Quote: Original post by zyrolasting

Quote: Autodesk is a great example of a company whose products are widely pirated but as a result completely dominate the market because the students that pirate their software can't use anything else when they enter the workforce. So their income loss from piracy is essentially negative.

That's really neat, but by "can't use anything else", do you mean the student does not feel obligated to learn anything else, or the company is so renowned that it's software is effectively the sole standard for the relevant field and the student feels obligated to go with the flow?

I mean that's what they can put on their resume, and that's what will get them hired. Dominant software becomes dominant for a reason I admit, but once it's there, there is a lot of inertia, and businesses stick with it even if it would be better in the long run to switch. When people pirate that software, they're just adding to the inertia, perpetuating the cycle.

Quote: Do you have a reference for your information I can look at? I'm not seeing it on google. (In fact, the above links were found instead.)

No reference, just anecdotal evidence, unrecorded observation and untested/untestable hypotheses. Not much help in an academic paper I guess, huh? When I'm talking about 3ds Max or Maya, it does rely on my firm belief that virtually no illegal downloads by students represent a lost sale, at least on those expensive software packages. But when I was a student surviving primarily on ramen noodles, a freezer full of ground elk that my roommate's dad gave us, and Arby's barbecue sauce packets, software was not very high priority list of things to buy. Part of the reason I got into FOSS, really.


(Note: I keep saying piracy for simplicity but I'm very much in agreement with Rycross that it is copyright infringement, and the absurd penalties and copyright extensions recent administrations have supported are unconstitutional.)

Quote: Original post by i_luv_cplusplus
I am a student too, so I don't have any experience with business but I have a question for you frob... how are you measuring the amount of players? I hope you aren't using the number of unique IPs, because in Europe most people have dynamic IP, which can really distort such numbers (when your IP changes every few hours).

Telemetry gives many ways to judge unique players.

IP address is one useful tool, but as you point out, it is obviously not exact.

The number and names of simultaneous logins, usage patterns of user names, the disk key or account number, a GUID generated at install and stored on the machine, assigned cookies, and many other identifying elements can provide insights to how many actual humans there are.

It can be obvious such as 700 concurrent logins from a single key, or disc keys being used that were never printed and assigned. It can be an observation of X concurrent users compared to Y sales.

Even outside the game telemetry, you can perform simple statistics on support calls, or even using the optional game registration data where you volunteer to give some personal details.

Simple statistics can give you very accurate estimates about the percentage of authorized and unauthorized users. Even if you only research 30 accounts you can get a small margin of error with a high confidence.



One of the awesome things about statistics is that you only need to know details about a few accounts, even as low as 20 accounts, to get good predictions about millions of users.

[Edited by - frob on October 7, 2009 4:23:02 PM]