70-85% piracy rate in the US, 90% in europe and off the charts in Europe. So whats the solution... go to closed platforms think again they will just start modding there game console.

Quote: Original post by bgilb
Games just are priced completely wrong. 60$ is absurd for a game

If the game cost 10$-15$ many more people would actually buy it and they would probably end up making the same amount.

When World of Goo implemented the pay whatever you want temporary, they made vast amounts more from people who payed just 5$ (30,000$), versus those who paid the original amount (25$ only made 600$ or so)

No dice on that. 1.99 iphone game is pirated with a 0% buy rate. 0%!

Quote:
Woe be the PC game developer these days, as various reports put piracy rates in the U.S. at approximately 70-85%.
PC piracy

Pirates?! I'm supposed to be fighting a hydra!

It's no wonder that Epic Games is dumping PC games for the greener pastures of console gaming: piracy rates for the U.S. market alone are hovering around 80%!

And beyond the U.S., the piracy picture becomes even larger and more menacing -- especially if you're an independent developer without "Madden-sized advertising budget," said THQ Director of Creative Management Michael Fitch, who laid out his case against piracy and hardware manufactures in an epic rant at the Quarter to Three forums.

In the post, Fitch attacked pirates, the PC software security model and everything in between. In Europe, he said, piracy rates approach 90%. In Asia, those figures are "off the charts."

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/165488/hard-times-pc-game-piracy-in-us-estimated-at-75-80/

Quote:
Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch is a lot like Sony's PSP in many ways: they both play games, movies and music -- and now both can struggle with the effects of piracy. According to iPhone developer Smells Like Donkey, about 80 percent of all downloads of Tap-Fu were illegally downloaded.

The developer notes that learning how to pirate games off the iPhone is surprisingly easy, thanks to "a kernel patch that bypasses Apple's DRM system" that "would take an average person 5 minutes in Google to find." Additionally, the developer discovered that an average of zero percent of pirates end up purchasing a legitimate copy of Tap-Fu -- it seems marking the game down to $1.99 didn't discourage anyone from taking a free ride.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/26/developer-claims-80-percent-piracy-rate-for-latest-iphone-releas/

EDIT: I'm going to put a disclaimer here because I know some people can't read: This post is not condoning piracy.

Interesting, I have reports that say piracy is actually only 1%!
Boy, isn't it easy to say things like that when you have nothing tangible to back it up with? What does a piracy "rate" even mean? What methodologies are being used in these "studies"? Seems to me it's usually something like sales / torrent leechers at a given moment * number of torrent sites on internet * seconds in a day.

There are many reasons why PC games sell worse than console counterparts.
-Piracy
-Lack of advertising.
-Lack of an audience who has game-capable PC's.
-Lack of an audience who is capable of using their PC's.
-Lack of an audience who wants to deal with the bugs that come with running PC games.
-A general preference for using gamepads.
-A general preference for sitting down on your couch watching your big screen TV.
-A general preference for setting up consoles in spaces that have room for multiple people to hang out in.
-A general sense of consoles being new and fresh and exciting, while PC's are for nerds.
-A lot of PC games being throwbacks aimed at old nostalgic people.
-A lot of PC games just being horribly broken to begin with.
-A shift in the way people use PC's from sitting down and focusing on one application to multi-tasking between many things for short periods of time, which does not mesh well with traditionally long and involved games.
-A PC audience who is jaded by shitty protection systems that break their legit games.
-A PC audience who is jaded by getting crappy console ports.
-And many other things!

You'll notice piracy is a reason. People really need to stop acting like it's the only reason. Pirated copies != why your business is failing. Blaming everything on piracy is a cop-out and not healthy for anyone.

And I haven't even gotten into how # of pirated copies != # of lost sales, which is an even bigger discussion in itself.

Quote: Original post by LockePick
And I haven't even gotten into how # of pirated copies != # of lost sales, which is an even bigger discussion in itself.

It's something the "victims" always overlook though.

E.g. Photoshop is often regarded as one of the most pirated pieces of software in the world. If somehow, all copies of PS were scrubbed from the net, and a truly non-pirated version was released in stores instead, does anyone really believe that sales would increase?
Or would another piratable software package simply become the new de-facto standard for computer painting, eventually leading to a decrease in PS sales?

As for games, the people I know that pirate games, pirate *all* of their games (except the 1-2 they get as gifts each year). If they can't pirate a game, they simply don't play it. Stopping these kinds of people doesn't increase sales at all, and thus counting them in "OMG look at all the sales we're losing"-statistics just makes these statistics even more meaningless...

You guy speak easily about internet verification.
Which would be fine if everyone had internet.

I live in Hungary (it's not Balkan yet). Next to the the second largest city.
And I had to wait 3 fucking years for a fucking internet, which I have now for one and a half year.

And I can't play a single player mission?

Of course I would get pirate version (ask somebody to download for me).

This theme is an interesting one.

OK I'll buy it if I can.
But there's stuff it's very hard to find. And I don't want to pay 200 $ to a membership and an other 200 $ to get the stuff brought to me by ship from Uganda.

If there wouldn't been pirating, some stuff would be almost impossible to get.
Or I should piss of with my strange and marginal taste.

Quote: Original post by bgilb
Games just are priced completely wrong. 60$ is absurd for a game

If the game cost 10$-15$ many more people would actually buy it and they would probably end up making the same amount.

When World of Goo implemented the pay whatever you want temporary, they made vast amounts more from people who payed just 5$ (30,000$), versus those who paid the original amount (25$ only made 600$ or so)

Indeed, $60 for 20-40 hours of entertainment is really absurd, thats like $3 for one hour of entertainment, much better to just buy a movie. Oh wait nevermind.

If you look at the amount of entertainment a good game offers its really not that expensive, ofcourse there are bad games that aren't worth their price but that is true for almost any form of commercial entertainment, play the demos before buying to find out which ones you like.

@Hodgman, I think that when it comes to Photoshop a removal of the pirate versions would have little to no effect on sales of the full photoshop suite, but a huge positive effect on similar but cheaper tools such as Photoshop Elements or free tools.

Those that need the functionality photoshop offers allready pay for it, Those who can get by with less would probably pay for something cheaper if piracy wasn't an option.

Its really a bit like with Microsofts Windows versions, pirates always pick the best version instead of the one that matches their budget and requirements.

And people who pirate all their games are probably the ones contributing the most to lost sales since they would have to buy more games if piracy wasn't an option, The ones who buy "must have" games and pirate random games might not contribute at all to lost sales though.

Ofcourse since people have a finite amount of money to spend on entertainment the pirates are very likely to spend their entertainment budget on things that are hard or impossible to copy which probably hurts the game and movie industries the most. (You can't copy a live performance for example and books are still better in the classic non digital format).

Quote: Original post by jackolantern1
However, there is a big conflict that I see in the gaming community at large. On the one hand, players complain about the increasing costs of games (which is only partially due to piracy, of course), closing of studios, and decreasing commercial offerings every year, but on the other hand, they raise hell when a company actually wants online-verification for offline single-player games. If we all just accepted internet verification as a ways to at least mitigate PC game piracy, companies would be much better off against it. While it doesn't stop everything, there are advanced security techniques that involve internet-verification that would make things incredibly harder on so-called "release groups" that are the ones distributing pirated games.

But that only prevents release groups from releasing it before or on the day of release (like Bioshock mentioned earlier). No DRM will prevent pirates from playing the game eventually. I often have to resort to no-cd cracks and such on old games because the DRM doesn't work right on newer systems; makes assumptions about drive letters and whatnot. It's very aggravating.

The fact is, there is no way to prevent piracy on a traditional game. It will happen. What you can prevent is pissing off customers with crappy DRM. I'm guessing there is some 'happy medium' that the bean counters figure out for maximum profits or something.

And how can you say piracy on PC is worse than consoles? Are you kidding me? Most PC games won't run multiplayer without a legit copy (CD Keys and whatnot). Console games just use the disk for verification. I know loads of people that run with mod-chips and such in their consoles. The ones that get banned (what was it, a few million with xbox live recently?) are just the stupid ones & probably less than 1% of the pirates. Consoles sell more games, not because there are less pirates, but there are more people that play games on consoles.

I actually like the Steam/Impulse/GoG model. I've got all three.

I get to download all the games in the market, instead of running around the games shop for hours not finding the title I want. And with a simple registration, and a hand shake, I get instant proof that I am a paying customer, and get all the consumer rights that come with that title.

I also don't have to mess with loose, damagable media. It's all there for me to download when I want to, with clear and easily confirmable rules of service.

Internet connections are still a problem for most people, but I'd like to think that they're a problem which will be solved within the next decade.

Quote: Original post by Phytoplankton

Quote: Original post by Scet
I thought this thread was going to be about Pirates!.

Yes, that was my hope as well. 16 Colors of euphoria.

Was hoping for a new remake, but would have settled for a thread about a patch that removed the annoying Coral-reef ocean sound from the original. [smile]

Quote: Original post by Lode
So DRM in games is bad for me. It gives me the feeling that I'm not going to be able to play the game anymore in 10 years. And it depends on a lot of crap too, so the scenario of mounting ISO's in Linux and playing it with Wine doesn't sound realistic with modern games anymore either (and neither does playing it with whatever version of Windows that exists in 10 years).

And that why I think it's the customer's right to complain about DRM.

I think people rightfully complain about DRM since the concept is pretty much retarded -- an effort to stuff a genie back into the bottle. On standard desktops, even at best, it conceptually amounts to giving someone a safe deposit box with all of the keys, but then trying to keep them out by bribing some of the bankers.

I don't see how DRM is anything more than a ton of wasted effort. I find it amazing that so many millions are being spent on an effort that security professionals must already have advised them is futile.

[Edited by - HostileExpanse on December 2, 2009 4:17:44 PM]

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse

I don't how DRM is anything more than a ton of wasted effort. I find it amazing that so many millions are being spent on an effort that security professionals must already have advised them is futile.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Would you say Steam is unsuccessful? What about iTunes?

The key here is about the customer experience. Piracy will always offer the best cost, so you have to beat it by making sure you offer the best value. Moral issues aside (and like it or not, there is a moral issue here), these days I simply find it more convenient to buy my games/music from Steam/iTunes. I know I'll actually get what I want without the risk of malware or the hassle of searching for a torrent. And DRM? Meh, it essentially doesn't effect me. All of my iTunes music is DRM-free, so no hassles there. As for steam, most of the games I play are online, and if my net connection goes down (like it did last night), I fire it up in offline mode and away I go. I've even got a few games installed on my netbook.

The flip-side is the movie/dvd experience. Philosophically, I don't believe in piracy. I'm happy to pay for my content, but bloody hell the movie studios make it hard! If the movie I want even comes out in NZ, I have to sit through a bunch of ads that I can't skip. Worse, I have to sit through a @#$@ing stupid warning about piracy, when I paid for the bloody movie!! grrr