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.”
Related Stories:
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.
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.
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?
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.
Why has “Flash game” become a generic term for “2D game”?
P.
> 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…
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Believe me Jim, he’ll just ignore that fact. The justification was wafer thin as it was.
@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.
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.
“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.
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.
Err, forgot to put the word “brother” into that last post, my bad.
Well, I was waiting for the Euro release with the extra chapter, so I guess now I can buy it anytime.
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?
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*.
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.)
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…
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.
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.
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.
Quite frankly I preferred this post when we were making bum jokes.
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.
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
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
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!
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.
Hey Now,
90% seems like a lot.
thx 4 the info,
Catto
I have played the game, all levels without skipping, loved it, connected to the internet and made a pretty tower, right now I’ll go back in the levels and try to make ocd in all.
Do you know why doesnt people like me dont want to buy the game? because maybe the last time they spent money on a game was 5 years ago and they prefer having a mcmenu instead of paying for it ^^
anyways, some people will not want to spend any money, and i support them
ps:I didnt bought it, and im happy with my decision :D
Would like to have superior skills, then you must not miss the purchase of wow gold from mmoinn.com. We mentioned to you cheap wow gold and wow power leveling . mmoinn.com is a professional trade platform, you will get a guarantee of confidence!
Toshiba PA-1121-08 AC Adapter(DC19V 6.3A 120W )Toshiba PA3201U-1ACA AC Adapter(15V 5A)Samsung SyncMaster 770 TFT LCD AC Adapter
hi, nice info, glad that I joined this. Would likek to share something interesting [url=http://ezinearticles.com/?Facts-About-Penis-Enlargement&id=1886679]
penisenlargment[/url]
metin2 goldwow goldmetin2 yangmetin2
goldI have been collecting for years the notes that people leave one another, and their storiesThe good the bad and the ugly! This led to this website and a book. wow goldmetin2 yangwow gold
dofus kamas
nice post.
i like it very much.
thanks for your sharing.
This is really a great stuff for sharing.keep it up .Thanks for sharing,
pandora beads bracelets
Leather Bracelets
Great post, thanks for sharing with us. Just I think can you please visit my blog? I need some visitors and I would appreciate your help, thanks.Voip revies,cell phone tracking,r4 carte ds
Have you heared about a game which you need use requiem gold to play, and you can also borrow requiem lant from other players
If you are really a game player, you must know fast gold world of, or fast wow gold, they are equally valued in this game, more you own them, more items you can buy. Sometimes it is also called instant wow gold, of course you can buy wow gold instant at many websites, but what I want to say is that you can get wow gold cheap more easily.