Rock, Paper, Shotgun

15/11/2008 at 12:09 Nny says:

Ouch. That sucks :(.

15/11/2008 at 12:17 beetleboy says:

I gotta say, I remember having a NES 8 bit system, and no way to pirate games. The end result was that I bought or got around 2 new games per year, since they were very expensive compared to my limited budget. So I played less NES and did more other stuff.

If every pirated copy is a lost sale, you are implying that people have some pretty hefty resources for their entertainment. However, it would probably be equally unlikely to claim that a pirated copy is never a lost sale.

That’s all really a side thing, though, isn’t it? The question is, where do we go from here? DRM does not seem to work. Many gov’ts seem all too happy to start monitoring all internet traffic in search for pirates, but instating a 1984 on the internet seems a bit on the harsh side for chasing pirates. At least those gov’ts could make some half-arsed excuse re. national security, that would sound a tad more reasonable?

What I’d like to ask 2D Boy is whether they see the sales of World of Goo as good enough? Are they raking in cash, making just enough, or is this pushing them into the red? Because we’ve seen successful examples of no-DRM online sales, e.g. Nine inch Nails previous album “Ghosts I-IV”, where the modest price of 5$ per album still led to sales of 7.5 million dollars in the first week. Since no record company was involved, I’d think that would keep Trent et al afloat for a while, at least?

15/11/2008 at 12:18 Little Green Man says:

Well, I preordered it and it was awesome. Frankly I think more people bought it because it was shipped without DRM, but obviously people could pirate it more easily. Really I would have thought that most pirates won’t buy a game regardless of worth or their current financial standing. This chimes with the 1000 pirates = 1 lost sale thing. Still a bit sucky, but definitely not out of the ordinary if you look at how much some games gt pirated (e.g one’s with install restrictions).

15/11/2008 at 12:27 Smurfy says:

I think this is a very interesting result.

Here’s another question. If piracy figures don’t represent lost sales, what do they represent? Is it an indictment of humanity? Are they free advertising? Could 2D BOY have befitted in any way from them? Or are they causing active harm?

This is the part that struck me the most. It’s very possible that there simply is no way to stop pirates. They break DRM within minutes, and as they pointed out on the WoG blog, one DRM’d game still had a 92% piracy rate.

I think publishers need to start thinking hard about this. To quote the Spy-Engineer, “Maybe we should just give up, pardner.”

15/11/2008 at 12:39 Tom says:

I could imagine word of WoG spreading to people who don’t normally play games, as it’s such a quirky, casual game – male and female. Most people will stay quiet about playing Gears of War 2 or Half Life (in particular I’d imagine, due to it’s name) in the office however I could easily imagine people going “oo check this out”.
I think 2D Boy brought this themselves tbh. “Know your audience” springs to mind. Because they made it so easy to share the game with friends, this has happened.
I find it slightly baffling that in the face of this level of piracy 2D Boy would say DRM’s pointless. I don’t think it is. I think the market they were dealing with was an entirely different one.
Personally i think DRM is very important as has been clearly demonstrated here.
All the morons in the previous thread who started attacking 2D Boy’s figures really need to… well.. do something… God knows what or where to start though.
The fact that an Indie dev can make such an entertaining game and see next to nothing profit wise is just plain old wrong. They should have protected themselves. They should have used something Steamworks.
It was perfect. Friend shows friend some game play. Friend likes what they see, spots it on Steam, realises it’s dead cheap and says “oh why not”.
As it stands, friend shows friend game, friends says do you want it?

15/11/2008 at 12:42 Will Tomas says:

I suspect that given rates like this and the uselessness of DRM, we’re going to end up seeing things like in-game ads take off much more. Possibly in a less intrusive way than you might think, a la Battlefield: Heroes, but there needs to be a secondary funding method for games. Now it’s probably the biggest entertainment industry in the world I suspect it wouldn’t be a hard sell to get advertisers involved, and that way even if the game’s pirated the advertising still gets across.

I want to make it clear that I strongly dislike this idea, but it’s the only idea that I can see satisfying publishers once they realise DRM isn’t cutting the mustard.

15/11/2008 at 12:48 BaconIsGood4you says:

Since we’re dealing with an infinite supply now that we have digital distribution, the industry must think of how they can provide a service rather than a product. You have an audience, use it.

15/11/2008 at 12:53 Gap Gen says:

There are probably plenty of people who are completely oblivious to the point of consumerism. It’s entirely possible that the vote you cast with your wallet is more powerful than the vote you cast with the ballot. If people pirate games, then the argument is that they dislike the product and do not wish to see any more of them in the future.

On the value of DRM: It was quoted in the last thread that the piracy rate of a DRM-protected game was about the same rate as World of Goo. As long as it can be cracked, it can be pirated, so why offend your actual customers? It would be interesting to compare different levels of DRM – from CD keys to full-blown SecuROM stuff to Steam, just to see what difference it makes.

15/11/2008 at 13:07 Quirk says:

Good stuff.

Their initial release was, simply put, bad science. Bad science is going to draw complaints, and it’s nothing to do with people being apologists for piracy. And, yes, it appears now that most of the people submitting high scores either were on static or sticky dynamic IPs, or did so only once. Without that data being provided though, the claims being made were unsupported.

These figures are much better, and they should’ve released them at the start. We now have a quantifiable baseline for piracy; we can say with a measure of confidence that piracy of World of Goo is at least 82%. It very probably is more than that, given the optional nature of the checkbox, and possibly significantly more, but we don’t have any way to get a meaningful figure on that.

Now we have a number of data points suggesting that piracy of smaller games is > 80% (Introversion, 2D Boy, Reflexive), and at least the first two of these points (I don’t know enough about Reflexive’s calculations to comment on them) are based on relatively sound metrics. This gives us something to work off when considering the effectiveness of different anti-piracy measures.

And yes, four or more freeloaders for each paying user is a depressing statistic.

15/11/2008 at 13:12 Jochen Scheisse says:

Nice to see our statistics nerdrage taken seriously :)

15/11/2008 at 13:25 Sheepye says:

People in a general sense are bastards who will always try to make a quick buck for nothing (look at me talking like a yank!).

The internet can’t be regulated or taxed without the innocent suffering and the pirates themselves complaining, and even then you can’t limit what people can do on pc’s in writing codes and hacking.

Hence, this is the price PC people pay. Our format kicks the consoles asses, but consoles are a helluva lot easier to regulate as your regular joe consologs cant just go and get a copy for nowt with an internet search.

Personally I’m just too moral a person to go and pirate things. If a game is too expensive I will wait for it to drop in price or haggle, as I’m a dullard that doesn’t see the need to break the system of finance, though it seems bankers and crooks will do that for me. Look at me getting exasperated and all. The non-voice of the silent majority.

Ah well, tis the beauty of humanity in balancing the gits and the good. I think I’d be bored if I had my way of no pirates whatsoever, but it’s bad when it’s at an 82% PERCENT RATE OHMYJOLLYGOSH. Seriously, a little pirating is to be expected by any company but that’s just getting silly. Is it because WoG is a niche gamers game rather than a casual game that non-gamers know about? So the people who know how to get it for free can as it doesn’t feel like a big-budget fancy muddy graphics game but rather an indy game to them? So some sort of thinking that “This is just a novelty game that I see done for free by bedroom programmers on the internet every day”? A lack of empathy to their financial difficulties?

Sorry for the long post guys. Ferero Roche for you all if you read this far into my drivel.

15/11/2008 at 13:28 MeestaNob! says:

RPS: Do 2dboys stats differentiate by continent? Europe’s release was a clusterfuck, I’m wondering if this shows in the IP records?

For what it’s worth, I’m still very skeptical that even 82% is correct.

15/11/2008 at 13:33 Ed says:

I’ll admit to have pirated the odd game over the years. I guess, I would probably have bought some of them, if I couldn’t have pirated them… I think for anyone to say otherwise is silly – and I can’t believe the 1000 pirates = 1 sale thing. I mean would those 999 pirates honestly not buy any games if pirating them was impossible?

The issue is people have got used to pirating games and getting those people to pay is hard work. In the same way, most console players have got used to paying for games…

I’d say games like WoG where the developers are indie and very up front about things will suffer less than games from EA etc. If WoG has 82% piracy, I’d bet EA’s RA3 has 90%+ piracy… Cost obviously has something to do with it, as does the ease of obtaining it. I’ve bought many more games via Steam than I have in the shops – I’ve probably got 5 games on DVD on my shelf here, but about 30 on Steam…

15/11/2008 at 13:36 Klaus says:

Jochen, that message just says you’re, or rather, that person is a pedophile. The last thing on my mind is sexuality.

15/11/2008 at 13:38 SwiftRanger says:

” If piracy figures don’t represent lost sales, what do they represent? Is it an indictment of humanity? Are they free advertising? Could 2D BOY have befitted in any way from them? Or are they causing active harm?”

It’s definitely not good and doesn’t speak well for the ‘respect’ a lot of people have for developers. It’s also unbelievable some say WoG wasn’t worth its money, there are plenty of other, more expensive, less fun and shorter pastimes the same people are willing to pay up for.

Some exceptions aside (like caramelcarrot said, availability is key), in this case the pirates shouldn’t be considered as part of the games bizz idd. They’re just leeches.

15/11/2008 at 13:40 Hoernchen says:

There’s a big difference, 90% sounds like ‘omfg’, but 82% is what i’d expect from a small indie game where the full is game just 150mb and as easy to get as the demo. Releasing it in the middle of crysis and far cry and all the other games was probably not a good idea, either. I guess there are as much people who buy a game after pirating it (hello, bioshock !) as there are people who wish they pirated a game after they bought it (damn you, gothic 3 !), and then there are those who just pirate everything and if they can’t they don’t care. Conclusion: They didn’t lose potential customers, but they’ve got a free ‘omfg look 90%’ ad campain all over the internet.

15/11/2008 at 13:47 Pags says:

@Klaus: I’m going to use that line of argument all the time now. Of course some might argue that it doesn’t really prove much. But they’re not using the same line of argument so I could be (but am probably not) wrong.

15/11/2008 at 13:55 qrter says:

This is great. Well, not the stats themselves, ofcourse, but that 2D Boy took some time to come up with more reliable numbers.

I too complained about the bad science but only because it damages the chance of a healthy debate on piracy. It wasn’t about 2D Boy saying something wrong (in fact, it wasn’t 2D Boy’s point anyway) but how the rest of the internet will then adopt that wrongness as fact and keep promoting false information.

John Walker:

I’m sure that many will pick at the maths above and argue their reasoning why they think this number might be lower (or even higher), but I’m not sure that’s relevant. Unless there’s a dramatic proof out there that slashes this figure into a quarter, it strikes me as a distraction. If one can’t destroy this number, and therefore the 82% figure is close enough to accurate, given that it might be slightly lower or higher, what then? That’s the interesting discussion. Is this piracy a problem?

Well, the number is relevant because it indicates how large problem is – I do agree with John about his follow-up questions though, what now is the actual effect of this piracy? The data perhaps suggests that developers/publishers should ‘write off’ copies ‘lost’ to piracy and just keep focusing on the people that actually pay.

Tom:

I think 2D Boy brought this themselves tbh. “Know your audience” springs to mind. Because they made it so easy to share the game with friends, this has happened.
I find it slightly baffling that in the face of this level of piracy 2D Boy would say DRM’s pointless. I don’t think it is. I think the market they were dealing with was an entirely different one.
Personally i think DRM is very important as has been clearly demonstrated here.

I find it more than slightly baffling that you call other people ‘morons’, Tom, yet you seem to have missed 2D Boy’s main point completely and then seem to base your conclusions not on what 2D Boy have been saying but something inside your own head, I guess.

15/11/2008 at 13:56 Tom says:

@ John Walker:
My reasoning is that I’d imagine WoG has been played by far more casual gamers than hardcore types. These people are going to be, I’d imagine, less savvy to the various means of obtaining software for free, and probably more easily put off attempting to crack it if it appears rather difficult to do. 2D Boy didn’t even try to counter that and as a result their software has spread, hand to hand, like wild fire.

15/11/2008 at 14:03 Tom says:

On top of that, because DRM has become such a hot topic (even my mum and sister know of it for Gods sake – two of the PC illiterate people you’ll ever meet) as soon as you stick that “DRM FREE” label on your software, music or whatever, people know they can share it without concern, and so do. The whole DRM thing has gone full circle. Because of idiots on the internet kicked up a far bigger fuss than it deserved in the first place, DRM became a big issue and public knowledge, so now when devs release DRM FREE software people start sharing it like nudists because they think the DRM FREE label is another way of saying “go on, knock yourselves out”.
It’s gone full circle. Can’t help but wonder if this is what publishers wanted to happen all along to be honest.
It’s a freakin’ conspiracy I tell you!
We, the gamer, have made DRM important imo. Not the pirates or sat quietly by, occasionally chuckling. It was the people who love to kick up a fuss.

15/11/2008 at 14:05 Gap Gen says:

Duoae: No, my point was that the money you spend determines the products that you want to exist. If no-one bought toothpaste, toothpaste would cease to be sold. If no-one buys from a given developer, that developer won’t make games any more.

Publishers and developers like recognition, sure, but recognition doesn’t buy motion capture suites and high-end workstations.

15/11/2008 at 14:16 Caiman says:

I think the solution is simple. Companies should forget about pirates, assume those people will never buy a significant portion of their software anyway, and concentrate instead on giving legitimate users the best experience possible. Piracy is an endemic problem that simplistic DRM is not ever going to solve – it’s an arms race that the pirates will always win.

Therefore, if you ignore pirates that means the success of your game comes from its success with legitimate purchasers, and DRM is clearly something that will reduce that success. Give your legitimate users rewards for buying your game, extra downloadable content, whatever… just ignore the damn pirates, it’s a waste of time thinking about it.

15/11/2008 at 14:37 Tom says:

Well, I take back what I said. I know of a BitT search that searches multiply sites. WoG got ripped to pieces torrent-wise. From what i can tell BitT probably makes up the majority of that 82%.
I still say TPMs could be the way forwards. People say xBox gets it as bad as PC but that clearly isn’t true. I’m using uSniff as a basis by the way. Take a look at the results for dead space for example. The list for PC dead space goes on, and on. console rips though aren’t even on the first page. Surely that says it all. Consoles use hardware as part of the DRM. PCs don’t. Simple as. I’d bet a lot of money that in the end all motherboards will come with TPMs as standard. The reason hardware works is because you have to spend money and risk messing up your console in the first place in order to use ripped copies.

15/11/2008 at 14:44 Jochen Scheisse says:

The biggest problem is that there is no copy protection. The only possibility is to make it like WoW and construct the game so it’s mechanisms do not work without a connection to a server. Otherwise, it will be cracked. And the more a game is advertised and published through the cool new channels of the intertubes, the more it exclusively reaches the ears of people who at least know, if not use, methods to pirate.

15/11/2008 at 14:47 Lemming says:

I’m surprised its that high, but not surprised that it’s happening at all. Remember that whole thing with being on Steam, then NOT being on Steam just because of some pointless deal? That’s the reason I don’t own the game yet. I’m waiting for it on the one service it should have been on from day 1.

15/11/2008 at 14:50 Conlaen says:

I can imagine there is some people out there that pirated because of the delayed release in Europe.

Little anoyed myself that I am still waiting for this one to come out. No reason to pirate still, cause I can be patient, but I can imagine there is people out there that didn’t want to wait for something that their neighbours across the ocean have been playing for quite some time now.

15/11/2008 at 14:55 Jochen Scheisse says:

Nash is correct. I remember that there were dongles on the Atari, and even those were cracked through software means. DRM is a waste of time. You either make the software virtually uncrackable through the game mechanisms (like every MMO does), or you don’t.

15/11/2008 at 15:02 Klaus says:

@Pags
I think it’s unrealistic to say they could be millionaires when little to nothing points that way. Perhaps if they were more vigilant about protecting their work I could entertain the idea.

It looks from here like they used this game as some sort of social experiment. This is what I believe to be true, and selling easily replicable versions of your work with little or no enforcing of any regulation does not seem like an awesome way to become a millionaire.

But still I guess we could still lynch the evil pirates for depriving 2D Boy from their potentially wondrous bling. It’s just obvious they missed out on potentially becoming nouveau riche.

Of course, if they were doing their damnedest to protect WoG, then just ignore my rambling.

15/11/2008 at 15:16 cliffski says:

“Actually, it’s the opposite. If you pirate something you’re sending the message to the producer that you want that product,”

bullshit.
How does the producer even know you played it unless there is a highs core table you submit to? the people who make singleplayer games generally have zero way of knowing you pirated it.
Pirating games you enjoy is stupid. It just kills off any desire by producers to make more games you might like. Like most people who make games for a living, I have to make games that sell. If everyone on earth pirated Starship tycoon, I still wouldn’t make a sequel. Why would I? The game didn’t make any money. It’s that simple.

15/11/2008 at 15:18 Alteisentier says:

Speaking as a European, I know my self and many of my friends are waiting for the European release before getting it.
While I could get it from his website.. I’d much rather have a steam copy that I can use anywhere rather than a serial key or downloadable exe copy in the email.

15/11/2008 at 15:21 nikos says:

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: *ISPs*. It was mentioned earlier that the problem of piracy (from the standpoint of the developer/publisher) is that no money changes hands when a game is pirated. But it does! Every pirate pays a hefty sum to the ISP for the privilege of teh interweb.

It has been mentioned left and right in the music industry, that the only economic, non-technical, solution is to close the circuit and bring the ISPs in the loop. ISPs charge quite large sums for a product that would be meaningless without piracy (you can watch youtube/do email/browse web, fine on a 1mbps connection). So a deal between content providers (music, movies, games etc) and ISPs might help: pay a fixed sum per month and download as mush as you want. The ISPs + content providers hash out a plan for translating downloads to popularity or whatever index is required for splitting the profits.

Just a thought!

15/11/2008 at 15:24 Martin Ganteföhr says:

If piracy figures don’t represent lost sales, what do they represent?

They represent the conversion rate commericial developers can expect from commercial media products.

It would seem likely that without any measurement of purchase control or product protection taken, the rate will continue to approach that of shareware and similar free-will, donation-based revenue models.

15/11/2008 at 15:26 Klaus says:

If 2D Boy’s flaw is that they had a positive outlook on human nature then it is the rest of us that should be ashamed and not them.

I agree, I’m not saying should be weary of people. But if this was their attempt to be millionaires (which I don’t think it was with this game), then they could have tried harder.

So if my attempt was to definitely make it to age 40, as opposed to just living and see what happens like everyone else, I’d be wearing some sort of vest or protection for sure.

15/11/2008 at 15:31 The Apologist says:

The thing is this is a question of values. I’m absolutely not a Daily Mail reading old man. But the fact is that markets have to run on trust.

This proves what publishers have been saying for some time. Collectively, pc gamers are not worthy of a producers trust. That’s our collective fault. Collectively, our values are so impoverished we can’t even transact together such that the market can function.

That’s why, I’m sorry, I don’t care that some people don’t like Steam. I don’t care if they complain about in-game ads, or subscriptions, or micro-transactions. The fact is publishers have no choice, because, in sum, they simply can’t trust their would-be customers.

It’s incredibly depressing, but I think we need to start by preaching at pirates, talking to them, ruining their communities, ostracising them, or whatever it takes to change the self-centred people who cause this problem.

15/11/2008 at 15:33 cliffski says:

It’s incredibly depressing, but I think we need to start by preaching at pirates, talking to them, ruining their communities, ostracising them, or whatever it takes to change the self-centred people who cause this problem.

Agreed.
Please seed:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4455354/KUDOS_2_FULL_LATEST_(1.05)_Patched

15/11/2008 at 15:33 The Apologist says:

@ Cliffski – I think it is sad to say it, but yes, Steam if it helps, or change the game they want to make to be a platform, a flashgame on a site that can carry advertising. That would change the product, and I hate that idea, but what choice do they have.

15/11/2008 at 15:46 cliffski says:

It makes a big difference to me (as an indie dev) if my sales go up 10%. What most people forget is that game development is 95% fixed costs of making the game. Especially if you sell on-line, with small games and thus no collossal bandwidth.
So say You need to sell 4,000 games to break even, and earn £10 a copy(normally less). If you sell 5,000 then you have made £10k. Not much. If you sell 6,000 then you have made £20k, and your income for that product just doubled, even though your sales only rose by 20%.
This makes a BIG difference to any analysis of the figures.

15/11/2008 at 15:53 jalf says:

Here’s another question. If piracy figures don’t represent lost sales, what do they represent? Is it an indictment of humanity? Are they free advertising? Could 2D BOY have benefited in any way from them? Or are they causing active harm?

Mindshare, perhaps?
The amount of people who are aware of the game, have some interest in playing it? Perhaps they represent 12-year olds who quite literally can’t afford the games they want, but who, when they grow up, will become good customers because they’re already old fans of 2DBoy? (No, I’m not saying that makes everything ok, or anything like that. Consider it a thought experiment, but the more people *played* your game, pirated or not, the more people obviously pay attention to your games and are interested in them. In the long term, there might be advantages to this widespread piracy. At least it means people are playing your game)

How about Blizzard? How many people do you think played pirated copies of the first Warcraft or Diablo? And how many of them do you think are Blizzard fanatics to this day, buying *everything* they make? Probably quite a few. Could that (another hypothetical example) be a reason why they’re so popular today? That so many people grew up on their (usually pirated) games?

Just a thought.

15/11/2008 at 15:58 Jochen Scheisse says:

I don’t think I said that they were naive anywhere, if they were so was I. I would never have thought that the piracy rate for a game so clearly designed as anti-corporate and putting its trust in the gamers could be so brutally attack by those into whose trust its fate was left. If they anticipated such a large piracy rate then I doubt it is something that they think of happily as they go to bed at night.

No really, that’s being naive IMO, and I don’t think 2D assumed that a lot of freeloaders would be impressed by their move to not use DRM and buy it because of that. These people are no rebels with a cause who want to send a message to anyone about anything. These people just don’t want to pay. Even assuming that 5% of pirates do so because of an ideological motive would be bold IMO, most people who are saying so are just bullshitting themselves and using a pathetic defense when confronted with the immorality of their actions.

Even the assumption that if the game would cost 2€, all the people or even more than half of the people would buy it if they can simply download it and save 2€ is bold.

15/11/2008 at 15:58 Y3k-Bug says:

I really should learn how to use blockquote code properly one of these days…

Anyway:

@jalf
But in order to fully use Diablo, you had to be on Bnet. In order to be on Bnet, you had to pay for the game. So through piracy, you STILL had to pay for it if you wanted the full experience. So Blizzard still came out ahead.

15/11/2008 at 16:00 jalf says:

I still don’t see why there are not fake torrents. If you can persuade 100 people to seed a fake torrent on release day, you make it twice as inconvenient to get a pirated copy. Do this with 10 torrents and its 10 times as inconvenient.

Because it won’t work. Every torrent site I know of allow users to write comments on a torrent. What kind of comments do you think will show up there once the first user has finished downloading the game, and finds out it’s a fake? At a wild guess, I’d say something like “It’s fake, guys, don’t bother. Try this *insert url here* instead.”

15/11/2008 at 16:03 jalf says:

But in order to fully use Diablo, you had to be on Bnet. In order to be on Bnet, you had to pay for the game. So through piracy, you STILL had to pay for it if you wanted the full experience. So Blizzard still came out ahead.

True, but don’t you think a lot of people still pirated it just to play on a LAN? Anyway, I’d say Blizzard came out ahead no matter what. I mean, they’re pretty damn successful today, don’t you think? ;)
I was just pondering if piracy might translate into a larger customer base in the long term? I think it’s fair to say that young kids more often pirate than adults, simply because they don’t have as much money to spend (and they may have more time to play games). But doesn’t that imply that once they grow up, they’ll start paying, and if they grew up on *your* games, the chances are good that they’ll start paying *you*.

As I said, I don’t believe this in any way justifies piracy, of course. Just pondering on John’s quite interesting question. :)

15/11/2008 at 16:06 cliffski says:

@jalf.
There is nothing to prevent the people seeding fakes commenting either. Both saying the fake is real, and the real is fake. How do you know who is pro-piracy and anti-piracy on a torrent site.
Besides how many downloaders read all the comments before downloading?

15/11/2008 at 16:09 rabbitsoup says:

y3k-bug
“But in order to fully use Diablo, you had to be on Bnet. In order to be on Bnet, you had to pay for the game. So through piracy, you STILL had to pay for it if you wanted the full experience. So Blizzard still came out ahead.”

very good point blizzard make there games now so that they can make money good for them i say. great business model

]

15/11/2008 at 16:10 Y3k-Bug says:

@Jochen
Bingo. This isn’t a morality issue. People steal games because its incredibly easy, with zero chance of being caught and prosecuted for a crime. DRM attempts to make it harder and thus dissuade people from “casual” piracy, like what is happening with WoG where people can just sent their friends copies of the game through the IM client of their choice.

15/11/2008 at 16:19 Hypocee says:

Thanks for doing some sensible analysis, 2DBoy. Next time, let’s do that first.

Taking this number as gospel for the sake of argument: My own reaction is that if I created a piece of digital content and got 1 in 5 users to pay for it I’d be over the moon, at least until I started worrying that the high adoption rate meant the product was underexposed :) As I said (well, implied) in the earlier post’s comments, the 90% figure surprised me by being so low given the initial methodological flaws. Prior to this whole deal, I’d have planned for a 90% piracy rate as the indicator of a well-chosen price point.

To a first approximation, everything online is either a gift or booty. Has been from the start. All you can do is plan on that, take the Stardock approach and target those few who have the motive, means and opportunity to support you. Some of the guys here seem to picture a ‘pirate’ as some twentysomething in a darkened room, snickering at the chump on the other end of the line. I think we may tend to forget how many time-glutted, cash-poor students there are in the world…or how many jerk teenagers; go on XBL sometime! All you can do with those demographics is make sure they know your name when your next thing comes out. They can grow up into responsible gamers with disposable income, I’ve seen it happen.

I view this as something of a triumph for social engagement as a ‘DRM’ mechanism. Two of my favourite games of the last couple years – WoGoo and Armageddon Empires – have been super-indie, unadvertised, unscrambled games that fit on a keyring, and both have (so far) paid their authors enough to keep chuggin’ along. Both did it by using personal contact and transparency to inspire loyalty in consumers. I’d obviously prefer that they each had a money hat, but when you look at the survival rate of developers of any size, this sort of revenue is a sign that someone – including RPS and friends in the gaming journosphere – is doing something right.

15/11/2008 at 16:21 cliffski says:

I don’t make world of goo. I made Kudos. What do you want from me?

15/11/2008 at 16:25 Y3k-Bug says:

@pkt-zer0
You’re absolutely right, current DRM schemes hardly do anything to stop piracy. But that why EA and the like keep paying companies to develop new schemes, in the hope that they one day hit upon the DRM system that can’t be beaten, or is extremely hard to beat.

Here’s another interesting question that can be asked out of all this:

How many of the unpaid for copies were from “casual” piracy [guy pays for a copy, then sends copies to his friends through his thumb drive, or IM, etc], and how many were stolen copies from bit torrent?

15/11/2008 at 16:31 beetleboy says:

Ron Carmel – I understand if this is not something you’d want to discuss here, but I’d just throw out my earlier question to you: are you in the black or the red? Are you doing ok from this game?

Aaaand, of course, do you have any thoughts on the “where do we go from here”?

I understand if you prefer to do some work or play a game instead of discussing things on the internet, of course! We all know it can easily get heated and a bit fruitless. However, it would be very interesting to hear some thoughts from “the inside”, so to speak! =)

15/11/2008 at 16:32 Mman says:

It is interesting to see an actual percentage for the “pirated” amount. But this has no bearing on DRM if you cannot compare it to a similar value for a game with DRM. If 80% of people still pirated the game with DRM, then obviously it would be useless. But if it actually decreased piracy then you could make an argument about effectiveness.

15/11/2008 at 16:33 cliffski says:

people on the internet in misunderstanding and misplaced rage shock!

15/11/2008 at 16:37 Y3k-Bug says:

Is there a reason why someone like Cliffski, or a larger developer couldn’t put up more fake torrents on Pirate Bay, but include some kind of automagical tracking code inside it, which returns as many details as possible about the end user/pirate?

First off that would be rather pointless. You can’t prosecute a guy for copyright infringement if he downloaded a fake torrent. Where’s the actual copyright infringement?

Second, the real torrent already supplies you with the IP address of every person you’re receiving/sending data to. You wouldn’t need a fake torrent, the real one supplies you with the amount of data an IP has given you, the IP number, and even the country and ISP of tha IP address if you choose to resolve it.

15/11/2008 at 16:39 Andrew Wills says:

@ beetleboy

I see your point, and I think charging for a service like that would generate a backlash, but if it was something that gamers took upon themselves to accomplish, as an independent group, then surely any backlash would come only from the people pirating the game… Which just underlines the point of doing it.

15/11/2008 at 16:43 Y3k-Bug says:

I’d wager he meant 13 – 17-ish?

I meant why assume pirates are in any age group? There’s no evidence to suggest what age they are in either direction.

A few studies have said that gaming is primarily dominated by males in the 25-40 age group. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to assume that the age of pirates correlates roughly with that?

15/11/2008 at 16:43 Nuyan says:

I just took a look at the World of Goo discussion on the Pirate Bay. What struck me is that 1 in 4 comments there went like:

“Awesome game, after completing the game I send the developers 15 euros with PayPal.”

or

“If you can afford it, BUY THIS GAME. It’s just two developers that made this game.”

or

“going to buy it when the box is coming to europe…”

or

“C’mon people! pirating indie games is just wrong!”

or

“Going to buy this game when I have the money”

Plus a huge discussion on piracy and indie games, of course. I thought it was quite funny, I also think it’s better to comment there and inspire people to buy the actual game than to spread viruses or pull of other cheap tricks.

15/11/2008 at 16:44 cliffski says:

I know it (fake torrents) works a bit. At least, there are hundreds of people who unknowingly download fake torrents. I know it because I can see them right now downloading in my copy of utorrent :D.
I’m sure most of them will grab another torrent once they realise its the demo and not the full version, but maybe it helps add to the fact that they wasted their time trying to pirate it, whereas getting it from me guarantees a legit full and up-to-date version.
I do my tiny 0.01% to remind people that there is inconvenience associated with pirating, that you won’t get by being legit. It’s like the house of Lords (“It doesn’t do any harm, and it may even do some good”).

15/11/2008 at 16:46 Jochen Scheisse says:

Concerning the piracy numbers, I bet ron&friends did it because they have recently finished a great game and now have too much spare time on their hands, yet not enough income to just vanish to an island with white sand and blue ocean for some weeks. Also, publicity is good and will probably bring them another 100 sales, which might hopefully translate to another month of paid rent and reasonably priced alcohol, or whatever floats their boat recreationally.

So, if you really want to do 2D a favour – spread the word! Start a discussion about the WoG piracy numbers on two of your favourite newsboards. Give them the spin an indie developer urgently needs to sell games. Link to the site where the games can be pir…purchased. Purchased. That will help them far more than us theorycrafting about the future of DRM, although that is of course a highly interesting topic.

15/11/2008 at 16:47 cliffski says:

@pkt-zer0
Not at all. I am 100% behind 2DBoy who have made one of the best games this year. The thing is, it’s not my place to seed fake torrents of someone else’s game. I wouldn’t do that unless Ron was OK with it. I would consider it cheeky to take it upon myself to act for him. I would, however, happily do so if he asked me. That’s all i meant.
I’ll happily seed anyone’s fake torrrents :D

15/11/2008 at 16:53 ron carmel says:

@I don’t understand this comment system:
no, we wouldn’t use DRM even if it worked. we made world of goo because we want people to play and enjoy it. if someone would play it for free but is not willing to pay for it, we’d rather they play the game and enjoy it without paying, as long as you don’t take this as our blessing to pirate world of goo :)

15/11/2008 at 16:53 Klaus says:

I meant why assume pirates are in any age group? There’s no evidence to suggest what age they are in either direction.

Well, adults have money, mostly. Also, when you look at the comments on most torrent sites it gives you the impression that most of these people can’t be over 20 years of age.

It’s conjecture. They might be adults, it’s just difficult to imagine.

15/11/2008 at 16:55 Duoae says:

@John
Do most people see playing a copy shared by a friend as the same as bittorrenting the game?

I’ve never had a DRM free digital copy that i would share around with friends. I’ve shared around my bought retail copies of discs though these generally had disc/cd-key copy protection which meant that i was unable to play them at the same time.
If i was being honest i would probably only burn one CD copy and use that with maybe a backup on an external HDD. That CD copy could be used by myself or friends…. of course that would also require the disc be in the drive so i guess it’s still not DRM free….
From a logical standpoint sharing a DRM free game when you can both play the game independently is piracy. From a human perspective, as long as the game wasn’t shared exponentially then i don’t think i’d have a problem with it.

Sharing it with my immediate family is another matter. I would happily share a DRM free game with my mum, dad and siblings just as we all sit down and watch the TV and movies together. Only one of us pays for each experience but we all share it.

Regarding the fake torrent issue. I think it’s a terrible idea – not because it can be used to fight piracy but because it opens up a whole ream of legal ramifications for those doing it and these are the reasons why the big publishers do not partake in the practice.
First off there’s such a thing as entrapment…. then, if you’re planning on adding in some tracking software or something, you’re venturing into the realms of illegal monitoring of people which at best requires a license and at worst can only be allowed by government-sanctioned bodies such as the police. If any of your software can be linked with any system problems experienced after installation then there’s going to be one hell of a legal backlash against the people who spread this because legally, the downloader has done nothing wrong by downloading something that was not an actual game… though the intent may have been there. Not sure where intent comes in on this but i wouldn’t want to touch that can of worms.

15/11/2008 at 16:57 Klaus says:

The dark side is awesome though.

15/11/2008 at 17:00 beetleboy says:

This also reminds me where NiN earned the other half of the 15 million in that first week of sales: selling super-exclusive collectors edition boxes with all sorts of extra doodahs for 300 dollars apiece. I’m not sure that kind of pricing would work for WoG, but it does seem that some people go to lengths to acquire limited edition boxes of their favorite games, e.g. Fallout 3 or WoW. Now, unfortunately, I’m not sure if this is really something applicable for indie devs. Maybe instead selling some nifty t-shirts with WoG prints? Physical swag, and if done tastefully, would be walking advertising yet look indie.

Just throwing it out there, dunno if it’d work?

15/11/2008 at 17:02 jalf says:

cliffski:

I know it (fake torrents) works a bit. At least, there are hundreds of people who unknowingly download fake torrents. I know it because I can see them right now downloading in my copy of utorrent :D.

That doesn’t mean they work, even a bit. It means someone are downloading your fake. That is not the same as “someone who would otherwise pirate your game decided to buy it instead”, which is the one meaningful measure of whether your idea “works”. If it doesn’t convert pirates to legit users, it doesn’t work, no matter what other effects it may have.

And it’s naive to think you can outwit pirates. That hasn’t worked for the last 15 years, and I don’t see why it’d work now. Yes, even if we all massively seeded fake torrents, even if so many people did it that it actually *did* make people give up on pirating the game, and even if those who gave up then decided to buy it, that might give you a respite of, say, 2 weeks. After which the torrent sites and the warez groups would adapt, coming up with new and better measures to tell the real deal from the fakes.

Unlike 2DBoy, I think you’ve lost sight of the goal. The goal is to make people *buy* your game. In itself, preventing people from pirating it is worthless. It’s only interesting as a means to increase your sales.

15/11/2008 at 17:03 The Apologist says:

@ Y3k-Bug – sorry, I don’t really understand the point you are trying to make. I am not suggesting people aren’t aware of the harm they do. To knowingly cause harm to others for personal gain is absolutely an ethical issue.

By your definition, so crime would have any moral or ethical component.

15/11/2008 at 17:04 Andrew Wills says:

OK, there’s a lot of people shooting down suggestions made by others about the best way to deal with piracy… What about those same people suggesting ways TO deal with it?

There must be some solution, and the best I’ve seen so far is cliffski’s “fake torrents”. The more fake torrents there are the better. It’s like coding and hacking.

A coder accepts that their work isn’t foolproof, so they put as much in the way as possible to prevent non-legitimate users gaining access to their system, in the hopes that they’ll give up and go away.

What about seeding the ACTUAL game, with tracking code and some kind of memory leak program, slowing down their computers to a crawling pace, making the game unplayable after 20 minutes? I have no idea about the laws of this kind of thing.

15/11/2008 at 17:07 beetleboy says:

The Apologist – pirated WoW is such a terribly inferior product, well, I fumble for likenesses. It’s like using a car made out of cardboard, it’s a bad idea even if it’s free. This is only what I’ve heard from friends that tried pirate WoW servers, but apparently the world (server) frequently crashes, your ten hours of work in a day on the character evaporate into nothing, and 2/3 of the world doesn’t even work at all. If you can afford non-pirated WoW, I think you will want that instead.

This type of persistent online content is however also not something that I’d see as easily applicable for e.g. WoG. However, I don’t doubt for a second that Blizzard absolutely loves it.

15/11/2008 at 17:09 The Apologist says:

@Andrew Wills – I agree, but it would be good to have people understand that it is a gamer that seeded, not a company (big or small)

Personally, I would draw the line at seeding a programme that shared information about them without their knowledge, but maybe I am just too soft

15/11/2008 at 17:10 Sam says:

@Andrew Willis: I’m suggesting that you shouldn’t try to deal with it, with technological solutions. You deal with it by making a game and being a company that people want to give money to so they can make more cool stuff – yes, people will still pirate your stuff, but that’s irrelevant if the people who love you and want to give you money are sufficient to fund your development. Heck, like beetleboy suggested, decouple the “giving money to the developers” thing from the “download a copy of the game” thing, by offering merchandise and other limited physical goods as well (or, if you’re running an online game, by moving to a service-based subscription model).
And, considering the 1:1000 lost sales/pirated copies figure, stop obsessing over every torrent losing you millions of pounds…

15/11/2008 at 17:12 Y3k-Bug says:

@The Apologist

Maybe I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying. I got the impression you were saying that [to use your own analogy] the rates of drunk driving in the UK diminished when an ad campaign made the case that it was wrong to drink and drive. So by making pirates aware of their wrong-doing, you would have less piracy? If that isn’t what you meant, I apologize.

It is important to design systems to help people do the right thing (WoW seemingly being the best example).

But that’s DRM though. You just called it “a system to help people do the right thing” instead of calling it “DRM.”

15/11/2008 at 17:17 Andrew Wills says:

@ Sam: I agree that getting people to buy the game is more important than stopping people pirating, but I see them as seperate issues, both of which should be focussed upon.

2DBoy focussed upon providing gamers with plenty of incentives to purchase their game, as did Cliffski, but both have had their games pirated in huge numbers, despite their efforts (no DRM, low price, good demos, availability).

So what more can they do to improve matters? The fact is there are still people out there who wanted to play World of Goo and Kudos 2, but didn’t pay for it, so they pirated it instead.

15/11/2008 at 17:19 Hypocee says:

@John: I’m not really sure I understand the point of the question, so here’s my best shot: Yes. But! Aside from any moral questions, in a playground piracy/LAN scenario there are additional empirical obstacles over the BitTorrent scenario – remembering to buy a licence, and indeed knowing that the thing’s not free in the first place. Let’s take three hypotheticals – Death Worm, World of Goo and Armageddon Empires.

Assuming Death Worm was a commerical product – maybe at a a $10.00 price point – if I were exposed to it at a LAN party or a browse through a campus share (and liked it) I’d probably have mostly exhausted it by the time I got ‘home’. Whether I initially knew about the shadiness or not, sad to say it probably would have fallen off my radar by the time I got back in a buying phase.

Assuming I’d been introduced to World of Goo at a LAN, I’d still be playing it the next time I had a browser open, and it’s obvious from the amount of content and polish that it’s unlikely to be a freeware game. High probability of purchase.

If I hit Armageddon Empires at a LAN, I’d still be playing it later…but in terms of the interface, the board art and mechanics, it gives off the vibe that maybe some beardy fellow could have just holed up in his basement and hammered it out for the good of the world. Only the card art and the credits listing cue you that this product is probably somebody’s mortgage.

I give those three examples for a reason: I don’t tend to think about this from the consumer side, I always think about it as a pusher: How can I help this good game get more revenue? These three examples illustrate what I consider the three aspects most important to personally pushing a game. 1. Size – I think there’s a certain minimum conceptual ‘size’ below which people can’t sell face-to-face. You can make the best particle toy in the world, but if it only lasts five minutes you’ll need an octopus sales model and it’ll fail to earn anyway. Sad but true. 2. Polish/Variety – it helps if your game makes it obvious that it’s a product. Some games don’t fit this kind of ‘show of force’ like World of Goo, but there are other things you can do, like including unobtrusive credits/website on the menu screen – things that freeware authors tend not to do. As mentioned, this would have helped sell me Armageddon Empires in the absence of knowledge about its status, which brings me to… 3. Make sure consumers know it’s shady. Yes indeed, I am a naughty Blackbeard and I have pushed full games – games that I wanted to succeed, and with the best of intentions. Case in point, cracked Battlefield 1942 installations for Desert Combat at a LAN party, with the cheerful admonition that ‘next time we play I’d like to see a CD OK?’ If there were no demo of AE I’d aggressively pass it around with a text file entitled ARMAGEDDON EMPIRES $30 crypticcomet.com in the same folder. There’s no such thing as a bad sale of a good game. In the BitTorrent scenario, I’m one of the people who responds to those ‘please buy the game if you like it’ announcements; yes, we really do exist folks! I check out the developer, publisher, price, DRM status etc. as long as I’m aware it’s commercial in the first place.

Fortunately, this all reveals the number one factor that didn’t enter in – representative demos. I don’t need to push full versions of WoGoo or AE, because they have generous demos that I can say are indicative of the full experience. I’ve sold 1.5 copies of WoGoo that I know of, maybe a couple more in time, by sending around the demo and my endorsement. It’s an area where (many) games really have an advantage over things like movies and music face-to-face, because you can’t really push ‘part’ of a song.

Well, that got big. Hopefully it’s information you’d like to have.

15/11/2008 at 17:23 The Apologist says:

@Y3k-bug – my example was misleading, because you are right, in the case of drink driving the change did begin by raising awareness of the harm. But what I was trying to say was that, to my way of thinking, it was when people collectively stopped finding the behaviour morally acceptable that they started walking home from the pub or paying for a taxi instead of just jumping in the car.

Well, I guess you could count online components as DRM, and my technical knowledge is limited, maybe that is how they are written. But it seems to me there is a difference between something like SecureROM which only functions to check the validity of the title, and ultimately seems a negative thing for users, and WoW. In WoW the online component of the game is a fundamental part of the game design, and is something its users love. Blizzard maintains good servers, and provide a service that is difficult for anyone else to offer, meaning that a (literally) vast number of users make, in my view, the right choice.

You might regard it as DRM, but either way it is about the game and gives value to the player.

15/11/2008 at 17:25 Sam says:

@Andrew Wills:
Yes, but the 1:1000 ratio implies that most of those people aren’t lost sales. So, what you’re saying isn’t “how can we make more pirates buy the game”, but effectively “how can I make sure no-one gets a hold of my game without being made to pay for it?”. The deeply communist soul of me thinks that this is sort of missing the point.
2DBoy have the right attitude to this, in my opinion – don’t worry about the pirates, they’re background noise freeloaders. You can’t turn them into sales, so why make effort to stop them from playing the game – at best, someone seeing them playing it might be encouraged to actually buy the game… or donate money to you, or buy one of your promotional t-shirts.
After all, you made the game because you love it, right? As long as you *are* getting enough paying customers to be comfortable in your lifestyle, why are you begrudging other people the chance to love it as well?

15/11/2008 at 17:26 Y3k-Bug says:

There isn’t a single game out there that doesn’t have a pirated version. The thing is that with online games with key verification, you’ve instantly made it less worthwhile to pirate due to not having it be a part of the full game world greated by owners of the legit copies.

15/11/2008 at 17:31 Y3k-Bug says:

@The Apologist

You just nailed it right there. While Blizzard’s system is definitely DRM, its DRM that has value; connecting millions of people to a rich game world.

Steam is the same case. It’s DRM through and through but has definite value besides the fact. IM client, the ability to instantly find and join your friends in any game you both own, a built in store to purchase more games, etc.

But can a DRM scheme add value in a single player game? Is it even possible?

15/11/2008 at 17:33 cliffski says:

“After all, you made the game because you love it, right? As long as you *are* getting enough paying customers to be comfortable in your lifestyle”

This isn’t the point. In order for any marketplace to deliver the BEST games, the market *signals* have to work. That means that good games need to make good money, crap games need to make crap money, and awesome games need to make awesome money.
If World Of Goo made $4million, then developers would make more awesome games like WoG. That’s a GOOD thing all round.
Like it or not, industries work around money. If Hidden Object Dash IX makes more money than WoG, you will get more cloned casual-game sequels and less original masterpieces like WoG. This is a bad thing.

I want WoG to make tons of money because it’s a GREAT game, and I want the industry to make more games like that. Whether or not 2DBoy want or need the money is, in effect, not the point.

15/11/2008 at 17:36 cliffski says:

jalf why are you so pissed off that I might seed fake torrents of my games? Unless you torrent all your games, how does what I do and suggest bother you in any way at all?
If I’m wasting my time then fine, it’s my time to waste. I don’t like seeing game developers ripped off, especially me. I don’t get why people get so annoyed at me for suggesting ways to prevent that *shrug*

15/11/2008 at 17:43 Andrew Wills says:

@ Sam: Whilst in principle I agree with you, as you’re completely right, they ARE background noise, they aren’t worth the time and effort, but making it easier for them, and removing the consequences and difficulties of pirating, will only make people paying for the game frustrated.

If 2DBoy were to ever say “Fine, I give up, pirate away, or buy my game, it’s up to you, but don’t worry, I wont press charges, or put any obstacles in your way!” then what’s the point of buying the game. You get no advantage as a paying customer.

If there are no consequences for breaking the law, no downside and no difficulty, then more people would turn to piracy.

15/11/2008 at 17:56 Y3k-Bug says:

@The Apologist

I hear ya man. With the way things are looking now, Epic single player titles like Deus Ex and Bioshock are gonna go the way of the dodo.

15/11/2008 at 17:56 Sam says:

@Andrew Wills (and cliffski, really):
What’s the point of giving to charity? It doesn’t give you any advantage, compared to not giving to charity.
Effectively, 2DBoy *have* said what you’ve suggested they could say. They’re not pressing charges, they have no DRM, ron carmel himself has said that he’s not interested in trying to punish the pirates.
And, yet, 15,000 people, so far, have bought their game. Stardock did even better, with basically the same message.
The advantage you get as a paying customer is knowing that you’re helping out the people you like, who make the games that you like, and that your money is going to them to help them do more things like that.
That’s why I buy the games that I buy. That’s why I’ve effectively bought X-COM three times now, and Deus Ex twice, to get them in different formats (and on Steam, etc). That’s why if Introversion, 2DBoy, etc, all had “donate to us now” buttons, I’d have used them to give them more money than the price of the game allows (it’s why I like the idea of a Radiohead style “choose the price you want to pay for this download” system, so I can pay more if I want to).
That’s also why I don’t care if people pirate those same games. Why should I be frustrated? Why should I be sad that someone else gets to play a game, for free, that I chose to pay money for? I like those games, why do I begrudge other people also getting to play them?

15/11/2008 at 17:58 Nimic says:

You’re missing the point, cliffski. Works in what way? In that it makes some people mildly irritated for all of five minutes until they find a working torrent? Like someone said, fighting piracy is only worth it if it brings someone to actually buy the game.

15/11/2008 at 18:05 Rev. S Campbell says:

Mm. It’s a ridiculously stupid idea, because however much you might want to hit out at them, it’s not rational. The more you piss them off, the less inclined they’ll ever be to buy your game. And while I’m sure it’d comfort a lot of people to portray things as more black-and-white, the simple truth is that pirates DO buy games.

15/11/2008 at 18:13 Hypocee says:

If 2DBoy were to ever say “Fine, I give up, pirate away, or buy my game, it’s up to you, but don’t worry, I wont press charges, or put any obstacles in your way!” then what’s the point of buying the game. You get no advantage as a paying customer.

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001341.html

15/11/2008 at 18:20 Gap Gen says:

Actually, on Cliffski’s point I could see big publishers seeding bad torrents randomly from a big server, if that would be cost effective.

15/11/2008 at 18:22 Rev. S Campbell says:

“If someone is annoyed at me for trying to stop people taking my games for free, then frankly, fuck em. I don’t care about how much I annoy people with that attitude”

I know you don’t. I and others are merely pointing out that it’s your own throat you’re cutting there. Or, if you prefer, your nose to spite your face. Whatever you think, even someone who’s pirating your game today is a potential customer tomorrow.

15/11/2008 at 18:33 cliffski says:

“Which is one reason I’ve never bothered to check out Political Machine or Kudos and whatever else you do. I actively avoid anything with your name on it.”

because I don’t approve of piracy?
Frankly why do I care? If you are so pro-piracy as to hate me for my stance on it, then you aren’t going to buy my games (or anyone else’s) anyway.

But hey, if it makes you feel big and tough…

15/11/2008 at 18:41 cliffski says:

82% is low?
Seriously?

15/11/2008 at 18:50 karthik says:

Reading the entire comment thread this far has been an exercise in masochism. Barring a few genuinely insightful comments, straw men arguments and anecdotal statistics abound.
Considering, however, that this is the first Piracy-related-article I’m seeing that is removed from needless DRM bashing, I was hoping to find a convincing answer to John’s question in the comments:
What do piracy figures represent?
And on a related note:
How do we fight piracy?
Nikon’s suggestion above is the only one that appears actually feasible. Probing the latter question gives:
What is the indispensable component of the process of pirating a game?
The ISP, of course. The Internet connection is the one thing every pirate must pay for. A tie up between ISPs and developers to charge for downloads will force pirates to become legitimate customers- or to give up. The verification could, perhaps, be carried out based on checksums of the game content freely seeded/hosted both on Pirate bay and through more official channels. Also, ISPs claim torrents hurt them, (leading to much port blocking, content filtering and whatnot) so the cost to the ISP can be recovered as part of the download price as well.
I suspect that this will be broken as well in a short period of time. But it’s a start. Besides, it agrees with the nature of the medium: Digital content is an infinite supply market, so constricting supply through artificial means (such as by seeding fake torrents) makes less sense than making it widely available and charging for the process of obtaining the content, the “transportation costs”, so to speak.
With widespread fake torrents, eventually trusted meta-channels will rise that carry metadata about genuine torrents.

Unfortunately, I’m no network engineer. I’m not sure if this method of authentication (checking by the ISP, effectively a DRM) is any harder to crack than the present methods.

15/11/2008 at 18:59 Y3k-Bug says:

@karthik

That idea isn’t at all feasible.

An ISP’s job is to provide me with a connection to the Internet, not to police what I do on it. The most they can do is send out a cease and desist letter to the owner of the connection, and thats it. And who exactly is going to pay the astronomical fees associated with handling all this? You need to pay a company to monitor all the torrents out there, you need lawyers to draw up these letters, and you need to get the ISPs to play ball. Since the gaming industry doesn’t have an lobbying body that represents the interests of all publishers, the idea is dead in the water.

Secondly, its illegal. An ISP can’t charge you for what you choose to download. That’s getting into net neutrality, which is a separate issue entirely. But at least here in the US its quite illegal.

15/11/2008 at 19:05 Y3k-Bug says:

You really see 82% as being that far from 95% in this argument?

82% isn’t low using any benchmark man. Thats a shit-ton of piracy going down.

15/11/2008 at 19:15 Jochen Scheisse says:

Oh, Mr. Campbell, I had such a beautiful analogy in store for 82% piracy being comparably low, but due to me being repeatedly critizised for my tasteless analogies, I shall not use it.

So it is maybe comparably low, but still very very high.

15/11/2008 at 19:16 Gap Gen says:

Maybe you could have non-compulsory online activation, but if you don’t activate then it plays sea shanties non-stop at almost sub-audible levels.

15/11/2008 at 19:18 Y3k-Bug says:

Fair enough. But thats still a whole lotta piracy.

15/11/2008 at 19:20 oddbob says:

“Or maybe if you don’t pay then you can still play but the NPCs are much, much ruder to you”

Dude, that’s an incentive to not pay. Or is that just me?

15/11/2008 at 19:24 nikos says:

@karthik and Y3k-bug

The idea of taxing the internet (i.e. everyone and anyone) won’t work of course. But there are plans for voluntary subscription to networks that will legally allow you to share, by paying a small fixed-rate amount. Such a network would pay a license fee to the content providers, and whitelist the content allowed to be swapped. This is thought of as a way to combine the ease of P2P with “legal ease of mind”.

Discussion on proposal for the music industry here:

15/11/2008 at 19:25 nikos says:

for some reason the forum ate my link, here it is again

15/11/2008 at 19:29 Duoae says:

@ Gap Gen

There may be some confusion here, but three people replied with basically the same thing – publishers and developers cannot “see” pirated versions unless, like WoG, the game contacts the server. This is rare for single-player-only games.

I understand what people are saying… though i fail to see how you guys are missing the point of what i’m trying to say there is definitely confusion. I’ll state my point one last time.

Developers and publishers ‘see’ the pirated games as equal to or some function of the seeded and downloaded torrent numbers freely available on the internet if you go and have a look at those sites that provide trackers. These numbers do inform the decisions of the publishers and developers.
From a both of those standpoints (dev&pub) there is the same conclusion coming through (i.e. they infer something from them):

1) More people are pirating the game than paying for it.
2) These people want to pirate the game because they want to play it.
Ergo
3) These people want this game and others like it of the same type but because they can get it for free will not pay for it.
4) Implementing a system that stops them from getting it for free will result in increased sales because there are a lot of people out there who want the game but have been getting it ‘cheaper’.

And this is where my original comment of: “Actually, it’s the opposite. If you pirate something you’re sending the message to the producer that you want that product comes into the equation. It makes perfect logical sense to me but i guess i must be using some sort of moon logic or something.

My main point, though, was that I don’t see how most publishers can ’see’ pirated games and use them as evidence for potential success.

They can’t and we all know this…. but like i said in one of my previous posts – they use torrent numbers as if they were actual real numbers and as an indicator of demand that is being satiated by the availability of a cheaper (i.e. pirated) version of the product.

I’d agree that the weight of your single purchase is limited, but then so is your vote in an election. The point is that multiple people make the same decision as you, so if you make a bad one then statistically so do a lot of other people. Sure, the point of refunds and so on affects things slightly but then this is true of any commercial product, and fewer stores are accepting refunds as it’s obvious you can copy games and then return them.

Like i said above: the informed part of the consumer base (i.e. us) is less than 10%. For small publishers like for WoG and Introversion their market is pretty much only comprised of this 10% – the informed. Therefore the vote with your wallet mentality can actually make a difference because one sale will make a difference.

For larger publishers and developers – those who mainly target the other 90% of the consumer base through TV, magazine, billboard and major website ads the vote with your wallet mentality will not work unless that 90% of the uninformed consumer base is given the information. We all know about DRM, install limits and games that are getting panned in previews etc. They don’t. It’s only when they buy a game that they realise their mistake and by then the time to vote with your wallet is passed and since they can’t return the game then they don’t get a second chance.
Similarly a large portion of that 90% don’t pay attention to the publisher or developer and so won’t boycott future games because they were made by the same team or whatever.
Also, with regards to DRM and install limitations that 90% won’t know or care (as John Riccitiello pointed out in those famous Gamasutra and Eurogamer interviews) until they have a problem with them and even then they’re effectively in the thrall of the game company because they have no information infrastructure that they know how to use to rely on in solving the problem.

This is nothing like a vote in an election because if you don’t know the facts of each party’s manifesto then it’s your own fault – those facts are not hidden from the voter and in fact many shady practices are revealed by the general press. Now, imagine if 90% of the voters didn’t access radio, TV, the internet or newspapers and instead voted based on the ‘party political broadcasts’ or party ‘newsletters’ we get. Would you be as sure that the 10% could make a difference if they voted for party B when party A had the best marketing strategy (even though they were bigots and shady dealers behind it all)?

15/11/2008 at 19:33 karthik says:

@Y3k-Bug
I agree, net neutrality isn’t something anyone ought to mess with. The idea is appealing because it makes no difference to the legitimate customer whether he’s paying an ISP or (say) Steam for his purchase, while stepping on the pirate’s Achilles heel.
But yeah, a gargantuan alliance between the ISPs and game corporations has the trappings of a dystopian Internet, which is almost as bad as hardware DRM.
On a more general note, I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer to “What do these piracy figures mean?”
I’m reminded of a chapter from Freakonomics where Levitt lists a number of possible reasons for the decrease in crime rate in the USA post 1990, and asks the reader to guess which of the reasons was causative of the drop. The guesses in this thread resemble the reader’s guesses from the list of reasons in the book- speculative and based on intuition and personal bias.
The scientific method of ascertaining the true reasons- based on actual data- won’t be carried out anytime soon given the difficulty of obtaining information on the Pirate demographic. Which is, quite surely, a bit maddening given the length of this debate.

15/11/2008 at 19:42 Rev. S Campbell says:

“we are risking normalising piracy”

Piracy is already regarded as “normal”, and has been since the days of the Spectrum.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4122624.stm

(Sorry, you’ll have to cut and paste, I can’t be arsed figuring out the HTML.)

All the industry’s shrieking hysteria about piracy funding Nazi paedo snuff terrorists for the last 20 years hasn’t made a dent in that impression, and it never will. Nobody except pious nerds thinks piracy is much of a crime. Them’s just the facts, like it or not.

15/11/2008 at 20:27 Rev. S Campbell says:

Unless you think it is right?

Was that not clear?

My position has evolved over 20 years of experience of all sides of the industry, and piracy is ultimately, overall, beneficial to everyone involved. That’s as good a definition of “right” as I can think of. I have little time for the promotion of ideological dogma over practical reality.

15/11/2008 at 20:53 cliffski says:

aha, I see you were a level designer on cannon fodder 2, which is great, but hardly relevant to what challenges face current pc game developers…

15/11/2008 at 21:12 Rev. S Campbell says:

You can insist that piracy is a great thing all you want.

Thanks for the permission!

15/11/2008 at 21:15 Jelly says:

Surely Piracy = Annoyed Developers = Less or no games?

15/11/2008 at 21:20 Jon R. says:

Cliff, you are right and always have been. Whatever you think about the issue, keep on it. I want you do protect your profits in whatever way you see fit, and i say this with the sincerity of someone who genuinely wants you to starve if it means you no longer get to put out games that only technically allow you to believe you can speak with the voice of a game designer.

I like the idea that it matters one way or the other what message it sends to the industry. The industry follows its own retarded notions, then generates whatever rationale for it after. Did you fuckballs honestly forget how long we had to bitch about co-op before developers stopped whining and bothered to start including it again?

In general, god fucking forbid anyone should have to create something that anyone would actually want to buy instead of desperately trying to shoehorn “You break it, you bought it” into applying to something that intrinsically cannot be broken.. Such an alien concept for an industry built on AAA obsolescence.

15/11/2008 at 21:26 Jelly says:

@ Rev. S Campbell

Faster Broadband and greater availability of pirated games will, surprisingly, result in an increase in piracy. Couple that with considerably less piracy on alternative platforms, and PC Developers will begin either decreasing the priority of PC ports or just forgetting them altogether.

15/11/2008 at 21:39 Jelly says:

Not just download speeds, but availability: back in the day, you’d have to be part of a comparably small community to have access to free copies of the latest games. Nowadays, there are massive warez forums with thousands of members and torrent sites with millions.

COD4 is about 6.4GB.

:3

15/11/2008 at 22:11 Robert says:

I’m a student in New Zealand, and each week, I live on $160NZD, which is $90USD or £60.50 (go,go xe.com). I spend $100NZ on rent, and $30NZ on power, phone, etc and then I need $5-10 for bus fares. This leaves me with $30NZ, which mostly goes on food. If I shop from the Asian Warehouse, I can make food down to $20NZ a week.

$160 a week is fairly standard for a student here in NZ.

Games in New Zealand cost $100NZ, $110 for a “AAA” title. So if I live on noodles, ignore my girlfriend and friends and bike rather than bus, I can buy one game every 3 or 4 months. Luckily, my girlfriend is very understanding, and almost every fucking cent I can claw away from my meagre food budget goes on games. However, there is a large shortfall… I can’t play one game solidly for 4 months, not at the rate I go. So I pirate some games, and buy what I can.

When I was young enough to not have (and not need) any income at all, I pirated nearly all of my games (and bought all the ones I could over birthdays and Christmas). When I worked full time in-between high school and uni two years ago. I bought a new game, with real money, from a shop, every week, and pirated nothing.

I know, I know, “wah wah fucking sob story, just pay for them.” I do feel awful about it; as soon as I have any money, I spend it on games. It’s almost like a subscription, rather than a product-purchase. I pay 90% of my “spare” income, and I can play all the games I like. Sometimes that 90% is pittance a week, and sometimes it’s fifty quid. If only the game industry worked as a whole, if I paid money for one game, but pirated another, somehow both would get a share of that sale.

Did I pirate World of Goo? Nope, even though I loved the demo. Since ‘Audiosurf’ came out, and I saved up for it for a month and a half, and from reading RPS so much, I’ve always felt the incorrect feeling that indie game developers are “on my side” and big companies aren’t, and that’s what’s stopped me downloading World of Goo and others. Of course, EVERYONE who makes a game is on my side, I very much doubt that there are any game developers (outside of the Russian guys that made that Truck Game) that aren’t in it out of passion.

So, I suppose to summarise. 100% of the people I know who pirate games, do it because they’re poor, and would otherwise go without. And 100% of the people I know who pirate games, go without food quite often just to buy games. 85% of games are just priced too high for me, but 100% of games are priced WAY below anything representative of how much effort went into making them. “We” aren’t a bunch of people who think that somehow, downloading games and not paying the authors is “yeah, cool, anarchy… or something!!”, fucking hell how I’d dearly love to be able to buy games, and in a few years, I’ll be able to.

~

P.s. Only game which is available on Steam that I have ever pirated was Half Life 2 (because fucking Steam was a piece of crap, and I was on dialup), which I now own. Nearly every single game I have bought in the past 2 years has been on Steam (because Steam is really, really awesome, and I am on cable).

15/11/2008 at 23:06 BonSequitur says:

There are legitimate uses for BitTorrent, so trying to restrict it as “piracy software” is downright fascist. Actually, even if there weren’t legitimate uses for BitTorrent, attempting to ban software is fascist.

Apologist: A “seeder” is just someone in a torrent who isn’t “leeching,” that is, someone who already has the whole file being torrented and who is just uploading. BitTorrent relies on a small number of seeders distributing pieces of the file to a much larger number of leechers, who then proceed to exchange the pieces between themselves to re-assemble the file.

15/11/2008 at 23:28 Thiefsie says:

Nice to see some people digging themselves holes and others rising well above it. I don’t have much more to add to this apart from vaguely being of the mind that rampant piracy is a huge part of publicity and maybe moreso in the indie area is well on the way to actually increasing sales. Have I bought Braid – No. Have I bought Kudos – No, have I played either – No. Have I bought WoG – Yes, Did I buy Trials – Yes, Did I buy Audiosurf – regrettably yes. Do I pirate games – many yes. Do I buy games – many yes.

Who would have thought 2/3 guys at 2D boy would garner the frankly fucking huge amount on attention they have… with presumably not much marketing budget?

Just to add my demographic to whatever debate needs them. I too was off the class of teen (or lets say student) that pirated EVERYTHING except very early before I knew about pirating, and then as incomes increased and maturity grew, started buying much much more entertainment. I still pirate many games (part collector perhaps??) but generally they are old games which until recently haven’t had much of a revenue stream for developers anyway (so late after release). I also don’t play at least 80% of the games I pirate… however in the last month alone I have bought 6 full ticket price new games, and I intend to get my value out of them all.

As others have said, piracy != lost sale. Developer’s goals should to sell as many friggin copies as they can no matter what, not combat the sliding slope of piracy.

I still probably think maybe that WoG would have been slightly better if the serial keys used for pre-ordering were used the same way for the final thing, at least then their statistics would be able to use a far more concrete serial key way of determining numbers rather than unique ids.

As an aside, honestly DRM rarely bothers me at all. Legitimately I’ve hardly ever been bothered by it for real, and I figure if suddenly one of my games fails to work I’ll just crack it. What does bother me though, is regional DRM and price fixing. CoD 4 is still $88.50 USD on Steam for me. Hah!

16/11/2008 at 00:05 Jon R. says:

That’s up to the publisher though, despite Valve having complete control over the distribution method and taking a huge chunk of the profit off of doing little work of their own for it.

Maybe. I could be wrong. Did RPS bother to ask what that whole deal was about when they were interviewing people there? Because, gee, that might have been a relevant line of questioning.

16/11/2008 at 00:17 Y3k-Bug says:

Random useless post:

This thread… this thread is OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!!@%%%

16/11/2008 at 01:20 Gap Gen says:

Duoae : I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know what motivates publishers as I’m not a publisher and have never spoken to one. But as you say, if publishers chase sales from people who won’t buy games then they are idiots. If they have market data that suggests that a sufficient number of pirates can be persuaded to buy legitimate copies (as cliffski tried in his dialogue with pirates) then fair enough.

16/11/2008 at 01:50 Devan says:

Just a thought on fake torrents. If I were to help seed them, I would need to download first, and risk becoming another piracy statistic :(

Another thought: I wonder how much the “DRM Free” tact has helped 2D Boy. It’s a good product which many people love. I didn’t find it all that enjoyable, but bought it anyway partly because I want to support the initiative (which is a factor in all my other DRM-free purchases as well). So I am one person who would likely not have played farther than the demo if it had used DRM. I wonder how many other sales were clinched for the same reason.
The “DRM Free” headline probably also increased word-of-mouth advertising for the product and made people interested in its success, as seen here.
Finally, 2D Boy indicates in their article that DRM does not seem to diminish piracy at all. So, it seems in an environment where DRM is becoming increasingly burdensome for buyers, the lack of it has significantly buoyed WoG’s financial success, which is of course 2D Boy’s main objective.
They’ve also received a lot of mindshare these days, which is great if they want to produce more titles.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, piracy sucks and is an ongoing problem, but 2D Boy made the right decisions and seems to be benefiting from them.

16/11/2008 at 02:36 Hypocee says:

@Beetleboy again: Actually, I now recall that 2DBoy is part of an experiment in indie game/clothing crossover marketing: http://2dboy.com/2008/03/20/sexy-indie-game-shirts-sightings/

16/11/2008 at 07:42 Nimic says:

Personally, I used to pirate almost everything, on account of me not having any money. Well, maybe not “almost everything”, but quite a lot. Then, when I started having an income the last few years I more and more started buying games I otherwise would have downloaded, and now I haven’t downloaded a game in quite a long time. This is, of course, partly because I can now afford to buy most of the games I want, but also partly because of services like Steam and now GoG (and, despite it’s huge shortcomings, EA Downloader).

16/11/2008 at 08:26 cliffski says:

oooh and you got me banned from TPB.
How helpful. Pity they allow anonymous registration isn’t it.
nice try pirates.

16/11/2008 at 08:39 The Apologist says:

Sorry for my bad typing BTW. It’s early…

16/11/2008 at 09:09 keety says:

I bought WoG, I never recieved a link for the download after going through Paypal, so I downloaded a copy off a newsgroup.

16/11/2008 at 09:33 cliffski says:

PC gaming is a wasteland of shoddy console ports now. That wasn’t the case 5 years ago.
People might like to deny it, but this is because of piracy. Everyone I know in retail gaming who used to make PC games now makes console games and do half assed ports later. Some are abandoning PC entirely because of the fear that the mere existence of PC ports reduces console sales due to PC piracy.
I’d love to have more decent turn bsed strategy and RTS games designed for a keyboard and mouse. More flight sims, and more complex sim games. hardly anyone makes them, because they just don’t make any money these days.
That’s all thanks to the ‘heroes’ at places like thepiratebay.

16/11/2008 at 10:29 cliffski says:

“cliffsky, what happened to your open approach to talking to the pirates? Why all this hatred now? What’s changed?”

I have talked to pirates, and entirely taken on board their justifications for piracy. I ditched DRM entirely, dropped the price of the games, and worked harder on them. I never claimed I wasn’t bothered by piracy or saw it as harmless, and I still don’t. I still have nothing but contempt for people who actively go out of their way to spread pirated copies far as wide (as opposed to people who just download a copy as a demo).
There is a world of difference between a kid in mexico downlaoding a pirated copy of a game he cannot afford, and some swine who runs a warez site and makes a fortune in selling ad space while distributing other peoples hard work.
The first one I can understand, the second one needs to get caught and fined big time. I know some people think that’s harsh, but generally those people aren’t the ones whose work is being pirated… :(

16/11/2008 at 10:41 Sam says:

@cliffski: Considering how the TV Licensing Authority is seen in the UK, that’s not the best example for you to use. People do resent paying the License Fee, and do try to get out of it… and this isn’t seen, by most people, as a horrific crime.
You’ve also missed the point where Meat Circus and I both demonstrate that, unless the content producer’s work is of infinite value, the *fraction of that cost per copy* tends to zero. Arguing otherwise suggests that you think the value of your work *increases* the more people have a copy of your product… which surely you don’t think?

16/11/2008 at 11:03 Sam says:

@Jim: The cost to the content producer is a one-time cost, per product. Unfortunately, the economics of physical goods doesn’t work when dealing with informational products, and it does the whole “cost per copy = one time cost / number of copies” thing that all of us but cliffski agree leads to the cost per copy being effectively zero.
Of course, this doesn’t help repay the one-time cost, since we can’t integrate infinitesimals to get real money in real life.
Most companies, however, do get people who are prepared to pay more than the actual value of the copy – “paying customers” – the additional value of which can be taken to repay the one time cost of content production. (As the value of a copy is zero, these paying customers are worth, effectively, countless pirated copies.) Allowing people other means of giving money to the producer – donations, merchandise etc – or allowing them to choose the price they want to pay for a copy of the product (some will choose above the value the producer wants), are other ways to realistically recoup those one-time costs.

16/11/2008 at 11:13 Dinger says:

Simulations largely died not because people found more interesting types of games, but rather because simulation freaks are classic early adopters. Twenty years ago, any AAA flight sim whatsoever was guaranteed to move 150k copies in the US. That would be a huge success. Today, any AAA flight sim will probably move the same number of copies, and be a failure. Computers got too good for them.
Of course, Microsoft did its best to screw things too. Simulator fans will buy a lot of hardware for their game (somewhat weird when you consider that someone will not blink at dropping $1000 on controls, but complain that $70 is “too expensive” for the software), and in the name of “security”, XP (KB pass-through controls) and then Vista (anything not running off of USB) disabled a bunch of it.
Back in the day, most PC owners who played games had joysticks, too. Today? Heck, I own one, but it’s on another continent.

16/11/2008 at 12:01 jay says:

Meat Circus, what mindset should creators have?
What should they be doing instead of what they are doing now?
(These are actual questions not anything else)

16/11/2008 at 12:08 cliffski says:

Wow.
So people are seriously (with a straight face no less). are now suggesting that when you buy something, you should only be charged the MARGINAL cost of production?
Wow.
I mean WOW. This is like economics 101. You think that because a pharmaceutical company can make an additional pill for £0.01, then it should cost £0.01? because if you do, you just killed off the incentive for anyone to cure any disease by doing research.
How do you think the R&D costs of new cars, new chips, new video cards etc get paid back?
Every sale pays back the entire marginal cost plus some percentage of the fixed cost based upon the likely sales of the product. I didn’t realise this was a big secret.

If I knew everyone I’d market my next game to thought that they should only pay the marginal cost of each copy, then I knew my total earnings would be zero and I would go to work in Tescos. It is only because HONEST people actually pay for stuff that pirates get to enjoy stuff for free.

Your model of paying nothing for content only works if other people do not do what you do. Effectively, you are just leeching off honest people. The same applies to the license fee, sky subscriptions and income tax.

16/11/2008 at 12:11 Sam says:

@cliffski: We wouldn’t know, North Korea doesn’t talk to anyone. Soviet Russia managed to make supercavitating torpedoes before the West did, though…

16/11/2008 at 12:23 Rev. S Campbell says:

Lots of interesting points here.

how many long loved and cherished games companies are still around Stu?

I don’t know who you love, of course. But I’ve never seen a shred of evidence that any individual creator ever went bust because of piracy. Games which are massively pirated still sell huge numbers if they’re popular enough – Gran Turismo 2 is the usual banner example here, arriving at probably the peak of PS1 piracy, yet still selling TEN MILLION copies. Feel free to pick your own from a thousand similar examples. Is Peggle any less pirated than any other game? Yet it’s still sold millions.

What does that tell us? That if you make games that enough people like, you’ll sell enough to make money regardless of piracy. If you don’t, you’ll go bust regardless of piracy. Nobody’s ever offered one iota of evidence of piracy being the thing that made the difference between success and failure.

PC gaming is a wasteland of shoddy console ports now. That wasn’t the case 5 years ago

If PC gaming is less diverse now than it was ten years ago (I’m with Jim on it being 10 not 5, and I’d certainly say that it is less diverse now, because 10 years ago I could look at a PC games magazine and not want to kill myself), it’s because PC developers and gamers have been engaged on an epic trip up their own fundament. I expanded on this theory at great length in a series for Total PC Gaming recently, but essentially it’s no different to what happened towards the end of the Amiga’s life – nerds successfully ghettoised the format by swarming out to buy the same old generic shit every month and ignoring more innovative and accessible releases.

It’s hardly a phenomenon unique to the PC or even to gaming, but the PC gaming demographic – being made up almost entirely of obsessive tech-nerd males – is more vulnerable to the effect than most spheres of culture. I tried to do my bit to fight it by bringing Indie Zone to PCZ and bigging up fun, accessible little games, but you can’t resist the power of the ignorant masses and their lust for yet another Bald Space Marine floating-head-shooter that you need a £200 graphics card to show off properly, or more fucking wizards.

but that fact is outweighed by my belief that piracy is cheating/stealing and ultimately not paying for the work of people who laboured to create it. That alone – and at least my own notion of a societal agreement to fairness and not ripping people off – makes it unacceptable

Well, now, that rather depends on your perspective of “societal fairness”, doesn’t it? A great many people work at least as hard as software developers, yet unfortunately find themselves in professions that society happens to value poorly. Cleaners, sewage workers, binmen, pick your own emotive example, but a lot of people slave their souls to shadows for a sub-survival income and could no more afford a £40 videogame than they could buy a diamond Ferrari.

“Tough shit,” you might say, “they should have studied harder and got a useful job like being a City banker or Big Brother contestant, but the point is, why shouldn’t people who work incredibly hard be allowed to share the cultural fruits of the society they support, if it doesn’t make any difference to anyone else? If someone can’t afford to buy a game, then it doesn’t matter either practically or morally if they play a copy of it.

Even from the purely selfish perspective that we see so much of here, people being happier, in general, is good for everyone. Would you pay an extra £5 in tax a year if it meant housing all of the homeless, which in turn meant you weren’t harassed by beggars every 20 yards when you went shopping? I would, purely out of self-interest rather than pity or charity, but I get the feeling most of you would be writing angry letters to the Daily Express about “yet another bloody tax hike”, blind to the obvious benefits for everyone.

I’d be a lot more sympathetic towards people’s indignant objections if they weren’t so transparently based on an abstract ideological notion of maintaining status and differentials, and I don’t find that especially moral.

(And just by the by, if it came to the crunch I know who I’d rather society tried to do without, between a sewage worker and a videogame developer.)

Like I said before – I haven’t yet heard a PRACTICAL argument for piracy being bad, because everyone seems to accept that it has beneficial effects even for developers and publishers, and it clearly does for everyone else involved, while we simply don’t have any evidence for those effects being outweighed by negative ones, other than that it offends people’s personal morals. And, y’know, that just puts you alongside the people demanding Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross be publicly killed for a mildly off-colour pisstake on an old man who wasn’t very bothered, or the fundamentalist nutters who wanted Jerry Springer The Opera banned, or the baying mobs burning down the Danish embassy over a newspaper cartoon. Show me facts. Show me figures. Show me victims. Because otherwise all I can see is winners, and I don’t give a toss if your petty ideological dogma gets all huffy about it.

16/11/2008 at 12:35 Paul Moloney says:

“The point I wish to make, Revd., is that Piracy is morally neutral, and practically a great boon to the creative industries.”

What absolute twaddle. If for your own reasons of guilt you want to rationalise that there’s nothing wrong in making copies of people’s work rather than paying them for it, go ahead, but please don’t embarrass yourself by putting it forward as a some kind of moral position for we adult to consider. This is just the usual self-serving dreck put forward by most pirates; don’t feel your’re anything special.

P.

16/11/2008 at 12:43 The Apologist says:

Rev – you are asking for a practical argument?

Well, as far as I can see your argument boils down to ‘as long as there are enough honest people prepared to pay the produced for the entertainment they want, piracy doesn’t matter’.

Well, Cliffski and I have both pointed out that, in practical terms, pirates are spongers and if everyone did what they advocate then no-one would develop games.

I would go on to suggest that widespread piracy may well have a corrosive normative effect – those who would pay see others getting theirs for free and it becomes easier to justify ethically questionable behaviour.

And @Sam – it is perhaps more relevant to note that Ukraine have started developing good games since…er Capitalism…the soviet’s nuclear capacity was developed because it was in the State’s interest for self-preservation. It seems unlikely that videogames probably wouldn’t fall into that category. No profit motive, no games.

16/11/2008 at 12:47 The Apologist says:

No profit motive, no commercial games industry.

I am not saying creativity doesn’t exist outside of the profit motive, but unless you are content with the production values of modders, then yes, I am saying that.

Perhaps I should have written, no profit motive, no games industry.

Show me different?

16/11/2008 at 12:48 cliffski says:

Sigh.
So meat circus, if you think all games should be free, how the hell do you think new games like World Of Goo and Oblivion and Call of Duty are going to get made?
Are bored billionaires going to fund them out of charity.
What a load of twaddle.
I’m not prepared to pay anything for pickle, because I don’t like pickle. That doesn’t mean I can insist that the pickle manufacturers make it and let me steal it without repercussions does it?

Its flipping amazing that people will hurl abuse at DEVELOPERS for having a sense of entitlement, when the pirates are the ones taking the fruits of our hard work for free.

On days like today I HATE PC gaming, and fully understand why nobody else I know wastes their time with it any more.

16/11/2008 at 12:51 cliffski says:

“You do know that Intellectual Property doesn’t exist, don’t you?”

Nor does money. In fact, money is a ‘state-mandated monopoly”.
I imagine you’d cry like a baby if I suddenly reduced your bank balance to zero. But why?
Money is an artificial concept that only has value due to state mandated artificial scarcity. if you try and copy money, you go to prison for a very very long time.

16/11/2008 at 12:53 The Apologist says:

“You want it to be illegal for me to create copies of a game created by somebody else. What is that if not a state-mandated monopoly?”

A functioning market.

16/11/2008 at 12:55 Rev. S Campbell says:

@ Rev – that you are being impractical,

In what possible sense?

16/11/2008 at 12:59 Thirith says:

@Meat Circus: I’m interested – how is cliffski’s sense of entitlement as a developer misplaced, yet that of someone playing pirated games (i.e. feeling entitled to playing these games without paying anything) not a misplaced sense of entitlement?

16/11/2008 at 13:01 The Apologist says:

@ Rev – I was being speculative, but so are you. You haven’t presented any figures on piracy years ago, for example?

Are you arguing that everything is fine if only publishers believed it was? Well, they don’t, and I don’t understand really the reasons we should be doubting them? And as a gamer, I see fewer games I enjoyed, and a load of console ports instead.

You blame paying consumers for that. To an extent that may be true. I think it is equally reasonable to suggest that people pirating games has had an important effect.

16/11/2008 at 13:03 cliffski says:

“You claim to create games because you love them, but are spending all your time demanding your ‘right’ to earn money.”

what horseshit.
I don’t demand anything. I want to be paid in exchange for the effort I put into making games BY PEOPLE WHO PLAY THE FULL VERSION.

if you think that’s unreasonable, then frankly, I suggest you grow up.
Nothing I, or anyone else says will ever persuade you that piracy is wrong. You will no doubt feel that you ar a victim of an evil facist state if you ever get caught and fined, and moan about it or the internet forever more.
I don’t care.

You are the reason people give up and work on console games, or abandon making games altogether. People with your attitude “all game developers work is worthless” make developers feel like shit, and probably persuades many of them to find better paid, and less criticised jobs.

We are guys who make games to entertain people, yet for all the abuse that gets hurled at us, we might as well be war criminals. What the fuck is wrong with people?

16/11/2008 at 13:06 The Apologist says:

@ Meatcircus – it seems simplistic to me to say that creativity and profit motive must be or are separate in this way. That is not the history of art or cultural production for many many years in any sector.

Show me an example where your utopia exists or works?

16/11/2008 at 13:16 The Apologist says:

@ Rev – not seeking to hairsplit, but rather I just don’t know what the historical analysis you apply really means in the absence of a lot of data and some detailed work. If we ask is piracy a more relevant factor now that it was in the past, there is a lot to take into account.

What is the proportion of piracy vs overall sale vs cost of production. What are the implications of an ageing demographic, different hardware, MMOs, digital distribution. It is a complex picture, and I just don’t know what to make of the point that there was always piracy so it shouldn’t be a big deal.

16/11/2008 at 13:26 DeliriumWartner says:

“You do know that Intellectual Property doesn’t exist, don’t you?”

Nor does money. In fact, money is a ’state-mandated monopoly”.
I imagine you’d cry like a baby if I suddenly reduced your bank balance to zero. But why?
Money is an artificial concept that only has value due to state mandated artificial scarcity. if you try and copy money, you go to prison for a very very long time.

Awesome point cliffski.

Meat, you declare things like “You do know that Intellectual Property doesn’t exist, don’t you?”, but you fail to add any sort of logical reasoning for it. People who haven’t read the things you have, or looked into the philosophical ideas behind it, will simply dismiss your arguement unless you can back it up, help them to understand your point of view. You’ll also be harming your arguement, as people will dismiss it as they dismiss you for making wild statements without setting up the basic ideas first.

Unless the idea isn’t to reason out or inform, but rather to be incendiary, in which case you’re doing a fine job and don’t need my help.

16/11/2008 at 13:32 Pags says:

@Rev S. Campbell: your point about the GBA/DS doesn’t take into account a number of other factors, such as the way the DS was marketed as a learning tool as well as a gaming console.

16/11/2008 at 13:38 Jochen Scheisse says:

Yes, the devils actually want to live off creative work. Let’s go down to their home and egg it!

16/11/2008 at 13:52 Rev. S Campbell says:

your point about the GBA/DS doesn’t take into account a number of other factors, such as the way the DS was marketed as a learning tool as well as a gaming console

Oh for Heaven’s sake. If I were to list everything that’s ridiculous about that sentence it’d take me 1000 words, and I’ve wasted enough time on this already.

16/11/2008 at 14:02 Heliocentric says:

No, Dan.. You should be rolling coding your own. All the cool kids do it.

16/11/2008 at 14:03 Toastmodernist says:

I absolutely adore cliffski’s games but i’d still like to add my voice to the people who think certain forms of piracy can be beneficial.

Generally, i think demo’s aren’t a good enough indication of quality, certainly not longevity, and so i’ll download the game. If i like it i’ll do my utmost to purchase it immediately, if i don’t have the money at the time (which is generally very often) then it will be the next game i buy. If i don’t like then i won’t play it anyway and uninstall it.

I know this still makes me evil and whatnot but i really don’t think i’m harming developers, there are lost sales due to me downloading games which i don’t like but might have bought but this is balanced out by games i probably wouldn’t have bought but after playing it and being surprised by the quality i bought it right away.

Also I think the sharing with friends thing can be beneficial too, this is a pretty useless example because bethesda made fallout 3 but i gave him a copy of fallout 1 & 2, while he never actually bothered to buy the games himself he did pre-order the limited edition of fallout 3 as soon as it was available. Obv. this is more along the lines of Rev. S’ piracy creating future demand lines.

16/11/2008 at 14:09 Rev. S Campbell says:

Before you head off chaps, I just want to clarify what I think is your shared position. Is it that the people who pay for games (described as ‘pious internet nerds’ above) are effectively idiots? Stupid people who hand over money for something they should be taking for free?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but no, of course that’s not my position. I pay for games on a very regular basis. Those are not the people I described as “pious internet nerds”, and it does your argument no favours to misrepresent me in such a way.

People who can afford games should pay for them, in order that their creators are rewarded. If people can’t pay for games, it doesn’t make any difference to anyone if they play them or not, because they wouldn’t have bought them either way. People who can afford them but choose to copy instead, well, I think they should pay on principle BUT I don’t agree that their not doing so is of any practical detriment to the industry, and certainly not to society in general, because one way or another disposable income gets disposed of.

16/11/2008 at 14:21 karthik says:

If I understand correctly, Mr. Walker’s position on the matter is that irrespective of whether the developer thrives off its sales, it’s just plain unfair that some people have to pay for entertainment while others get it for free (through outlawed means).
If so, I have in mind a weaker case of price discrimination in mind that is perfectly legal.
Consider, for instance, that you bought Episode 1 (HL2) for it’s asking price of $20 (was it?) when it was released, and I purchased it for the tidy sum of $10 an year later. For the exact “same amount” of fun, you’ve paid twice as much as I did. Isn’t that unfair too?
Of course, there’s the time factor. (Which I’ll address if it comes up in the discussion.)
My argument is similar to that of Meat Circus: That the marginal cost of creating a copy is what matters, and therefore Valve can afford to price it lower when they have (nearly) recovered their costs and are making a profit.
Also consider that the exact same game costs twice as much in the UK as it does in the US, and about four times as much here in India. This is the case at release for a few games on Steam (mentioned in previous RPS posts).
Isn’t this but a milder case of the net effect of piracy, which is classified as a societal affliction? Why is this OK when Piracy is illegal?
I hope I’m not opening a can of worms here.

16/11/2008 at 14:27 Dan Lawrence says:

@ Rev

Fair enough, I think it was more Meat C expounding the more extreme position, you just seemed to be singing from the same song sheet above.

I think your last comment largely makes ense, in that you agree that creators should in principle be rewarded by those that can afford it BUT…

I think that it (piracy & the fear of piracy) is likely causing some damage to the type of indie game that this yammerfest was kicked of by (though since World of Goo is also on other formats it to, is not the perfect example). Of course, its not causing harm to society in general and it very likely isn’t hurting the whole games industry much either the games buisness as a whole is very profitable but piracy directly & yes, the fear of piracy does, seem to me, to hit developers of PC indie games.

I don’t have any excellent strategem for stopping it and agree that DRM at least as we have seen it up to today is an utter waste of time and harms only the few people who do buy your game.

I don’t agree that piracy is any more effective means of spreading awareness of an indie game than a pirated copy, whcih was another vibe I was picking up off a few commenters (probably Meat Circus).

16/11/2008 at 14:37 Monkfish says:

@Rev. Stu

Of course, the games industry has grown massively largely thanks to the popularity of all those lovely consoles. Since Sony’s coolification of gaming back in late ’94, it now reaches a far wider demographic than it did 25 years ago. It’s reasonably safe to assume that the vast majority of the millions and millions of consoles out there haven’t been modified to run copied games, so: wider demographic + closed system = growth.

Of course, I recognise that the Nintendo handheld market is a bit of an anomoly – rampant piracy and all – and there is some evidence to suggest that it actually benefits Nintendo to some extent. When a particular hardware manufacturer stands to gain, it is true that piracy can increase hardware sales, widening the demographic further, thus leading to more sales when potential pirates convert to potential customers. It could be said that the Speccy, C64, Amiga and Atari ST were “beneficiaries” of piracy in this manner.

In the PC gaming market, though, who are the beneficiaries? ATI and Nvidia? Intel and AMD? Seagate and Western Digital? All of the above? The potential “benefits” of piracy are too thinly spread.

It’s also become far too convenient for people to obtain copies of games en masse. Bittorrent and Usenet are now the modern day equivalents to the playgrounds of 25 years ago – and I must say they represent one fuck of a big playground.

PC gaming is very much riding on the coat-tails of console gaming, now. It may not necessarily be down to piracy alone, but there is a widely held perception that piracy is the major contributary factor – especially when looking at the ratios involved. This may be right or it may be wrong (in pure economical terms, at least), but it is this perception that is causing the damage – developers and publishers are now actively using piracy as their reasoning to postpone or not bother with PC versions of their games (oh hai, Epic!).

Publishers that are owned by shareholders will never subscribe to the idea that some folks should be left alone to fill their boots with free entertainment even if those people wouldn’t have bought it anyway. While it’s entirely true that not every copy made equals a lost sale, there is the belief that some are – it’s just impossible to quantify. With the onus on the publisher to protect their shareholders’ investment, DRM becomes the inevitable answer. Of course, it doesn’t work – we know that and they know that (no, really, they do!) – but they have to be seen to try.

16/11/2008 at 15:20 karthik says:

@footle
“Regardless, it’s an awful example to use for your case because it’s one in which the creators of the work are choosing what the market value of their product is at any point in time: not the pirates.”
We already know that pirates attach a value of zero to (their copy of) the product. My point is merely that publishers themselves engage in a lesser form of discrimination between customers consuming the same product.
Lesser, that is, than when you compare a paying consumer with a pirate. EA giving away the original Red Alert, for instance, only goes to show that the marginal value of creating new copies is indeed zero or close to it when a sufficient number of copies have been consumed.

16/11/2008 at 15:54 footle says:

“ I meant the marginal cost of creating new copies.”

Or you could say that the marginal cost of creating new copies without providing any support, updates etc. whatsoever is very low – or could be considered as part of a marketing campaign for Red Alert 3.

16/11/2008 at 17:11 Wulf says:

Or you’re paying for a negligible-cost copy, rather.

16/11/2008 at 18:34 Adam Hepton says:

I pay for things I use, because I get paid for doing things that other people use. It just seems right to me, and if it doesn’t seem right to you, you’re not the kind of person I want to know.

16/11/2008 at 19:57 Rev. S Campbell says:

I pay for things I use, because I get paid for doing things that other people use. It just seems right to me, and if it doesn’t seem right to you, you’re not the kind of person I want to know.

It’s a deal!

16/11/2008 at 20:27 Tom says:

un-freakin’-believable…
This is some seriously madness. Distill it and a drop would kill an elephant.

16/11/2008 at 21:06 Klaus says:

Woo!! I wake and Thunderbird kindly lets me know that I have 111 messages from RPS. And I read them all.

The world is changing slightly. Perhaps some people have learned something or adjusted their viewpoints. I checked on the validity of over 2000 DS releases and in checking I see some new Suikoden game is coming out. I am happy and somewhat optimistic for the time being.

16/11/2008 at 21:17 Ran says:

Well, I’m thinking only of Goo since that was the topic at hand.

Their demo was EXTREMELY generous. First 12 levels free (out of 48 total levels). Definitely long enough to make your decision whether to buy (and keep playing).

How many of the piraters played onto level 13 (first level of Chapter 2) and beyond?

16/11/2008 at 22:12 Oddbob says:

“How many of the piraters played onto level 13 (first level of Chapter 2) and beyond?”

I truly have no idea. All of them? Two of them? Eleventy? The demo was and is incredibly generous, but that’s information we’re never likely to find out so it’s all a bit moot really. I’ve bought games and never played past level one. Makes as good as no odds.

“It seems fair enough to ask what you do, since we know what Cliffski does for a living and the information seems germaine to the arguments going on here”

How so?

16/11/2008 at 22:37 Y3k-Bug says:

A question to those who say that railing against piracy is foolish:

Valve has stated that Steam has had a direct, positive effect on sales for them. While Steam doesn’t stop piracy in its entirety, it effectively stamps out zero day piracy, which many developers agree is the most dangerous kind.

What do you say to Valve’s claim that stopping zero day piracy DOES have a positive effect on their sales?

16/11/2008 at 22:47 Jon R. says:

I’d say that Steam is also quite effective at stamping out zero-day playing of legitimate purchases. I’d also say that it’d be really, really hard to find anything negative about taking a huge chunk out of the sale of games you really didn’t have anything to do with.

Furthermore, i’d wonder if the people most worried about zero-day piracy aren’t the ones most dependent on blind sales. And then i’d say that Doom 3 got the living shit pirated out of it before release and still managed to be the company’s best selling titles, evidently splitting 3 million sales evenly between the PC and Xbox.

16/11/2008 at 23:16 Rev. S Campbell says:

Valve has stated that Steam has had a direct, positive effect on sales for them.

What do you say to Valve’s claim that stopping zero day piracy DOES have a positive effect on their sales?

Hang on. Did they actually say the second of those, or have you just extrapolated it?

17/11/2008 at 00:19 Jon R. says:

Lombardi said something to that effect here: http://www.halflife2.net/2005/06/30/interview-with-doug-lombardi-valve/

17/11/2008 at 00:29 Rev. S Campbell says:

Ah, as I suspected – he didn’t say any such thing.

“In addition to allowing us to sell our games, it has enabled the prevention of the “zero day” piracy problems other major releases incurred between gold and their launch days last year. “

Nothing whatsoever about any link between piracy and increased sales.

17/11/2008 at 01:02 Pace says:

I’m interested to hear from people reading this epic thread, but who aren’t necessarily posting.

Just for shits and giggles, I cut and pasted this entire thread into MS Word, and it told me that there are 46,000 words in this thread. Those following the NaNoWriMo thread in the forums know that this is short novel length type word count. I suspect there may be a problem in simply reading the entire thread.

17/11/2008 at 01:12 Pace says:

Oh, to answer John’s question (even though I haven’t followed this entire thread), these discussions have shifted my opinion somewhat, but I think it’s more or less settled now.

17/11/2008 at 01:21 Jon R. says:

“Nothing whatsoever about any link between piracy and increased sales.”

Best he does is this:
“Doug Lombardi: Well, Steam allows us to eliminate “Day Zero” piracy – which is between gold and when the game’s on the store shelves – and that’s when all the real piracy, the damaging piracy happens.”

17/11/2008 at 03:22 Thiefsie says:

I’m still happily sitting on the fence even after reading this entire comments thread. I believe that piracy is virtually just as good for the industry as it is bad. Word of mouth is worth everything, and in today’s culture a lot of people who have the money to spend it, WILL spend it to save time doing something else (convenience). I and all of my friends are proof that when you are young and moneyless you pirate like a mofo but as soon as $ start coming in it’s just not worth it 90% of the time. Call that growing up, realising that payment is due and ‘doing the right thing’ I don’t know… But I’ve bought WoG and still haven’t played past demo levels as I have been distracted by other games at the moment. I bought it because I could see the charm, and the developers were appearing to be doing good things as far as DRM etc. This is a huge amount (or maybe not? – being that it is only towards the game-reading public out there) of publicity for an indie game by 2/3 people. Compared to say Cliffski, who for which Kudos I’ve never heard of apart through RPS.

I still pirate way more than I buy, but then again I play maybe the first level or two of half these games and thats it, and the rest I don’t even touch – I think I just get cuaght up in marketing and decide I want to have that game without paying for it.. and inevitably don’t even play it. Lost sale? Perhaps, but frankly that switches from bad consumer to bad developer?

What is the solution? I don’t know, but sure as hell this PC gaming is doomed malarky is just that. A scapegoat for developers inherantly angry and damned well yearning for entitlement that is largely misplaced. Video games are such fickle, short-lived things that the smallest factor may limit sales, thus I think the best tactic for a developer is to make someone buying the game as smooth an obstacle course as possible, with the biggest factor being price. Multiple places to buy, no drm that helps virtually no one, no confusion across markets with price fixing, and for god sakes allow consumers to make a donation if they want. Some will pay more? (Most won’t but that’s not the point). Reward them in some tiny way?

I think the larger fact of the matter is that gaming has hit mainstream, and PCs aren’t mainstream in terms of gaming. The average luddite can’t and won’t understand drivers, and thus consoles are where they go. Mainstream audience = mainstream consolitis = mainstream sales levels. The growth in gaming is from more people doing it… that is all.
GFW are an effort to combat this, but are failing miserably as they are doing the wrong things. No one needs vista? More standardisation is needed, without MS being the god of it all.

Hallelulah for the time (probably never) when gaming is a unified system and you pop a disc in like a dvd and there are no PCs, xboxes, ps3s, wii’s fighting for the virtually same market.

PC’s are virtually this unified environment, but they are of course too loose and too hard for average ppl to contend with vs a box that has a gamepad and plays everything you throw at it.

Alternatively a lot of people are risk adverse, especially with their money. And one driving factor for me with console games is that I can bloody well sell them (or even return them here – they call that EB renting haha) for money if you aren’t satisfied.

How come game developers aren’t killing second hand games for consoles? – Looks like they are ever moreso trying to start that happening though these days with one use download addons/codes from purchase etc.

If you could actually get your money back from a game you bought and weren’t satisfied with (a la WWI post on this site) well I’ll be damned I’d probably buy more games.

This is my primary reason for disliking steam, let alone the fact that if you fuck up somehow… maybe cheating for example… all your games are screwed.

Let’s be honest, a lot of companies offer money back guarantees because the odds are in the consumer not bothering to return the item. Why can’t game companies do that too – through steam especially as they have the online authentication to virtually make sure you aren’t playing it since returning (like a real object).

Same goes for the price. What is the biggest factor to people buying a game? The money! of course! Lower the cost and bam. I know my magic number is about $50 AUD (for AAA games). Which thankfully to a couple of cheap online retailers a lot of games are released at (cd-wow, play-asia – though not so much with our dollar in the pooper now). I’ve bought no less than 6 new release full price games in the last month, the biggest factor being the price.
And yes I have to admit that even though I bought it. I think WoG is overpriced. If they didn’t have their anti-DRM stance or general charm and honesty I wouldn’t have bought it unless it was $10

The exact same struggle has of course been fought by the music industry for years… and they seem to be finally realising that piracy is actually increasing their revenue as well. What about the radio… license fees aren’t huge! What about tapes years ago, what about the huge fight with DVD copying… this same old game just keeps happening where piracy is blamed for everything, then everyone moves on and makes money again.

wow that is one huge aimless rant.

Summary:
Piracy is not necessarily bad.
Do whatever you can to make it easy for people to reasonably purchase your product without any/many restrictions. (Ideally to me that would be a single serial entry at install. No disc check etc. It can phone home to concur that code if it needs to and then let me do what I want – Steam is ideal in this regard apart from the games that also have other protection in built)
Including price.
Publicity is key – read GoW (Dude Huge) or Halo – arguably close to average games that sell squillions.
Make quality. Not shovelware or shit ports or half arsed games.
Treat consumers like clever people – not criminals.
Value-added features. (Not crap added like limited edition dolls). Higher quality sound/textures/additions (free – valve style), support etc (think StarDock) that is a good way to handle this.

17/11/2008 at 05:31 Saflo says:

Humanity eh? It’s a doozy.

That’s one way of putting it.

17/11/2008 at 06:17 malkav11 says:

The fake download thing was big in the days of Kazaa. It probably contributed to that filesharing service’s decline from popularity. But all that accomplished was to move things to BitTorrent where it’s even easier to pirate and in quantity to boot.

Even if you could successfully promote confusion by distributing fake torrents on the public trackers, you don’t hit the private trackers (which are a more significant source of piracy anyway because they’re less vulnerable to anti-piracy efforts and tend to have more reliable, high-speed communities) and would at most probably drive casual pirates into another form of filesharing. There are scads. BitTorrent just happens to be the most popular at the moment.

17/11/2008 at 06:57 malkav11 says:

…oh, and one other thing – the game would have to legitimately require that much space. Pirates already know full well how to strip out padding.

17/11/2008 at 07:21 Klaus says:

Hmm, start producing ‘massive games’ and eventually technology will catch up. No one wants to pirate 25 gigs, but not a lot of people would like to waste 100+ gigs on four games.

And what happens to Direct2Download?

17/11/2008 at 09:37 Paul Moloney says:

“Same goes for the price. What is the biggest factor to people buying a game? The money! of course!”

If so, then why do the console version of multi-platform games sell 2 – 3 times the amount when they often cost 30% more? No seems to have a problem paying up to €70 for Halo 3 and GTA4.

P.

17/11/2008 at 10:40 Trollish says:

If it wasn’t possible to pirate games, most pirates would buy games. It’s that simple.

17/11/2008 at 10:58 TheDeadlyShoe says:

If so, then why do the console version of multi-platform games sell 2 – 3 times the amount when they often cost 30% more? No seems to have a problem paying up to €70 for Halo 3 and GTA4.

They came out much earlier on console. Even if PC and Consoles were equal overall in terms of game sales, those games would have sold better on consoles because of that.

Additionally, those numbers probably include resales, which are cheaper. Of course, the resale money never reaches the developers – no better than piracy as far profits are concerned.

17/11/2008 at 11:15 SwiftRanger says:

“It makes me sad when the visual result of debates like this is two ranks in their trenches, refusing to budge (rightly or wrongly). I don’t think that’s ever the case, but those who are doing the new thinking are not always doing the typing.”

I detest both camps, even after the ‘arguments’, pulling out-of-context quotes, conveniently ignoring points they don’t have an answer to, all which are omnipresent in these comments from both sides. Claiming that piracy can only be good is just as short-sighted as claiming it can only be bad. Depending on the game, it’s somewhere in between of course.

The most ideal case of releasing a new game is when it has a proper demo or trial version, the right price, uncrackable but user-friendly copy protection and a worldwide release (online and retail). That would be a true utopia of course but it would make the extremes in this ‘debate’ obsolete.

17/11/2008 at 11:33 Rev. S Campbell says:

If it wasn’t possible to pirate games, most pirates would buy games. It’s that simple.

Wow. Thank goodness you were here to cut through the crap for us.

17/11/2008 at 11:58 Dan Milburn says:

Because they don’t directly host any copyright infringing material. Of course people are trying to shut them down, and many of the other big torrent sites have been, but currently what they do is not against Swedish law, although that may well change.

17/11/2008 at 12:00 Catastrophe says:

I’d just like to say I agree with Rev. and also believe cliffski’s argument has been foiled yet he keeps repeating it over and over.

I also think many of cliffski’s comments seem to take what Rev. stated, and place them totally out of context to attempt to justify the silly retorts he keeps making.

Also regarding the statement that “WoW has never been pirated” is technically incorrect. People run private servers where people can play for free. So not only has the game been pirated, the server software to run the game has too.

17/11/2008 at 12:08 Rev. S Campbell says:

Genuine question: why is the Pirate Bay allowed?

http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-isp-refuses-to-block-pirate-bay-080327/

17/11/2008 at 12:12 Paul Moloney says:

Rev; so you’re talking about either having specialized software or specialized hardware (the Multiface cost £30 in the days when the UK weekly average wage was £120 (the weekly wage in Ireland was probably about 2/3rd of that at the most); you had to have the hardware in order to play backups made from it). These weren’t common – I didn’t know anyone with either, hence tape-to-tape copying being the most common method of piracy. To pirate now, you need a freeware BitTorrent client, a freeware ISO mounter, and er, that it’s. You can download games from people all around the world, rather than mates in your playground.

Are you really trying to claim the two situations are the same?

P.

17/11/2008 at 12:12 cullnean says:

pirate bay is not against the law in sweden, due to some percedent that was set a few years ago.

17/11/2008 at 12:21 M. P. says:

I don’t doubt the figures 2D boy arrived at, but I’d be curious to see the average number of high scores submitted per user. I think the 71% of users who accessed the high scores table from a single IP is pretty telling: most ADSL and cable connections use dynamic IP allocation – my ISP charges extra for a fixed IP, and I think only a small proportion of home users need that. So my guess is that a large proportion of that 71% are people who only played the game briefly to try it out and only contacted the high score table once. If they had played the game for an extended period of time and thus submitted high scores more than once they would’ve done so from a different IP, so my guess is that, excepting a small proportion of people who have static IPs because they were playing WoG at work (shame on them! ;p), most of those 71% just used the pirated copy as a demo.

Of course, my theory fails to account for the fact that for them to have tried the game briefly and then not bought it doesn’t make sense cause it’s just too much fun for anyone to not want to play the rest of it! :)

17/11/2008 at 12:33 Iain says:

@Meat Circus: “You do know that Intellectual Property doesn’t exist, don’t you?”

Try telling that to the person who wrote my employment contract.

@everyone else:

I think the Rev is mostly right when he makes a correlation between piracy and people being able to afford to buy games. The only time I pirated games was when I was a kid and got 50p in pocket money a week. Even with budget games on the Spectrum only costing £2-3 a piece, it was still difficult to save up enough money to go out any buy games, so I did pirate a fair few things off friends and filled up the other gaps in my collection with the free full games you used to get on magazine covertapes.

Now, I don’t pirate. I don’t need to. I have more than enough disposable cash to buy the all games I’m interested in. Just because a game might be available for free on a torrent doesn’t justify me not going out to buy it, even if I am a tightfisted Scot. I’m yet to be convinced either way on the whole ‘piracy equals/does not equal lost sales’ argument.

However, I think some people just like to have things for free even if they can afford to buy them, and simply pirate because they can. And it doesn’t matter what form of DRM or copy protection you use, people with that mentality will always pirate, regardless of how inconvenient developers might try to make it.

I think the only way you can minimise piracy is to reduce the number of reasons people might want to pirate it. Make games more affordable, more accessible and able to run on a broader specification of machines (to cut out the “I want to see if it will work on my PC before I buy it” rationalisations) and get rid of DRM entirely (since that just makes the game more expensive to produce for the developers and alienates a lot of the customer base by simply being there – see Spore, for example) – then you might make some headway. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to think that you can ever get rid of piracy entirely. People just aren’t wired that way. Some people will always want something for free if they can get it for free, regardless of whether they could afford to buy it or not. That’s just human nature.

17/11/2008 at 12:48 Paul Moloney says:

Let me rephrase without flaming.

Meat Circus, perhaps people might take your opinions on the piracy of intangibles if you tell us how this would impact your own job.

P.

17/11/2008 at 12:53 Duoae says:

@ John
I’m interested to hear from people reading this epic thread, but who aren’t necessarily posting.

It makes me sad when the visual result of debates like this is two ranks in their trenches, refusing to budge (rightly or wrongly). I don’t think that’s ever the case, but those who are doing the new thinking are not always doing the typing.

I haven’t changed my stance but then i consider myself to be more central (middle ground) in the arguments. I don’t believe that every pirated copy is a lost sale. I don’t believe that because you can’t afford something that you should be able to take it (even though there are socalism/communism reasons for allowing lower wage people access to these things) but perhaps that’s more of a problem with people’s wages for their jobs and having a divide in wealth which is inexcusable.
I also don’t believe that a content producer is entitled to profit from every use of their product once bought (i.e. every time a film is watched – or through sharing a product (e.g. friend watching a film) and i don’t believe that once sold, the content producers have the right to control how that product is used (i.e. limited installs and DRM) though they still own all the rights and controls allocated to them for their copyrights and the content of that product as it is with all other products on the market – the majority of games are not services (MMOs excluded of course because they provide functionality that cannot be achieved through personal means).

What this thread has done is improve my knowledge of both sides of the argument and allowed me to expand the ideas that i am exposed to (specifically some of Rev.’s posts).

I also think that the vocal minority, while annoying for the people they are vocal to, are important. No human can know everything and in the subjects that we are each individually familiar and knowledgeable in we should strive to improve things for everyone – not just ourselves – and this is the service that the vocal minority provides.

Take for example the ID card system being introduced in the UK. My bet is that a majority of the population are or would be against it given all the facts but as it happens it’s the vocal minority (No2ID and such groups) who speak out against it, harrass government and try and inform the general public as to the problems.
There are other examples such as the credit crisis and bad funding management of the government – things that i have no idea about – and while watching Bremner, Bird and Fortune the other evening i was appalled and scared at the stupid things that ‘the people in charge’ do. It seems to me that the appointed people have no sense or are completely self-serving…. or possibly both. If the vocal minority didn’t shout out loud these things wouldn’t be exposed and i wouldn’t know about it.

Like it or not but the vocal minority is a good way to gauge the overall impression of the populace and is also a good way to know which way to aim when producing a product or plan. Of course there are groups of vocal minorities that are bad for everyone because they are so extreme that they are past the point of reasoning and logic: militant animal rights groups spring to mind.

17/11/2008 at 12:56 Tom says:

I couldn’t be arsed to go through this entire thread, but I have read a lot of it, and still can’t quite believe what I’m reading: it’s all just attempts at justifying theft.
Some people argue… well… they’re arguing all manor of… stuff.
Lets bring it right down to the basics, and instead of using a BitT client and a torrent site, we’ll use a swag bag and a game shop: You walk in to EB, pick up a game and read about it, stick it in your swag back and walk out the shop without paying… need I say more… ? THAT IS THEFT! A LOST SALE. You log on to Pirate Bay -> hit download… THEFT! IT’S THEFT PEOPLE! FUCKING THEFT, FOR THE LOVE OF DOG, HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU POSSIBLE ARGUE ABOUT THIS?! TTHHEEFFTT! YOU. HAVE. STOLEN. SOMETHING. AAAARRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!
That is the inescapable truth.
And having read a fair portion of this thread I can’t help but wonder how many people in here paid for WoG.
Now that would be an interesting percentage to know.
Zero day piracy is the thing to counter. Stop that and as a games dev, you’re good to go. All remaining piracy is inevitable so you may as well not bother trying to stop it.
Said it before and I’ll say it again: Steamworks is FREE. For the love of dog why isn’t it being used?!

17/11/2008 at 13:00 Catastrophe says:

“Do not get personal with these comments. Flaming will not be tolerated.”

Who flamed who? I’ve read up and down the latest comments and can’t find the drama :(

17/11/2008 at 13:01 cullnean says:

im with tom

17/11/2008 at 13:04 Pike says:

@Tom, it is in no way shape or form theft to copy something. Theft assumes that the victim actually lose access to the stolen property. This is not some fringe opinion. It is actually the way our legal systems are set up. Losing a potential sale isn’t the same as being robbed. If it was then any form of competition would be seen as theft.

If copying to someone’s publically available intellectual work without consent was equatable with theft, how come there are time limits attatched to IP? Why does it cease to be theft after 20 years if it’s a patented invention, for instance?

17/11/2008 at 13:17 Iain says:

@Paul M: I’m not trying to say it’s impossible: I’m saying it’s much much much more easy now.

I think what you actually mean is that you’ve got easier access to material to pirate. The actual physical process of piracy itself is no more easier now than it was 20 years ago. Clicking a link is just as easy as pressing record on a tape deck and finding a copy of Lerm was just as easy as finding a torrenting program. If you couldn’t do it at the time, well I think you just need to blame your friends for having too many scruples. But look on the bright side, there are fewer stains on your soul…

17/11/2008 at 13:32 Tom says:

[I am angry]

17/11/2008 at 13:46 Dan Lawrence says:

@ Pike

I think there is generally a time limit of theft of more physical goods to its just not explicitly set in law as it is with IP. A lot of regular goods are consumable or at least damaged in their usage, a second hand table is worth less due to its condition whereas a second hand digital game is funtionally identical to its original so has lost no intrinsic value through the act of anothers usage of it.

I don’t think you’ll find many clued up content creators opposed to IP lapsing after a number of years. Cliff Richard and the companies that hoover up IP excepted.

For the record on second hand game sales/rentals, this was something of a mess up on the part of the games industry as I believe the film industry takes a cut of all its rental sales.