Titan Quest producer rants on PC market.

[obediah]

Lol, I'm going to the library tomorrow to pirate some books and cds just to get ninjas panties twisted even tighter.

I'm getting something for free, suck it fags.

 

[Xi]

So the question is, of the pirates, how many of them would have purchased the software if there were no other reasonable means to attain it? 20-30%? I mean, they must have had an inclination of interest in the product to download it in the first place.

According to the statistics from Reflexive (I think it was), stopping 1,000 pirates converts into 1 extra sale. So if your game is downloaded 10,000,000 times, you're talking about 10,000 lost sales (10M / 1k). A game that's illegally downloaded 10M times apparently sells around 1M copies (using Doom as a basis), so it's about 0.001% of sales lost (if I did that right, statistics aren't my strong suit).

I'm not going to go into too much detail with this because I agree with you mostly. From my POV it seems like piracy is more of a problem is all. Just a guess as I have no hard facts to back up my claim. So, I decided to search for the article you mentioned.

Is this itAn article that discusses it anyway)
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=17350

My only gripe with their statistics is that it is a sample of casual game piracy. Applying this research to more hardcore gaming seems a bit off. We're talking about people pirating games like Tetris and Mahjong, not high end games. Applying these statistics to big budgeted games would not work. There are many other factors, including market samples, that would come into the mix. We would be treating people who play games like Pong the same as people who play games like Unreal tournament. These are different classes of gamers, and that skews applying these findings to the video game piracy this thread discusses.(IMHO)

Still, it's interesting for one reason. Increasing the effectiveness of DRM is actually shown to increase sales. So it gives some merit to my argument by showing that there are people who would actually purchase the game if it were not easily pirated.(Even if it is 1000:1)

 

[mlc82]

It may surprise him to find out that DRM is a deciding factor for many customers. Bioshock? I didn't buy it. I wanted to. It looked fun. It got great reviews. But I didn't buy it. I got wind of the horrible DRM system they had set up and I did what many others did. I let my money do the talking. My money said "The person I represent is fed up with publisher's invasive DRM and is not going to give me to anyone who puts it in their product no matter how great you may think it is."

I'm glad companies are starting to feel the sting of my actions but apparently they think that sting is coming from something else.

Same here, in fact, I can't even count how many games I've wanted to buy until learning that some invasive DRM or another was included on them, which quickly meant that the game company would no longer receive my money, even if we're talking about one of the greatest games ever made. I couldn't care less about pirating these games, and hope the companies supporting draconian DRMs go under, simply because these measures ONLY harm legitimate paying customers, and don't bother the software pirates one bit. You wouldn't think it would take a genius to realize this, but apparently, it does.

 

[Dhruin]

In large part, the piracy issue has already been resolved for many game producers. They moved to consoles.

 

[Naked Ninja]

but I can't see it being a "MUCH higher chance", at all

Then you are naive.

and the factors that would lead a customer to pirate something they would have once bought are generally much more than "free is seductive"

Very naive.

That 70%? I'm still saying it's it an odd figure because out of four different occasions, it happened once. There need to be more context for it to have any meaning.

No, not really. It's like having an unlocked door. You put a lock on it, suddenly all the vagrants who were just wandering in don't any more. You then add in fingerprint identification and blood tests, now those same vagrants still can't really get in but people who legitimately want to can't get in either. That is the kind of thing that happened. The first attempt at making it harder was the majority of the gain.

In fact if you think about the pirate schtick in general it makes sense. Pirate teams compete to crack games, but I don't really think that if you wait a while, then change all your protection schemes to close all the pirates holes they are all going to go back and redo the cracks. They've mostly moved on, it seems like there is a bunch of cracks for that game already so why would a new team look at cracking it? In essence, the fact they thought they had already won worked in their favour. A luxury only open to downloadable content, admittedly.

When you were on holidays and baboons invaded your picnic, why did you run away?

Heh, nice try, but we got pwnd by baboons because we made a mistake. There were a bunch of native ladies sitting under a tree nearby, before they came to us one wandered over to them to scout. Before it got close one of the ladies jumped up and thrashed at it with a shambuck, a kind of whip thingy. So it left. That was our mistake, not making it clear when one came over to look that we were willing and able to do it violence. Like pirates, it saw an easy target and came and took our stuff. You don't like DRM? Well it's the equivalent of the shambuck.

And if the baboons are smart enough to get around the traps, as they have done countless times in the past, then the traps are no longer addressing the problem, yet they've become a problem of their own.

They don't lay traps. The rangers shoot them. There is no wailing. Any baboon who learns that man is a good source of food becomes a big problem.

but I am saying it's not exclusively a problem

But you are implying there is some sort of semi-constant average level of piracy which all developers must take into account in their equations. But there isn't. That reflexive guy made the point that their DRM is in-house built, instead of bought, and that helped. Because it's not a known protection to crack.

Personal bias?

Yes, personal bias. Your bias that the game was shit. I'm curious, planescape wasn't a particular good seller either. Obviously this means planescape's lackluster sales = shit design and we shouldn't feel sorry for the devs. They made crap, they got pwnd.

Funnily enough, most of those methods are effective deterrents, though none will actually stop a determined thief

No it won't. But it will stop the people who would steal it if it was easy = majority of pirates.

Ever bought a DVD, only to find the clerk didn't swipe it through a magnetic decoupler, and the case is locked? Ever bought a game and found the clerk has taken the wrong disc out of their locked cabinet, or hasn't realised the game comes on two discs, and only gave you one? That's happened to me plenty of times.

Oh good lord. Yes yes, that's happened to me. But the number of times I've also bought items and had no problems whatsoever is MUCH, MUCH greater. Generally I just phone them and it's cool. But hey, I don't understand their justifications so I get really really angry and mutter about them hating me as a customer, right?

Popularity begets popularity. Ever wonder why the first issue of an new magazine series costs about 10% of the standard price? Ever wonder why pretty girls offer you free drinks/vouchers for brands of alcohol you've never heard of? Ever wonder why Microsoft is happy to make substantial losses on the Xbox and 360? It's all about securing a market share.

How long do you think those companies would stay in business if you could get EVERY issue at 10% price, always, within a day of release. Or even free? If they generated massive expenses creating a product and then the majority of their potential customer base just downloaded a scanned copy of their product from the net? But lets blame the publishers hey, those evil, evil bastards! It's their fault!

Is that comment just as reasonable as your own 70% comment? After all, mine is derived from the same report as yours, with an equivalent fragment of information and no context.

Nope. Your analysis is flawed, that's why it's not as reasonable. Locking a door that's had it's lock broken the first time is obviously more effective than then adding further locks. It is common sense that the biggest gain is the first.

Someone receives what they think is a Rolex as a gift

This is pretty telling. That piracy is so rampant the common person sees it as a gift. A gift, lol.

against what they believe is a genuine Rolex

People use cracks on games then believe it is as stable as a genuine copy of that game should be shot, to prevent them from breeding.

If the person givng the gift provided them with the necessary information - "Don't get excited, it's counterfeit." - That person now directs their complaint to the giver when the watch breaks.

So your argument is people are unaware that the copy they have is knock-off?

If the user knew the "crash" was actually a failed security check, then they'd be saying "The <pirate> crack release is worthless, and <pirate> are incompetent fucks who code with their feet" and not directing their ire at Iron Lore. Pretty simple, yeah?

Except that makes it whole orders of magnitude easier to crack. A random seeming crash is going to be much harder for pirates to track down. Guess it worked too well. Still, like I said, your hindsight is awesome.

I've test driven quite a few cars in my time. Every now and then, I'll get together with a mate and do the rounds of the dealerships, even though I can't possibly afford any of the cars I'm "testing". If I was in the market for a car, I have a shortlist of cars I like from first hand experience.

That would be the demo. You aren't getting the car, you are playing with it for an hour. Silly example. If you got to keep the car (or magic up a perfect copy out of thin air) no one would ever buy the things, they'd just keep the demo cars and in short order the car manufacturer/dealership would go out of business. Come on man, this is just ridiculous.

It's hard to compare that effectively to games, but I think you're being very short-sighted if you want to view all pirates as a problem.

It's actually very easy, your analysis is just poor.

But for each of him, it seems fair to assume there are probably about 7-9 people who weren't going to buy the game anyway, and can't be considered a problem. In fact, why shouldn't they be considered 7-10 more potential viral marketers

Because, like a virus, they convert legit customers to what you call "viral marketers". They eat your customer base. And no, most of them aren't going to be future customers. Like the baboons, they are going to keep trying to get free food until they get whacked with a stick. Or shot.

Even if you were to foolishly dismiss them completely, you have to ensure the solution you target at the small percentage of problematic pirates doesn't lead to 70%-90% of your audience becoming a potential source of negative publicity.

That we can agree on. But I think it's often much easier to see a flaw in a strategy after the event than it is before hand. That bug in the caves, now that I think about it, if you ignore the bad publicity, from a coding side it is going to be a lot harder to crack. You can call what looks like a legit function but pass it in slightly off data which will cause a meltdown further on, from the point of view of the dude trying to trace your code for the anti-piracy stuff it is a hell of a lot harder to narrow down than a boolean check with a message box and an exit() call. I can see why someone coded it that way. Sure, short sighted to not realise pirates are going to be spreading negative vibe BEFORE legit customers can spread positive vibe. But it's still a clever technique from a pure programming standpoint.

Haha, if I went that way I'd do it to the data passed to the gfx card, a slight mistake there causes a hard reboot, not blue screen or desktop crash just BANG. It was frustrating enough debugging that with a compiler, the pirates would be in for an amusing ride.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

I'm not going to go into too much detail with this because I agree with you mostly. From my POV it seems like piracy is more of a problem is all. Just a guess as I have no hard facts to back up my claim. So, I decided to search for the article you mentioned.

... and thus we have what is essentially the crux of this entire debate. How many sales are actually, really lost because of piracy? Both in terms of people who would've bought the game had there been no other option and including those who are induced to piracy because "all their friends are doing it"? Does including DRM-style copy-protection methods balance out against the people who won't buy it because it has DRM?

The problem is a lot of those statistics don't exist. They can't exist. How can you really say that "because we did X for Y game, it increased / decreased sales? We totally would've sold more / less had we done Z". If Half-Life 2 didn't have Steam, would it have sold the same 2 - 3 M copies? If HL2 had had better copyright protection, would it have sold more? There's really no way of answering that without a lot of guess-work. Which is why I think these debates keep going around in the circles they do.

Is this itAn article that discusses it anyway)
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=17350

That's the one.

 

[Naked Ninja]

@ DU : Rubbish. Sales are almost always highest in the beginning, trailing off over time. If after some time you implement protection and sales climb 70%, and you haven't done some sort of mass marketing scheme, then yes, you have a very good idea of their effect.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

@ DU : Rubbish. Sales are almost always highest in the beginning,

Which is probably why, at the beginning, their sales "increased" after the first fix and then went backwards the other three times they changed their protection. Except for the final fix which happened after the release of their next game (which I guess is common for the original to increase in sales when the sequel comes out).

... but if you believe that their changes to the copy protection resulted in their decreased downloads then what he said becomes much more prevalent: "As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale."... then there are clearly better things to be doing than "fighting" piracy.

 

[Naked Ninja]

I think I've died and gone to the hell reserved for mathematicians.

No, that isn't it. I'm just being stupid. People want to pirate but don't want to think of themselves as "a bad person", so they come up with justifications to ease their guilt. Why do I think I can counter that with logic? Emotion trumps logic, I've known this for ages but I keep forgetting. Stupid stupid stupid, I could have used this wasted time more productively.


Right, sure, continue on. You're doing your bit to spread awareness, continue on with your self-congratulations. Devs are just being stupid and whiny.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Right, sure, continue on. You're doing your bit to spread awareness, continue on with your self-congratulations. Devs are just being stupid and whiny.

Nope. I'm just saying that the statistics on piracy are few and far between and those that do exist don't really tell the story of "pirates eating the industry alive" or being such a huge problem that PC games must be abandoned in favour of console games... which oddly enough, are also pirated. What they do seem to say is, quite literally, that most pirates really wouldn't have paid for it anyway. By the order of 1,000 pirates to every 1. So the next time you see a game that's been pirated 10 million times, think about the 10,000 lost sales that equates to (that is, according to "the statistics"). Then realise a game needs to make a couple of hundred thousand sales to be any decent.

... and remember I'm the one who said: "The problem is a lot of those statistics don't exist". If you play by the statistics we do have, your argument (which I'm not sure what it is by the way, other than stamping your foot and whining, which you seem to do a lot) loses.

So I state again, how many sales are actually, really lost because of piracy? Because if Reflexive is right (like you want to believe), then it's nothing worth crying about.

In fact, you're looking at those statistics and trying to use them to your advantage. "See, sales went up 70%" completely ignoring the guys own statement about the 1,000 to 1 conversion rate that was in those statistics (also keep in mind, a lot of stuff like the actual numbers he's talking about and the dates concerned - EG, just how long after release was that first anti-pirate patch? - are missing). Pirates do represent lost sales but it's the same way any theft represents a lost sale. That is, it's around the 1% mark... and the non-digital world has been dealing with theft for a long, long time and hasn't yet imploded.

 

[DraQ]

I'm just being stupid.

To sig or not to sig, that is the question.

 

[Yahweh]

I don't have to vilify you - you do a good job of it all by yourself.

I don't focus on piracy, but dickheads like you who will say how great and harmless it is are either complete morons or else lying to themselves. I have slept with a lot, I mean a lot of married women. I don't go around giving some hippy ass bullshit free love spiel to everyone who mentions that they think cheating is bad.

"The business model for SP games likewise depends upon demand, but no demand exists." Stupidity or selective sight? There isn't more demand for MMOs and games that require online patches. The difference is that you're forced to fucking pay for it.

"So, instead of adapting your business model to suit the actual market, you've resigned only exploiting 10% of the market & calling the rest twats..."

People that pirate games aren't worth jack shit for advertising. No one wants to market towards russians and chinese who don't have any money to pay in the first place, and even if they did, exposing someone to an ad more than once or twice is nearly pointless when you can get ads that get unique views with google ads very easily. It's not worth much money, and it would take extreme maketing effort to tap into any of what it was worth - ie it would be expensive.

"That's not even a relevant question, unless you accept it as fact that you cannot profit from more than 10% of your customers."

What are you, an idiot? Don't answer, it's obvious.

"Ironically, the publishers are the ones with the outmoded business model. That they have a stranglehold on creativity is only a minor concern when they keep you from feeding your family."

Outside of shitholes like kracozia starving is not much of a concern.

Disconnected is a great example.

Yes, it is so much easier to dismiss what I said if you can just vilify me a bit.

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.

So why do you focus on them? Despite your own advise, your entire post is focused on piracy and treats it as a problem.

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.

Don't muddle the issues. The business model for MMOs works because it depends upon demand, and demand is present.

The business model for SP games likewise depends upon demand, but no demand exists.

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, instead of adapting your business model to suit the actual market, you've resigned only exploiting 10% of the market & calling the rest twats...

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

That's not even a relevant question, unless you accept it as fact that you cannot profit from more than 10% of your customers.

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.

Indeed, if you can't profit from more than 20% of your costumers, you're in the wrong line of work.

Ironically, the publishers are the ones with the outmoded business model. That they have a stranglehold on creativity is only a minor concern when they keep you from feeding your family.

You can't fight the market forces. PC games are just never going to be super sellers like consoles.

Indeed, they're much, much better. There's no way in hell a console market based on scarcity can ever compare to a PC market based on post-scarcity. As soon as distributors realize that revenue from game sales is the least profitable thing they can possibly do, the only console owners will be the 10% who currently buy PC games.

What I don't understand, is why you lot insist on operating in this nonsensical manner. You have a massive market. Your penetration of that market is unrivalled in any other market. Yet out of the 100% theoretically available revenue, you can't even come close to half with your current business model.

Even if we accept as fact that yours truly and 90% of everyone else are 110% finely distilled asshole, it does not change the fact that you as an industry are doing the worst fucking job in the history of capitalism.

It's very interesting to see Crytec brought up in this thread. It's also very interesting that instead of looking at their relationship with nVidia, the only thing you lot took note of, is that making the game wasn't as expensive as it could have been.

Now if nVidia paid 4 mill just to get their logo in the intro & that price was after they'd poured 5500 manhours into the creation of the game, imagine what Blockbuster or whatever, would have to pay to get a spashscreen add between loading levels. Or Pepsi for the odd vending machine. Or Britney Spears for having her latest hit single played in the background on a radio.

I say again, the problem isn't that games can't make you filthy fucking rich. The problem is that you really fucking hate money and gamers with a passion. Either that or you're just plain dumb.

Because most all of that market is worthless, and because you can only saturate ads so much. Showing ads to russian teenagers for new escalades makes no sense at all, and you can only get show someone an ad so mucha nd get anything out of it, and you can only get so many advertisers, and it all takes money.

 

[DraQ]

Because no one outside the Russia and China pirates games.

 

[Naked Ninja]

Like I said, hell for mathematicians. Let me help you :

By the order of 1,000 pirates to every 1

And the average conversion rate (for indies) of legitimate customers who download the demo of their game to purchasing the full version is : 1 in 100. 1%

Which means the conversion is a 10th of normal. 1 in 10.

Given the 1 in 100 basic conversion rate, that implies that 1 in 10 of those forced-non-pirates then went and downloaded the demo, then 1 in a 100 of those who downloaded the demo went on to purchase (assuming a similar conversion rate to the standard one for other customers), bringing us to the 1 in 1000 figure.

1 in 10. 10%. And since the piracy rate was so much higher than the legit, that led to a jump in sales of 70%

Because if Reflexive is right (like you want to believe), then it's nothing worth crying about.

If reflexive was right then it was about 40%. 70% increase in sales = about 40% of the total. Almost half. There is no business on the planet that wouldn't look at that as a heavy loss.

Your problem is you are looking at 1 in 1000 and thinking "hey thats really small!!!". It is 10% of the normal rate, which is still something "worth crying about", especially over a much larger user base.

Any more maths I can help you with?

 

[Section8]

In fact if you think about the pirate schtick in general it makes sense. Pirate teams compete to crack games, but I don't really think that if you wait a while, then change all your protection schemes to close all the pirates holes they are all going to go back and redo the cracks. They've mostly moved on, it seems like there is a bunch of cracks for that game already so why would a new team look at cracking it? In essence, the fact they thought they had already won worked in their favour. A luxury only open to downloadable content, admittedly.

Okay, I'll pay that. It does seem pretty unlikely that crackers will bother keeping track of games and re-cracking them every time the DRM is changed. But like you say, it's very specific to downloadable content, and I think in this case, very specific to casual gamers who don't normally pirate games. I'd say it's a lot easier and safer, given the nature of websites featuring cracks and serials, to just take 5 seconds to query a torrent search engine and download a full game with a crack confirmed to work with it, especially if said game is only a few megabytes worth of data. Much more appealing than the few megabytes worth of trojans and malware you'll get from a cracks/serials site.

They don't lay traps. The rangers shoot them. There is no wailing. Any baboon who learns that man is a good source of food becomes a big problem.

That's an example of a sound solution to the problem then. Rangers are able to clearly identify the specific offenders and eliminate them. It's a fairly extreme solution, but I'm sure it works. The unfortunate thing is, there's no way for developers/publishers to apply such a concise and targeted solution to piracy, because legitimate users and pirates are usually in the same firing line, and difficult to separate.

But you are implying there is some sort of semi-constant average level of piracy which all developers must take into account in their equations. But there isn't. That reflexive guy made the point that their DRM is in-house built, instead of bought, and that helped. Because it's not a known protection to crack.

Well, if there's no way to determine the average level of piracy (the examples quoted in this thread all point to something around 90%) then surely you assume the worst, no? Incidentally, I'd happily retract many of my criticisms of Iron Lore/THQ if there was proof to suggest Titan Quest had a significantly higher rate of piracy than any other game, but I don't think that's the case.

Yes, personal bias. Your bias that the game was shit. I'm curious, planescape wasn't a particular good seller either. Obviously this means planescape's lackluster sales = shit design and we shouldn't feel sorry for the devs. They made crap, they got pwnd.

If I was evaluating Planescape: Torment purely from a business perspective, then I'd say that yes, it's a shit game, and the reasons why it wasn't a big seller are blatantly obvious. If I was looking at it in broader terms, I'd say it's a flawed masterpiece with very little mainstream appeal. To examine Titan Quest under the same microscope, I'd say it's a graphically accomplished, but lacklustre game that lacks a defining point to stand out above a saturated subset of the market. It fails as a game, and fails as a business prospect. Ergo, shit game.

No it won't. But it will stop the people who would steal it if it was easy = majority of pirates.

Actually, if there's anything working in retail has taught me, is that it's ridiculously easy to steal most things, and most of the security measures retailers use are big bluffs. The big difference here is the attitude, and you can see it every time one of these threads pops up. Piracy is so much more acceptable than theft.

Yet is there any effort put toward combating the casual acceptance of piracy? How many publishers/developers actively try to change that attitude? That's exactly what Stardock and Radiohead have done in two different industries, and it seems to have worked out nicely for them. The Adams brothers, developers of Dwarf Fortress, are able to live on paypal donations from fans of a completely free game.

Oh good lord. Yes yes, that's happened to me. But the number of times I've also bought items and had no problems whatsoever is MUCH, MUCH greater. Generally I just phone them and it's cool. But hey, I don't understand their justifications so I get really really angry and mutter about them hating me as a customer, right?

Yeah, well I got to deal with the flipside of that coin every day. The majority of cases were genuinely understanding, but for every 5 people who are happy enough to have the situation resolved, there's one that wants to rant and rave to everyone they know, to complete strangers, talk the ear off every manager in the place, and so forth. These people may only be 1 in 6 statistically, but they're always out to make sure as many people as possible have to listen to their problems.

As an analogy back to gaming - these are the people that post angry user reviews everywhere they can, the people who rant and rave on any messageboard they come across, the people who blog about it, and generally create a nuisance of a much greater magnitude than the people who are too busy enjoying the product they've just bought/pirated.

Nope. Your analysis is flawed, that's why it's not as reasonable. Locking a door that's had it's lock broken the first time is obviously more effective than then adding further locks. It is common sense that the biggest gain is the first.

It's not adding further locks, it's changing them again. But as I said, I'll concede this. The first time was sufficient to invalidate the exploits and cracks at which point the crackers probably didn't revisit those particular games again. However, the 13% when they introduced per-game DRM seems insignificant by comparison, when you'd think it would be far more pronounced.

Oh and incidentally - it's common sense that the first time you release Diablo the gains are going to be much, much higher than the thirtieth.

This is pretty telling. That piracy is so rampant the common person sees it as a gift. A gift, lol.

Way to misread my analogy. In this case, because the Rolex is a gift, you have no way of knowing the source, just like how the gamer has no idea the source of the crash to desktop was actually an intentional security check. If the "Rolex" owner knows the source of the problem, they have no cause to blame Rolex. If the gamer knows the source of the "crash", they have no cause to blame the developer.

Except that makes it whole orders of magnitude easier to crack. A random seeming crash is going to be much harder for pirates to track down. Guess it worked too well. Still, like I said, your hindsight is awesome.

Which is the better scenario here? Easier to crack, or reports of bugginess and instability spreading across the internet like wildfire? Take a look at Pool of Radiance 2. Less than half a dozen people out of however many tens of thousands bought and/or played the game encountered a bug that uninstalled critical system files. It's a pretty fucking critical bug, but when that story hit the web, it was time for the developers to kiss their sales goodbye.

Hindsight, my arse. What the fuck did they hope to gain from sneaking security checks in throughout the game? Do you honestly believe there are people out there reasoning along the lines of "Hey, the game crashed again. Maybe if I pay for it, that won't happen"? What was the best case scenario for that "copy protection"? Did it stop people pirating the game? No. Did it convince pirates to see the errors of their evil ways and buy the game? No. I ask again, what the fuck did they hope to gain?

That would be the demo. You aren't getting the car, you are playing with it for an hour. Silly example. If you got to keep the car (or magic up a perfect copy out of thin air) no one would ever buy the things, they'd just keep the demo cars and in short order the car manufacturer/dealership would go out of business. Come on man, this is just ridiculous.

If demos were like the shareware games of old, I could buy that. But these days you download a gigabyte worth of data for half an hour's worth of play. That's like driving for three hours to a car dealership, and your test drive consists of reversing down the driveway. I seriously doubt the selling capacity of such a system. "Test driving" a full game is hardly ideal either, but it's still preferable.

Haha, if I went that way I'd do it to the data passed to the gfx card, a slight mistake there causes a hard reboot, not blue screen or desktop crash just BANG. It was frustrating enough debugging that with a compiler, the pirates would be in for an amusing ride.

The funny thing is, the crackers would probably relish the challenge. Well, the skillful ones, anyway. But by the time they were done, there would be countless incomplete and inferior versions out there, along with many, many reports of how the game is so buggy it doesn't just crash to desktop, it bluescreens.

 

[Disconnected]

The difference is that you're forced to fucking pay for it.

Precisely. As long as publishers compete on price and their competition are giving away the products for free, there is no demand for the products the publishers sell.

People that pirate games aren't worth jack shit for advertising. No one wants to market towards russians and chinese

In this thread there's been repeated claims that 90% of the European gaming public plays pirated games. FYI, Europeans have more spare time than Americans, better internet connections, greater mean incomes, face less severe punishment if they get caught, have vastly less chance of getting caught, and are much better protected against privacy invasions by the private sector. And of course, advertising works better the more people are exposed to it.

who don't have any money to pay in the first place

If that was the case, piracy would be good for the industry. Why? Because if those oh-so evil Chinese and Russian pirates are pirates, they have internet access. If they have internet access, they discuss their likes and dislikes with people in other countries. That creates word of mouth advertising for games, to people who can afford to buy the games. And of course, if those oh-so evil Chinese and Russian pirates can't afford anything, the game industry couldn't sell them anything anyway.

But hey, it's not like you're contradicting yourself at every fucking turn.. Oh wait, you are.

it would be expensive.

Fun Fact Time™.

The average price of reaching 1,000 people with 1 commercial through video media in the first world, is 30-40 USD.

On average, individuals of a peer group has to be exposed to a commercial or campaign 10 times within a 2 month period for low-level recognition to be established. For actual mindshare, individuals have to have the same level of exposure to a diverse campaign over a period of several months, after which the intensity of the campaign can typically be eased somewhat.

Video media is currently the king of delivery systems. It works better than anything else (and costs more), because people have to make an effort to avoid seeing the commercials, and because commercials can be target at specific demographics.

Video games can do the same damn thing, and though I don't have any research to back this, I'll bet a fucking paycheck they're at least as demographic specific as other video media.

While it doesn't take any time at all to establish a market for advertisement in the game industry, it does take time to fully realise that market. That's bad, because it means revenues from advertising will suck for at least a few years. But if the claims in this thread about how many people games reach are accurate, even a handful of advertisers and a low price is sufficient.

Outside of shitholes like kracozia starving is not much of a concern.

20,000 homeless people in Silicon Valley, with full time jobs [source: International Herald Tribune Feb. 21 2000]. Damn that bastard world for not conforming to your imagination, eh?

 

[Raapys]

In large part, the piracy issue has already been resolved for many game producers. They moved to consoles.

Yet piracy is rapidly increasing on consoles as well, so it's only a temporary solution.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Like I said, hell for mathematicians. Let me help you :

By the order of 1,000 pirates to every 1

And the average conversion rate (for indies) of legitimate customers who download the demo of their game to purchasing the full version is : 1 in 100. 1%

Which means the conversion is a 10th of normal. 1 in 10.

Given the 1 in 100 basic conversion rate, that implies that 1 in 10 of those forced-non-pirates then went and downloaded the demo, then 1 in a 100 of those who downloaded the demo went on to purchase (assuming a similar conversion rate to the standard one for other customers), bringing us to the 1 in 1000 figure.

1 in 10. 10%. And since the piracy rate was so much higher than the legit, that led to a jump in sales of 70%

Because if Reflexive is right (like you want to believe), then it's nothing worth crying about.

If reflexive was right then it was about 40%. 70% increase in sales = about 40% of the total. Almost half. There is no business on the planet that wouldn't look at that as a heavy loss.

Your problem is you are looking at 1 in 1000 and thinking "hey thats really small!!!". It is 10% of the normal rate, which is still something "worth crying about", especially over a much larger user base.

Any more maths I can help you with?

Except this still assumes all the pirates can/will spare the money for this. It's like arguing that if fake jewelry didn't exist, children would purchase the real thing. The reality is, the children would do that (Or, more likely, have their parents purchase it for them) unless the real thing dropped to a reasonable price for that purpose. Of course, that isn't viable with jewelery. Games on the other hand, could quite possibly pull this off, since their distribution cost through downloads is essentially nil. While the pirate > Sale ratio is atrocious as it stands, it'd probably close up a lot if the prices were slashed. Pirating a game is simply more of a pain in the ass than paying 5$ after all.

 

[Xi]

In large part, the piracy issue has already been resolved for many game producers. They moved to consoles.

Yet piracy is rapidly increasing on consoles as well, so it's only a temporary solution.

I'm willing to bet the next consoles will have proprietary disk formats if this generation gets hurt too much by it. Currently, piracy isn't a huge factor for consoles, but it is on the rise as you say.

 

[Dhruin]

It may well be on the rise but it won't ever come within a milliion miles of the potential piracy on the PC, because of the mods required to the equipment and the ease for the platform holder to ban online access and the like. If you think it's even close, you're deluded.

I also love this advertising thing, by the way. Fucking awesome. I love this world we live in where we are happy to pay $$$ for our sugary carbonated drinks or trendy running shoes so they can afford to advertise in games and so we don't have to pay directly for them. Yay us!

 

[Raapys]

I think you're underestimating console piracy, actually. Have a look at the torrent sites and you'll find there's tons of xbox360 games available with hundreds of seeders. You just need to flash your box to use them. And it doesn't really matter if they ban online access( which they wont ), since everyone have computers they can use for the actual downloading anyway. Besides, piracy on a console is probably even more tempting, considering the price of console-games.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Like I said, hell for mathematicians. Let me help you:

I'm not a mathematician and statistics and ratios aren't my thing, so by all means.

By the order of 1,000 pirates to every 1

And the average conversion rate (for indies) of legitimate customers who download the demo of their game to purchasing the full version is : 1 in 100. 1%

Why are you comparing "1 legitimate customers per 100 downloads" to "1 sale per 1,000 pirates"? They're two different statistics.

Which means the conversion is a 10th of normal. 1 in 10.

Given the 1 in 100 basic conversion rate, that implies that 1 in 10 of those forced-non-pirates then went and downloaded the demo, then 1 in a 100 of those who downloaded the demo went on to purchase (assuming a similar conversion rate to the standard one for other customers), bringing us to the 1 in 1000 figure.

1 in 10. 10%. And since the piracy rate was so much higher than the legit, that led to a jump in sales of 70%

Okay, now you've lost me. The guy who has the figures and did the maths, worked out that for every 1,000 pirated copies they eliminated, they only made 1 sale. He re-inforces that point twice with: "knowing that eliminating 50,000 pirated copies might only produce 50 additional legal copies does help put things in perspective.".

So how do you get your figure? His article seems to re-inforce the concept that eliminating pirates doesn't achieve a huge (in terms of actual numbers sold) increase in sales compared with the number of pirates you're eliminating. It appears to me you're trying to spin it that somehow or another, they made massive sales. Which again, appears to go against what the guy in the article actually said.

Because if Reflexive is right (like you want to believe), then it's nothing worth crying about.

If reflexive was right then it was about 40%. 70% increase in sales = about 40% of the total. Almost half. There is no business on the planet that wouldn't look at that as a heavy loss.

I understand what you're trying to say here, that while 1 in 1,000 might be huge, it really does represent a marked increase in sales (because sales are so small). I don't understand how you're getting there though. The fact that he clearly states "1 in 1,000" to me says much more than the "70% increase". That could be 10 sales going up to 17 next week while downloads reduce by several tens of thousands. If that 70% increase in sales, or 40% of total, was true, then how come it only works out to 1 extra sale for the elimination of 1,000 pirates? It seems to indicate more that very few people were buying the game anyway and that reducing piracy is a drop in the bucket.

Your problem is you are looking at 1 in 1000 and thinking "hey thats really small!!!". It is 10% of the normal rate, which is still something "worth crying about", especially over a much larger user base.

The "heavy loss" comes back to perspective. He's talking about the 92% of copies of the game that are pirated. If we say 100,000 was the total (using figures from his follow-up article I found, see below) then:

100% = 100,000 copies of the game downloaded
2.3% - Bought the game = 2,300
29% - Pirated the game = 29,000 (this is the 92% of full versions)
14% - Went online with the demo = 14,000
57% - Never went online = 57,000

So, if piracy was eliminated, those pirates purchase at a rate of 1 per 1,000. That means the 29,000 converts into: 29 extra sales.
Meaning total sales = 2,329.
29 / 2,300 = 0.01%

That is, that "92% of the people playing this game are dirty pirates!" actually represents 0.01% of total lost sales. In other words it means that most pirates, if forced to pay, wouldn't. As he says "Could we realistically assume that stopping piracy would have caused 12 times more sales?". The answer appears to be no and in fact the conversion rate so piss-poor that it's potentially not even worth trying.

Also, if reducing piracy "clearly" increases sales, then how come the other 2 times they did it, sales didn't change and the last time they did it, they got a much smaller 13% increase?

Any more maths I can help you with?

By all means. Use real numbers too, rather than ratio's and percentages as I want to see how the increase in sales is so huge at 70% when all I get is a measly less than 1%. By the way, he wrote a follow-up piece which has the dates. It also links to a slideshow (works in IE better than Firefox) where he has a graph of Reflexive's Income (slide 13). Slide 17 is interesting too. Might be some lessons in there for this THQ guy.

 

[Section8]

The graph in that slideshow is pretty interesting. It shows that the introduction of the new DRM actually arrests a much steeper increase in sales in the previous weeks. It also shows that the first DRM update coincides with a popular game release, and christmas holidays.

 

[nik2008ofs]

But it's still a clever technique from a pure programming standpoint. .

And yet, pure programming cleverness proved about as effective as the happy thoughts of a million pirates as far as the ability to pay the bills is concerned.

Making the game crash without a relevant message was not the brightest idea, although it wouldn't have been as disastrous if the game hadn't leaked weeks before the official release, something which even the most rabid detractor can't blame Iron Lore for.

The current situation with Assasin's Creed is very similar. The official release for the PC is still weeks off, yet it is available at any torrent tracker worth its salt. It crashes constantly. Problematic crack or faulty game? I reserve judgment until the official release, but I wouldn't be surprised if by that time there is a lot of negative buzz about the game's "buginess" on the net...

 

[pkt-zer0]

So, if piracy was eliminated, those pirates purchase at a rate of 1 per 1,000. That means the 29,000 converts into: 29 extra sales.
Meaning total sales = 2,329.
29 / 2,300 = 0.01%

Percentages don't seem to be your strong suit. 29 / 2300 = 0.01 = 1%
Also, that's not accounting for the 57% of all downloads that never went online. Even assuming all of those people pirated it, it'd still be around a whopping 3%, though. I really don't see how this is supposed to be proof of "zomg piracy killed them", at any rate.