PC has Piracy Rate of 93-95%

Kirby · 25-08-2012 8:15am

Azza wrote: »

The article which PC gamer was based on was wrong, Eurogamer clarifed Patchers comments on Ubisoft, he actually said that he heard from Ubisoft that they where suffering piracy rates as high as 90% not that there sales had dropped 90%.

Capcom are also claiming a 90% piracy rate.Christian Svensson of Capcom where also of the opnion that DRM can make a meangingful difference to a projects profitability.

Sega where claiming a higher than 80% piracy rate on the the football manager series.

What is a Ubisoft rep going to say exactly? "Nope, we got it wrong, wasted millions in the development of this DRM and all it achieved was annoying legitimate customers."

Azza, you can't believe everything a company representative says. It's in their own best interest to portray their own product and DRM in the best light possible. In any business, people crow about how good a job they did and how necessary they are to the company. To say anything different would be to risk losing your job.

With regards Football Manager, Sega took a new approach this year and put it on Steam. Now, it was just as easy to pirate as last years version but I'm betting the sales improved massively. What does that tell you?

Any opinion Capcom has on DRM should be viewed with a mountain of salt. Companies that practice business the way they do with on-disc DLC and unlock codes are on very shakey ethical ground when it comes to piracy anyway.

I'm in no way excusing piracy in this, I just feel that you are being very naive in your taking these quotes as gospel. These guys have an agenda.

Plenty of PC games sell bucket loads. And then some don't and it's all them nasty pirates fault. It's alot easier to blame an outside force than look at the problem that you might have within. Did we make a bad game? Did we market it wrong? Is our DRM counter-productive? Jaysus heads might roll if thats true.

Na.......it's them damned pirates! "They tuk er jerbs!!!"

Myrddin · 25-08-2012 11:34am

Kirby wrote: »

Any opinion Capcom has on DRM should be viewed with a mountain of salt. Companies that practice business the way they do with on-disc DLC and unlock codes are on very shakey ethical ground when it comes to piracy anyway

The farce that was 3DS Resident Evil savegames was another example of DRM madness

Azza · 25-08-2012 11:41am

Kirby wrote:

What is a Ubisoft rep going to say exactly? "Nope, we got it wrong, wasted millions in the development of this DRM and all it achieved was annoying legitimate customers."

You seriously believe there is a possibility a company would keep using a system that is costing them millions? Strikes me as rather naive. Sure its possible that companies can make mistakes and miscalculate with severe financial consequences, but to continue using a system that's costing them millions that sounds insane. I'd also like to see some proof that DRM systems cost millions to implement. Sounds like an exaggeration to me.

Kirby wrote:

With regards Football Manager, Sega took a new approach this year and put it on Steam. Now, it was just as easy to pirate as last years version but I'm betting the sales improved massively. What does that tell you?

Did it help prevent zero day piracy?. All steam games are easy to pirate, but the fact that the developers can withhold say the .exe file off the retail disc, means that even if there is a leak at a disc pressing plant, the game will not be cracked until after release. That is all they may have been hoping to achieve, (obviously putting games on Steam with massive customer base is a great idea, expanding your potential customer base will always lead to increased sales). We don't have any figures on sales do we so it tells me nothing. I could say, its drastically reduced piracy, what does that tell you? Of course there are no figures so its just speculation.

Kirby wrote:

Any opinion Capcom has on DRM should be viewed with a mountain of salt. Companies that practice business the way they do with on-disc DLC and unlock codes are on very shakey ethical ground when it comes to piracy anyway.

I have no problem with any of that. I'm mildly irritated by pre-order DLC, but that's normally fairly trivial content, that makes virtually no difference to how much I would enjoy a game. More and more I'm simply buying from the store/website with the best price, regardless of pre-order DLC.

As for unlock codes, that's been the story with PC games for years. You use a code to activate it. Sometimes the code is tied to an account which makes second hands sales difficult.

As for on disc DLC. I believe a company can sell a product however they wish. Your no doubt referring to SFxT. I purchased the game and do believe I purchased a complete game (albeit a poor game from a game play perspective). There is as much content in that game as any other fighting game that I have played. They created the DLC with a separate budget concurrently with the main game. If they did not intend to sell the extra characters as DLC then those characters would not have been made, plain and simple. Who cares when they where developed. People where unhappy with the release date and complained, so Capcom moved them forward. People complain about the price of DLC, but no one is forcing them to buy it. Your not at disadvantage against these characters because you learn about them by playing them. (I do have an issue with certain DLC gems giving an advantage, pay to win so to speak)

Then to this argument that I own what's ever on the disc I paid for. You going call out Netherrealms, for their DLC plans with Injustice God's Amongst Us. No on disc content but when it comes to DLC people will be forced to download the DLC to their hard discs There doing this so people who don't buy the DLC can play against those that do. (the same reason Capcom gave for putting the DLC on the disc with SFxT) Netherrealms have said it been an issue with MK9 that people won't download the free compatibility updates for MK9 that allow non DLC users to play against DLC users. Thus people with the DLC can find it difficult to use the DLC online.

But think about it for a moment, the content is going be on your hard disc, you won't have an option of not getting it if you want to play online. Your hard disc is your property. You own the hard disc yet you can not access this content unless you pay for it, its locked down. But for some reason I can't imagine people are going complain. They didn't when they did the same thing with the expansion packs to Company of Heroes. People grumbled about having to download 10GB+ expansions because how time consuming it was, but none of them went OMG I have content on my hard disc that I can't use, F**K you Relic/THQ. If you actually think about its worse having content locked on your hard disc than on a disc, because your down storage space.

Kirby wrote:

I'm in no way excusing piracy in this, I just feel that you are being very naive in your taking these quotes as gospel. These guys have an agenda.

I'm trying to bring in some balance. I don't take everything they say as gospel I'm just trying to counter balance the argument. There isn't much facts and figures coming from either side, but you can as a neutral party go to file sharing and torrent sites and see the scale of piracy. Again I'm not equating each pirated game equals a lost sale but look at the scale of the issue, Its hard to say without an agenda that piracy is having no effect what so ever.

Time and again, people say it comes down to greed. After all games developers/publishers are businesses trying to make money which is fair enough. But if it all comes down to greed then why would they keep using DRM system that cost them money it doesn't make a lick of sense. There is no logic.

gizmo · 25-08-2012 12:00pm

Kirby wrote: »

What is a Ubisoft rep going to say exactly? "Nope, we got it wrong, wasted millions in the development of this DRM and all it achieved was annoying legitimate customers."

They could say nothing or they could give a vague "we believe our measures will be successful in reducing the high rates of piracy that is affecting certain titles we release". By saying that the DRM has been successful and lead to a reduction in piracy figures then they're boxing themselves into a corner.

Kirby wrote: »

With regards Football Manager, Sega took a new approach this year and put it on Steam. Now, it was just as easy to pirate as last years version but I'm betting the sales improved massively. What does that tell you?

And as I linked earlier, due to the one time activation required once purchased from Steam, there was fan outcry for such "outrageous" DRM. I'm sure sales did increase of course given not only the increased market but also the disturbingly large number of gamers who refuse to purchase content from any other digital distribution service that isn't Steam.

Kirby wrote: »

Any opinion Capcom has on DRM should be viewed with a mountain of salt. Companies that practice business the way they do with on-disc DLC and unlock codes are on very shakey ethical ground when it comes to piracy anyway.

They are, however, an excellent example of measures which are decryed by most casual fans of their series but supported by the core fans as is evident by the reactions of many of the Fighting Forum folk around here.

EDIT: Amusingly enough I started this post before Azza replied and he has now rather conveniently provided an example of this.

Kirby wrote: »

Plenty of PC games sell bucket loads. And then some don't and it's all them nasty pirates fault. It's alot easier to blame an outside force than look at the problem that you might have within. Did we make a bad game? Did we market it wrong? Is our DRM counter-productive? Jaysus heads might roll if thats true.

It's a damn sight easier to blame pirates for lower than expected sales when you see your game being downloaded millions of times more than it sold.

Umekichi · 25-08-2012 12:26pm

EnterNow wrote: »

The farce that was 3DS Resident Evil savegames was another example of DRM madness

Or how about the Fiasco that was Spore.
I remember buying the game(not having checked about online activation - my fault), installing it and having to find someone with internet to mooch off to activate it (eventually had to use my mum's phone as a modem - which of course ate her credit), then finding out it could only be installed like 3 times(maybe 5

) before you had to contact EA and might be able to install it again!
So instead I just pirated the damn thing so I would not have to go thru that hassle again :mad:

Myrddin · 25-08-2012 1:53pm

Umekichi wrote: »

Or how about the Fiasco that was Spore.
I remember buying the game(not having checked about online activation - my fault), installing it and having to find someone with internet to mooch off to activate it (eventually had to use my mum's phone as a modem - which of course ate her credit), then finding out it could only be installed like 3 times(maybe 5 ) before you had to contact EA and might be able to install it again!
So instead I just pirated the damn thing so I would not have to go thru that hassle again :mad:

Case in point. How many of the pirated copies that were downloaded, were downloaded by legitimate owners. I'd wager quite a few

ríomhaire · 25-08-2012 1:54pm

Azza wrote: »

I wasn't aware Diablo 3 was cracked, I was under the impression it was uncrackable because alot of the data needed to play it was kept server side. How long did it take to get the crack out?

Do you know that you can get pirate copies of World of Warcraft? Server emulators aren't a new thing.

Azza · 25-08-2012 4:52pm

Yes I'm aware there is ways of playing pirated versions of WOW but I'm not too familiar with them or the scale of it.

Umekichi wrote:

Or how about the Fiasco that was Spore.
I remember buying the game(not having checked about online activation - my fault), installing it and having to find someone with internet to mooch off to activate it (eventually had to use my mum's phone as a modem - which of course ate her credit), then finding out it could only be installed like 3 times(maybe 5 ) before you had to contact EA and might be able to install it again!
So instead I just pirated the damn thing so I would not have to go thru that hassle again

I had the same thing happen to me with Mass Effect. The online activation notice on the front of the box was covered by the price tag. I didn't have internet at the time as I just moved house so I had to wait a day before I could get it activated elsewhere. Annoying but not the biggest disaster I've ever faced.

Online activation is not a major issue people complain about now. If your game uses Steam you need to be online to activate it.

As for the the install limit I agree 3 was too low. Shortly after release they increased it to a 5 install limit and a little while after that they brought out a de-authorization tool for Spore and an automatic one included in the second patch for Mass Effect. The de-authorization tool mean't unlimited installs. When asked if they would ever take the de-authorization server offline in the distant future which would render these games useless, EA responded that they would patch any games to no longer require activation.

EA also released statistics they took from a sample of Mass Effect players, Spore players and Spore Creature creator.

In the case of Mass Effect from 183,313 players the number of players who tried it activate it on more than machines was 0.9%.

In the case Spore Creature Creator of 453,048 the number of players who tired to activate on more than 3 machines was 1%.

With Spore of 437,138 players 0.4% tried to activate more than 3 times.

At the time there was a few reports that people who went over the activation limit where able to phone EA and get more activations. I didn't here of any that where refused.

Again I still think 3 limits was too small, 5 being much more reasonable and had the de-authorization tool been at least announced earlier then EA could of saved themselves a lot of hassle. But if those numbers are accurate it would seem the issue was massively blown out of proportion. But its kinda typical of internet behaviour, go to the official forum of any PC game that's just been released and your sure to find lots of threads saying this game is the buggest game ever released. People who are having no problems don't feel the need to post but they far out number the people with issues.

animaal · 26-08-2012 10:42am

gizmo wrote: »

...the disturbingly large number of gamers who refuse to purchase content from any other digital distribution service that isn't Steam.

That'd be me.

I dislike Steam. It has a slow, ugly GUI, with an "offline mode" that requires you to be online to activate. On the positive side, the Steam sales offer good games dead cheap. And every game I ever bought Steam is still available to me for download again, whereas I'm quite likely to have binned/lost physical disks. I use Steam, despite the annoyances.

The best distribution system I've seen is GOG. It's mostly more expensive than Steam, with less variety. But the product itself is better, with no crappy "launchers" or accounts required.

There's no way I'm going to install a separate "digital restrictions" application/launcher for each games publisher. I'm a fan of Silent Hunter 4. I made the mistake of buying SH5 on disk. Some months ago UBI fixed the requirement to have a permanent internet connection. But this is through an "offline mode", and the rubbish UPlay launcher is still required, with a dedicated UPlay account. The result? SH5 is in a box in the garage, I'm sticking to SH4.

I'm not interested in pirating games. It's not theft (let's not redefine words to suit our beliefs), but it is ripping off the games creators. I won't be buying any new UBI games, but it's not a religious thing - I'll still buy their older stuff that installs like an ordinary application and doesn't purposefully force me to jump through through hoops to play.

the_syco · 27-08-2012 1:34pm

Azza wrote: »

I like the way people keep claiming the way DRM does not reduced piracy, when in the very article that started this thread Ubisoft said it did see a noteable reduction of piracy thanks to there DRM.

One would wonder what has DRM stopped more? Has it stopped more people pirating their games, or more people buying their games? I'm thinking a bit of A and a bit of B.

Azza wrote: »

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory was uncracked for 424 days.

A lot of rubbish games never get cracked. Not saying that SCCT was rubbish, but the crackers have ignored some games in the past, unless there is a large demand for them. Have seen some games taking 6 weeks to crack due to very good DRM.

fionny · 27-08-2012 1:35pm

Ubisoft are idiots, they have THE worst DRM practices in the market (which the claim is working really well) and then they pull a random out of the air.... Im ashamed i even paid the 3euro for From Dust ;P

C14N · 27-08-2012 1:37pm

The amount of PC piracy going on is insane. I just don't understand it either. PC games are so cheap these days, I would have no desire to pirate them at all. I rarely spend more than €15 on a PC game.

For people pointing out that a pirated download isn't a lost sale, that is technically true in the sense that it's not a lost full price sale but it does mean there would have been a certain amount of money that each of those people would have been willing to pay to get that game. They obviously were interested enough to invest their time searching for it, downloading it and installing it so in a hypothetical world where piracy doesn't exist, they would have been willing to pay some amount to play that game. Maybe that figure is €30, maybe it's just €1 but over millions of people you can be fairly sure they could have gotten a few million more in sales, even if only at a knockdown Steam sale price.

Azza · 27-08-2012 1:50pm

the_syco wrote:

One would wonder what has DRM stopped more? Has it stopped more people pirating their games, or more people buying their games? I'm thinking a bit of A and a bit of B.

We don't have access to numbers, so we can either take Ubisofts at there word or simply speculate.

the_syco wrote:

A lot of rubbish games never get cracked. Not saying that SCCT was rubbish, but the crackers have ignored some games in the past, unless there is a large demand for them. Have seen some games taking 6 weeks to crack due to very good DRM.

It used the notorious Starforce system. It wasn't that the game was ignored it justs the DRM system took an unsually long time to crack.

fionny wrote:

Ubisoft are idiots, they have THE worst DRM practices in the market (which the claim is working really well) and then they pull a random out of the air.... Im ashamed i even paid the 3euro for From Dust ;P

Pull a random what?

fionny · 27-08-2012 1:52pm

Azza wrote: »

Pull a random what?

Doh pull a random number...

My favourite Online PC Gamer review site too exception to them too:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08/22/ubisoft-boss-declares-f2p-is-because-of-95-piracy-rates/

Azza · 27-08-2012 2:07pm

RockPaperShotgun wrote:

But the problem is deeper than just believing that piracy rates are 95%. (Because of course you just can’t measure that. You can count torrents and compare it to sales, etc, but it’s still a guess.) Let’s just say that piracy rates are 95%, because I’ve no more evidence to say they aren’t than they likely have to say they are. The issue is determining what it’s 95% of.

Yes you can measure piracy rates. You can count them on a torrent site and other file sharing site to get an estimate of the piracy rate as they mentioned.

But declaring a piracy rate does not mean your saying that your loosing that exact percentage in sales, Ubisoft didn't say that. RPS with the wording in that paragraph are implying thats what Ubisoft said.

RockPaperShotgun wrote:

There is no hard evidence to show that piracy affects sales. If Ubisoft has some, then they should share it. There is evidence to show that pirated copies almost never translate to lost sales (and as much anecdotal evidence to show that piracy encourages sales as there is to show it discourages them)

Be nice if they provided that evidence!

the_syco · 27-08-2012 2:27pm

Azza wrote: »

It used the notorious Starforce system. It wasn't that the game was ignored it justs the DRM system took an unsually long time to crack.

I remember that DRM alright! I had to reinstall Windows after I installed one of the Trackmania games that came with it, and have avoided any game that came with it, to the point that I was looking to see if a legit serial could be used with a cracked game so that I could play the game online without going near Starforce! :mad:

Azza · 27-08-2012 2:48pm

Check out this article on Starforce from a few years back.http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_9.html

I think its fair assessment.

MOH · 27-08-2012 4:37pm

If UbiSoft, with their ridiculous DRM, are *still* claiming a piracy rate >93%, then surely it's obvious their DRM isn't working?

They're always throwing out these figures, without any solid basis for them. Even if they're comparing an estimated number of torrents with sales figures, that's still inaccurate, since as has been pointed out lots of people who buy the game end up torrenting a crack anyway to avoid the ridiculous DRM. I also suspect they're based on anyone who starts a download, even if they abandon it after 1%.

The argument that "if you don't like the game, don't buy it" doesn't help the figures - people not buying the game reduces the sales and thus increases the "piracy rate". Which for a publisher with such infamous DRM will certainly be a contributing factor.

Time was, if you pirated something you got an inferior product. These days, it's the legitimate paying customers who are getting the inferior product, and made to jump through hoops to get use out of it, while the company who sells it doesn't give a damn as long as they have your money. I'd be less worried about picking up a virus from a pirated game, than have some DRM malware installed with the 'legit' version which starts making decisions about what other software I can run on my own machine.

I used to spend a heck of a lot of money on games, but at this stage I've just given up. I'm not going to support the likes of Ubisoft screwing their customers, I'm not that comfortable pirating games, so at this stage I'm pretty much down to the occasional indie or Humble Bundle purchase. And flash games, a lot of which are rubbish, but many of which have shown more depth / imagination / gameplay than a lot of the junk churned out by big studios. I've even bought DRM free games I'll probably never play, because I'd rather give them the money than support a methodology that's ruined PC gaming for me.

gizmo · 27-08-2012 5:05pm

MOH wrote: »

They're always throwing out these figures, without any solid basis for them. Even if they're comparing an estimated number of torrents with sales figures, that's still inaccurate, since as has been pointed out lots of people who buy the game end up torrenting a crack anyway to avoid the ridiculous DRM. I also suspect they're based on anyone who starts a download, even if they abandon it after 1%.

It would obviously depend on their method of calculating the percentages but assuming it's based on downloads vs. sales then that case isn't valid as the figures would increase linearly.

As for the basis for a "complete" download, this is also unlikely given the way trackers generally work. It's more likely to be measured via the number of seeders on specific torrents across a range of sites.

With regard to the authenticity of the raw data, it's not like Ubisoft are the ones pulling numbers out of thin air. As linked earlier, sites like Torrentfreak compile the charts of the most downloaded games on a yearly basis and the top titles, on the PC at least, have been hoving around the 4m mark for the last couple of years.

MOH wrote: »

The argument that "if you don't like the game, don't buy it" doesn't help the figures - people not buying the game reduces the sales and thus increases the "piracy rate". Which for a publisher with such infamous DRM will certainly be a contributing factor.

It would still decrease the number of downloaded copies thus eliminating the piracy excuse for lower than expected sales.

C14N · 27-08-2012 5:10pm

MOH wrote: »

If UbiSoft, with their ridiculous DRM, are *still* claiming a piracy rate >93%, then surely it's obvious their DRM isn't working?

Not if it's the case that this is a lower piracy rate than before they used their ridiculous DRM.

MOH wrote: »

Even if they're comparing an estimated number of torrents with sales figures, that's still inaccurate, since as has been pointed out lots of people who buy the game end up torrenting a crack anyway to avoid the ridiculous DRM.

I would say a small minority of people who pay for the product also get a cracked version. Most of the complaints stem from things like having to have an internet connection to play but I doubt many people downloading 5GB+ files from torrent sites have poor internet connectivity anyway. Even if 100% of people did that, it amounts to only 7.5% of the piraters having paid for it.

MOH wrote: »

I also suspect they're based on anyone who starts a download, even if they abandon it after 1%.

Maybe but do you really think many people don't finish the download?

MOH wrote: »

The argument that "if you don't like the game, don't buy it" doesn't help the figures - people not buying the game reduces the sales and thus increases the "piracy rate".

I don't follow. How does not buying increase the piracy rate? I never had any interest in the last 3 Call of Dutys so I didn't buy them, how could this increase the number of people torrenting it?

MOH · 27-08-2012 8:20pm

C14N wrote: »

Maybe but do you really think many people don't finish the download?

Depending on the size of it, yes. I'd imagine quite a lot of people who weren't particularly interested in the game might start torrenting it but move on to something else before it finished.

gizmo wrote: »

It would still decrease the number of downloaded copies thus eliminating the piracy excuse for lower than expected sales.

C14N wrote: »

I don't follow. How does not buying increase the piracy rate? I never had any interest in the last 3 Call of Dutys so I didn't buy them, how could this increase the number of people torrenting it?

It's not increasing the number of torrents, it's increasing the ratio of torrents to legit sales.
Pulling figures out of my ass, if you've got a game that would sell 50,000 copies and have 450,000 people pirate it (90% piracy rate). 10,000 people are put off buying it by yet another level of rubbish DRM, and walk away instead of pirating it. That's only decreasing the legit sales, the piracy is unchanged, so now the 'piracy rate' is nearly 92%.

Even if 10% of the pirates are only pirating it because of the DRM, and they walk away instead of pirating it, piracy rate is still gone up to over 91%.

Piracy rate is a meaningless headline-grabbing statistic. Lost sales is the only figure that matters, and that's a far, far lower figure.

I'd love to see publishers release some other figures, like number of day-zero sales versus number of customers unable to play the game on day zero due to bugs, overloaded servers, or other technical issues.

Azza · 27-08-2012 9:12pm

I would agree totally that the actually number of lost sales is far lower than the number of pirated games. But even if it far lower, its still a massive problem.

The Witcher 2 developers CD Project estimated back in November that the Witcher 2 had been pirated 4.5 million times. It had at the time sold 1 million.

If just 1% of those pirates purchased the game at say €30.00 CD Project would of made additional €1.35 million in revenue.

MOH wrote:

I'd love to see publishers release some other figures, like number of day-zero sales versus number of customers unable to play the game on day zero due to bugs, overloaded servers, or other technical issues.

Why would you believe there figures on that when you don't believe their figures on piracy rates? Would you believe them if the said the numbers where low?

Turtwig · 27-08-2012 9:24pm

Does anyone have any independent figures on Piracy?

I'm always sceptical of publisher estimates.
(For anyone who's got five mins to spare a good TED talk on the piracy loss calculations.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0

Azza · 27-08-2012 9:38pm

Go to file sharing websites and view for yourself.

Turtwig · 27-08-2012 10:18pm

Azza wrote: »

Go to file sharing websites and view for yourself.

I wouldn't really regard a file sharing site as being impartial or independent.

SeantheMan · 27-08-2012 11:23pm

Don't think it was posted here, maybe as he didn't want to shamelessly promote -

But Arcade and Retro did a "piracy special" podcast this week, worth a listen

http://arcadeandretro.com/arcade-and-retro-podcast-episode-11-piracy-special/

gizmo · 28-08-2012 12:01am

Jernal wrote: »

Does anyone have any independent figures on Piracy?

Well there's the figures from Torrentfreak that have been posted a few times. I hardly think they're going to exaggerate the figures for the benefit of publishers. All they're doing is counting up the number of seeders across all available public sites so if anything, the number is smaller than it should be.

Azza wrote: »

The Witcher 2 developers CD Project estimated back in November that the Witcher 2 had been pirated 4.5 million times. It had at the time sold 1 million.

It's actually worse than that, as of July this year the entire series had sold a little over 4m copies across both the PC and 360.

blatantrereg · 28-08-2012 12:53am

I think piracy rates are higher in a lot of countries than they are in Ireland - and they are high in Ireland. It could easily be that high. It's true that people pirate plenty of games they wouldn't buy. Also plenty of people buy games they pirate, if they like them enough.

MOH · 28-08-2012 12:59am

Azza wrote: »

I would agree totally that the actually number of lost sales is far lower than the number of pirated games. But even if it far lower, its still a massive problem.

The Witcher 2 developers CD Project estimated back in November that the Witcher 2 had been pirated 4.5 million times. It had at the time sold 1 million.

If just 1% of those pirates purchased the game at say €30.00 CD Project would of made additional €1.35 million in revenue.

That's true. And the same could be said of any other heavily pirated game.
The problem is that the money's not there for that argument to apply to every game.
There's a finite amount of disposable income spent on games. There's a lot of expensive titles vying for that cash. If piracy were somehow wiped out tomorrow, it's probable that the amount spent on games overall would increase somewhat, but not dramatically.
But even if the amount spent on games somehow (?) doubled overnight, of the 93% who currently pirate, only another 7% would actually buy the game. The other 86% would just never play it. And realistically, what kind of extra spend are you actually going to get? 10%?

Whatever about motivations for pirating overall, crappy DRM *does* drive people to piracy. And once they've started, it's easier to find justifications, valid or not, to continue. So they start spending their money elsewhere, and the overall cash spent on games is reduced. So even if you do somehow wipe out piracy, you've to convince these people to bring their cash back to your industry again.

Why would you believe there figures on that when you don't believe their figures on piracy rates? Would you believe them if the said the numbers where low?

Fair point. But I'd at least like to see them acknowledge that DRM and overloaded servers prevent some legitimate customers from playing the game they've paid for, problems pirates may not face, instead of constantly focusing on themselves and ignoring customers.

MOH · 28-08-2012 2:04am

Sorry for the double post, but I went looking to see could I find any figures to back up my ramblings. This article is two years old, and the study it refers to is behind a paywall, but taking the article content as a basis:
$25.3 billion spent on games in the US in 2010, across all platforms.
$4.15 billion spent on PC games.

I'm not sure what a AAA title costs in the US, but I'm taking a ballpark figure of $60. That gives us a total of just under 70 million units, for the US.

Add in the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands and Belgium and you've got 120 million units altogether ($7.2 billion). That's probably the majority of the Western gaming world, and that's for all PC games.
Problem is, I've no idea how much of that cash is going on the big names.
Even if it's half of it, that's 60 million units.

So 60 million units total, split between all the big name games each year.
That's your finite cash market.

Obviously, there's a few assumptions there! And that's only over 6 countries, but the biggest markets are included.
But that's the scale you're looking at.
Wiping out piracy isn't going to magically generate an additional 800 million units and $93 billion dollars in revenue.

Azza · 28-08-2012 9:35am

MOH wrote:

There's a finite amount of disposable income spent on games. There's a lot of expensive titles vying for that cash. If piracy were somehow wiped out tomorrow, it's probable that the amount spent on games overall would increase somewhat, but not dramatically.

That could make the difference for a game developer on the breadline.

MOH wrote:

But even if the amount spent on games somehow (?) doubled overnight, of the 93% who currently pirate, only another 7% would actually buy the game. The other 86% would just never play it. And realistically, what kind of extra spend are you actually going to get? 10%?

That extra 7% is a doubling of your revenue.

MOH wrote:

Whatever about motivations for pirating overall, crappy DRM *does* drive people to piracy. And once they've started, it's easier to find justifications, valid or not, to continue. So they start spending their money elsewhere, and the overall cash spent on games is reduced. So even if you do somehow wipe out piracy, you've to convince these people to bring their cash back to your industry again.

People already have trucks loads of reasons for pirating. The game is too expensive, the game is too short, I want to see if it runs on my PC, there was no demo, I didn't like the developers last game so I want to try it to see if I like it, I'll buy it later when its on sale. I don't like the genre normally but I wanna try it, its a crappy console port etc.

Mark Hamill · 28-08-2012 10:53am

gizmo wrote: »

All they're doing is counting up the number of seeders across all available public sites so if anything, the number is smaller than it should be.

Really? I was always under the impression that torrent files just point at seeders, so, basically, if you have the same torrent file on two sites with ten seeders reported on each site, you only have ten seeders overall (not twenty), as both files are pointing to the same seeders.

gizmo · 28-08-2012 11:12am

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Really? I was always under the impression that torrent files just point at seeders, so, basically, if you have the same torrent file on two sites with ten seeders reported on each site, you only have ten seeders overall (not twenty), as both files are pointing to the same seeders.

I'd imagine they'll be counting up the seeders per tracker rather than per actual torrent.

The reason I say it'd be smaller by the way is because they're only counting public sites, so neither private torrent sites nor newsgroups will be included.

Overheal · 28-08-2012 12:57pm

i love this from my email today:

It’s Pirateable generously DRM-free and it’s only $9.99!
Soon to be available on major distribution sites: Steam, Desura, Gamestop, OnLive, Mac App Store, etc.
Platforms: Windows and Mac

re: Miner Wars Arena

gizmo · 28-08-2012 1:35pm

Overheal wrote: »

i love this from my email today:

re: Miner Wars Arena

You left out the fact that it needs a persistent internet connection to play the single player portion. :pac:

C14N · 28-08-2012 2:00pm

MOH wrote: »

There's a finite amount of disposable income spent on games. There's a lot of expensive titles vying for that cash. If piracy were somehow wiped out tomorrow, it's probable that the amount spent on games overall would increase somewhat, but not dramatically.
But even if the amount spent on games somehow (?) doubled overnight, of the 93% who currently pirate, only another 7% would actually buy the game. The other 86% would just never play it. And realistically, what kind of extra spend are you actually going to get? 10%?

This is all just assumption though. Not everyone is gaming on a budget, I would say very few gamers are saying to themselves "I have €XYZ to spend on games this year so I need to make it count".

We don't know how many of those people would have bought the game otherwise. You can guess it would be 10% but there's really no more basis for that assertation than there is for the devs to assume most of those people would have bought it.

It's also not a black and white case of "well they didn't have €60 to spend on it anyway so there's no lost revenue" (even though €60 would be an usually high price for the special edition of a PC game, virtually unheard of for a standard edition). Maybe they didn't have €60 or didn't want to spend that but maybe they would have bought it a year later when it's €20 or in a Steam sale when it's €10. We have no idea how many of the people this applies to and while pirates and netizens will try to say it's under 10%, that's no more based in fact than the publishers who might say the majority would have coughed up for the game.

Manic Moran · 29-08-2012 5:22am

Skerries wrote: »

Ubisoft's CEO Yves Guillemot has revealed that the percentage of people who pay in free-to-play games is roughly the same as those who buy boxed games (approximately 5-7%)

On PC it's only around five to seven per cent of the players who pay for F2P, but normally on PC it's only about five to seven per cent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated. It's around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-03-19-world-of-tanks-monthly-profits-hitting-double-digit-millions

"We probably have one of the highest payment ratios in the industry, it's around 25-30 per cent," he revealed. "Because people love the game."

fionny · 05-09-2012 2:36pm

Ubisoft just gave an interesting interview to Rock Paper Shotgun:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09/05/ubisoft-drm-piracy-interview/

Kirby · 05-09-2012 6:12pm

I wonder in hindsight, would Azza and Gizmo's take on this topic be different?

gizmo · 05-09-2012 8:09pm

Kirby wrote: »

I wonder in hindsight, would Azza and Gizmo's take on this topic be different?

Why? What part of my take on it was incorrect?

PC has Piracy Rate of 93-95%

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