Sunday afternoon is filled with delightful free comedy (Ever get a chance, go see Brian Gittins). But the evening? It will be full of pasta and sleeping. But in between, in the meniscus between the two, it’s time to compile a list of writing on games found across the internet this week while resisting linking to some piece of music that caught our fancy.
- This is the heftiest piece of the week, and if I had more time to do a proper analysis, I’d have done a real breakdown in an longer post. As it is, you should just go through it. TweakGuides do an enormous and relatively non-partisan 10-page examination of Piracy which includes at least a half-dozen good ways to start fights. Some numbers comparing PC and Console piracy which make anyone playing a “But it happens on consoles too!” openly laughable? A vivisection of the “DRM doesn’t work” and “DRM is always cracked” argument? Arguing that there uproar around Starforce and Securom was just hysteria rather than anything rooted in fact? And while we’re there, a strong critique of Steam? I wouldn’t agree with some of the fine detail, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s well worth taking on board. And… go, comment thread, go!
- Cheery RPS-tribute site The Reticule – and I suspect none of the Reticule Writers will get that particular in-gag – have been motoring with the interviews recently. As we approach the release of Sol Infernum, they chat to Cryptic Comet’s Vic Davis about making a hell set strategy game. Good stuff.
- I’d missed this Ben Fritz has been doing some impressively in depth reporting around the fall of Brash Entertainment. If you’re the sort who cry out for investigative journalism in games, you’re pretty much duty bound to click through.
- Gamasutra has some interesting demographic information about people who game, which seems to confirm the older gamer = pc gamer idea. Perhaps common sense, but good to see evidence to back up assumptions.
- Not strictly speaking PC stuff, but I did a profile of Rare Software for OXM US which has been lobbed online. I think it’s one of the better more subdued pieces of games writing I’ve done this year, and find Rare’s dilemma fascinating. Get a chance, do read.
- Minor PC Games writer John Walker writes a piece for his obscure blog. I think it’s just about worth bringing to wider attention. Its subject: “On Why Games Reviews Should Be Subjective”. It’s strong.
- I really quite like the demo that Ex-Pipette Rose Elinor Dougall has up on her MySpace page. Very lovely.
Failed.
Related Stories:
I made a forum post re subjectivity\objectivity and reviews, as we are up to 100 posts about piracy again.
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
It’s interesting to see so many straw-man arguments and excuses that the article refers to fill up this comments thread. I thought the tweakguides article was excellent.
But the article itself is full of straw-man arguments also.
It’s ironic, really.
Well the statement that says DRM causes piracy is false is false, since Spore is the top most pirated game and many many people I know on The Pirate bay said they are downloading it because of the limited installs and DRM so yes that is false.
I have to admit, the article failed to impress me. I’m not sure I’m convinced either way by Starforce/securom arguments, although I dislike being forced to install programs that may cause problems so companies can protect against people… who aren’t me. What I find most frustrating about this article is the claim that drm is useful. With little evidence. Industry people clearly believe that zero day protection is important, but I just haven’t seen any evidence for that. Yes, obviously if you have zero day protection, then there will be no piracy on that day…. But how does one measure the scale of gained sales there? This is actually a difficult issue, and requires some decent statistical analysis, something that is lacking. One could, for example, attempt to create a statistical model to incorporate factors on sales- model terms I might consider would include DRM usage (probably just a binary yes no parameter to make things simpler), metacritic ranking, advertising budget. You know, if a games company wants to pay me, or another statistican to do this kind of analysis, I’d be happy to do it. Obviously this kind of data exists, along with sales data, which is the only outcome variable we are truly interested in!
Ideally one would like to conduct an experiment where one releases a set of games, half with drm, and half without it, and see which perform better. This would have to be randomised… so I doubt you’d get any company to agree to it. That sort of thing would be much more useful to settling this debate once and for all. I know one of the main reason’s I have not picked up Spore or Red Alert 3 yet are feeling uncomfortable as being treated badly as a consumer. I never felt that with Steam, although I will note I didn’t buy bioshock through it.
ok, that last sentence makes no sense….
Well, one problem with modelling sales is that it’s very difficult to predict what people will do in any given situation. The thing is, World of Goo circumvents a lot of the classic arguments for piracy that people make – as the article says – and yet it was still pirated to hell and back. It’s not a big company that made it, it has no DRM, was reasonably priced and was openly available globally on release. Anyone who complains about the lack of early European Steam release and pirates it as a result has no sympathy from me – they’re a pathetic, whiny criminal.
I think the World of Goo point is one of the more convincing arguments that the article makes, and I can’t see any way to justify pirating World of Goo other than because people like getting things for free.
@ Xercies (”Well the statement that says ‘DRM causes piracy is false’ is false, since Spore is the top most pirated game and many many people I know on The Pirate bay said they are downloading it because of the limited installs and DRM so yes that is false.”)
But is it? how many of those people are merely saying that the DRM is their motive for pirating the game, when deep deep down inside they know that in truth its actually because they can, and because any excuse is excuse enough for them to do it.
Just because they say thats their reasoning, is no gaurauntee that it isn’t just an excuse for their behaviour.
I hate DRM, but it doesn’t stop me from buying the games I’m really interested in buying (Never was that interested in spore so in the end I never bothered, haven’t played it and probably never will. If I was interested in Spore I probably would’ve bought it anyway, especially once EA had backed down and softened the demands of the DRM a fair bit.).
@Cliffski:
Well, I bought Kudos 2 straight from your site and was pretty satisfied with the process.
I think this might be a case of people’s natural inclination to aim for the most “recognizable.” Brand names, product loyalty, the lingering effect of advertising and word of mouth… perception’s really important for consumers, for good or ill.
But hey, at least one guy trusts you. And other indie folks whose games look interesting, too.
And on Steam: Well, I’ve no beef with Valve, personally. And I’ve also got no beef with Stardock’s new competitor, Impulse. As a paying customer, it’s nice having a choice.
With the Steam pricing fiasco, though, that puts a bit of a kink in the consumer “trust” thing. And it’s ultimately all about trust.
The article does admittedly fail to mention the investigations of one indie developer that suggested DRM prevents something like 1 pirate copy in a thousand, anyone remember where that article is? – As I ought to refresh myself on the wording of what that developer reported.
(EDIT: After further consideration, the above comment about 1 to 1000 pirated copies can be considered unreliable, primarily because its a casual game and therefor its relevance to AAA titles can be heavily disputed. Also, if a pirate is no longer able to play a single player experience, they’ll just go do something else, what impact this might have on an online game like Battlefield, I don’t know)
Also sure, that article seems to be pretty critical of Steam, regardless, its right in its statement that Steam should have a good competitor, because that will encourage steam and its competitor to reduce prices all around. Its curious how prices on steam are often higher than that of boxed retail despite an absence of printing/boxing/transport/storage costs, not to mention that retail has to pay its staff a fair amount (As in, at least minimum wage, this adds up), in fact there are reasons why adoption of 2nd hand/trade in games have taken off so much – Retail (Indie retail especially) feels it needs the extra revenue.
So yeah, as much as I like steam, it needs a viable well known competitor/brand so that market forces can take full effect.
@Al3xand3r – You seem to have real issues with the facts and arguments in the TweakGuides article. Could you elaborate on them (especially an example or two of his straw-men arguments)? I agree that quite a bit of the article is speculation, perhaps as it has to be since it doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of solid information available. But I don’t think you can write off his whole argument because of a few weaknesses in his sub-arguments.
The points he raises sound fairly reasonable and valid to me (as a layperson I admit). No, his argument isn’t flawless and much of his ‘evidence’ may be questionable, but at least it has had a lot of thought put into it. I’d genuinely like to see a similar article in favour of piracy, so we could get both sides of the argument in a well thought out, structured way.
Larrington: Worth re-reading. I think people quoting the 1 in a 1000 number without remembering what it’s specifically talking about is misleading.
(i.e. It’s a casual game)
I also wish they explained more of the maths behind their 1 in 1000 number.
KG
Re Cliffski: The only problem I have with going directly to a small developer (and I do it pretty frequently) is because y’all aren’t completely reliable.
I’ve been selling games online longer than valve. from the same site, same URL.
just saying…
Also the company who did the 1 in a 1,000 research are heavily criticised for having the weakest, lamest DRM scheme ever. There are universal cracks for their stuff everywhere.
So they didn’t have much incentive to show how strong DRM works.
In fact most indie games go totally uncracked until they appear with portal DRM… I know several devs who refuse to use some portals because of the inevitable cracking of the game the day they release it.
Cheers for the info Kieron/Cliffski, most useful.
Note to self: Research “Portal DRM”
@Cliffski: Ouch, portals take 80% of the price from you for each copy sold? Thats outrageous!
Additional Edit: Hmm, games journalistic opportunity has just occured to me – An artical asking if ‘Games Portals’ are worth going near, if what I’ve read recently is anything to go by, the answer is a resounding no.
I’d say the World of Goo case questions whether DRM is useful: it had roughly the same piracy rate as games with DRM. So while DRM may not cause piracy, DRM also seems to do nothing to decrease piracy.
Then again, I do agree with the statistician above, who pointed out that all this is anecdotal, until there’s some randomized testing. WoG and e.g. GTA4 may or may not have the same demographic buying them: we have no way of knowing if DRM was any factor whatsoever in the piracy rate of either game. It may all be down to the demographic buying, or some hitherto overlooked factor. Unless we test, we wont know.
As for MMOs as a business model, to me, it seems most devs are making the mistake of trying to make the next WoW, instead of going for something totally different. WoW-type MMOs seem to be hell to develop, needing gigantic budgets and having a high chance to fail – so why not go for something that focuses more on gameplay and less on glitz? Less fancy graphics, but hang on to that MMO part of it? Throw in a little RTS or something else, perhaps? Hey, it’s just a thought, but I think MMO games can be so much more than graphics-heavy grind “RPGs” like WoW. It’s just a matter of exploring other ways in which a persistent online world can be used in an interesting way in games.
I do have to say, that TweakGuides article uses a lot of very wobbly logic.
A couple of examples – when the author shows us how many torrents he counted for PC versions of popular games compared to 360 and PS3 version torrents, he says:
“For those questioning whether these figures are even remotely accurate, one well-known piracy site recently released a Top 10 Pirated PC Games of 2008 listing, and they even went so far as to insist that torrent figures compiled in this manner should be highly accurate.”
The list on that ‘one well-known piracy site’ featured in a previous RPS post and what a lot of people (including myself) noted was how the site gave absolutely no indication at all how they arrived at those numbers. So the author is underlining his own findings with numbers that are at least as questionable as his own.
“The console versions of each of the above games is exactly $10 (20%) more than the PC version, which is actually quite common. Console games will generally cost more than the PC equivalents. Quite clearly, the price of console games would tend to imply that they should in fact be selling fewer copies than their PC equivalents, and being pirated more often due to cost, when the exact opposite is happening in reality.”
This is just naive – cost of a version is only one of many elements of a buying decision.
“This is because by the very act of obtaining and playing a game, they’ve clearly demonstrated that they place some value on that game. After all, if something is truly ‘worthless’, consumers won’t bother to obtain or use it in the first place, regardless of whether it’s free or not.”
No, they’ve “clearly” demonstrated that they place some value on downloading the game. It says nothing about how worthy someone might find the game to play it.
I’m not even touching that “locked house” analogy, I’ll be here all night.
Oh, the locked house analogy?
Yeah, if everyone in the world could make working pirate copies of everything in your apartment, without you losing any actual property, as soon as someone just *once* cracked the lock, somewhere far physically removed, with little chance to get caught. Err. Yes, in that world, the practice of crackable locks on doors might indeed be somewhat different. Because it seems to be a world somewhat dissimilar to the current reality, at least as far as your ordinary locked door goes..
I know that having the P word on the menu cancels any other type of discussion but I’m going to try. The post of John is excellent but I never understood why Kieron’s piece about New Videogames Journalism got so much hate or how it ended being a lazy tag for bad writing, he addressed the need of a change in the way of writing reviews and gave it a personality, a name and a purpose. I really think it was a brave and revealing piece and it´s still something meaningful to me. It saddens me to see it reduced to an uncomfortable seal applied to bad writing.
Locked house analogy made sense to me. Pirates can’t physically remove Z Developer’s assets, but by cracking the game they allow people to play it without paying, robbing Z Developer of revenue. It’s not the physical or intellectual asset which is being lost to the developer/publisher, it’s the revenue from it.
As for first-day sales and their significance, a lot of game publishers say it’s important. A lot of People From The Internet say it’s unimportant. Who’s got the detailed sales figures in this debate? Whose job depends on knowing exactly how and when games sell? I’m betting that first-day sales are as important as the publishers claim.
So having a lock which will hold for two weeks, protecting your first-day revenue, seems very worthwhile to me.
Here’s an idea: why not have the draconian DRM on launch-day, and protect the precious first-day sales, and then release a DRM-free version a few months later, after the game’s been cracked anyway? That’s more-or-less what happened with X2-The Threat, although it took 18 months or so.
@ Gpig: I like the cut of your jib. I too find myself in an odd limbo of desensitisation with regard to the act of shooting (and in games!). Oddly enough, I find guns that imbue a real sense of kineticism into the proceedings – rickety old sub-machine guns that rattle around as the bullets fly, or gravity-gun style weapons that fling projectiles (or people) with speeds that make your graphics card go “eh, no. I’ll render that by triangulation” actually fun – in the same way throwing a ball is fun – whereas more the mundane shooting fare prevalent in 90% of war games (and thus 70% of all games) doesn’t really affect me at all – which in fact I find myself doing for exactly the kind of ‘tactile reinforcement’ of the gameworld and its inhabits that I think CliffyB was getting at as referenced in Thomsen’s article.
I do think it was an astute observation regarding shooting replacing jumping – but my distress when starting up Bioshock for the first time at the A button not making my character jump was palpable (and, the neighbours tell me, audible). I wonder if that’s telling?
So if platformers are defined by having “jump” as their main verb, and shooters are defined by having “shoot” in the same role, what defines the RPG? “Wander”, perhaps?
“Min-Max.”
J-RPGS: “Grind”
C-RPGS: “Refer to game-faqs”.
“uninstall”
(A long posting in three parts: StarForce, Steam, and general.)
—
I’ve never bought, pirated, or played a StarForce-protected game — by the time I might have done so, the controversy was in full swing, and I figured I’d just stay away.
I do wonder, though. Was there an actual bug in XP that meant corrupted sectors on CDs were slowing down the drive, eventually killing it? If so, that could go a long way to explaining the StarForce problem. There have been various copy protection schemes in the past that use deliberately corrupted sectors on various kinds of media, since these cannot be easily reproduced in a pirated copy of media.
Obviously, if you stop using StarForce, that means you stop using StarForce-protected media. Hence, sure, your problems go away.
—
Regarding Steam: I’m not really too concerned about the lack of competitor. Other companies are sure to try, and Steam is just leading the way. They’re also setting a great example for those to follow, as well as raising the bar (quality-wise) for entry.
IMO, Steam is “DRM done right”. That is, while customers would prefer a world without DRM — and publishers would prefer a world where they could make enough money without it — we apparently don’t live in that world (now). It’s thus unfair to compare “Steam versus nothing”, but very fair to compare “Steam versus other DRM schemes”, which is very favourable for Steam.
I’m also only mildly wary of purchasing games digitally via Steam, or purchasing them as a boxed copy and registering the CD key with Steam. Yes, I realise that it represents a single point of failure — but the more people use Steam, the more of an “essential service” it becomes, the more they invest in keeping it up and running at high speeds 24/7, and the more likely Valve is to stick around for another few years to run it.
Ultimately, Steam (and digital delivery) isn’t just about prices, it’s about convenience. I purchased Left 4 Dead on a Sunday night at around 8pm, and I was playing by 10pm. There’s absolutely no way I could have gotten a legal copy that night, and a torrented version probably would’ve taken way longer.
People are willing to pay more for convenience. With Steam, that means both “get it when you want it”, as well as “log in and play it from anywhere” and “no fussing with CDs or other wacky DRM stuff”. I’ve never used the offline mode, though I might someday, so that’s an extra bonus.
If it comes down to paying $50 for a boxed copy of a game using some third-party DRM activation service (reliability / longevity unknown), or $50 for a digital copy of the same game that activates via Steam, I think I’d choose the latter, unless there are some serious goodies in that boxed copy. Heck, I might even pay $60 for the Steam version.
Note that all of the above only applies if companies let Steam do all the DRM. If they try to layer their own stuff underneath Steam, then all bets are off. (Frankly, I think the Steam store ought to be noting the presence of non-Steam DRM on every applicable product.)
—
Those issue aside, the article has certainly opened my eyes to a few things. I’ve found myself slipping more and more into piracy over the years, and yeah, it’s just too easy to self-justify.
In some situations, I’ve tried to do good, but been driven to piracy just to actually get the goods I already purchased. In one case, I purchased most of the seasons of a TV show before reaching one with a corrupted DVD at a critical point in the season. Unable to return it or contact the publisher, I was forced to pirate it.
Unfortunately, it’s a slippery slope. Once you’ve downloaded a season of the show and had a falling-out with the publisher, the urge to buy the following seasons isn’t particularly high. Worse, you don’t know where your true motivations lie. Are you “punishing” the publisher for releasing a bad product and refusing to stand behind it? Or are you just happy to have an excuse to do what you would have liked to have done otherwise?
Games are the same story. There are those of us who try to maintain some moral code in the face of rampant piracy, yet it’s still too easy to fall prey to our own excuses to justify downloading instead of buying.
The most common is the “I wouldn’t buy it anyway” excuse, which is true in some cases, but tends to be overused. We’re just not able to completely put the “free version over here!” fact out of our head and make an objective decision. Hence, every little flaw in a product has an inflated effect on the perceived value of the program, so you can decide it’s “mediocre” enough to justify pirating rather than buying.
Ultimately, deciding whether to pay money or not isn’t a fair decision when you get the product either way. :)
The only real solution is to cease pirating and go back to the “old way” of either buying stuff or not touching it — and in some social circles, that can actually make you the odd man out. That, more than anything, is probably the best barometre for how crazy the current piracy situation has become.
Personally, while I’m not ready to give up piracy altogether, I do try to be as fair as I can. If a demo is available, I’ll always play that rather than using the “I’m trying it out” excuse to pirate it. I’ve pirated stuff and then gone back and bought the real thing — particularly from indie companies who keep prices low and don’t use DRM, like Introversion (Darwinia, Uplink, DEFCON).
(Introversion also has a fantastic hybrid delivery system. You buy a boxed copy and they send it to you, but they also immediately let you grab a downloadable copy. It’s even better than Steam, since it gives you the best of both worlds, not to mention being devoid of restrictions.)
Having read this article, I know I’ll be a lot more selective about what PC games I download. I’m a lot less willing to grab something for free when I know the developer is hurting for it — and when I’m hurting myself right along with them, in the long run.
I’ve actually just finished rereading the Gowers Report on Intellectual Property (which the British Government commissioned, accepted the findings of… and recently seem to be ignoring again now they want to do things that it noted were stupid), and I thought one of the more relevant things that it noted was that the evidence suggested that people considered copyright violation to be “okay” because copyright currently restricts acts which aren’t harmful to the copyright owner (copying CDs to your iPod, for example) as well as acts which do harm the owner. Hence, the reputation and image of copyright are harmed sufficiently that people don’t care about any copyright violations…
I thoroughly agree with the piracy indepth article. I don’t know enough about Starforce to know whether he was right or wrong, but as it was obviously just a sort of urban-myth-disproving corollary to the rest of the article, it doesn’t particularly matter. His figures all seem very plausible, and the section on PCs versus consoles was excellent and unequivocal (if a bit UK- and US-centered).
Oh, and as an aside to people who claim consoles have just as much DRM as PCs and don’t represent a solution to the problem – yes, but there’s one key difference. It works. I buy a game for my console, it will work for ever without limits, and I can play it on as many consoles (mine or other people’s) without any problems. I can lend it, resell it, and in short do whatever I want with it so long as I don’t try to play it on more than one console at a time, and I’m fine with that. A model for the PC, perhaps?
I just want publishers to stop forgetting to put the CD keys in the boxes, or if they must forget, at least have their support department email me a CD key instead of helpfully advising me to waste my valuable time taking it back to the shop. I’m looking at you, Valve/EA.
And by the way, I enjoyed the quote from Cevat Yerli in the piracy article:
“At the end of the day, I think our message is if you’re a PC gamer, and you really want to respect the platform, then you should stop pirating.”
I think if you’re a Crytek executive and you respect your wife you should stop beating her.
Oh, I’m sure first-day sales are important if the publishers and developers (who yes, have that sales data) say they are. I have no reason to disbelieve that. What I don’t believe is that a few days wait for a crack turns potential pirates into customers, and like many other piracy-related numbers, there’s no real hard data on that.
But here’s a compromise I’d be more than happy to live with, if zero-day piracy really is the main thing DRM’s meant to stave off: use whatever DRM you like. Make it as insanely hateful as you want. And then, when the pirates have gotten round it and put a fully functional pirate version up for download (i.e., usually within a few days), immediately patch the lot of it out of your software entirely and remove it from any further print runs of the discs. After all, it’s served its purpose, hasn’t it? And what, exactly, is the point of leaving the DRM on if the only people still dealing with it are your legitimate customers?
malkav11: The part about removing the DRM from further print runs is problematic, since I’m guessing multiple versions means higher costs in terms of production, testing, and support.
I guess you could just have your online authentication servers no longer enforce the limited installs rule, and simultaneously release a patch that people can use to avoid further phone-homes. But unless you alter the source media, it’d be tricky to avoid the initial need for online activation, unless you give people a patch they can run before install, or inbetween install and activation.
Sure, if you draw attention to the fact that one CD = limitless installs, people will start to casually copy it. But I suspect that casual copying, once the bane of computer software, now has an extremely minor impact compared to piracy.
Mind you, I’m not really sure how much of a difference it would make anyway. I’m betting the biggest sales factors are quality, the nature of your target audience, and how long your product remains uncracked. Except in particularly “loud” cases like StarForce, the people who boycott your product due to DRM are probably just a very vocal minority — and one that’s likely to shrink if strong DRM becomes the rule rather than the exception.
Personally, I’ve pretty much had to accept that if I want to keep (legally) playing any of today’s titles ten years from now, they’d better be console titles. But then, I guess the same can be said of anything that came out fifteen or twenty years ago today, since it’s not like I’m able to play old PC games off the original floppy diskettes. ;)
The strong “abandonware” community suggests that we’ll still be able to play the best games of today in ten or twenty year’s time, even if we have to use emulators and illegal cracks to do it. But I still can’t decide whether saying “you’ll be able to play the pirate version even once the activation servers go offline” is reason to accept harsh DRM schemes, or just a cop-out by people who want to have their cake and eat it too. Even if it’s a lie.
“Some numbers comparing PC and Console piracy which make anyone playing a “But it happens on consoles too!” openly laughable?”
Let me see there are 42 million PS3+X360 and they have 110 thousand pirated CoD4… and there are over a billion PCs but lets say only half of them can run CoD4, 500 millions with 566 Thousand Pirated CoD 4. Yes, consoles are openly laughable.
I learnt a lot from that article. On a couple of occasions, there’s an appeal to possibly dubious authority (such as with the torrentfreak piracy rates for 2008), but the lack of authenticity is a pervasive problem in this matter anyway. For lack of better data, I suppose I could say the results are depressing even if they’re skewed by up to an order of magnitude. {sigh}
@Another one: The data you mention is off. The article estimates the number of CoD4 capable PCs at close to 100 million or more, based on medium and high-end graphics card sales since Q3 2005. The number of CoD4 capable consoles is estimated to be 42 million, as you’ve mentioned.
With the torrent numbers you mention, that comes to 1 pirated CoD4 copy per 200 (or less) PCs- the console piracy rate being 1 pirated CoD4 copy per 420 consoles. So CoD4 piracy is about twice as rampant on the PC, and factoring in the volumes themselves, the difference is even more pronounced.
Oops, there’s an idiotic flaw in my argument. I’m sorry, I should have compared the CoD4 PC and Console version torrent download numbers with their respective PC and Console sales numbers, not the maximum available customer bases. As it stands, my previous analysis is meaningless. I’m off to see if I can find CoD4 sales figures on that article.
@Another one: Better figures from the article- 566000 CoD4 downloads with 766000 legitimate sales (inclusive of estimated digital distribution sales) on the PC. 3 million copies sold on the Xbox alone- so PC CoD4 piracy is at about 3:4 based on torrent numbers, Console piracy based on torrent numbers alone is certainly 1:30 or more (in favour of legitimate sales).
The number of CoD4 capable PCs does not factor into this at all.
That TweakGuides article on piracy bothers the shit out of me. It’s the kind of shit that will just further the FUD about the PC platform among game publishers while contributing nothing noteworthy, in spite of the PC platform’s $33 billion annual profits (according to the PCGA) in spite “rampant” (god he sure loves to use that word) piracy.
Even retail NPD figures the PC makes more money than all consoles and handhelds combined ($10b PC compared to $8b for all the rest).
Also yes, there’s a lot of opinion in that “factual” look, like the claim that cartridges are what made the Atari succeed (ignoring how they crashed and burned entirely separate from any piracy related issue- they failed hard in 83 despite the claimed superiority of their cartridges), or saying that the N64 used cartridges as an anti-piracy measure (They used catrtridges because they didn’t think consumers would put up with the long loading times the CD platform had) and that the Playstation had “rampant piracy” (again with that phrase), even though the PS1 owned the hell out of the N64, profits-wise.
That guy on Tweakguides is very thorough but there are serious issues with his methodology and some bits of it just don’t bear up to scrutiny.
I’m not convinced by the numbers he comes up with for number of copies downloaded of different games, for example. How does he count them? Does he join the swarm and count individual IPs? Does he keep track of any new IPs that join the swarm each day as well as keeping a list of all IPs who were already in the swarm from the previous day and slowly building up an aggregate of all the people who had joined the swarm of a torrent over the course of a month? And he manages to do this for several different torrents, each with hundreds of peers and seeds, over a period of many days? Does he also keep track of each peer’s individual progress, so that he knows to remove them from the aggregate if they haven’t finished downloading the whole torrent? And does that account for dynamic IPs?
All he does to explain his methodology is say “For those that don’t believe my numbers, here’s someone else’s numbers” without explaining THAT person’s methodology either!
Even if those numbers are accurate, they don’t account for people who are downloading the game even though they own it (for backup purposes, or because they lost the disc). You might think that’s a negligible number, but I personally have downloaded lots of games I already own: Max Payne (scratched disc), Max Payne 2 (lost one of the discs), Far Cry (wouldn’t work with my virtual drive software), Prince of Persia (ditto), Beyond Good and Evil (ditto), Baldur’s Gate 2 and TOB (left the CDs at my parents’ house), Deus Ex (left the CDs at my house and wanted to play it while visiting my parents’), Planescape Torment (1 disc was scratched), and there’s probably more that I can’t remember now, and that’s not even counting all those really old games that I own on 5.25″ floppies that I don’t have a drive I can read them on.
The “most downloaded game ever” moniker for Spore kinda proves that this is a major source for downloading. Could it be that a lot of people resorted to torrents because they knew about the restrictive DRM? And could it be that the fact that only 1% of people who bought it reached the installation limit was partly due to the fact that the restrictions were widely-publicised, so people knew not to install it as many times as they possibly might have wanted to under ordinary circumstances? Or because, knowing these restrictions, they resorted to downloading a cracked copy even though they owned the game?
(I’m not saying that the MAJORITY of downloaders are doing it for legitimate reasons, I’m just saying that the image which both the gaming industry and the article on Tweakguides are presenting is that 100% of peers in a torrent are “pirates”, and that’s completely misleading – going by my own experiences with games I’ve downloaded even though I owned them, it could be that a high percentage of them are legitimate downloaders.)
I could write another lengthy argument about why I think labelling all illegal downloaders as “pirates” is semantically inaccurate, and that label should be reserved for people who SELL illegal copies of a game, but I’ll restrain myself. When I was 11 and loaning and borrowing games from my friends though, I would have probably thought that calling me a “pirate” for doing so would be cool, and I wouldn’t have protested. Although even back then I KNEW that ninjas were, of course, cooler than pirates.
Do the pirated versions of Spore work with the online sharing?
@ M.P.
Wouldn’t it actually be fairer to say that a negligable percentage or torrenters might be getting downloads for back up purposes (or in your case convenience and damage replacement. If only all goods were as friendly as games, damage your car? No problem, we’ll fix it right up for you!). Since in a lot of cases the quoted numbers of downloaders exceeds the actual sales of the game and, in my completely subjective personal experience, almost noone who buys games then goes and pirates a version for a backup, especially not in the first month on sale. I think it would be more confusing for the author to ramble on about the 1-2% of users who use pirating sites for backing their games up.
@ Jetsetlemming
Yuo really believe that publishers believe an article on tweak games over actual sales figures? I can tell you that the chaps who make these decisions spend their nights at home in bed with pie charts of sales figures. Also, always worth remembering that around $2bn of that $10bn you quote comes directly from one game (WoW).
@ Noone in particular
Generally I think the whole point of the article is not that PC gaming as a whole is going to collapse but that certain forms of products which some of us are quite attached to playing on our PCs are going to. Browser games, MMOs, multiplayer only games are all the sorts of things that can thrive even in a heavy piracy environment. Single player games? Not so much, unless users can be persuaded firstly to be honest and just buy games they like the look of (yes, shock horror not everyone will be amazing just like when you got to see a movie, eat in a restaurant or have a night out on the town) and that DRM is like delicious chocolate candy (a trick Valve seems to have pulled on some people with Steam, and well done to Valve for performing that master feat).
“I think if you’re a Crytek executive and you respect your wife you should stop beating her.”
Whut? Is your point that Crytek should talk up the PC platform more, or that the CEO actually beat his wife? On the former point, there’s no reason why Crytek should stick to PC if there’s a business reason not to. Crytek is a business, not a charity or advocacy group.
Devil’s advocate here:
I’m guessing that the people who object to the DRM on Spore are probably the more “advanced” users — the ones who know about the issues involved, who know that the new breeds of DRM are going further than ever before, etc.
Unfortunately, I would expect that’s also the demographic of users most likely to pirate the game.
I’m reminded very much of that Brad Wardell posting about piracy:
It seems likely to me that the large majority of Spore purchasers were from the more casual crowd, the ones who buy all those Sims expansion packs, and the ones who don’t really know or care what DRM the product uses.
Conversely, a lot of the “advanced” users were probably going to avoid Spore anyway, after reviews made it clear it was a decent concept with very shaky execution.
When your userbase is laid out in that fashion, it’s hard to recommend caring about how restrictive your DRM is. Most people aren’t going to notice or care, and the ones crying foul are the ones least likely to have bought it anyway.
Really, the whole issue resolves around the notion of companies adapting — of ceasing to promote to high-piracy markets, and focus on the more profitable ones instead.
One of the common excuses for piracy has been that companies are just being whiners and need to learn how to better adapt to the “real world” of today. Well, great, they’re doing exactly that … but you probably won’t like the result.
@Gap Gen
Not at all, I was simply using a clumsy rhetorical example to suggest that his inference that all PC gamers are pirates is unhelpful.
Gap Gen, plurium interrogationum or the fallacy of many questions, or the loaded question, is what Cevat Yerli commited. It’s simply been pointed out by asking a hypothetical loaded question in return. The fallacy presupposes a condition in which any yes or no answer is an admission of the presupposition.
So if we want PC gaming to stay healthy, we should stop pirating? If we refuse, we are admitting we are pirates, if we agree, we are admitting we are pirates. We are prejudiced by Yerli who can not imagine that he holds any blame for why Crysis did not sell like a block-buster and why it was pirated quite heavily.
No, Crytek is not a charity or advocacy group, *but neither are the customers Yerli despises* even as they keep him warm and fed. His entire reaction to the reception Crysis got was of a sulking brat that thinks the world owes him something. If he wants any goodwill, he should give it liberally first.
@ Dan Lawrence: That’s sort of the question – how negligible is this percentage? I mean, if my experience with copy protection (especially the kind Ubi used to use, that refused to work if you had CloneCD or another virtual drive software installed on your system) is anything to go by then it must be a fair number. And the examples I cited were just the games I downloaded in their entirety – there’s loads more that I downloaded no-cd cracks for, simply because I hate disc-swapping, and I think a game played on a platform with gigabytes of storage shouldn’t require the sodding DVD in the drive on principle.
Certainly the number of torrent downloads the dude cited for Spore seems to suggest that the more annoying the DRM, the more the game will be downloaded. At least some of these folks will be people who decided Spore’s DRM wasn’t worth the hassle and they’d rather have a cracked version.
It’s really hard to pick out the compliments for me amongst all this P-word bitching, you know. I wish you people would be more sensitive.
That’s why Cooper dedicated an entire forum topic to discussing your everlasting brilliance! Speaking of which, it’d be nice to see the RPS writers frequenting the forum a bit more (besides Kieron who’s quite good at posting there every now and again). Though understandably you’re all quite busy.
eyemessiah*, not Cooper. I really need to pay better attention.
@Dan Lawrence:
“@ Jetsetlemming
Yuo really believe that publishers believe an article on tweak games over actual sales figures? I can tell you that the chaps who make these decisions spend their nights at home in bed with pie charts of sales figures. Also, always worth remembering that around $2bn of that $10bn you quote comes directly from one game (WoW).”
The current industry delays PC versions of games weeks to months, if they come out at all, claim the system is dying at worst and “lacking direction” at best, and in general badmouth it all the time. So, yes.
And WoW’s profits are NOT from retail sales of the game, they’re from subscription fees. NPD data is only for retail purchased copies of games. The only part WoW has in that $10b are copies of WoW bought at Gamestop and Wal-mart for $20, the subscription fees that are Blizzard’s bread and butter go completely uncounted by the NPD. They probably count in the PCGA’s $33b total figure, though.