Titan Quest producer rants on PC market.

[Hory]

You get all that for 23€? Which planet are you from?

I assumed an inital Titan Quest price of ~40$. It was probably more.

Also: Argument doding count: 2

I posted in the exact minute you did. I had no time to view your "arguments".
"Stop looking for things to accuse me of" warning count: 2

Who gives you the right to call a result "bad"?

Freedom of speech.

 

[Hory]

I'm curious Hory, how many of those things that cost the same as Titan Quest can you do for free, by stealing the product or service?

How many of those things can you duplicate ad infinitum without any direct loss to the owner, as is the case of digital products?

Oh but I weep for the generosity of man, that I have to pay for movies or beer. The people have spoken. Give us your beer for free all you breweries!!!

If I could manufacture,after hundreds of hours of work, a barrel with infinite beer, you can bet I'd be glad to have as many people drinking from it as possible.

 

[Sir_Brennus]

You get all that for 23€? Which planet are you from?

I assumed an inital Titan Quest price of ~40$. It was probably more.

Also: Argument doding count: 2

I posted in the exact minute you did. I had no time to view your "arguments".
"Stop looking for things to accuse me of" warning count: 2

Who gives you the right to call a result "bad"?

Freedom of speech.

Don't call me a liar, do you hear me?

I imported the Oceanic version of Titan Quest 2 weeks after release from CDWow for 23€ + p&p which was about 3€. I don't buy anything from CDWow anymore, because you'll have to use a fucking credit card now - and I am not doing this on the internetz.

Freedom of speech shouldn't be confused with the freedom to defend moronic, self-indulged logic to the point of lost hope. Done with you.

 

[nik2008ofs]

- Fixed crashes involving the Alt-Tab function

Guys it was totally the pirates fault that TQ failed

EVERY game's readme states that alt-tabbing is not recommended, even the ones that do not crash. Can't bash TQ for that.

 

[Hory]

I didn't call you a liar. I even said my price was an assumption. As with any assumption, I'm likely below the correct price, or above it. The price you paid isn't the absolute maximum. In my opinion, I was likely below the general price. Even your 26 EUR = 39 USD, so I wasn't far off. Why are we arguing about this? Oh, right, you're a nit-picker.

 

[nik2008ofs]

I think Titan Quest's problem is that while it wasn't bad, it wasn't exceptionally good, so most people spent their game budget on other games and pirated Titan Quest because they didn't think it was worth the money.

You assume that there was a significant number of games that targeted the same audience that were clearly and irrefutably "exceptionally good" available at the time of TQ and the expansion's release, and the gaming public chose them instead. I can't think of a single such game.

 

[crufty]

I can't think of a single such game.

Correct! Even if I had a pc, I would not have purchased titan quest. I would have bought no game -- nor pirated a game. Way too lazy for that.

 

[Jaime Lannister]

You assume that there was a significant number of games that targeted the same audience that were clearly and irrefutably "exceptionally good" available at the time of TQ and the expansion's release, and the gaming public chose them instead. I can't think of a single such game.

Diablo II.

 

[Yahweh]

Wow, it's like watching a class full of retards fight to the death over a half empty pizza box.

Since apparently no one understands 'maths', the case about the "70%" and "1 in 1000" doesn't really mean anything at all because online sales and downloads are not remotely steady or in an even distribution and it's also hard to pinpoint what their distribution is. It was 70% of the total sales, as well, not 5-6% as Section8 seems to think for some bizarre reason.

Piracy is always going to be out there, but there's no point focusing on it. People who aren't going to buy your game never are. Disconnected is a great example. Some people are just greedy shortsighted twats. That's why places like Korea have an immense market for MMOs and online games but never in a million years will they know the joy of a single player RPG that's made in their native tongue.

Fortunately in the civilized world, where some people realize that immediately gratifying every petty desire can be ultimately counterproductive, there are people willing and able to pay for games if you can get a game they like made and get it into their awareness somehow and make it possible for them to buy it.

So I think the real question people should have, is why does it take 300k sales for a company to barely squeek by?

Even if you somehow magically double the sales of all games on the shelf, it still won't compare to the profitability of consoles or cut the stranglehold publishers have on creativity. I doubt that TQ was the game that they would have made if they didn't have to pitch to a bunch of suits to beg for money. Maybe it was, but you're fooling yourself if you think that most developers are making the games they want. Do you think Troika wanted to make bloodlines realtime? Most developers are probably just happy to have a job, any job at all, making games of any sort instead of working as web monkeys getting bossed around by some idiot one tenth as smart as they are.

You can't fight the market forces. PC games are just never going to be super sellers like consoles. My hope is that niche games will get delivered online or in gaming stores like back when. Just ten to twenty thousand sales is more than enough to support a small team that doesn't have a crazy advertising budget. Which is nearly always the highest figure present in any 'development' budget.

 

[Fez]

The trick is to not look at the box as half empty, but to look at it as half full. Now that is worth fighting for.

 

[Longshanks]

I do not mourn the loss of Iron Lore. Didn't even know the name of the company till today, and have not been even remotely interested in any of their games.
Does it possibly presage more doom and gloom for the PC industry as a whole? Maybe, but what would the success of a company producing derivative games that I have no interest in mean?

I am a consumer, I mourn the loss of companies who are producing what I want, Troika, Looking Glass, Black Isle ...

Many PC owners are stupid, and do not know how to keep their systems in peak working order? This is not news to anyone, and as has been mentioned is one of the reasons consoles are so popular.

However, if PC users are stupid, what do we call a developer who seemed to have an incomplete understanding of the market they were developing for? Hardware, software, piracy, stupidity issues are not new, as NakedNinja said, every company must deal with these. "Our game did not sell enough, because of piracy", are the rates so wildly variant that it is impossible to take these into account before hand? This is a genuine question, as I really do not know.

Would Iron Lore have been successful if there were no piracy? I'm not so certain. Sure, if we removed all piracy from Iron Lore games only it would, but removing it from the industry as a whole could mean little improvement of their situation. With no piracy, and more overall sales, the expectations of investors are proportionally higher, Iron Lore may still have been seen as an underperforming company. Most people only have money to buy a couple of games at a time, with no piracy, are they more likely to buy from the major developers, or take a chance on an untried one? (see, piracy helps smaller developers, people can pirate from the big-boys and buy from the small fish :wink: ). This is not a serious point, but there is no question some do have something like this attitude (probably not significant enough to matter). These situations are only hypotheticals, just showing there are alternate possiblities to "everything would be rosy if t'were not for piracy", as this is a massive change in market conditions, no-one can say with certainty what the outcome would be.

VD has stated that if AoD doesn't make enough he is done. There are cracks for Spidweb games all over the place, his will be cracked in no time.

Pretty sure he's said the game will not be copy protected.


On piracy, and whether people would buy the games they pirate if they could not get them for free. I do not have to look at this hypothetically, I rarely pirate now, and only a short while ago never did. The number of games I buy has remained static, I buy games that I judge to be very good, I do not buy mediocre stuff that may mildly entertain me for an hour or two. It is thus now, as it was in my pre-pirating days (the only difference is, previously I played less games overall, though did hire some or borrow from friends (yes I know, even this is not strictly legal)), I can in all honesty say that I do not pirate games I would have otherwise bought. If this is true (and I do not expect anyone to simply take my word for it), no-one loses any money from my infringement on intellectual property.

The guy has some genuine reasons to be upset over consumers, PC development and the industry as a whole, but most of what he says seems analagous to a pamphleteer ignoring a "Warning! Dangerous dog!" sign, entering a property, then complaining about being bitten.

 

[Futile Rhetoric]

Oh thats bull and you know it. Have you never pirated something before? You get a game you want for free and the motivation to pay for it is almost 0 afterwards. You tell your friends it's cool and generally they will ask you for a ripped copy. Gained through education my ass.

I've pirated plenty of things before. I've also gone out and bought plenty of games I pirated. Examples? Last two: MotB and the Witcher. Pirated both, loved both, bought both. Now, clearly, this isn't the way you feel about games. That's fine. If you're afraid of piracy because you feel you can't trust yourself, so be it. I just don't see why your character flaws make piracy an evil endeavour, and would've suggested that this was a clearcut case of reaction formation, had I believed in it.

I pirated Bioshock, too, and would've run out and spent my hard-earned money in glee, if it weren't for the tiny little fact that it was worse than System Shock II (which I've also pirated, liked, and bought) in every conceivable way. Oh sure, I played it; I even finished it. I just didn't think it was worth my money. Felt no connection with it. Felt like I would be rewarding laziness, stupidity, and would send absolutely the wrong message to the people who had turned their back on everything I had expected from them. It wasn't an altogether unenjoyable game, but there are plenty of those around. They are a distraction, and a mere distraction is hardly worth my fifty dollars.

I love piracy. Piracy is great. Libraries have made sure that I've read far more books than I could have had there been none. Likewise, piracy has allowed me to listen to far more music, see far more movies, and play far more games than I could otherwise afford. I'm not quite sure why you think that's such a bad thing. I don't see how me not playing Bioshock would've made the world a much better place. It smacks of silliness.

 

[Norfleet]

I will say this, there are times when copy protection has actually kept me from buying games. I don't pirate them, but I sure as hell won't buy a game with copy protection that's questionable. I really dug The Sims 2, but EA's new copy protection has turned me away from buying any of the more recent expansion packs which would have been sure fire sales for them.

I have seen this firsthand. I run a site, and the moment the SecuROM scandal hit, piracy became rampant. While it had previously been something that was only murmured about by individuals on the site, after EAxis "upgraded" their copy protection, it pretty much became publicly blared info, causing a bunch of people who previously had bought everything to turn to piracy as first-time pirates. Whereas previously, piracy had been the choice of a subset of individuals, now, there are how-to threads on how to pirate and crack.

Not a single person has stated that they would instead buy the game as a result of the more onerous copy protection. To me, the evidence is quite clear here.

 

[Section8]

Funny side remark: You quoting Wiki gives me a smile, because you once accused me of lowering my credibility for doing so

Heh, yeah. I wish there was a credible source available, but I'm not paying NPD (New Power Degeneration?) good money just to prove a point on a forum.

If you have some understanding for (or like me a degree in) economics you must acknowledge the fact the sheer amount of floating investment money on this planet has lead to an rediculous increase in production cost for entertainment products, especially movies, music and games.

I'm sure that's true (my economics skills are sorely lacking) but that's irresponsible on many levels. If some venture capitalist decides he wants to spend 100 million on a single game, the developer really ought to step up and say - why? There's little chance of making a decent return on that outlay. Funding 100 different million dollar projects would be a better investment.

Is the push for leading edge technology the reason for that? Partially it is - but TO A LESSER DEGREE for PC games. You ask why? Look at the production of Crysis: Most of the grafix tech was delivered directly from NVIDIA! [snip]

Wow, that makes nVidia even bigger assholes than I gave them credit for. Spend money to inflate the demand for your own product, "optimise" without deference to your competitors and coerce dumbasses developers into competing with the guys you've just spent millions on.

So, on the PC Intel, AMD and Nvidia are willing to contribute for the rising costs in development of bleeding edge tech. That equals that out.

It does if you're one of their flagship products. Look at it this way. They pump millions into Crysis and give people a reason to buy a pair of 8800s are whatever, and I think there's enough anecdotal evidence to suggest people will outlay hundreds of dollars on video card upgrades mainly for a single game. Their investment pays off. Good for them.

Then you have the clowns who think - "if I'm making a commercial FPS, it has to look as good as Crysis to compete!" nVidia may invest a lesser amount in this developer, but it would be better business to set a high bar with a single title every now and then, and let the other guys pay for it out of their own/publishers pocket.

Meanwhile, you've got WoW going gangbusters, and its video card requirements are "32 MB 3D video card with Hardware T&L or better". Who is the more sensible developer here? The guys who see the value in delivering simple but stylistic graphics to the widest audience they can, or the guys who aspire to being little more than a marketing tool for nVidia, and prohibit the vast majority of PC owners from running their product?

What else does cost so much more? Everything else! Desingers, Testers, support, Coders, Studios, etc. With millions and millions of hedge fund money (think of Bono's Elevation Partners) available the prices rise according to the risen demand. Simple price theory.

The problem I see, is that the guts of the gameplay we're getting isn't appreciably more complex than it was ten years ago, while developers are still overworked and underpaid. So I can dig that developers are saying - sure Bono, we'll spend the billions of dollars you don't spend on charity on making games for spoilt westerners! But there's some serious inefficiency in how that is spent coming in somewhere along the way. The most logical place is in graphical content and programmatic support for it, and I'd have to believe that Crytek are "lucky" nVidia is helping them out.

If you want someone to blame for the enormous amount of money a game HAS to make to be profitable - take global capitalism.

Oh, I do. But nobody is forcing developers to follow like fucking sheep, and many of the modern day success stories we hear are from those who buck the trends.

Oh come on, again. Please stop this now. How many times have you really wanted something you can't afford? I have had many of these instances. You save up for it.[...] Thats so not an accurate reflection of what decisions you would have made if you'd been forced to judge which to buy based on demos.

The point is, most of these games didn't fall into the "really want" category. I did save up for the ones I really wanted. Regardless of whether I was pirating other games on the side, I was still spending as much of my income as I could on games, sometimes more than I could afford. If there were effective ways to stop me pirating the games I didn't "really want", I simply wouldn't have played them.

Is there? I've never converted anyone via piracy, nor heard of a case, ever. Oh wait, you bought a copy in varsity. Good job. But apart from you, every single instance of piracy I or anyone I know of has committed is pure and simple theft, giving nothing back. Conversion rate my ass.

Oh come on. You've never heard of someone downloading some music, deciding they like it and buying a legit copy? Someone deciding to buy a CD after listening to a song they taped off the radio? Someone downloading a TV show, or watching it on free-to-air TV and then buying DVDs (or other merchandise) of it? Or the gaming equivalent? Never heard of anyone swapping mix tapes, loaning DVDs/games/books/etc, and giving that person reason to buy a copy of their own?

My friends and myself engage in "soft" piracy all the time. We copy or loan anything from literature to games, and most of the time it's to share an awareness of something. "Hey, have you listened to/watched/read/played <x>? It's awesome, check it out!" If someone agrees it's awesome, there's usually a purchase made. We're all mid-twenties professionals with little else to spend our cash on, so why the fuck not?

Now like I say, I don't delude myself into believing this is in any way typical, but I'm constantly exposed to cases where piracy creates an awareness and breeds familiarity that leads to purchase(s) that wouldn't have occurred otherwise. I have no way of judging how significant the effect of "awareness through piracy" is, but you can't possibly dismiss it completely.

You mean the shareware they used to establish themselves?

That's part of it, yes.

Good thing they weren't relying on sales from Civ1 to feed their families while working on Civ 2 hey? My you must feel so proud.

Good thing they weren't stupid enough to rely on 12 year olds spending their lunch money as a source of income.

And what about the word of a thousand pirates who also provide you with a link to the free torrent of the game while singing it's praises? Come on now. This argument is moronic.

Pirates? On my internet? The one that has about a billion messageboards that censor and/or ban any and all discussion of piracy, yet exist around the discussion of games?

What is that number? 8% of players? That is still 100% of sales. As in people who give you money. You know, in return for the years you worked making that product they are playing? Multiplying by 8% to get 5.6%, so as to make it seem like a small number, is rubbish. It is 70% of sales, ie almost doubling profit. That is the reality.

I'm not disparaging the 70% spike in sales, because that's impressive, but there's no context for that figure. Maybe there was a 70% spike the day they updated their DRM, and a steady depreciation over the next year. Like I say, it sounds good, but it's hard to intuit any meaning from it. And the 5.6% isn't to disparage a gain of nearly double, it's saying 86.6% of your audience hasn't paid for the game. In other words, the vast, vast majority is unable or unwilling to pay for your game, but you've still got a userbase much bigger than those paying you, and they're still contributing in some way by establishing a market presense for you game despite an unwillingness to pay for your product. If we assume they weren't going to pay for it anyway, where the loss in your game achieving penetration 1150% beyond your paying audience?

You mean seeding the torrents to make it easier to pirate don't you? Your logic is flawed.

Irrelevant in this case, where torrents are unnecessary.

I don't give a shit about people who steal from me, why should I? You've got to be joking.

They're not. Fucking. Stealing. The only thing you lose from piracy is a potential customer, which means absolutely nothing unless you can prove that an audience an order of magnitude larger than your paying customers doesn't create potential customers. In this specific case, you'd have to prove that word of mouth from 1000 pirates doesn't generate at least a single sale. Of course, I can't prove it the other way, but anecdotal evidence suggests there's at least some trend in this direction.

Of course they wouldn't consider it a waste of money, they didn't spend any on it. I do not care about their opinions. I cannot feed myself from the happy thoughts of thousands of pirating assholes.

That is true, but you can't dismiss them outright until you explore the implications of thousands of people spreading happy thoughts across the internet.

And yet they broke even. For a game that size, a lot of someones must have bought it. Again, personal bias. You didn't like it, cool. Don't try and use that to justify the theft of the mans labor.

That's not my point. Plenty of games out there are quite successful despite rampant piracy. I'm sure there are a fuckload of people who pirated The Sims, and somehow, it sold 16 million copies and about 15 million expansion packs. Why? Because it's a better game, it's unique and it hits a much broader demographic.

It's like a retailer whinging that shoplifters have ruined them and sent them out of business. No. All retailers have shoplifters, so you have to account for that in your bottom line. You can spend all the time and money in the world trying to stop them. You could have security checkpoints and full cavity searches at the door. But unless you have something that is appealing to paying customers, you're fucked, no matter how low your shrinkage numbers are.

And therein lies my point. I'm not saying, "Titan Quest is a shitty game that deserved to be pirated", I'm saying "All games suffer from piracy, so the answer to why Titan Quest was only a modest success lies elsewhere." If Titan Quest was relying on a deeper penetration into the pirate market to achieve a higher degree of success, then maybe they should have dedicated more effort toward that goal. Or, if they were expect the same sort of piracy rates any other game suffers from, then maybe they should have targeted another demographic, or at the very least, made their game more appealing to the one they did target.

Actually, it proves a lot. It means you gain the most from simple protections, tightening it further results in decreasing returns.

Are they tightening it further? The way I read it, the 70% gain came when they eliminated registry exploits and the like, and changed their keygen algorithms. After an unspecified period of time, they changed their keygen algorithms again, and sales dropped. After another unspecified time period, they released an executable the rendered existing cracks invalid, for no effect. And then again, they changed their keygens, so each game in their range had a unique algorithm, instead of a generic one that applied to all of their games - with a 13% increase in sales.

There's nothing about "tightening up" their security, they're using the same methods and achieving vastly unpredictable results. I think it's safe to assume there are other factors that are crucial to consideration.

Ah, because pirates only target companies that make games you don't like. VD has stated that if AoD doesn't make enough he is done. There are cracks for Spidweb games all over the place, his will be cracked in no time. What if piracy proves a tipping point? If a 20% difference in sales (never mind 70%) would have changed his mind? Would you care then? So bloody short sighted.

No, they target absolutely everyone, and in spite of that, many developers succeed. If piracy proves to be a tipping point, then developers can't blame them for their failure. They need to blame themselves for a game that didn't reach enough paying customers. We all know there are pirates, I wouldn't want to bank on having a piracy rate significantly below the average unless I had a very effective anti-piracy plan - and since you're investing more in piracy protection, the audience you need to reach increases. Steam seems to be a pretty effective piracy deterrent, but Valve have invested a lot of money in getting it that way. Developers who distribute through Steam have to pay a cut of their taking for the privilege of protection and advertising - maybe it would be better to self publish, and make less sales for higher profit.

There are a lot of factors in play here, but to blame piracy for the demise of a single studio is ridiculous. It's a big "if only" like - "If only Titan Quest had sold 4 million copies like Diablo II! They're basically the same game, I don't see how it possibly failed!"

Also, have you forgotten that THQs anti-piracy measure for Titan Quest was not only ineffective in its purpose, but had a negative effect on the marketing of the game as well? Why shouldn't we be dismissive of someone who recognises piracy as an issue (duh), and proceeds to combat it in a completely inappropriate and self-destructive manner?

It was 70% of the total sales, as well, not 5-6% as Section8 seems to think for some bizarre reason.

70% of sales, 5-6% of the player base.

 

[Joe Krow]

If everyone could make any book they wanted materialize out of thin air for free would there still be book stores? If there were no book stores would there still be new books? "Of course there would be, writers would do it for the love of their art." So the next Troika will be some kind of non-profit hippie commune? Even your sacred Vault Dweller wants to get paid. Truth be told he wants to get filthy rich. We all do. Capitalism is a bitch. However, only an idiot would claim that producing digital media can be profitable in a market with unhindered piracy. You're as stupid as Iron Lore if you believe that. Iron Tower will suffer the same fate. PC gaming is dead, brothers. D-E-A-D.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

@ whoever wrote that

DOOM [didn't have] insane hardware specification - I actually bought a complete new rig to play it.

Carmack had to make use of several tricks for these features to run smoothly on home computers of 1993. Most significantly, Doom levels are not truly three-dimensional; they are internally represented on a plane, with height differences added separately (a similar trick is still used by many games to create huge outdoor environments). This leads to several limitations: it is, for example, not possible for a Doom level to have one room over another. This two-dimensional representation does, however, have the benefit that rendering can be done very quickly, using a binary space partitioning method. Another benefit was the clarity of the automap because it could be displayed with 2D vectors without the risk of overlapping.

Translation: Good coding make game work. Morons should not have desires to become computer game programmers.

In addition to news, rumors, and screenshots, unauthorized leaked alpha versions also circulated online. (Many years later these alpha versions were sanctioned by id Software because of historical interest; they reveal how the game progressed from its early design stages.[9]) The first public version of Doom was uploaded to Software Creations BBS and a FTP server at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on December 10, 1993.

Released as shareware, people were encouraged to distribute Doom further, and did so: in 1995, Doom was estimated to have been installed on more than 10 million computers. Although most users did not purchase the registered version, over one million copies have been sold, and the popularity helped the sales of later games in the Doom series which were not released as shareware. In 1995, The Ultimate Doom (version 1.9, including episode IV) was released, making this the first time that Doom was sold commercially in stores.

Translation: Releasing game for free = huge sales. Also, note that 10:1 figure in there again. Doesn't look like piracy is anything new...

1. The reason why Blizz could establish those franchises is: It was about 10 fucking years ago. You can't make modern legends on the PC atm.

Battlefield franchise, Call of Duty... Who'd ever heard of DICE or Infinity Ward before those two? DICE started in California, though IW were Swedes. And why not? What's really changed in the last 10 years? Piracy is somehow a new phenomenon?

3. Everybody mourned Troika around here - why not Iron Lore?

Because we actually care about Troika because they tried to make games which had a little more to do than just "see monster, whack it". Same reason that when your mum dies, you'll probably have a nice cry about it. The rest of us? Couldn't care less. Not our mother. We'll mourn when it is though. And really, if you then started ranting and raving that it wasn't the cancer that killed her from smoking 50 packs a day that it was instead everyone elses fault, you'd engender even less sympathy like this guy too. In fact, you and Naked Ninja keep going on about how this is another nail in the coffin for the industry, ignoring the fact that this has been going on for years. Developers fall over every other week. Games get pirated. The cycle continues. More to the point, this guy just about blamed everything on everyone else. There's no acknowledgement that okay, their game did have some bugs which didn't help or that their game is viewed as a "Diablo clone", the same way as all the Wolfenstein clones were back in the early 90's (anyone else remember Blake Stone?).

4. Good single player games on PC will come more and more from middle and eastern Europe - maybe even the Phillipenes or India, because it reduces production costs in a massive way. Why does UBISOFT produce every second game in China? Because IT IS CHEAPER!

Relevant because...? Mind you, the Swedes and Poles seem to be making decent games.

1. Both founded by industry veterans.

2. Both involved in the production of modern legends (Fallout / Diablo)

3. Both freelance producers.

4. Both squeezed in the sandwich of not getting paid anymore and not getting paid yet.

5. Both accused of sloppy coding.

Both were sloppy at coding. Some of the engine troubles in ToEE were simply asinine. Unnecessary slow-downs and far too many other bugs in the game. You'll also note that when Troika came out and blamed "the industry" for their failure, they too were critiscised for "making buggy pieces of shit". More to the point, not once did this guy mention their "inability to secure funding for its next project" as the real reason they've closed. Instead, it's piracy and computers are hard to program!

I do not mourn the loss of Iron Lore. Didn't even know the name of the company till today, and have not been even remotely interested in any of their games.

Games? They only made 1 and it came out 6 years after they were founded. They barely got the second game through the door. Troika meanwhile, at least managed three fully-fledged games (and not just one unique one and an expansion pack).

By the way, people have been talking about the death of the gaming industry since 1983. It's not going to die anytime soon. Not while Blizzard is still raking in billions, EA pumps out sports titles and indie-developers keep cropping up, making a game and then whinging that "makin teh gaem is teh hard!". Of course it's hard. It's computer programming, not fucking pre-school.

 

[Rohit_N]

(anyone else remember Blake Stone?)

I have fond memories.

 

[Xi]

If it were possible to know the exact amount of illegal downloads of a specific game, I wonder what it would look like?

If you check the torrent sites, some of them list 400 Seeders. On a Chinese tracker one listed 89,000 seeders.

Anyway, it's safe to say that Piracy accounts for a loss. How much is certainly questionable, but to disregard it is just as stupid.

 

[Norfleet]

Anyway, it's safe to say that Piracy accounts for a loss. How much is certainly questionable, but to disregard it is just as stupid.

It's easy to CLAIM it accounts for a loss. I am uncertain it even really does. Like even the anti-piracy arguments have made, the actual conversion of pirates to customers is practically nonexistent. Reflexive had to shoot down 1000 pirates to get ONE actual sale out of it. They also found that pirates contributed a good portion of the user-made content available. Given that pirates convert very poorly to customers, but convert quite easily to community contributors, can it REALLY be said that pirates REALLY create a LOSS? The success of Microsoft Windows seems to suggest otherwise. Windows is where it is today because it was widely pirated. If it had been locked down ironclad from the beginning, it would simply not have the kind of installed userbase needed to drive it. Somewhere along the line, Microsoft has forgotten this.

Bottom line: It is almost certainly the case that a new game from an untested developer will underperform in the open market. Piracy is quite possibly the easiest, and cheapest, way to achieve initial recognition. What happens after that is what you make of it. The claims that piracy is the PROBLEM strikes me as fundamentally spurious. Piracy has always been with us, and yet the gaming industry got this far. Piracy has plagued the music and film industry, too. None of these have failed.

In the end, none of this matters. Civilization as we know it is doomed within the next 20 years. Petty squabbles over children's toys will change nothing.

 

[obediah]

If it were possible to know the exact amount of illegal downloads of a specific game, I wonder what it would look like?

If you check the torrent sites, some of them list 400 Seeders. On a Chinese tracker one listed 89,000 seeders.

Anyway, it's safe to say that Piracy accounts for a loss. How much is certainly questionable, but to disregard it is just as stupid.

If you want a number, but can't estimate it, why is 0 any more stupid than any other guess?

To make a guess - 400 seeders. How many of those would even consider buying the game if it didn't show up on their torrent site? 4? I doubt more than 50 even install and try to play it. Even if against all logic, 20 people woul d have bought it if not for the torrent, 20 is much closer to 0 than 400.

As for your chinese tracker. Of the 89,000 seeders, exactly 0 would have been willing to spend money on it.

 

[Murk]

Sweet, this thread is going to give me plenty of entertainment tomorrow at work.

 

[kingcomrade]

guise I just pirated a vidya gaem how does i remove all responsibility for this? plz halp i feal bad

 

[Yahweh]

Anyway, it's safe to say that Piracy accounts for a loss. How much is certainly questionable, but to disregard it is just as stupid.

It's easy to CLAIM it accounts for a loss. I am uncertain it even really does. Like even the anti-piracy arguments have made, the actual conversion of pirates to customers is practically nonexistent. Reflexive had to shoot down 1000 pirates to get ONE actual sale out of it. They also found that pirates contributed a good portion of the user-made content available. Given that pirates convert very poorly to customers, but convert quite easily to community contributors, can it REALLY be said that pirates REALLY create a LOSS? The success of Microsoft Windows seems to suggest otherwise. Windows is where it is today because it was widely pirated. If it had been locked down ironclad from the beginning, it would simply not have the kind of installed userbase needed to drive it. Somewhere along the line, Microsoft has forgotten this.

Bottom line: It is almost certainly the case that a new game from an untested developer will underperform in the open market. Piracy is quite possibly the easiest, and cheapest, way to achieve initial recognition. What happens after that is what you make of it. The claims that piracy is the PROBLEM strikes me as fundamentally spurious. Piracy has always been with us, and yet the gaming industry got this far. Piracy has plagued the music and film industry, too. None of these have failed.

In the end, none of this matters. Civilization as we know it is doomed within the next 20 years. Petty squabbles over children's toys will change nothing.

Well, my example alone shows it's undisputable that they cause loss. Look at MMOs and online games. Even in dirt poor shithole countries like [insert any asian country here] MMOs and online games that can't be cracked are popular and get lots of money, yet how many single player PC games come out of these countries? Any at all?

For a US game places like that are a lost cause though, anyway. They have so little free money to spend in US dollar terms and there are such huge import tarrifs on games in many countries because they are considered luxury that basically it's hopeless even if they didn't pirate 99.999% of the software they use. The only real markets are the US and Europe in the first place. You may as well cross them off the list, and they are about 80% of the pirates out there, which skews the numbers that antipirates are working with. However it does show that piracy has a real effect on sales.

I don't really care about boxed games for a couple reasons, though. First, their sales might be lower than consoles, but they still more than outstrip any reasonable revenue that could be expected out of a title that's of remotely reasonable quality. 300k is more than fallout sold in the first couple of years, and those are the only years any actual money is made for the developers. Otherwise the small margin of profit becomes virtually zero as the price goes down. It's more than the old classics ever made, and those were considered smash hits. So obviously it's the fact that PC games have gone mainstream and are being forced onto the shelves with the console games to compete with space that's the problem. Even getting shelf space requires buying an ad at Comp USA (aka a bribe). Then the publishers get their cut, blah blah blah. More importantly, they have all become utter crap anyhow. People make it look like it's Iron Lore's fault they had to make a diablo clone. Well, if they pitched a topdown view turnbased RPG they never would have gotten to make a game in the first place.

The only real hope I see is indie RPGs with digital download, and for them a little piracy could hurt a lot. Some suggest they can be good publicity, but I don't think that's mostly true. Mainly they are hanging around forums where everyone else pirates as well, often nonenglish ones. They can be bad publicity, though, of course. Having them be 'active in the community' is not much help either. Their downloads of the game itself can cost a lot of money to a company, and so does running forums etc.

The money spent combatting it is also something they are to blame for, much as they try to deny any responsibility. People don't generally like their work taken and used for nothing on a matter of principle let alone lose the money - which most gamemakers are always struggling with. They are going to fight it, futile or not, and all that wasted time and money is the fault of the pirates. For someone in China there is virtually no chance to get them to buy something legally, but the easier you make it for casual pirates to get games, the more people will. For me it's just too much of a fucking hassle. I don't give a hit. I also like to have a physical prodcut of some sort, which is one reason people are mentally more willing to buy console games. It seems mmore like a physical commodity and not something totally abstract, which idiots like 'Disconnected' and many others in this thread are unable to put into terms of a real entity that costs tons of time and effort to produce.

Commercial softwre is a much different story than entertainment. The reason being that public companies can't shirk paying for software and get away with it. Not in countries with any order of law, at least. In many ways piracy does a lot more damage here than in entertainment, though. Not because it robs Microsoft of a few dollars. Quite the opposite, actually. The reason is that for personal use everyone uses pirated shit so products like Microsoft or [insert name of most popular product of any type here] become more and more the standard which actually makes the monopolies for companies like MS tighter and tighter and fucks us all. If piracy were impossible, how many people would pay 200-300 bucks for the full edition of windows vista? No fucking way that's going to happen. Everyone would look more seriously at other alternatives. maybe linux, but more likely something that is not as shitty as linux OR windows, both of which are incredibly shitty products int heir own ways. Maybe OS/2 warp would be a serious option, for instance. That could have become a great fucking OS by now.

So what is the solution? There is no big picture solution, but if games can be made cheaply which have good gameplay again istead of tons of graphics and poor gameplay and get digital distributions, maybe the nerd sector can finally have a few games that appeal to them again instead of MMOs and the action clone crap that's standard on store shelves. And always will be from here on out.

 

[vrok]

Who'd ever heard of DICE or Infinity Ward before those two? DICE started in California, though IW were Swedes

Small nitpick but it's the other way around, DICE is the Swedish developer. Not really a necessary correction but it's a question of national pride damn it! Massive Entertainment, responsible for the Ground Control series and World In Conflict, is also Swedish.

 

[Hory]

DICE only became famous because it developed BF1942 by acquiring the company that had previously made a similar (and more fun, in my opinion) game, Codename: Eagle. There are few games that I can recall laughing out loud to while playing, and this is one of them.