MSNBC & Stardock Talk Piracy

I'd call 22.5 million potential sales a "problem with sales."

Ein-7919

I don't know stats (impossible to obtain) but only a fraction of those people would have bought the game if there was no alternative. Most of them would have downloaded the game for free "because they can," not specifically because they wanted to play the game and experience it. It's all the attitue of doing something wrong because you can get away with it.

[QUOTE="Ein-7919"]

I'd call 22.5 million potential sales a "problem with sales."

DigitalExile

I don't know stats (impossible to obtain) but only a fraction of those people would have bought the game if there was no alternative. Most of them would have downloaded the game for free "because they can," not specifically because they wanted to play the game and experience it. It's all the attitue of doing something wrong because you can get away with it.

Please note that that is why I said "potential sales". "Potential sales" does not equal "lost sales".

[QUOTE="dnuggs40"]

And DigitalExile, you couldn't be more wrong. In fact, you are dead wrong. You think if piracy was suddenly not possible that these hundreds of thousands (millions?) would just stop playing games? No, it's insane pretend they aren't loosing sales. They are, and everybody knows it except the people in denial.

DigitalExile

If I have two cars to sell, and one person buys one and "pirates" it and now I see that 30 people have this car. Oh poo! I just lost 30 sales.

30 sales from 2 cars.

How did this happen? Did I have 29 extra cars that I forgot about?

No, 29 people got a different car. It may be the same as my car, might even be an exact copy of my car right down to the tiny coffee stain on the passenger side seat, but these people were never going to buy my other car because I didn't end up selling it, as evidenced by the fact that it's still sitting in my yard with bird poop all over it.

It's mostly likely that if that first person had bought my car no-one would have bought the second because no one wanted to buy it in the first place.

Those extra 29 people got the car because they saw it for free and decided to give it a whirl.

Same goes for retail games. If there are 10,000 retail copies, and only 5000 of those get sold, yet there are 80,000 playing online, did the company lose 75,000 sales? How could they lose that many sales when they didn't even have that many products.

Bare minimum your argument hold is that they lost 5000 sales (the 5K they didn't sell) but those pirated copies don't count as lost sales.

Now, if piracy was somehow stopped you'd either see extreme attempts to crack it, extreme attempts of boycott or a loss of sales (because people would no longer feel safe buying games because "word of mouth" would be cut down). Sales would probably increase, but I think it's "dead wrong" for you to assume that sales would magically increase by massive numbers. By your logic the companies would only have 10,000 and would sell those and have another 70,000 people slamming them for not making enough copies.

If you know pirates you'll know they they do it because they can.

They don't care about the games. They aren't gamers. If there's no games to pirate they'll try and pirate something else until there's nothing left to pirate then they'll go back to whatever it is they do when they're not cracking software.

Yeah, but what about all those people in 3rd and 4th world countries....??? I used to be one of them, and the only way to play the latest games unfourtanetly was to buy them copied. And for 2 reasons: 1- You can't find original games anywhere 2- Impossible to afford them with the US Dollar conversion rate. So these people will have to STOP all together playing PC games...??? I'm not excusing piracy for these countries, but understandable for lack of any other option....FelipeInside

Edit: Please excuse, due to I'm becoming very heartless with these piracy threads. There's simply no argument that Demigod indeed was destroyed by a high piracy rate and in result to have it effect your reviews is just unbelievable, lol... This is a problem that needs unified work between IP providers and publishers to maybe ban people IPs that become detected by the servers as an illegal copy and just maybe people will be a bit more responsible.

[QUOTE="FelipeInside"]Yeah, but what about all those people in 3rd and 4th world countries....??? I used to be one of them, and the only way to play the latest games unfourtanetly was to buy them copied. And for 2 reasons: 1- You can't find original games anywhere 2- Impossible to afford them with the US Dollar conversion rate. So these people will have to STOP all together playing PC games...??? I'm not excusing piracy for these countries, but understandable for lack of any other option....OoSuperMarioO

Edit: Please excuse, due to I'm becoming very heartless with these piracy threads. There's simply no argument that Demigod indeed was destroyed by a high piracy rate and in result to have it effect your reviews is just unbelievable, lol... This is a problem that needs unified work between IP providers and publishers to maybe ban people IPs that become detected by the servers as an illegal copy and just maybe people will be a bit more responsible.

[QUOTE="Ein-7919"]

I'd call 22.5 million potential sales a "problem with sales."

DigitalExile

I don't know stats (impossible to obtain) but only a fraction of those people would have bought the game if there was no alternative. Most of them would have downloaded the game for free "because they can," not specifically because they wanted to play the game and experience it. It's all the attitue of doing something wrong because you can get away with it.

You're missing the real clear message DigitalExile. Even if games sold low due to consumers weren't interested, the developers are clearly designating to the community to directly do not contribute to piracy. Making excuses to fuel the rocket ship(piracy) will only worsen the issue. We're losing enough PC dedicated developers as it is due to piracy and this is simply not a opinion rather it is actual fact. These threads, post, articles ect. are only promoting this problem and it's becoming very tiresome to apprehend.

OoSuperMarioO

No we aren't.

If piracy ended tomorrow we'd still see games with no demos, released games full of bugs, ****ty games etc. I'm not saying this justifies piracy, but rather what it does do is deters people from buying the product.

Games are quite expensive as a single product, and people don't like the risking their money just to be hit by bugs, or without at least trying a demo. So they say "I'm not paying for that". They might not instantly turn to piracy, but then piracy becomes more attractive.

Not to mention intrusive DRM, internet activation, hordes of accomanying programs (GFWL, Rockstar thing, Steam, etc etc). I bought a game for the game, not the stupid programs that come with it.

Not to mention all the developers that go to consoles regardless of piracy.

What developers need to start doing is give us more inscentive to buy their product.

**** off DRM.

**** off bugs and glitches.

Give us demos.

Make quality games!

The sooner they ignore piracy the sooner they'll get gamers back on their side.

(p.s. for the record I don't download my games, but I've wasted a lot of money on games I thought would be good and turned out **** for various reasons.)

It reminds me of the US/terrorist thing. Neither party will back down until the other one leaves, but it only takes one of them to back down and both will be happy. In our case it's the developers that need to ignore piracy.

""We're losing enough PC dedicated developers as it is due to piracy and this is simply not a opinion rather it is actual fact."

No we aren't."

Uh...yah we are. I can name quite a few PC only devs that have shut their doors (or decided to go console) and have attributed piracy as *part* of the reason they went under/moved.

Oh wait, that's right, you don't believe the people actually making games and they are just lying scum bags. Lol...I forgot. Isn't it amazing? The honest hard working people actually busting their butts and investing their time/money are less reliable and believable then the lazy good fer nothing punks who steal games. Only on PC Gaming forums can you have such arse backwards perceptions lol.

So go ahead, bring up all your pretend reasons why you steal, I am sure there are some who still believe such malarky.

Anyways....poor Brad Wardel...screwed by the very people he tried to appeal to. But honestly, I think it serves him right.

[QUOTE="OoSuperMarioO"]

You're missing the real clear message DigitalExile. Even if games sold low due to consumers weren't interested, the developers are clearly designating to the community to directly do not contribute to piracy. Making excuses to fuel the rocket ship(piracy) will only worsen the issue. We're losing enough PC dedicated developers as it is due to piracy and this is simply not a opinion rather it is actual fact. These threads, post, articles ect. are only promoting this problem and it's becoming very tiresome to apprehend.

DigitalExile

No we aren't.

If piracy ended tomorrow we'd still see games with no demos, released games full of bugs, ****ty games etc. I'm not saying this justifies piracy, but rather what it does do is deters people from buying the product.

Games are quite expensive as a single product, and people don't like the risking their money just to be hit by bugs, or without at least trying a demo. So they say "I'm not paying for that". They might not instantly turn to piracy, but then piracy becomes more attractive.

Not to mention intrusive DRM, internet activation, hordes of accomanying programs (GFWL, Rockstar thing, Steam, etc etc). I bought a game for the game, not the stupid programs that come with it.

Not to mention all the developers that go to consoles regardless of piracy.

What developers need to start doing is give us more inscentive to buy their product.

**** off DRM.

**** off bugs and glitches.

Give us demos.

Make quality games!

The sooner they ignore piracy the sooner they'll get gamers back on their side.

(p.s. for the record I don't download my games, but I've wasted a lot of money on games I thought would be good and turned out **** for various reasons.)

It reminds me of the US/terrorist thing. Neither party will back down until the other one leaves, but it only takes one of them to back down and both will be happy. In our case it's the developers that need to ignore piracy.

ah .. poor Brad, he got what he deserved for ignoring DRM, I wish I get something like that too :D

Oh wow...that post is ignorance personified.

lol. im guessing there stock holders got cold feet after seeing the beta versions of the game, so they cut funds, and then a buggy game got released and now they are crying about it.

Eh...no...not even close. Guess again.

think about it, first off who gives a dam about demigod enough to pirate it

Obviously over 100,000 people on the very first day.

so maybe they should just make a good game

They did. See all the reviews after the game stopped getting hammered by the pirates...

http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/demigod

So before opening your mouth, machiavell8x8, please at least know even a tiny bit about the subject you are about to give your opinion on (if what you say even qualifies as an opinion...it's more like uninformed ramblings).

actually the net code for Demigod is pretty buggy and poor, people should really find out stuff before openign their mouth :P

i know alot more than a tiny bit maybe you should take your own advice, one of the members that worked on the game said it needed more time and was rushed out the door. and if you listen very carefully that "100,000" people was just 100,000 HITS within a 15min period from pirated copys....NOT 100,000 copys of the game....so think about that for a second, if you can't connect your going to try again right? well thats already dropped it down to 50000. and yes i watched the review movie, and read the reviews....my opinion still stands. again go cry some more about the pirates, it isn't going to help.machiavell8x8

It wasn't rushed out the door, gamestop released the game (against the streetdate) early. This was not Stardock's fault.

and if you listen very carefully that "100,000" people was just 100,000 HITS within a 15min period from pirated copys....NOT 100,000 copys of the game....so think about that for a second, if you can't connect your going to try again right? well thats already dropped it down to 50000.

No, kid, you listen carefully. It was 120,000 CONCURRENT CONNECTIONS, not "hits". And out of those only 18,000 were legitimate copies. You literally are just pulling things out of your behind lol...

and yes i watched the review movie, and read the reviews....my opinion still stands.

Nothing you said stands, as everything from your mouth is wrong and misinformed ;)

again go cry some more about the pirates, it isn't going to help.

Go spout off about a bunch of stuff you don't understand? Y eah...

Anyways, if you actually read what Brad Wardel wrote on the demigod website you would see he is not crying about piracy, and is taking responsibility for what happened on release. The game is still selling well, too. But the pirates did cause a lot of issues, and I agree with him (in the video) this kind of thing looks really bad and other publishers will take note.

It's just sad to see when a game releases only 12% of the people actually will purchase the game.

[QUOTE="machiavell8x8"]i know alot more than a tiny bit maybe you should take your own advice, one of the members that worked on the game said it needed more time and was rushed out the door. and if you listen very carefully that "100,000" people was just 100,000 HITS within a 15min period from pirated copys....NOT 100,000 copys of the game....so think about that for a second, if you can't connect your going to try again right? well thats already dropped it down to 50000. and yes i watched the review movie, and read the reviews....my opinion still stands. again go cry some more about the pirates, it isn't going to help.dnuggs40

It wasn't rushed out the door, gamestop released the game (against the streetdate) early. This was not Stardock's fault.

and if you listen very carefully that "100,000" people was just 100,000 HITS within a 15min period from pirated copys....NOT 100,000 copys of the game....so think about that for a second, if you can't connect your going to try again right? well thats already dropped it down to 50000.

No, kid, you listen carefully. It was 120,000 CONCURRENT CONNECTIONS, not "hits". And out of those only 18,000 were legitimate copies. You literally are just pulling things out of your behind lol...

and yes i watched the review movie, and read the reviews....my opinion still stands.

Nothing you said stands, as everything from your mouth is wrong and misinformed ;)

again go cry some more about the pirates, it isn't going to help.

Go spout off about a bunch of stuff you don't understand? Y eah...

LOL WATCH THE LINKED MOVIE AGAIN, YOU WRONG!!! EVERYTHING YOU SAID ISBOGUS GO BACK TO BED! You just need to delete all the posts you made in the last 20 minutes and accept the fact that it is indeed YOU who is misinformed and spouting off kiddish replys to a topic thats way above your head.

[QUOTE="dnuggs40"]

[QUOTE="machiavell8x8"]i know alot more than a tiny bit maybe you should take your own advice, one of the members that worked on the game said it needed more time and was rushed out the door. and if you listen very carefully that "100,000" people was just 100,000 HITS within a 15min period from pirated copys....NOT 100,000 copys of the game....so think about that for a second, if you can't connect your going to try again right? well thats already dropped it down to 50000. and yes i watched the review movie, and read the reviews....my opinion still stands. again go cry some more about the pirates, it isn't going to help.machiavell8x8

It wasn't rushed out the door, gamestop released the game (against the streetdate) early. This was not Stardock's fault.

and if you listen very carefully that "100,000" people was just 100,000 HITS within a 15min period from pirated copys....NOT 100,000 copys of the game....so think about that for a second, if you can't connect your going to try again right? well thats already dropped it down to 50000.

No, kid, you listen carefully. It was 120,000 CONCURRENT CONNECTIONS, not "hits". And out of those only 18,000 were legitimate copies. You literally are just pulling things out of your behind lol...

and yes i watched the review movie, and read the reviews....my opinion still stands.

Nothing you said stands, as everything from your mouth is wrong and misinformed ;)

again go cry some more about the pirates, it isn't going to help.

Go spout off about a bunch of stuff you don't understand? Y eah...

LOL WATCH THE LINKED MOVIE AGAIN, YOU WRONG!!! EVERYTHING YOU SAID ISBOGUS GO BACK TO BED!

Wow...

Listen from :40 of the video...and at :55 he specifies "THIS IS SIMULTANEOUS CONNECTIONS".

Bed time, kiddo ;)

Seriously...go find another thread to polute with your non-sense.

"people who are hitting the server in the same 15 minutes period" kiddo.machiavell8x8

[QUOTE="OoSuperMarioO"]

You're missing the real clear message DigitalExile. Even if games sold low due to consumers weren't interested, the developers are clearly designating to the community to directly do not contribute to piracy. Making excuses to fuel the rocket ship(piracy) will only worsen the issue. We're losing enough PC dedicated developers as it is due to piracy and this is simply not a opinion rather it is actual fact. These threads, post, articles ect. are only promoting this problem and it's becoming very tiresome to apprehend.

DigitalExile

No we aren't.

If piracy ended tomorrow we'd still see games with no demos, released games full of bugs, ****ty games etc. I'm not saying this justifies piracy, but rather what it does do is deters people from buying the product.

Games are quite expensive as a single product, and people don't like the risking their money just to be hit by bugs, or without at least trying a demo. So they say "I'm not paying for that". They might not instantly turn to piracy, but then piracy becomes more attractive.

Not to mention intrusive DRM, internet activation, hordes of accomanying programs (GFWL, Rockstar thing, Steam, etc etc). I bought a game for the game, not the stupid programs that come with it.

Not to mention all the developers that go to consoles regardless of piracy.

What developers need to start doing is give us more inscentive to buy their product.

**** off DRM.

**** off bugs and glitches.

Give us demos.

Make quality games!

The sooner they ignore piracy the sooner they'll get gamers back on their side.

(p.s. for the record I don't download my games, but I've wasted a lot of money on games I thought would be good and turned out **** for various reasons.)

It reminds me of the US/terrorist thing. Neither party will back down until the other one leaves, but it only takes one of them to back down and both will be happy. In our case it's the developers that need to ignore piracy.

I see this "the games are so badly coded, full of DRM, and poor quality that we don't feel like we should have to pay for them!" argument a lot. Look, if a game sucks so much that you aren't willing to pay for it...then why are you playing it? Kind of flatlines your argument to be railing against a game while you're playing it. Now if you bought the game and you find out the game sucks, that's one thing. But to supposedly know that a game sucks only to then play it shows that you obviously didn't think that it sucked as much as you claimed.

If a game sucks, here's an idea: Don't play it. Why waste your time playing bad games? Now if you do want to play it then maybe you should, oh I dunno, pay the developers because you're using their product.

Now maybe you feel that a game isn't good enough to warrant the full price tag. Fine, wait until the price drops. It takes about 2-3 months on average for that to happen so be patient. Now if you still just have to play the game on launch day then buy the damn game at full price because obviously the experience you're expecting from it is so high quality that you absolutely must play it ASAP.

However, the "the game sucks" argument wouldn't work even if it was valid considering that if you go to any torrent site and search game downloads by greatest number of leechers, you'll find that the most popular games tend to correlate very nicely with the NPD's top selling PC games. If pirates' arguments were true then the most popular downloads should be crappy games that score 5/10 or lower and barely sell any copies to begin with. Instead what we see is that the most popular downloads are all AA or AAA titles.

The only argument that has some credibility is the "I just use pirated copies as demos" line. But that only works for games with no demos, and it only works if you decide to buy the game afterward or only play 1-2 levels (or equivalent time) before deciding that you don't want it. In other words, you can't claim that you're using a pirated game as a demo if you've gotten halfway through the game, beaten it, and/or dumped in several hours worth of play time.

In the end, there's only one real reason why people pirate games: Pirated games are free. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to justify something they know is wrong.

[QUOTE="machiavell8x8"]"people who are hitting the server in the same 15 minutes period" kiddo.dnuggs40

he CLEARLY says this is people who are "hitting" the server in the "same 15 minute period", what part of that do you not understand? so that CLEARLY can't be simutaneous connections now can it?

Dnuggs40 I have seen you argue this time and time again and agree 100% with you you but if i were you id give it up as a bad job. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about pirates and pratts like mr 8x8. I would just try enjoy your gaming while people like stardock still produce games for pc. I don't like the idea of even more restrictive drm or this server side idea but ill support it if it helps.dannyw7982

I get yeah, and you are right as long as it's so easy to get free media and there is no consequence then lazy poor people will do it. But what they don't understand is when it gets to this point they start pushing the hands of the publishers/law makers. I would rather have people understand this and knock it off rather than having intrusive and unfair laws being passed, and technology developed that is not so good for the consumers.

[QUOTE="dnuggs40"][QUOTE="machiavell8x8"]"people who are hitting the server in the same 15 minutes period" kiddo.machiavell8x8

he CLEARLY says this is people who are "hitting" the server in the "same 15 minute period", what part of that do you not understand? so that CLEARLY can't be simutaneous connections now can it?

You don't have a point. Here it is in writting...maybe this will help:

http://forums.demigodthegame.com/347149

But what happened was that we ended up with 140,000 connected users, of which about 12% were actually legitimate customers. Now, the roughly 120,000 users that weren't running legitimate copies of the game weren't online playing multiplayer or anything. The issue with those users was as benign as a handful of HTTP calls that did things like check for updates and general server keep alive. Pretty trivial on its own until you have 120,000 of them. Then you have what amounts to a DDOS attack on yourself.

Our stress tests had counted on having maybe 50,000 people playing at once at peak and that wouldn't be reached for a few weeks by which time we would have slowly seen things becoming problematic. With Sins of a Solar Empire, the game was incredibly successful but its user base grew slowly and steadily over time. Sometimes on a peak time the server would start to get slow and we would adjust so that it would be better next time.

But here, when you're getting that many connections at once, you're no longer talking about dealing with the basics like having a good SAN and lots of redundant servers. You instead fall into all kinds of weird secondary issues that start to pop up like yesterday's case where an older network card couldn't handle all the packets (not bandwidth limited but # of tiny packets being sent out at once).Stardock

i had a very good point regarding the movie posted in this thread which we were discussing, but yes that does help explain things a bit better, but all my comments were regarding the original post and movie posted so im sure you see where i was coming from.

still the thing that doesn't make sense is why would pirates be trying to play online, that makes absolutly no sense, clearly they wouldn't be there for updates either, none of that makes sense. but even they say they don't blame the pirates for the server issues, which begs the question why are there still problems surrounding online play at this point in time?

They didn't expect that many people to try and play on day one...I don't think anybody could guess (especially when you consider how their last game sold) they would have over 100,000 pirates in such a short period of time. Then again, I am sure a lot of the filthy scum from the DOTA community were interested in the game so it makes a bit of sense.

So anyways, those issues were fixed like on day 1 or 2, and since then another patch came out and MP is MUCH better. I have played every game I tried to connect for a while now, and it doesn't take long to connect to the game either. I do hear there are specific issue though, and they are working on that too with some kind of routing solution.

Listen...I am not trying to say Stardock/GPG doesn't own any of it's "failure"...and even Brad (if you go and read the journals) takes full responsibility of the situation. But when you have 88% of the people interested in playing a game stealing it there is a problem. And you can bet other publishers (like Brad noted) are taking note.

Then again, I am sure a lot of the filthy scum from the DOTA community were interested in the game so it makes a bit of sense.dnuggs40

[QUOTE="dnuggs40"] Then again, I am sure a lot of the filthy scum from the DOTA community were interested in the game so it makes a bit of sense.Swiftstrike5

i had a very good point regarding the movie posted in this thread which we were discussing, but yes that does help explain things a bit better, but all my comments were regarding the original post and movie posted so im sure you see where i was coming from.

still the thing that doesn't make sense is why would pirates be trying to play online, that makes absolutly no sense, clearly they wouldn't be there for updates either, none of that makes sense. but even they say they don't blame the pirates for the server issues, which begs the question why are there still problems surrounding online play at this point in time?

machiavell8x8

The main thing I hate about modern piracy, is that it's gotten really, really easy. Thus most people pirating are really, really dumb. The usual message on a torrent site forum is something like: "Okay, I downloaded the file, in has some strange expansion .iso; what do I do whith it?" I mean, it's like trying to steal a car without even knowing how to drive it... No wonder that they're trying to connect to official server with a cracked game. Some of them (recent Left 4 Dead case), are dumb enough to contact game's customer support complaining that the game won't let them to play online.

Anyway, I'm not trying to say, that an "educated" pirate is any better than others, but there was somewhat complexity in the "old days" piracy, and it has been scaring off greedy dumb children, majority of whitch really prefered to just buy a game, rather than bother with cracks. Now, it's really just a "click->ok->start a game" thing.

I don't know how their network really works but because the game is online game it should work like this.

1- you open the game and want to start a multiplayer sesion...it asks for a user name and password.

2- you have the legit user/password it will allow you in...if this is the case go to step 4....if not see step 3.

3- if your password is incorrect it kicks out and tell you user/password is not valid...This is called the Auth server and it's a basic setup for even you normal ISP.

4- your iser/pass is valid then welcome to the update server...it starts to update your game then you can start playing.

This is very simple though but you'll see that every one who have a valid pass will be able to enter and the ones who doesn't will not pose much traffic problem...after all Day 1 Auth server should be equipped to deal with heavy traffic.

sataricon

I already said I don't illegally download games so the "if you don't like it don't play it, if you played it you obviously didn't dislike it as much as you said" argument doesn't apply to me, not that it's a valid argument anyway. If I bought a crappy game I'd play it to get my money's worth. If I downloaded a game I'd play it and finish it to see if, at some point, it did get good.

But I also said that a crappy development doesn't justify pirating, it deters customers.

So if I come to a point where I see a crappy game for $50, or playing that same game for free after illegally downloading it, I'd download it. I get to play the game, ***** about it online, AND keep my money. (But as I said I don't download my games, so I have to ***** about my wasted money)

When developers say "Pirates cost us our jobs" it seems as if they're assuming legetitimate customers turned to piracy, but that can;t be the case. People who were going to buy the game bought the game. People who were never going to buy the game pirated it. People who were unsure either pirated it and didn't buy it, or they just didn't buy it. Saying people who were definately going to buy it, but then pirated it instead doesn't make sense.

What happened is these pirates played the game (any game) and word of mouth spread. usually this is a case of "this game is crap" and so people say, uh oh! I'm not wasting my money. In that sense, yes, piracy did ruin the sales, but only because of word of mouth.

Btw as a side fact (I once read on a paper I can;t provide the link to) it was said that someone is likely to tell about 10 other people of a negative experience, but only 2 other people of a positive experience. So if we have all these people saying bad things it's going to spread like wild fire.

And DRM is a very big issue that certainly will deter people paying for a game if they can;t then control how they use their own property.

As I said this doesn't justify piracy, but it deters people from buying a game. (That's the most important part of my argument)

[QUOTE="dnuggs40"]

And DigitalExile, you couldn't be more wrong. In fact, you are dead wrong. You think if piracy was suddenly not possible that these hundreds of thousands (millions?) would just stop playing games? No, it's insane pretend they aren't loosing sales. They are, and everybody knows it except the people in denial.

DigitalExile

If I have two cars to sell, and one person buys one and "pirates" it and now I see that 30 people have this car. Oh poo! I just lost 30 sales.

30 sales from 2 cars.

How did this happen? Did I have 29 extra cars that I forgot about?

No, 29 people got a different car. It may be the same as my car, might even be an exact copy of my car right down to the tiny coffee stain on the passenger side seat, but these people were never going to buy my other car because I didn't end up selling it, as evidenced by the fact that it's still sitting in my yard with bird poop all over it.

It's mostly likely that if that first person had bought my car no-one would have bought the second because no one wanted to buy it in the first place.

Those extra 29 people got the car because they saw it for free and decided to give it a whirl.

Same goes for retail games. If there are 10,000 retail copies, and only 5000 of those get sold, yet there are 80,000 playing online, did the company lose 75,000 sales? How could they lose that many sales when they didn't even have that many products.

Bare minimum your argument hold is that they lost 5000 sales (the 5K they didn't sell) but those pirated copies don't count as lost sales.

Now, if piracy was somehow stopped you'd either see extreme attempts to crack it, extreme attempts of boycott or a loss of sales (because people would no longer feel safe buying games because "word of mouth" would be cut down). Sales would probably increase, but I think it's "dead wrong" for you to assume that sales would magically increase by massive numbers. By your logic the companies would only have 10,000 and would sell those and have another 70,000 people slamming them for not making enough copies.

If you know pirates you'll know they they do it because they can.

They don't care about the games. They aren't gamers. If there's no games to pirate they'll try and pirate something else until there's nothing left to pirate then they'll go back to whatever it is they do when they're not cracking software.

There are several serious flaws in your metaphor. Let me try to rewrite it so it fits better with the actual industry we're talking about.

You go out and borrow $20 million dollars to research, design and produce a new type of car. Part of the cost is actually making the car, however it's a minor cost, the vast bulk of the $20 million is spend on making the initial car.

After 2-4 years of work and $20 million dollars invested you finally finished your car, you got the first 50.000 cars ready to be sold and can order up more on short notice if sales exceed expectations.

Now at first you sell a good handful of cars for $50 each and things are looking good. Suddently however someone turns up on the sidewalk and starts telling people walking past your store that he'll give them a new car, clear and free at no cost. That dosent mean that all people walking past your store would have bought a car, it dosent mean that everyone getting a free car would have bought one, but odds are that people who would have payed $50 for a new car are going to take the free car instead.. why pay $50 when there's someone standing right outside the store offering the same car for free?

Now in order to be able to pay back the $20 million loan you took to pay to develop the car you have to sell at least 400.000 copies. Actually convincing 400.000 people to pay for a new car is going to be a helluva lot harder as long as someone is standing outside offering the car for free. If you don't sell 400.000 copies, it's game over for your buisness.

Now don't get me wrong, maybe you botched the job making the car. It might be faulty, maybe it gets a bad gas milage or maybe it's just plain ugly and no one wants to drive it. If so you probably wouldnt sell 400.000 copies no matter what. But the bottom line is when you have to compete for the life of your buisness with someone giving your own hard work away for free, your in a pretty bloody bad place when it comes to keeping your buisness afloat.

Now don't get me wrong, maybe you botched the job making the car. It might be faulty, maybe it gets a bad gas milage or maybe it's just plain ugly and no one wants to drive it. If so you probably wouldnt sell 400.000 copies no matter what. But the bottom line is when you have to compete for the life of your buisness with someone giving your own hard work away for free, your in a pretty bloody bad place when it comes to keeping your buisness afloat.

Mazoch

Maybe some of those people are looking for a game to play, or maybe they aren't looking for a game at all, but they come across this free alternative and download it, but they're not a lost or stolen sale, which was my original argument that got lost. Some people who might have intended to buy the game were lost, but I don't think it's these millions of people, and enough to make companies go bust, unless the company was doing something wrong in the first place to lose themselves sales.

Piracy is definately a thorn in the industry (the more piracy prevails, the more intrusive developers will get with anti-piracy measures) but claiming that they went bust because they lost sales I think is ignoring from the fact that they didn't convince people to buy the game.

[QUOTE="Mazoch"]

Now don't get me wrong, maybe you botched the job making the car. It might be faulty, maybe it gets a bad gas milage or maybe it's just plain ugly and no one wants to drive it. If so you probably wouldnt sell 400.000 copies no matter what. But the bottom line is when you have to compete for the life of your buisness with someone giving your own hard work away for free, your in a pretty bloody bad place when it comes to keeping your buisness afloat.

DigitalExile

Maybe some of those people are looking for a game to play, or maybe they aren't looking for a game at all, but they come across this free alternative and download it, but they're not a lost or stolen sale, which was my original argument that got lost. Some people who might have intended to buy the game were lost, but I don't think it's these millions of people, and enough to make companies go bust, unless the company was doing something wrong in the first place to lose themselves sales.

Piracy is definately a thorn in the industry (the more piracy prevails, the more intrusive developers will get with anti-piracy measures) but claiming that they went bust because they lost sales I think is ignoring from the fact that they didn't convince people to buy the game.

While it's impossible to say just how maybe sales are lost. The closest comparision we have are consoles but they are a very diffrent market for a large number of reasons.

I think the only thing we can say for sure is that piracy results in a loss in sales that lower than the number of pirated copies and higher than 0.

However, a study looking at Call of Duty 4 (among others). It sold roughly 10 times as many copies on the X360 as it did on the PC. If you look at the number of times it was downloaded of public torrent sites it was downloaded 10 times as many time for the PC as for the X360. In short, there were at the time roughly a similar number of people playing CoD4, only 90% of the X360 players paid for their copy.. on the PC, 10% paid for their copy... Now if you were Infinity Ward, what platform would you focus on for your next title?

Now those numbers are not 100% accurate. One one hand they dont take digital download into account which are becomming very popular on the PC, but that the same time they only looked at numbers from a couple of the big torrent sites, which means that piracy through FTP, IRC, Mailing Lists, Dump Sites, Local Networks or Direct Download Sites wont be reflected in those numbers.

Interesting video, what really should catch your attention is the last 30 seconds or so...I too hope it never comes to that but I actually believe it will. Too many people pirate games these days and publishers are taking note.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/30392391#30392391

dnuggs40

PC will only have crappy ports soon enough, and then we'll be able to stop having this discussion.

Maybe its not the pirates fault, but they're not helping.

[QUOTE="dnuggs40"][QUOTE="machiavell8x8"]"people who are hitting the server in the same 15 minutes period" kiddo.machiavell8x8

he CLEARLY says this is people who are "hitting" the server in the "same 15 minute period", what part of that do you not understand? so that CLEARLY can't be simutaneous connections now can it?

Bioshock required you to authenticate your copy online with the server to download a few crucial files to get the game running. The problem for me was the damn servers failed so often at launch it was 5 days before I could get my preordered copy to install. So while I paid full price for the game I couldn't play it, only because of their copy protection, and yet the pirates had already cracked it to play within hours. That was a final straw after fighting with copy protection on other games that pushed me more into console gaming. If PC devs want to treat everyone like a criminal they can go without my custom, and I'll support the ones who treat their customers well. What I'd like to see, maybe even just as a trial, is for one big name developer to release their game, without copy protection, and ask people to pay for it what they think its worth. This was trialed with Radiohead when they sold their album this way. Companies need to face up to the fact that they cannot prevent piracy with tools, so they need to persuade people to buy the game instead of pirate it. Allow people to pay what they want for it, and some money from a potential pirate is better than getting no money from them when they pirate it instead.Avenger1324

[QUOTE="Avenger1324"]...What I'd like to see, maybe even just as a trial, is for one big name developer to release their game, without copy protection, and ask people to pay for it what they think its worth. This was trialed with Radiohead when they sold their album this way.

Companies need to face up to the fact that they cannot prevent piracy with tools, so they need to persuade people to buy the game instead of pirate it. Allow people to pay what they want for it, and some money from a potential pirate is better than getting no money from them when they pirate it instead.OoSuperMarioO

Be very honest, if you spent 20-30 million dollars to make a game over a 2-4 year development period, would you risk allowing customers to pay for what they think it is worth?

There's no denying that it is a very big risk to take, but it is a gamble that has been tried (albeit only once), and did make money.

Games developers make claims that the piracy rate is in the 80-90% range, and by letting people pay what they want to get a genuine version without the need to crack or find workarounds would surely tempt some just for the convenience. Even attracting a small % of the potential pirates would match the number of people buying the game legitimately anyway.

By having it download only direct from their own site it cuts out so many costs - no need for a separate publisher, no packagaing, no transportation, no cut taken by stores.

While there would obviously be people that want to pay nothing, or the absolute minimum, the esults of Radiohead's experiment was that people were paying to get it, even though there was the option to get it for free. As with any figures there is no way to tell how many people would have pirated it otherwise, or how many got it for free, simply because they could, but it does show that people are prepared to pay what they think it is worth, even when they could pay less.

Their attempt will be wasteful and pointless. It will take less than a day for anyone with any network programming skills to crack this one. You just need to capture the downloaded traffic and include it in your crack. Then you may or may not need to modify your server list to point back at your local host. These guys are uninformed and wasting everyones time. Go back to school Make a good game and people will buy it and you will get rich. Make a shoddy game and you will get murdered and you will blame everyone but yourself for the failure. That's exactly why our country is falling apart. We turn a blind eye to laziness and shoddy performance because we dont want to hurt anyone's feelings by firing their worthless butts and making them work at McDonald's where they really belong. For your information all MMO's have also been pirated including WoW, EQ2 and others. You can download their entire server content and run their entire game on your own computer at home. I guess blizzard will go out of business soon too. The only way they can stop pirates is by placing a guard with a gun physically next to each PC in the world. PC gamers will buy games but you need to understand that the average PC gamer has much higher standards than console gamers. So either A) you make a superb software or B) you will fail. If you cannot handle that then go make console & cell phone games.marc5477

How long did it take to "crack" WoW and Lineage? If you honestly think it will take a day or two you have ZERO idea what you are talking about. ZERO.

Anyways, the rest of your post is pure ignorance and doesn't even deserve a response.

[QUOTE="OoSuperMarioO"]

[QUOTE="Avenger1324"]...What I'd like to see, maybe even just as a trial, is for one big name developer to release their game, without copy protection, and ask people to pay for it what they think its worth. This was trialed with Radiohead when they sold their album this way.

Companies need to face up to the fact that they cannot prevent piracy with tools, so they need to persuade people to buy the game instead of pirate it. Allow people to pay what they want for it, and some money from a potential pirate is better than getting no money from them when they pirate it instead.Avenger1324

Be very honest, if you spent 20-30 million dollars to make a game over a 2-4 year development period, would you risk allowing customers to pay for what they think it is worth?

There's no denying that it is a very big risk to take, but it is a gamble that has been tried (albeit only once), and did make money.

Games developers make claims that the piracy rate is in the 80-90% range, and by letting people pay what they want to get a genuine version without the need to crack or find workarounds would surely tempt some just for the convenience. Even attracting a small % of the potential pirates would match the number of people buying the game legitimately anyway.

By having it download only direct from their own site it cuts out so many costs - no need for a separate publisher, no packagaing, no transportation, no cut taken by stores.

While there would obviously be people that want to pay nothing, or the absolute minimum, the esults of Radiohead's experiment was that people were paying to get it, even though there was the option to get it for free. As with any figures there is no way to tell how many people would have pirated it otherwise, or how many got it for free, simply because they could, but it does show that people are prepared to pay what they think it is worth, even when they could pay less.

Except making an album and engineering a major game and supporting the 50-75 people over 3-4 years with that kind of risk is stupid. Then even after release, a studio has to scramble for their next project (unlike a band that can just sit back and do nothing sometimes years at a time) in order to pay salaries, rent, server costs, software, ect, ect, ect.

Honestly I am surprised anybody would even suggest something like that.

Anyways, what kind of world we live in where people who invest their time, hard work, and money have to resort to giving away their products to combat the people who ARE STEALING THEM???????