasn’t a virus or whatever.
Seeing that could steer a person straight to a purchase. If its ip’s i’m 4. My house, my girl friends and at 2 building in my university, (any way to stick the save files on a usb along with the game without installing them in the right place each time?)
So thats 4, i’m like 3 pirates. 75% thief!
12/11/2008 at 14:45 Rain says:
I don’t know anyone with DSL and a static IP. So you got at least one new IP per day. My Router is even set to disconnect after 30 min of (Internet) inactivity.
12/11/2008 at 14:53 Dood says:
Unique IPs? So how do you take into account that the IP adresses of most internet users (at least in germany that is) changes at least once a day? Because dividing the number of adresses by your sales is just plain wrong. So, as much as I like you and your game, unless you can give me further proof of these 90% I will not buy your story.
12/11/2008 at 14:58 cliffski says:
I still think that the best way to fight piracy is to just make getting a proper hacked copy really awkward. For example, if everyone in this thread who ever has a bittorrent client running seeded this:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4455354/KUDOS_2_FULL_LATEST_(1.05)_Patched
I’d be a happy man, as it’s a decoy (fake).
ta :D.
Doing this hurts nobody, it isn’t DRM, plus it’s unstoppable, because the whole point of mass piracy is that anyone can upload and share anything. That includes the original legit developers. If they all did it, all the time, finding a legit torrent amongst the fakes would become mroe trouble than it’s worth.
Just an idea :D
12/11/2008 at 15:03 ETPC says:
Echoing the 90% piracy rate. Jesus fucking christ. Couldn’t there be someone who starts a grassroots campagain on the torrent sites or some shit? There has to be SOMETHING we can do :(
12/11/2008 at 15:07 Pags says:
Anyone notice Meat Circus hasn’t chimed in yet?
12/11/2008 at 15:08 Alec Meer says:
Candyman, Candyman, Candyman
12/11/2008 at 15:18 ETPC says:
DRM, DRM, DRM
12/11/2008 at 16:44 MarvintheParanoidAndroid says:
Whee, buying things on the internet is way too easy. Click click – monies gone, game received! It really is incredibly charming and lovely, I shall be playing it in breaks from Fallout 3.
12/11/2008 at 16:56 Fede says:
@cliffski: 1.05 already? Could you make Kudos 2 search if there are new patches in one of the next patches please?
90% and unique IPs: this system’s imprecision is really enormous, but could partially cover the number of people who downloaded it but didn’t allow the game to send the results. After this I believe there are more than 10% legit users, many more
12/11/2008 at 17:01 Biggles says:
Got to admit I was freaked by that 90% figure, but honestly, IP’s are a really bad way to measure this. How about assigning a UID to each copy when it first connects, then counting how many of those you have?
12/11/2008 at 17:36 qrter says:
I know, I know, the hysteria in PC piracy discussions is so much more fun ;) , but I do think this whole discussion would finally move a few real steps forward if anyone actually had some reliable information, including dependable correlation between downloaded copies and lost sales.
I mean, piracy is only effectively killing PC gaming if a significant number of those who pirate would’ve otherwise bought the game, not because it pisses the developers off.
Don’t get me wrong, I can fully understand how irate developers must get at seeing all those pirated copies going round but a bussiness isn’t run on feelings. Otherwise you’re doing it wrong. :P
Personally I don’t really see what’s wrong with lending your copy of a game to a friend, regardless whether that friend then goes and buys his own copy. You bought the game, you can do with it what you like. I used to have this little system with a couple of friends, where when we’d like a particular CD you’d burn a copy, give that to a friend with the condition that if they liked it, they’d buy their own copy and pass on the CD-R to another friend with the same condition and so on. That worked pretty well.
This is all completely different to torrenting your bought copy to a multitude of anonymous users, ofcourse..
12/11/2008 at 17:45 elefaire says:
It’s business. The only relevant number is profit.
To get back to the actual post, yay for not segregating stuff by regions.
12/11/2008 at 17:56 Gotem says:
I downloaded the demo from Steam, and it can also connect to see the other’s clouds, they took that also into account?
12/11/2008 at 17:58 The Apologist says:
I read one of these comment threads, and I get tempted to think it is a really complex issue. It’s not. All that crap about some pirates wouldn’t have bought the game anyway. As Jim says, fuck that. Didn’t buy it, then they have no right to access the game.
Pirates are bad people who are ruining my hobby.
12/11/2008 at 18:09 SwiftRanger says:
What’s so odd with people who want a boxed copy? I loved the demo and will surely buy this if it reaches Belgium.
12/11/2008 at 18:44 Noc says:
Well, SwiftRanger, it’s because people who want a boxed copy are anachronistically archaic Neanderthals who will try and feed the cloth map into the punch-drive in their Turing machine.
12/11/2008 at 19:06 perilisk says:
“I mean, piracy is only effectively killing PC gaming if a significant number of those who pirate would’ve otherwise bought the game, not because it pisses the developers off.”
Well, strictly speaking, piracy only harms the industry from the content consumer’s perspective when it makes returns from PC games lower than from other systems or other industries. Even then, so long as PC games turn at least some profit, we’ll probably get hand-me-down ports, delayed by a few months from the original console release.
12/11/2008 at 20:29 anon says:
cool eu release on steam, bro
cry some more
12/11/2008 at 20:40 Carra says:
Does make me glad I bought it (via steam, me was fast!). And can’t wait for the extra levels ;)
Was sad to see the game have a warez release. After all, it doesn’t even have to be cracked, no honor in that.
12/11/2008 at 21:06 PIRATEYARR says:
Maybe you shouldve left it on Steam. I was going to buy it since 19,99 is nothing, but LOL NOT AVAILABLE IN YOUR REGION for no fucking reason at all.
Game was nice, Ill buy it if you make a sequel and release it in all regions at the same time.
12/11/2008 at 21:25 arqueturus says:
Clever pirate.
It was available in all regions from the dev’s website. Wanker.
12/11/2008 at 21:58 Gap Gen says:
“I was going to buy it since 19,99 is nothing, but LOL NOT AVAILABLE IN YOUR REGION for no fucking reason at all.”
Except it is. You tit.
12/11/2008 at 22:13 The Apologist says:
But it seems to me that even if PC games can be profitable despite piracy, it really matters that there are other comparatively piracy free and higher profit alternatives out there.
High profile, talented developers will go where their publishers push them, and that means developing for consoles as lead platforms. So we get knock off ports if anything, and PC exclusive titles will be low budget. Anyone noticed the hardware curve slowing pretty dramatically recently?
Any pirate who says their actions don’t stop PC games turning a profit is (probably deliberately) misunderstanding the market and the consequences of their actions.
12/11/2008 at 22:16 Larington says:
The hardware curve slowing is also likely due to the fact that the new next generation consoles were actually threatening to get ahead of the PC, now they’ve all been out for a year, the PC doesn’t have to compete in that way to the same extent.
12/11/2008 at 22:17 Paul B says:
Yes, I bought if from the dev site – no region lock – and worth every penny. I don’t have a lot of money but I wouldn’t pirate games, as the good ones are well worth the money.
12/11/2008 at 22:25 Larington says:
The thing is, quite a few pirates probably don’t really care what justification they are using, just as long as they have some excuse, and ironically, thats usually that theres DRM in the first place, or that the games not good enough, etc.
The only viable solutions to piracy as far as I can tell are sociological ones, I’d explore the idea if I had the skills to do so, since no other sociologist or someone from an equivalent profession seems to be working on the problem or being hired by publishers to work on the problem, instead its the programmers who, whilst great at making games and getting the underworks err working, aren’t automatically therefor going to be great at dealing with piracy, since it seems any technological solution can be reverse engineered, with DRM not being an exception to this rule.
12/11/2008 at 22:29 Larington says:
Oh wait, we’ve swung into yet another frigging DRM discussion again. Wonder what would happen if posts & comments that try to use the words piracy or DRM were restricted… It’d certainly nullify a discussion about the next sid meier pirates game, arrrr. ;-)
12/11/2008 at 23:06 Mr Lizard says:
I can’t be the only person reading this to be (a) mortified at the rate of piracy of such a fine, cheap, independent, DRM-free game, while at the same time (b) unashamedly conscious of my own lifelong passion for games borne of numerous defining childhood and adolescent experiences, many of which I did not pay for and on formats now dead.
If we had had bittorrent back in the day, we would still have pirated those games. There just wouldn’t have been as many games to pirate. It breaks my heart but I don’t feel up to telling today’s kids not to do what I once did myself.
12/11/2008 at 23:18 The Apologist says:
@Larington – fair enough, I can’t remember back to the last round of consoles to know if that competition had a similar effect in hardware cycles in the past, but it does seem particularly marked to me.
As you suggest, a qualitative sociological study of communities buying/downloading habits according to percieved producer brand/values/behaviour would almost certainly be worth doing but it seems unlikely given that industry figures are just as prone to ideological stances on this issue as anyone else.
I attended a lecture at the RSA a couple of nights ago (the audio should go up on their site soon – http://www.thersa.org) where a music industry spokesman was talking about piracy there, and basically defending the old model of doing things in the face of years of failure to actually tackled the problem.
12/11/2008 at 23:35 Paul B says:
@Mr Lizard – Just because you once did something, doesn’t mean that you can’t be reformed. In fact because you once pirated games probably means you’re better placed to talk about the horrors(?!) of piracy – you have a bit of insight. Just as ex-alcoholics are the ones to talk to if you have a drink problem. It means you’ve been clever enough to see the light.
As someone who used to buy pirate games in the old Amiga days (I was only 11 at the time) I can say that I wouldn’t do that any-more. It was also much more in the open back then. The place where I bought my Amiga, and peripherals, was also the place that sold me the games. Now, it’s all done via bittorent on the internet, and it’s not quite as innocent as it once seemed long ago.
13/11/2008 at 00:01 Del Boy says:
Jesus, everyone is looking at this way too hard.
People pirate games for one reason and one reason only, it’s so damn easy!
I could be playing a pirated copy of World Of Goo in less than ten minutes if I was so inclined. This isn’t a moral issue or a socialogical issue, it’s being given something on a plate with no detrimental consequences whatsoever.
Until that goes away piracy will be rife and the only way I can think to make it go away is essentially censorship, which is definitely not a route we want to go down.
13/11/2008 at 00:02 Del Boy says:
No detrimental consequences to the pirate I (obviously) mean.
13/11/2008 at 11:37 MetalCircus says:
20 dollars for this is too expensive for what is essentially a polished flash game
Sorry guys, but no wonder it was pirated. They should have stuck it up on a website and put a google ad on the bottom.
For all the hype this game generated, I found it thoroughly dull and generic really, but I’m in the minority there. I just feel like i’ve played hundreds of these types of flash games before.
13/11/2008 at 12:08 Sam says:
Thing is, here, the thing is (quite apart from the fact that, as previously mentioned, tons of ISP give out dynamic IPs, so the initial statistics are certainly overestimating the piracy rate by some factor) that people are falling back on the old “why should someone get something for nothing when X” arguments, where X is either “I paid for it” or “People worked hard to make this”. (Often, I do suspect there’s a bit of the former clause even when people state the latter – no-one wants to feel like other people are getting the “better” of them somehow, especially if it’s by “not playing fair”.) What matters is that, in the end, 2D Boy get sufficient renumeration that they can eat, drink, buy nice cars and code more exciting games for us. If this is possible while even 99% of people who play World of Goo are getting it for free, then that isn’t actually an economic problem.
(Not that I don’t feel sorry for the guys at 2DBoy, as clearly this can be depressing if looked at like a conventional business, but, as they themselves said – it’d have happened with or without DRM, for a start.)
What I’d be more interested to see would be an experiment like Radiohead did – someone sticking up a game and letting people choose to pay whatever they think it is worth. The statistics from that would be very interesting, and cogent to the argument that some were making in thread about the possible “overpriced” nature of WoG at $20. (Personally, I’d be prepared to pay as much as $30 for it, and it would have been nice for me to be allowed to – can you donate to 2DBoy on their site?)
13/11/2008 at 12:54 MedO says:
Just want to stress the importance of the dynamic IP problem again, especially for people with laptops. Between the daily renewed IP at home, playing the game while connected at university, showing it to a friend at his place (connected to his WLAN), and playing at my parents’ place (daily renewed IP again), I’m probably 1 legitimate customer and 20 pirates already.
So before we talk about how much all the pirates are hurting sales and get worked up about this 90% figure, we should first try to get some numbers that aren’t likely to be off by orders of magnitude. In a german release, you could easily get a 90% piracy figure counted by that system without any pirates at all, not sure how ISPs handle IP addresses in other countries.
13/11/2008 at 13:11 Thirith says:
Sam: Interesting points. However, as long as publishers are only happy when games are exceptionally successful and consider a moderate success as failure, it’s not enough if a game sells reasonably well. If developer = publisher, then it’s enough (though not necessarily satisfying and definitely not fair) if they get “sufficient renumeration that they can eat, drink, buy nice cars and code more exciting games for us”. If developer != publisher it’s more complicated. Look at Activision’s decision to drop potentially successful titles because they’re not designed to be series with annual sequels.
13/11/2008 at 13:35 Gnarl says:
The only two reasons I can think I would stop pirating games for are either economic or fear. If it became difficult to the point I might as well earn the money and pay for it, or if there was a reasonable chance that I could be seriously fined or my internet connection be taken away. The sale numbers of most games are too large for my one sale to matter, so that is insignificant.
If I controlled thousands of game buying zombies I would force them to buy games, and would actually like to see more effort going to stop piracy. If it is actually causing low PC sales, which will be hard to find out considering most people have already made their minds up on the issue.
13/11/2008 at 13:40 Kieron Gillen says:
I’m impressed at all the attempts to reduce the actual piracy figure, and talking to 2D Boy as if they don’t know about IPs*. This is like standing over a corpse and thinking the most important thing to argue about is whether its bled 5 pints or only 4.
Sam: I especially like how you consider the concept of offence at a lack of parity to be somehow quaint and laughable rather than admitting that fairness is the highest pursued goal in our best societal organs and percieved unfairness is what leads to revolutions and general strife.
I don’t mind piracy. I just wish people wouldn’t spend so much time trying to undermine that it has any possible effect.
KG
*”Fast and loose”. Some people have logged on from multiple places. Some people haven’t logged on at all.
13/11/2008 at 14:07 Jim Rossignol says:
Yes those stupid old arguments about people being exploitative and irresponsible! We should probably not bother with those in our crazy “anything goes as long as you can pay for dinner” society.
13/11/2008 at 14:55 Paul Moloney says:
Kieran, I don’t think all of us were trying to defend piracy or trying to mitigate it by querying the use of IP addresses to come up with a piracy figure. Out of the big ‘net providers in Ireland – UPC, Eircom, Smart Telecom – only the relatively tiny Digiweb offers static IP addresses by default to non-business users. Otherwise, it’s you have to request it and its an extra charge (I suspect this is because they don’t want non-business users hosting web sites, etc, on their home machines). I’m not so naive as to think WoG isnt’ being pirated, but my hope was that the 90% figure is an over-estimate and that people are relatively decent.
P.
13/11/2008 at 14:55 Dood says:
Kieron, I don’t think anyone is trying to say that piracy isn’t a problem. But if we’re supposed to believe these numbers (which I am willing to do), then they should be based on a solid foundation. It’s just like any scientific paper. If your claim can’t stand up to certain challenges then no one will believe you, which will hurt your cause much more than saying nothing at all.
13/11/2008 at 15:00 Jerricho says:
So is the 90% already adjusted in some way to account for the error? I know that I must account for at least 4 IP addresses here in the UK logging on to the leader board. After a trip back home to Ireland last month I would have clocked up at least another 6IPs for moving around. So that’s 10IP addresses that I’ve played this from on my laptop alone.
Given that 2d-boy considered this an experiment of sorts it would seem worthwhile examining the results in detail.
Posted on the 2d-boy forum on the 9th of October Ron mentioned that only one torrent had been spotted (of the preview) and that 17 unique IPs (totalling 77 attempts) had tried to use the magic key.
This was after they’d sent out the pre-order links to some thousands of users. Anecdotaly it suggests the magic key was very successful, albeit for the first chapter preview.
So where did this explosion of piracy start? Are the torrent sites full of Goo now?
13/11/2008 at 15:03 Gap Gen says:
Maybe the answer is a Steam-only release? Would they have lost many sales doing that?
I still am not entirely convinced by arguments of cost for piracy when people can afford high-end PCs but not the games – especially since PC games themselves are around half the price of console games.
13/11/2008 at 16:28 Paul Moloney says:
Why has “Flash game” become a generic term for “2D game”?
P.
13/11/2008 at 16:59 bobince says:
> Would they have lost many sales doing that?
They certainly would’ve lost mine, I won’t use Steam at any price. And of course it would still have been pirated all over the place like every other Steam game.
But I can’t see the ‘$20 is too much’ argument at all. Perhaps as an Euroer $20 at the going exchange rate seems like less than it is in the US, but it really seems like nothing to me. £12.99? We used to pay that back in the days of the Spectrum for goodness’s sake.
Well, when we weren’t dubbing collections of games onto a C60, obviously. Plus ça change…
13/11/2008 at 17:00 PIRATEYARR says:
The thing is that I was going to buy it, but I was deliberately stopped from purchasing it even though my friend (who lives next to me) managed to download it several weeks ago. Sorry that is just asking for it.
Again, don’t be stupid with part 2 and launch a worldwide release.
13/11/2008 at 17:03 nyname says:
>You tend to spend more time with a game that cost you money because you have an emotional investment in it then. I wonder how many pirates warez everything, play them all for 5 minutes and think all games are shit because they never cost them a penny.
Hahahaha, oh boy.
I paid for Serious sam 2, i paid for TRON2.0, but i couldn’t be arsed to finish them, just too uninteresting.
Paying for games do not change in anyway the amount of time you will be playing it.
Simple example: My cousin lent me Zelda twilight princess.
I haven’t paid for it right as my cousin lent me it.
Yet i spent 50 hours playing it.
13/11/2008 at 17:22 Biggles says:
Keiron, I think you’re being somewhat over dramatic with that corpse analogy. The argument is that the 90% figure is alarming, but essentially meaningless if it isn’t based on sound principles. Especially if it is likely to be out by orders of magnitude. It might well be 9% or 2%, or 50%, each of which would have very different implications.
13/11/2008 at 17:24 caramelcarrot says:
I bought it, played it, gave it to a friend so we could play it on his projector, and then a third mutual friend decided to buy it for himself after playing it. 2/3 isnt bad, considering I doubt the 2nd friend would’ve bought it anyway. I think the PC piracy is just a sad fact of making popular games on a highly accessable platform.
13/11/2008 at 17:47 Jim Rossignol says:
Pirate: It has always been available globally on the 2D Boy site, from day one of release. Only Steam limited region availability, not the developers themselves.
13/11/2008 at 17:53 subedii says:
Believe me Jim, he’ll just ignore that fact. The justification was wafer thin as it was.
13/11/2008 at 18:38 elefaire says:
@Kieron – well, someone’s got to point that out to all the games journalists who’re picking the figure up and running with it, despite the fact that you, me, RPS and 2D Boy know full well that the actual number could be anything from 9% to 99% with such flimsy evidence.
13/11/2008 at 19:23 jalf says:
No it isn’t. It’s just not true for every pirated copy of a game. What’s bullshit is people who pick one example, and try to generalize this to cover *everyone*. When you do that, you can simultaneously prove that *everyone* pirated the game, and that everyone were a developer of it, and also bought it. Twice.
Obviously there are people who pirate games because they can. If DRM existed which actually worked, then it would prevent these people from pirating the game. These people then may or may not choose to buy the game, but it’s perfectly possible that they may just skip the game entirely, so even if DRM worked (which it generally doesn’t, because pirates can bypass it easily), it may not translate into bigger sales. It could just translate into fewer people playing your game, legally or otherwise.
But here comes the clever part. While I’m certainly not disputing the above, that people exist who pirate because they’re able to, that does *not* preclude the existence of people who pirate because the DRM sucks. Because a pirated game quite simply has more value than a legit copy, being unburdened with defective DRM carrying with it various nasty side effects and limitations.
Neither argument is “clearly bullshit” because there are plenty of people who fall into either category.
Finally, of course, there’s the point usually made by the Stardock guy. The piracy rate doesn’t matter. The number of pirates doesn’t matter, they don’t affect you financially. All that matters, the only number you want to maximize is the number of legit, paying users. 200 sales and 200,000 pirated copies is better than 100 sales and no pirated copies. So the 90% rate is, even if true, meaningless, *unless* you also have evidence that these 90% would actually buy the game if they hadn’t been able to pirate it.
That’s the problem with these piracy discussions. There are so many variables involved, and no one have reliable statistics for any of them. It’s possible to argue *anything* in a piracy debate. Using the few statistics available, you could argue that piracy is *beneficial* just as well as you could argue that it’s killing PC games.
About the 90% figure, as others have said it’s likely vastly inflated. I haven’t bought (or pirated, or played) WoG), but I suspect that for most games, I probably connect with 10 different IP’s just within the first few weeks. Dynamic IP at home, and sometimes I may bring my laptop to work, sometimes to school, sometimes to a friend’s place. It adds up. Assuming my completely made-up figure of 10 IP’s per player is accurate (which it isn’t), we could instead conclude that there had been *zero* piracy. Perhaps those torrents you found were actually legit users who, for one reason or another, found it easier to grab the game from a torrent after buying it. (No, I don’t believe that, but it’s possible)
Of course, there are factors pulling the opposite way as well. Multiple people may connect from the same IP (behind a NAT router, or because their ISP gave them an IP another player had previously connected from), and of course then there are the players who never connected to your scoreboard at all. So while I’m not disputing that the game has gotten pirated widely, the 90% figure means nothing, even as a rough estimate.
13/11/2008 at 21:16 SwiftRanger says:
“Well, SwiftRanger, it’s because people who want a boxed copy are anachronistically archaic Neanderthals who will try and feed the cloth map into the punch-drive in their Turing machine.”
Does the boxed version of World of Goo come with a cloth map? :) Or some slimy extra’s perhaps? That’s value folks, retail rocks I tell you. You can feel it and smell it!
I think the lack of an immediate worldwide retail presence certainly didn’t prevent high piracy rates but who can blame a smaller studio with a debut title for that? Also, that demo alone was nearly worth $20, and then I am ignoring the replay factor of trying to optimise every slime construction.
13/11/2008 at 21:20 Larington says:
I’m waiting for this to get its wiiware release, because I strongly suspect my ‘used to game but has sorta lost interest except for some facebook games’ might find this very entertaining and its the best way to plonk it in his view.
13/11/2008 at 21:21 Larington says:
Err, forgot to put the word “brother” into that last post, my bad.
13/11/2008 at 22:32 rocketman71 says:
Well, I was waiting for the Euro release with the extra chapter, so I guess now I can buy it anytime.
14/11/2008 at 00:15 Nahual says:
I’m not entirely sure i understand how the estimate works, but if i do, i think it might be grossly overestimated.
I bought the game on day one from Steam. Since finishing I’ve done the tower building a lot, from at least 8 different IP’s from my house, cause i don’t have a static IP address and the ISP changes it about once a week or whenever i disconnect the modem, and that’s not counting connecting from my office (don’t tell anyone :P), friend and parent’s houses.
Does that mean it if i connected from 15 ip addresses (easily, if not more, laptops rule) i count for 14 pirated copies even though mine is perfectly legal?
14/11/2008 at 10:48 rocketman71 says:
Damn, not on Steam yet. Yes, I prefer to buy it there if, as someone says above, all you get when you buy from the game website is just an exe. I’d rather have the possibility to download it anytime from Steam.
Also, seeing that the piracy rate is being calculated over unique IP’s, I have to agree with Nahual. My home provider is really shitty, so I have to restart my router once or twice every night, and every time I’ll get a new IP. If I had pirated the game and was playing connected to the server, that would account for 2 or 3 different persons *every day*.
14/11/2008 at 11:05 Sam says:
Sam: I especially like how you consider the concept of offence at a lack of parity to be somehow quaint and laughable rather than admitting that fairness is the highest pursued goal in our best societal organs and percieved unfairness is what leads to revolutions and general strife.
No, I just think that people should accept that at least part of their “piracy is bad” response is due not to some idea that people should be renumerated for their work, but due to their feeling that they’ve personally lost out by paying for something that someone else hasn’t.
If you want to support a developer, then you should be happy to pay them money to support them, regardless of what anyone else is doing – if we’re being all free-market capitalist about this, then the product is only worth the value the market assigns to it, after all.
Fairness / equality is, of course, an important thing for society to pursue, but my assertion is that part of the issue with easily-duplicable products, like computer games, is that it is very hard to enforce the same concept of “fair” that you enforce on limited products, and it is not clear that it is the best way to treat fairness for this class of items. (After all, a pirate might argue that it is “unfair” that some people get to play games because they have “money”, and others don’t , since it costs nothing to make new copies of the product once complete – regardless of how laughable you think this argument is, the pirate is using their own argument based on a perception of unfair disparity, too. Clearly the only solution is to get rid of money and become an idealised communist society instead ;) ).
It is clearly unfair if a developer doesn’t get proper renumeration for their work – however, there are ways to get renumeration which are not wedded to the concept of being paid for every instance of your work in existence. (And, indeed, in some industries, the other means of renumeration are already more significant for the artist – being a music journalist as well, Kieron, you’ll be sick by now of the “support your artist by going to their concerts” argument for music piracy.)
I don’t mind piracy. I just wish people wouldn’t spend so much time trying to undermine that it has any possible effect.
We’re not? People have raised perfectly valid points about not going totally overboard based on one data point which 2DBoy themselves have noted is based on an unreliable metric. Depending on how many ips the average ISP gives a customer, the raw 90% figure could represent anything from 90%+ piracy to 0% piracy – it is unlikely that it is at either extreme.
Considering the existence of studies which suggest that the conversion rate of “pirated copies” to “actual sales” may be as low as 1:1000, in that case, even with 90% piracy, 2DBoy haven’t lost a lot of sales to people who would be prepared to pay any money at all for their game. On the other hand, if you take the position of the music industry, 2DBoy have lost 90% of the sales they could have made. Again, either extreme is probably wrong, but it shows how silly it is to take either position (and, indeed, we know that all the pirate copies seem to be coming with exhortations for people to “buy the game” in the info files attached – which suggests that either the pirates feel guilty for pirating WoG, or that they see piracy as independant of supporting the developers themselves. Interesting sociological study, there.)
14/11/2008 at 11:47 Kerotan says:
I find solace in that 2D boys spirit hasn’t been broken by pirates, you’ve got to be bloody heartless to steal from an indie developer, but then again there are still people that complain that garry’s mod 10 costs money…
14/11/2008 at 13:15 dhex says:
the solution is to start stealing shoes off peoples’ feet while shouting “information wants to be free!”
that’ll learn ‘em.
for what it’s worth, i bought world of goo due to the staff proselytizing here, but i’m stuck on world three.
14/11/2008 at 14:41 cgoodno says:
Sucks to hear about the high rate of piracy. If I find myself sitting at my computer with nothing to do, I might buy this as well. Just don’t game on the PC much anymore (other than NWN2 mods). Put this on XBLA or PSN and I’ll buy it in an instant.
14/11/2008 at 14:49 Ymgve says:
Was it explained exactly what 90% meant? Does it mean that if for example 1000 people bought the game, 900 pirated it? Or does it mean that f.ex. you saw 10000 IPs connect when only 1000 bought it?
Also, IPs are a bad metric, as others have stated. It’s better to generate a machine-specific ID (from hard drive serial numbers or other hardware) and send that over. That would remove any doubt from ISPs using DHCP.
For bonus points, if a game uses a serial number, send over that. (But don’t disable copies with invalid numbers. That removes the incentive for pirates to remove the online functionality.) Then you can get other statistics, like if pirates play the game for longer or shorter than legit users (supporting or undermining the claim that “they only download it to test the game”), the timeline of pirated downloads and which countries have more pirates.
14/11/2008 at 15:29 Bhazor says:
Quite frankly I preferred this post when we were making bum jokes.
17/11/2008 at 15:19 Uther Doul says:
Um, maybe I’m missing something here, but does this mean that by visiting the leaderboard on the website I’m now counted as a pirate? Even though I’m only vaguely aware of the game, never even seen it played, and only ended up here after hearing about this 90% piracy thing? What kind of metric is that? Seriously, if you want to esimate piracy based on IP addresses, then allow for duplicates due to dynamic IPs, and people just visiting that web page. 15-18% seems more like it, 30% max. On the other hand, if I was more cynical, I’d suggest that a 90% piracy figure will probably be far more widely reported alongside the game’s name than the daft means used to calculate it, leading to a fair bit of free publicity. But since I’m not that cynical, I’ll probably head out and buy the game as part of my new support DRM-free games drive.
17/11/2008 at 21:53 Anonymous says:
how exactly does drm stop piracy? Can you tell me of any game that hasn’t gotten cracked? And how could you possibly measure piracy? that’s total crap. Also i found the game boring just by playing the demo, but that’s just me anyway
17/11/2008 at 22:30 Anonymous says:
As for the comments about steam, i would like to see what are the figures of the sales and how they compare to the other methods’ figures. i would bet that most people learned about the game because it was advertised on steam and wtf would anyone search for the dev’s website? so the availability problem would be rather large
23/12/2008 at 18:37 Jimmy Z says:
I purchased this game thru Amazon and love it, but heck, my IP is static and I used to watch it change numerous times a day, every day. That means after owning this game for a month, these ‘pirate’ researchers who came up with the 90% pirated figure are going to have a result of worse than 99.9% piracy just from me and my single legitimate copy of the game. This 90% is complete crap, but will now be used to justify the invasive and destructive measures used by EA and DRM software like SecuROM. I would’ve thought these ex-EA employees who authored this game would have had a few more clues than that, but apparently not. They’ve gone from being heroes to being patsys in my book. BOOOOOOO!
23/12/2008 at 19:12 Thirith says:
Jimmy Z: next time you resurrect a comments thread, you may want to read a bit more about what you’re saying – such as, for instance, a deeper discussion of the figures (on this very site!) or 2D Boy’s statement that regardless of this they still wouldn’t put DRM on their game because it doesn’t work. Pirates will still pirate the game.
Your heroes/patsies thing is just silly.
31/12/2008 at 04:09 Catto says:
Hey Now,
90% seems like a lot.
thx 4 the info,
Catto
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