Another day, another post about piracy to fuel the impassioned debate of the principled hordes. See how we dance for you.
It’s a particularly interesting piece of piractical news this time, even if you generally avoid the shouting matches around the subject. Filesharing news site Torrentfreaks have done some mathematical investigative work, casting an eye over a bunch of trackers to come up with what they reckon are the 10 most pirated PC games of the year to date. Care to bet on what’s number one before we draw back the curtain?
Worth noting that, annoyingly, we don’t know quite what sites Torrentfreaks have monitored for this or what their research methods were. It’s more than likely private trackers aren’t included, for instance. The actual totals could well be far higher than the “estimated download count” below, but if their maths is correct it should at least be a reasonable snapshot/average of the year in torrents. It may be entirely off-base, of course – but it doesn’t seem fantastical.
1 Spore - 1,700,000 – Sept. 2008
2 The Sims 2 -1,150,000 – Sept. 2004
3 Assassins Creed -1,070,000 – Nov. 2007
4 Crysis - 940,000 – Nov. 2007
5 Command & Conquer 3 - 860,000 – Mar. 2007
6 Call of Duty 4 - 830,000 – Nov. 2007
7 GTA San Andreas - 740,000 – Jun. 2005
8 Fallout 3 - 645,000 – Oct. 2008
9 Far Cry 2 - 585,000 – Oct. 2008
10 Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 - 470,000 – Oct. 2008
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking either:
a) “but Spore’s rubbish!”. In which case, shuddup. We’ve done all that shouting already.
2) “it’s because of the DRM! This is a successful protest against the forces of evil!” In which case, mmmmaybe. Mmmmaybe not.
That Spore’s high placing is a direct result of its headline-making crazy-copy protection is certainly the popular theory. It’s hard to doubt that it didn’t play some part, thanks to a double whammy of protestors voting with their feet and protest-observers being confused and afraid by all the Chinese whispers about what Spore’s copy protection actually involved. Take a look at the number 2 game, though. That makes me doubt that Spore’s bittersweet chartopping here is quite as simple as so many will likely presume.
It’s The Sims 2 – a four year old game, and still significantly more torrented than this year’s heaviest hitters. That’s certainly nothing to do with DRM – that’s simply demand from a potential playerbase that’s way larger than most others even dream of. Given that Spore comes from the same stable as The Sims 2 and transparently chased the same audience, there’s a pretty strong chance a meaty fraction of its leechers came from that demographic, not the the DRM protest/fear demographic. I have no figures to back this up, sadly – this is just me raising an eyebrow and saying “eh? EH?” knowingly. Most likely, Spore’s king of torrent hill status is a combination of both factors. The same can’t be said for game number 3, which is really something of a mystery.
From my sagging office chair, it rather seemed as though the PC port of Assassin’s Creed came and went pretty quietly. There was some hoo-hah about dodgy performance and ludicrously protracted exit procedures, and there was the hangover of console AssCreed players irate about its comprimises, but it didn’t really seem to inspire either great love or great protest.
So why so high? Possible factors: the fact a version was leaked significantly before it hit the shops; the fact it came out during a relatively quiet time for big-name games, so perhaps enjoyed heightened interest; the fact it had pretty high system requirements, so may have appealed more to a tech-savvy audience, au fait with torrenting; the fact it did have something of a bad rap off the back of the console version, which made interested players more reluctant to purchase. All theories, and there’s probably one simple answer I’m too stupid to deduct. It sure does look weird there, though.
No real surprises otherwise – all big-name sequels, as you might expect. Only 3 of the 10 are original IPs, in fact. We can also doubtless expect the likes of Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2 to climb higher once they’ve been on sale for longer, while GTA IV and COD5 should make their presence known very soon. Also, San Andreas being so high after three years seems odd, but that’s most likely down to extreme anticipation for GTA IV.
So, not a complete picture of the year that was in terms of piracy, but it’s an interesting document of what have been 12 months that seemed to really shake PC gaming. Or our comments threads, at the very least.
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miraclemetal is right.
Hear me out first! We all understand economics, right? Supply and demand. Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it. And so on. People buy stuff when they think the cost is justified. That’s where the money comes from to make the games in the first place – the assumption that if a good enough product is produced a high enough amount of people will pay for it. And to paraphrase Scott Adams, there’s a big demographic who is either crazy or will buy anything that you can find buyers for pretty much any product imaginable.
Taking something physical is theft – because someone is then deprived of it. They had it. Now they don’t. Taking something (game code) which is not physical, costs nothing to duplicate (let’s avoid being pathetically pedantic and ignore the bandwidth, storage, electricity, etc, shall we?), and never actually existed before you ended up with it? Well, that’s not taking, then, as far as I’m concerned.
JonFitt’s totally right that when nobody pays for something capitalism craps its pants. We all recognize that. But let’s say you were never going to pay for some game, no matter what (for whatever reason – anti-DRM, anti-company-in-question, whatever). So you download it. As far as I can tell nobody comes off ‘worse’ in this scenario. Why? Because in our hypothetical situation, there was never any outcome in which the game was paid for. I don’t know if anyone objects to this reasoning on a case-by-case level; what objections I’ve seen are due to the self-evident fact that not everyone can act this way. Call me naive, but I believe people are better than that. As easy as digital piracy is (and it could barely be easier), shit still sells. If I wave my magical economics wand, I can make the following ridiculously generalized statements: sales are proportional to quality and inversely proportional to cost. If one makes the assumption that a sufficient percentage of the general population aren’t complete asses, then so long as a company produces a sufficiently ‘good’ product, and prices it reasonably, things will look after themselves.
Note to self: design game called “army of tutu”
@cjlr: That’s what I thought for a while. The problem is, no one can categorically say they would never have bought the game unless they never have the game. It’s an unprovable statement: Maybe you wouldn’t have bought it full price, but when Steam has a 50% off sale, maybe you would have bought it then.
There will be a portion of people who could claim they weren’t going to buy a game, but really would have done had they no choice and the price aligned with their desire.
Also, if you claim that the price you consider a thing is really worth to you is zero, why are you downloading it at all!
People buy shit, this is true. But when you start allowing piracy on principle, and remove the wrongness, then those people will just start taking shit for free. Friends and relatives will say “You know it’s perfectly legal to take Sims 2: Bowtie Expansion for free right”. Then the whole piracy model breaks down.
It relies on people saying “I’m going to take this, but someone else will have to pay for it”. So I have to pay for Crytek to push the graphics envelope, but “you” should get it for free. Because “you’re” special? (Not necessarily *you*)
You think it’s ok to have a system where there’s an exploited group paying for a freeloading group?
Any volunteers for the exploited group if there’s no penalty for being a freeloader?
Side note:
However I think a certain amount of piracy would keep a monopolistic system in check (if EA literally bought all the developers), but that’s not the case.
It seems the main reasons for piracy are a huge sense of entitlement and a corresponding lack of willpower (for every other – non-digital – commodity if you can’t afford it, you don’t buy it, if you want it that bad, save your pennies then buy it) which taken together speak of the immaturity of the deniznes of the interwebs.
The Speak You’re Branes sections on most sites (YouTube, BBC, IGN etc.) reinforces this. Here’s hoping the electronic society grows up by itself before its forced to by outside agencies.
@cliffski
Thank you for the reality check. Have you had any luck with sub $10 games? How do people react to prices above $23?
Do you think the route Burnout Paradise is taking, with the full game available as demo, but with a time-limit is a good one (it seems as such for me)?
JonFitt:
Or, to put it another way… An ecosystem can’t survive if everything’s a leech. It’s funny, you’d think the very technology of torrents would’ve illustrated that much to cjlr and miraclemetal.
(No, wait guys, I’ve totally worked out how never paying for stuff isn’t abuse of its producers! ‘Cos, like, coders only make code, right? And the designers only direct that code into something enjoyable, and the artists only make… art. Art doesn’t exist either, right? HEAR ME OUT! So, anyway, you can boil their work down into a bunch of magnetic fluctuations on a disc, right? That’s practically nothing! It isn’t real! And if the game’s not real… none of the work must have been real! I’ve simultaeneously cracked the code of society, nature, and the First Law of Thermodynamics itself! If none of the work was real… then the thing I’m downloading emerged from nothingness! Like, why would I pay for that? I bet you guys wished you were this smart, you’d loads more spare cash leftover.
…Hang on, a film can be reduced to essential non-existence, too! ‘Scarface.mpg’ is nothing but tiny magnetic blips! I’ve got to inform Hollywood! They’re paying billions of dollars to produce stuff that won’t even exist! Makes me wonder why they bother pressing all those DVDs, since nothing on them will exist either… In fact, this means the entire digital revolution was nothing but… a mass vanishment! Photography? Typography and prepress? I don’t what they’re doing to make those books and magazines and art shows, ‘cos it’s gone! Digital fuel injection? You won’t get me in one of those cars! Email? Everyone’s basically throwing their communiques down a black hole! And the internet! My god, it’s just a vast blank space! Which is good, ‘cos the nothingness really didn’t capture my abs on Facebook back when it was manifesting. Hoist the imaginary mainsail, imaginary seaman! We’ve got to warn the world! Because the internet itself does not exi–
@JonFitt
Yes, it’s true that the most one can say at any moment is whether or not the current (and near-future) market price is good enough for them. Without knowing future conditions (I don’t – but anyone who does, feel free to weigh in!), it seems a bit silly to wait for some vague unspecified turning point in the nebulous future. Downloading a copy today doesn’t preclude purchasing one later (at your 50% on Steam deal, let’s say), if you follow my view honestly. I’ve DONE that.
It seems to me that people, being, by and large, not assholes, would recognize the big picture. It’s like, er… fishing. If one person takes extra fish, the system recovers, but if everyone does, it tanks. And looking at global fish stocks… well, it would appear on the surface that my optimistic outlook is built on thin ice. Which is frozen over quicksand. Even so, I don’t know that anyone’s claiming to be unequivocally freeloading (but then, who’d admit it?). I didn’t exactly claim to establish a value of zero, either: just lower than any available price. There may be, as you say, an inevitable ‘exploited’ group and a ‘freeloading’ group… But depending on, well, quite a few factors, I’d bet that most people would a good deal of time skipping between the two, were they to exist.
And I didn’t mention this before now, but there is one case in which nobody can dispute the legality of software downloads: if retarded DRM schemes deprive you of your LAWFUL right to make a PRIVATE copy of something… Anything which is limited to either a single physical manifestation or a finite number of digital transfers is just plain asking to be pirated.
@ James T
Yes, because reductio ad absurdam is ALWAYS the inevitable result of any position besides complete and utter neutrality, right?
SuperNashwan says:
So in conclusion, some popular games were pirated a bit last year. Amazing.
We don’t even know the first thing about the methodology behind what these numbers actually are.
Totally.
Err, you guys do know torrents aren’t the only way to get “scene releases” and there was an internet b4 torrents ;) thus those numbers are really flawed and only represents maybe 30% or less of actual downloads.
Groups don’t actually release anything to torrents (besides n00bs/homebrew). There are other ppl down the chain that do that. Nor do they care if anyone actually d/l’s the game. All they care about is being 1st to crack it/releasing it, for credits to topsites and their own elitism.
Sometimes I wished the scene would close shop for a few months just to see all the crying on torrent sites and for people to get a clue.
Piracy has its good and bad points. Not everyone on the planet gets games cheap and while someone in the States is going “man its only $30″ someone else is Australia is “farking $100 for a gamE?” or some Asian countries where they sell them for $10 a pop to try and stop the illegal street stores. So buying 10games a year can be unrealistic for some ppl thus they will buy afew games and pirate others.
The publishers and middleman are really ripping us off generally and slowly due to DD we are finally getting some savings but for a NOBOX edition we are still getting ripped off. The problem isn’t something that will change overnight but it is a complex problem with “industrial age” mentality execs vs “information age” and since we are still in the early days of the Info age, it be still awhile till things change as a whole.
Some games get good support after the game is released so anything broken gets fixed with patches and others get little to no support(be it because the company went under or they moved onto another game) and a broken game remains broke(or if you are lucky and happen to have a dedicated community behind the game) like GPx series etc Alot of ppl(like me) have been burnt this way. You have to learn it the hard way tho.
Some games are single player 10hr, little replay affairs and they want to charge the same price as a game that you can play for years and years ie: adventure vs FPS. (another major problem how do use measure value for money in games).
Some games have no demos and ppl will d/l a pirated game or app to evaluate it b4 buying(which is one of the main advantages for a scene release). Sometimes the demos don’t represent the actual final game or something major has changed since the demo and ppl need to re-evaluate.
Some ppl are just mad tightasses and cry about how expensive everything is and wont ever buy any game ever because they are poor BUT they still have the money to spend $$$ on vidcards and quadcores(yeah go figure). Half that list of games provided are some of the most demanding graphical games. Tho again this can come back to what they perceive as value for money.
I think after playing afew MMO’s now like WOW/WAR etc the ~$11-$15/mth mark should be how most games should be sold(well i still get taken to the cleaners for the $100BOX).. Pay as you play will prob become reality more so in the future as current DRM dies and something replaces it(something has to replace it). Something like STEAM. Tho again Audiosurf was only $9.99 and I still play it now 9mths later where as Portal was… part of Orange Box, played the full game and never played it again… Soo I guess I need to work out the kinks with that idea :)
Then we have the “insert CD/DVD” games where the game must be in the tray at all times. While I never believe clowns that say “i scratched it” or “i lost it” having the option to not have the CD in the tray is nice esp when the drive is also used as a burner and dvd player and it can getting annoying. Some game developers eventually give in and offer patched versions but again it depends on how much after box support they provide. Cracks provide this option.
I know some ppl like playing games just to be the “1st” to finish then spending hrs on forums telling us how cool they are and all the flaws the game has and why they are glad they didn’t pay for the game, not really playing the game and moving on to the next game b4 you get a chance to finish installing it. They don’t see any value in any game, I don’t think these ppl hurt the sales.
Some ppl are just collectors, much like stamps and sports cards in the good old days they now collect warez and rarely actually play the games they get. Same deal I don’t think they would buy these games but since they have the means they do it, maybe a drug fix :)
You can mix and match the above with everyone here I think. Everyone has tried it for different reasons a mix of the above whatever but the main jist of it is that the PC games industry needs an overhaul and when publishers complain its piracy that caused the company to fall over, blah blah, for me it sounds like just another excuse for not fixing the real problems lets blame the pirates. Piracy has been around since the 80’s! and it hasn’t stopped M$ and EA making billions. It’s not a new problem just that more people have access to it.
Finally to the ppl that mentioned that they d/l the full “pirated” game to get a “backup” LOOL!! Pirated games aren’t some magical version! They are either CLONECD/DVD versions of the game you just bought or they have injected the “crack” into the ISO. Save your bandwidth! just d/l the crack from gamecopyworld (b4 torrents! OMG) esp if you don’t want DRM or if you want to remove the “no cd” check. The releases don’t provide legit keys for on-line play(usually) only to actually install the game. So if you happen to have a legit version and happen to use a crack because you don’t want DRM, its OK ;)
(i only intended to make mention that torrents/sites don’t really represent the scene in anyway or its the only place to get things, as its been mentioned here and PCG mag b4, consider it a letter to the editor that I never bothered sending haha).
One of the better posts about piracy, SPEEDCORE.
I for one , pirated the game in protest. I don’t usually pirate games, nor do my friends. I however , this year , pirated 4 games. Mass effect, crysis, red alert3 and spore , not because of not being able to afford it, not because of my wanting it, but simply because their idea that they own the game after selling it to me is absolutely morally wrong.
Its like selling you a house , and then setting terms as to who is allowed to enter the house , what products you’re allowed to have in the house, what furniture you’re allowed to buy etc.
I’m sorry but if you are selling property , intellectual or not, then you have no say what the person is allowed to do post purchase. Sure replication should be limited for commercial gain but not to the extent of telling people what they are allowed to have installed on their pc or including limitations to how many times you can install it.
@ Speedcore
I think anyone who knows anything about anything is aware of the way cracks and such get out. Besides, if its clean, who cares what the source is? All a ‘pirated’ version ever is, is just an image and a crack.
I mostly agree with the other stuff you said… but:
“While I never believe clowns that say “i scratched it” or “i lost it”…”
I used to think the same thing… Until my much beloved and frequently used CD of Red Alert 2 exploded. We’re talking shockwaves. Enough force to blow open the drive tray. I was finding little plastic shards in my case for months. The laws exist for a reason: shit happens. If you can’t get your sorry ass a (legally-entitled) backup/replacement ” ”legally” “, fuck ‘em.
And really, doesn’t it make perfect sense that someone would afford the hardware but not the games? I mean, working with a fixed amount of money, would you rather have a) a good system and lots of pirated games; b) a mediocre system and a handful of games; or c) no system and lots of games? Well? Tough call, eh?
cjlr: Provide a broken principle, get a broken result. I refer you to Jon Fitt for the rest.
Fallout 3 being up there doesn’t surprise me, It is nearly AU$120 on Steam.
Holy shit, you’re joking…
…Ah, according to XE, it’s about 106 AU (from 70 US). Thank you market crash! Even the bricks-and-mortars don’t gouge you like that. I wouldn’t pay half of that for FO3, but maybe that’s just me.
…Ditto CoD4, which is still going for 90 AU! Well, it’s us who dictate the prices in the end…
Hmm, if the “scene” closed up shop, I’m fairly sure somebody would quickly take their place. They aren’t bio engineered borg, they’re just regular people who have talents that can and will be duplicated.
I’m not overly concerned with why people pirate games. There is, I imagine, a number of why’s and some (like myself) don’t even have one.
Yeah, what happened to Steam always being a better deal than physical stores? I was looking at Prince of Persia and it’s $50 USD on Steam, but only $29 CAD (~22 USD) in stores here, not even as a sale price. That’s a rather ridiculous difference.
Always? Steam has never been a better deal than physical stores with the very occasional exception of one of their weekend sales. That’s one of the problems with Steam.
@ James T
“Provide a broken principle, get a broken result.”
I don’t see it as broken.
Yes, you can get basically any media for free these days. That’s indisputable. If, in the absence of a “freely available” version of work x, you would not buy it; if that becomes an option, and you then take it, it can’t be equated to a lost sale. From where I’m standing, that’s indisputable.
So far as I can tell, then, any disagreement is based on application, not on the reasoning. It depends on your assumptions regarding how ethically the population in general will respond. If someone’s not ethical they’ll take whatever they want and let everyone else bear the burden of cost. If someone holds themselves to a standard then there’s no conflict.
But to continue from there is to delve into a rather contentious philosophical argument about morality. Suffice it to say that you’ve got your assumptions and I’ve got mine. Working with the same facts, we’ll draw different conclusions. I like to delude myself into thinking I present a fairly articulate case, but somehow I doubt we’ll be convincing each other of anything any time soon.