Gamasutra article Spore & Piracy: EA, ESA, Analysts

[LCJr.]

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=20424

This article is interesting. Now as we all know if a game does badly anymore it's all because of piracy. The respective publisher points at some torrent trackers numbers and cry's each download is a lost sale.

Now get what EA is saying about Spore.

EA recently revealed that it has sold 1 million units of Spore since launch. At the same time, TorrentFreak, a weblog dedicated to aggregating news for the BitTorrent P2P protocol, is claiming that Spore has been downloaded 500,000 times on BitTorrent alone, saying it may become "the most pirated game ever."

The editors at TorrentFreak suggest, "The idea behind DRM is that it will stop people from pirating the game, but in reality, it often has the opposite effect."

So could the DRM have created more lost sales for Electronic Arts than it prevented? Mariam Sughayer of EA's corporate communications department says this isn't the case.

Not So Fast

"Stepping aside from the whole issue of DRM, people need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale," she tells Gamasutra.

Downplaying the piracy issue in this particular case, EA's Sughayer says: "We’ve talked to people that made several unsuccessful attempts to download the game and ended up with incomplete, slow, buggy or unusable code. In one case, a file identified as Spore contained a virus."

"To say that every download represents a successful copy of the game –- or that there’s been more than 500K copies downloaded -- that’s just not true."

Perhaps oddly, these comments represent an almost total role reversal from the normal dialogue on the topic from publishers and industry associations -- which usually stresses sales lost to piracy.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

 

[Fez]

They just flip-flop in a heartbeat, if it suits them. A fine example of why EA and others are full of shit.

 

[gromit]

We’ve talked to people that made several unsuccessful attempts to download the game and ended up with incomplete, slow, buggy or unusable code.

Ha ha ha, what? Did they call tech support?

 

[uhjghvt]

We’ve talked to people that made several unsuccessful attempts to download the game and ended up with incomplete, slow, buggy or unusable code.

Ha ha ha, what? Did they call tech support?

I think what they meant is that some people tried to download it but couldn't so they bought it and ended up with buggy slow and unusable DRM code on their computer

 

[Pastel]

I'm pretty sure they are lying about that.

 

[Kaiserin]

I'm pretty sure they are lying about that.

It was one of the cleanest cracks I've ever seen. It was the absolute exact opposite of a pain in the ass from my experience.

 

[inwoker]

I'm pretty sure they are lying about that.

It was one of the cleanest cracks I've ever seen. It was the absolute exact opposite of a pain in the ass from my experience.

ok

 

[Fez]

I'm pretty sure they are lying about that.

It was one of the cleanest cracks I've ever seen. It was the absolute exact opposite of a pain in the ass from my experience.

ok

 

[Naked Ninja]

That's funny, I bought the game, didn't work on my primary box. Tried cracking it, the crack had a trojan, still didn't work. Tried installing on my second box, worked fine.

Meh, probably drivers.

 

[BethesdaLove]

How bad NN must suck if he manages to fnd a crack with a virus...

 

[SuicideBunny]

How bad NN must suck if he manages to fnd a crack with a virus...

 

[Burning Bridges]

Sounds like someone is trying to save their asses, before the internal inquiry who is responsible for the desaster.

 

[Kingston]

On an unrelated note, CliffyB sez "The person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC, to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know BitTorrent, to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC"

http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?story=55003

If it has good graphics its more likely to be torrented!

 

[Elwro]

I'm pretty sure they are lying about that.

 

[JarlFrank]

"PIRACY IS EVIL IT STEALS OUR SALES WE NEED TO PROTECT OUR PRODUCT BY USING A REALLY HORRIBLE DRM THAT ONLY HURTS CUSTOMERS BUT IS NO PROBLEM TO PIRATES!!"

"But that makes more people pirate your game."

"Uhm... uhm... YOU KNOW PIRACY ISN'T THAT BAD AT ALL THE DRM DIDN'T REALLY MAKE MORE PEOPLE THAN USUAL PIRATE THE GAME, IT'S ALL JUST IN YOUR IMAGINATION PIRATES DON'T HURT OUR SALES AT ALL!"

... what?

 

[Geofferic]

If it has good graphics its more likely to be torrented!

By this logic, Spore should have about 3 BitTorrent downloads...

 

[Lord Chambers]

Jarl Fucking Frank, you excitable idiot, no one in the interview said anything close to "pirates don't hurt our sales." There should be a part of your brain which alerts you as you post lines of capital letters that your response is far exceeding the evidence.

This is not a flip flop. This is a different spokesperson pointing out, seemingly without prompting, that every download is not a lost sale. Later she says that some people have had problems with their pirated copies. The author of the article leads this latter quote with "downplaying the piracy issue in this particular case," which may indicate context in which the EA spokesperson said it. It may be a bridge from the previous paragraph about the complexities of assessing damage. Or, since it’s not explicit to the reader how the quote “plays down” the “piracy issue” in this particular case, we might venture the Gamasutra author has poor comprehension skills and sucks like many other gaming journalists.

When all the statements EA makes in the future do try to minimize the impression that a large number of Spore downloads harmed the success of Spore, then it will be a flip flop. Until then it’s a fucking different spokesperson pointing out the complexities of piracy’s impact on sales, which for all we know, was well within the scope of the interview the author conducted.

 

[Severian Silk]

Someone needs to Photoshop a "This crack is CLEAN!" picture.

NSFW

 

[JarlFrank]

Lord Chambers, I think you don't really understand the context.

The drama around the DRM of Spore was huge, and many people on forums and/or other places on the internet said they'd rather pirate the game instead of buying it *because* of the DRM. And usually, when a game sells low, a company blames the pirates. They don't make any realistic analysis of the actual damage done to them by pirates. They blame the pirates, and only the pirates, for their game not selling. ZOMGZ ITS ALWAYS THE EVIL PIRATES THEY DESTROY THE INDUSTRY!!11!1
But now EA actually says that the pirates didn't hurt them *that* much, and that many of the downloads were actually downloads of virused versions and non-working versions and things like that. They're trying to play the problem down a bit. They don't want to admit that their DRM was the reason why the game was pirated that often. And with the example of non-working downloads and cracks that are actually trojans, they want to somehow prove that their DRM actually did work and render some of the pirated versions useless.

It's all a matter of context. Without all the bitching and protesting about the DRM, EA would probably not admit that the piracy doesn't hurt them as much as they usually claim. They are trying to justify their horrible DRM by giving some examples of people who downloaded Spore but didn't get it to work.

 

[Xi]

Yeah, they are definitely trying to say that their DRM is "effective" by down playing the actual piracy numbers. Still, they did sell a million copies already, and are bound to sell more, so I doubt it's a loss by any means.

 

[BethesdaLove]

I guaranty that without piracy Spore would sell 5 times more!

 

[Ion Flux]

I'm pretty sure they are lying about that.

It was one of the cleanest cracks I've ever seen. It was the absolute exact opposite of a pain in the ass from my experience.

Accidental butt humor is the best.

 

[Destroid]

They are trying to justify their horrible DRM by giving some examples of people who downloaded Spore but didn't get it to work.

Are you suggesting that EA are suggesting that their DRM somehow made the pirate copies not work and infected the cracks with trojans?

 

[MetalCraze]

EA logic:

Journalist: hey it looks like your game is doing well
EA: Not it's not! It was pirated to hell, we got over 1 million lost sales because of each download from torrent.
That's why we must proceed with DRM.

Journalist: hey it looks like your game is pirated as shit
EA: No it's not! Just because it was downloaded from torrent doesn't mean we lost sales - because you have to crack the game and that is oh so hard.
See our DRM is effective, we must proceed with it.

Truly masters of logic.
Does EA enjoy paying money to Securom or something?

 

[JarlFrank]

They are trying to justify their horrible DRM by giving some examples of people who downloaded Spore but didn't get it to work.

Are you suggesting that EA are suggesting that their DRM somehow made the pirate copies not work and infected the cracks with trojans?

No because some download versions didn't work because the crack was too hard to create and the crackers failed at properly doing it.