US PC Game Piracy Nearing 80%

[UntamedLoli]

Paid DLC: We can finish the game later and charge you for it.

[wibod]

And then there's Infinity Ward and their massive fucking fail called IWNet. Lets have peer to peer hosting and not have dedicated servers for a relatively fast paced shooter when P2P has already shown to give massive advantages on the console to the host. Lets do the same thing with on a platform where host advantage becomes even more pronounced due to the higher level of accuracy in the controls. They could have just as easily supported dedicated servers and still made a central login server to curb piracy, but in reality they don't care about the PC as a platform anymore.

Also the hulabaloo about piracy is seriously overblown, Stardock is doing just fine and they make niche RTS and 4X games. Valve is still getting the majority of their money from PC gamers and Blizzard is hardly starved for cash. It's all about people respecting those companies, and enjoying their product because the developers show atleast some respect to the consumer by not insulting them with restrictive and intrusive DRM and not calling all PC gamers pirates.

[Aiursrage2k]

If you saw the rest of the rant you might think differently. Those people who are crashing with the pirated version are actually causing the other potential buying customers to not buy the game because its "buggy".

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

So, for a game that doesn't have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game. What was the ultimate impact of that? Hard to measure, but it did get mentioned in several reviews. Think about that the next time you read "we didn't have any problems running the game, but there are reports on the internet that people are having crashes."

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663

Maybe customers would be more apt to buy the game if:
a) they respect the developer
b) the game is worth the price, and the developer has a record of making games that are worth the price

Things like this used to be good business sense. It's why I buy Blizzard games legit, not because of any threat from the League of Lawyers or invasive DRM. The same principle applies to music.

Insulting the customer by making it harder to install the game legitimately than pirating it because of DRM, or by unleashing rabid hordes of lawyers on potential customers, only serves to erode respect for the developer. Then there's EA games... enough said.

No world of goo  (2 guys), had a 90% piracy rate.

World of Goo developer 2D Boy has revealed that its excellent indie title has suffered a staggering 90 percent piracy rate. The question of lost sales is a much tougher one.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars

[Aiursrage2k]

If you saw the rest of the rant you might think differently. Those people who are crashing with the pirated version are actually causing the other potential buying customers to not buy the game because its "buggy".

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

So, for a game that doesn't have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game. What was the ultimate impact of that? Hard to measure, but it did get mentioned in several reviews. Think about that the next time you read "we didn't have any problems running the game, but there are reports on the internet that people are having crashes."

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663

Maybe customers would be more apt to buy the game if:
a) they respect the developer
b) the game is worth the price, and the developer has a record of making games that are worth the price

Things like this used to be good business sense. It's why I buy Blizzard games legit, not because of any threat from the League of Lawyers or invasive DRM. The same principle applies to music.

Insulting the customer by making it harder to install the game legitimately than pirating it because of DRM, or by unleashing rabid hordes of lawyers on potential customers, only serves to erode respect for the developer. Then there's EA games... enough said.

No world of goo  (2 guys), had a 90% piracy rate.

World of Goo developer 2D Boy has revealed that its excellent indie title has suffered a staggering 90 percent piracy rate. The question of lost sales is a much tougher one.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars

Here is what they need more of. Pirates will be taken to the woodshed.

The Grapple problem, saving problem and glide problem - it is not a BUG. Every Batman that's cracked has the same issue so you can't continue after 58% (Batcave after getting the Advanced Batclaw). So there's no point in posting "Omg I can't grapple". You want a problem fixed ? Good,buy the game. Why do I say that ? - Well because you can't get the option "Downloadable content" on cracked version,the game is awesome and perfectly made to ripoff developers,all those bugs will go away with full game,you can use other costumes for Batman and have more fun when DLC gets here. People ask "Why would I spend 60$ on a singleplayer game?" - Because Original game will bring up more content.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/batmanarkhamasylum/show_msgs.php?topic_id=m-1-51247259&pid=952339

Following a huge increase in complaints from the music, movie and software industries, the four major Japanese ISP organizations have agreed that they will work with copyright holders to track down copyright infringing file-sharers and disconnect them from the internet.

http://torrentfreak.com/japanese-isps-agree-to-ban-pirates-from-internet-080315/

[wibod]

It's no surprise that indie games are pirated, but as it says lost sales are something completely different than the amount pirated. Indie games are always of questionable quality and as such people will pirate them to see if they're worth it.  No matter what the amount pirated is not equal to the amount of lost sales because people who pirate the game do buy it, not all of them obviously but many people do. The reports of the game being buggy may cause the loss of some sales, but I don't think it's necessarily going to mangle the game when it comes down to the total sales. Remember looking at piracy in the short term for PC games is silly as PC games sell more over a longer period of time whereas consoles sell more in a short period. Also in the case of Arkham Asylum there was a one month lag time between the console and the PC port, and it was a 3d platformer fisticuffs game which is better on the console for control reasons. Basically piracy was the least of that games worries.

[UntamedLoli]

About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

wat

EDIT: That really just shows that DRM is causing more harm than it would have otherwise if crashing because of it doesn't even leave a unique message at all.

[DrumsofWar]

If you saw the rest of the rant you might think differently. Those people who are crashing with the pirated version are actually causing the other potential buying customers to not buy the game because its "buggy".

The flip side of that argument is that the security checks also crippled the sales boost you get from pirate-to-buy players.  People make their decision to buy a game from one of four sources; review website/magazines, real life friends, some forum, or by pirating it.

A successfully pirated game affects the opinions of three out of those four sources and if you're an indie developer, that's three for three considering your product won't be gracing every big magazine or website out there.  It may not seem altogether fair but the downside of a free market is that it takes more marketing money to get to the top, which means you have to submit to free advertising.

[Lavarinth]

I love what they did with Batman, but in all due time it gets worked around.. I just beat it, and I didn't buy it.

[Mr.]

I bought World of Goo.

Twice.

No, seriously.





I also did not buy Crysis.  I didn't pirate it, either.  But I did want it.  I saw it on Steam, and I wanted to see how my new computer would handle the graphics, so I was about to buy it, when I saw a little notice stating that it had Securom DRM.  So I looked up Securom, and read all about how it fucks shit up.  There was that, and the bullshit install limit.  SO, I decided not to buy Crysis after all.  No thanks, EA.  I'd rather not take the chance of being one of those odd cases of screwed up computers.  I'd like to be able to install this game after I upgrade bits of my computer's hardware.  And I definitely do not want to support a game which includes all of that retarded DRM.

Also, I could say that I don't pirate very many games, and that I buy the ones that I like, or that I mostly pirate games that are out of print.  But really, it's still wrong.  I can justify it to myself, and I can try to justify it to others, but I secretly know that it's still wrong.  And I think that by justifying it like that serves to validate the idea of piracy to others, who will repeat the same justifications, until we're all basically saying "It's okay that we're pirating games."

But will the fact that I'm acknowledging that change my pirating habits?  No.  It won't.  It's far too convenient for me to just go online, and search for a torrent.  It's too hard to resist saying "Well, I've heard good things about this game, but I'm not sure if I want to spend money on it, so I'll just download it!"

So basically, I know it's wrong, but I'm going to do it anyway, when it's convenient for me.  Damn, no wonder 235423523 people are doing it.

[IskatuMesk]

Crysis; you're not missing anything, believe me.

[Negi]

I bought World of Goo.

Twice.

No, seriously.





I also did not buy Crysis.  I didn't pirate it, either.  But I did want it.  I saw it on Steam, and I wanted to see how my new computer would handle the graphics, so I was about to buy it, when I saw a little notice stating that it had Securom DRM.  So I looked up Securom, and read all about how it fucks shit up.  There was that, and the bullshit install limit.  SO, I decided not to buy Crysis after all.  No thanks, EA.  I'd rather not take the chance of being one of those odd cases of screwed up computers.  I'd like to be able to install this game after I upgrade bits of my computer's hardware.  And I definitely do not want to support a game which includes all of that retarded DRM.

Also, I could say that I don't pirate very many games, and that I buy the ones that I like, or that I mostly pirate games that are out of print.  But really, it's still wrong.  I can justify it to myself, and I can try to justify it to others, but I secretly know that it's still wrong.  And I think that by justifying it like that serves to validate the idea of piracy to others, who will repeat the same justifications, until we're all basically saying "It's okay that we're pirating games."

But will the fact that I'm acknowledging that change my pirating habits?  No.  It won't.  It's far too convenient for me to just go online, and search for a torrent.  It's too hard to resist saying "Well, I've heard good things about this game, but I'm not sure if I want to spend money on it, so I'll just download it!"

So basically, I know it's wrong, but I'm going to do it anyway, when it's convenient for me.  Damn, no wonder 235423523 people are doing it.

Don't worry, crysis was crap.  I pirated it.

Anyway, if the game has a major multiplayer component, it's easy to prevent piracy by just tracking cd-keys.  So the games that get hurt most will be the games that are single-player only.  How many games like that have come out recently for the PC that were worth more than ten minutes of playtime?

[Taeradun]

quite a few, but they were all freeware/open source

[DrumsofWar]

A lot of companies were still able to make money off singleplayer games even with the piracy going on since their product engendered loyalty like Bethesda (Elder Scrolls), Cyan Worlds (Myst), and MicroProse (Civ and MOO).  It's still valid that they might have been a lot stronger and profitable had there not been so many pirated copies of their games, but there was a lack of value for arcade and console games too.

For a long time, the game to user ratio was closer to 1:1 in PC gaming than it was in consoles or obviously, arcade gaming.  Everyone went to one friend's house who had Super Mario 64 even if half of them had Nintendo 64s because no one's going to buy individual copies when you got so used to having 5 people dropping quarters into one arcade machine.

That said, I think the rate of piracy is definitely going up now that they're getting the cold shoulder so much.

[UntamedLoli]

The thing that really bothers me lately with alot devs is the complete lack of even trying to make an interface friendly to a PC user and instead opt to copy the console one to the letter over to the PC.

Not even have simple things like (Borderlands) double clicking on on a friend in your list to invite them to your game when clicking doesn't even do anything otherwise but instead you have to use a hotkey after clicking on their name and the mousewheel doesn't even work to scroll menu's and you have to use Page Up/Down.

Even better are the games that don't even show you PC hotkeys on menus/in-game and have 360 controller buttons without a keybinding menu to see what they are.

[Negi]

Dragon Age is so much better on the PC.  That game is great.