Gaming industry lose 'billions' to chipped consoles

gizmo

desertcircus wrote: »

I don't play a huge number of games, but there is a trend among record labels that people should keep an eye out for. Interesting musicians and bands are progressively disappearing from major label rosters and being replaced by the kind of product that sells to people who don't know how to use torrents; small children and people over fifty. Sanctuary Records used to be a home for those interesting bands who were dropped by their labels - until it folded.

There's a very simple rule at play: if people are pirating the product you make, then you focus on making and selling products pirates aren't interested in. The trend that's operating in music is a few years behind in gaming, but sooner or later the money in games will be focused on selling not to you, but to your small child or your parents or grandparents. It's the reason Justin Bieber and Michael Buble are getting astronomical sums spent on them.

Make it unprofitable to sell to you, and you'll ensure nobody bothers producing anything aimed at you. Whether or not you'd have bought that game, the manufacturer thinks you would have, and your download is another signpost pointing towards Kinectimals and Nintendogs for them. It's the same with films - there's been a boom in simple, kid-friendly films with sequels already agreed, because there's simply no financial benefit to focusing on gritty films. Kick-Ass was turned down as an option by countless studios because it was too risky, and may not have made its budget back. You don't hire a huge team and make them work for months or years to produce something that's a huge piracy risk; it's financially insane. Far more sensible to hire a smaller team to work less and produce a sequel to a simple game that sold lots to people who aren't likely to be pirates.

Except, this mainstream pop stuff is still the most downloaded music out there.

ricman

I buy all my games in shops,i dont usually pay more than 40 euros.ie mostly preowned or 2 games for 50special offers.
i have never met anyone with a modded 360.I think its like the music industry,ok some kid downloads a 1000 songs=1000 lost sales, its unlikely he would buy all those songs, or could afford to buy em ,its not 1000 lost sales.i see no point in modding, you cant go online, 1 game is 6gig ,its wrong and not worth the trouble.a ps3 game is 25 gig on average
i didnt know you could mod a ps3, how many people out there have blueray burners.
i buy high quality games ,eg red dead redemption,halo 3.etc i,d have no interest in buying pirated games.no more than i ,d want to buy illegal drugs.
THERE will always be people who ,ll try and get games, music for nothing.
You could say the publishers lose billions from the sales of preowned games,people have a limited amount to spend on games, or music,movies etc
A game is not like a lp, you cant buy one song,its the whole game or nothing at all.
When tapes audio cassettes came out, they said home taping will kill the music industry.
i remember when the ps2 came out, modded ps2 ,s were very common, you could just copy the games on a cdr.
i prefer just to buy legal original games.

amacachi

gizmo wrote: »

Hah, fair enough.

That being said, I still don't know anyone who owns 300 albums either.

Fair enough, when I was 16 I knew 3 or 4 people off the top of my head who did have that many albums. Most people I know now have a much narrower preference for music if any at all. I also don't know anyone who has filled an 80GB iPod.
Just out of interest, would anyone on this thread object in about 10 years time when games on the current consoles are unavailable if people then started to pirate them?

Sparks43

Ok so i have an r4 card for my ds and im playing old Spectrum, Nes, Game boy,Snes and megadrive games.

Got them all from a download site and dont feel 1 bit guilty for doing it as most of the games im playing i owned when the Consoles where out 1st

Take that moral police


* switches on ds and plays jet pac *

Fnz

gizmo wrote: »

Except, this mainstream pop stuff is still the most downloaded music out there.

The 'most popular music' being the 'most downloaded music' is to be expected. Its mention is not really a counter-point to desertcircus's post.

gizmo

Fnz wrote: »

The 'most popular music' being the 'most downloaded music' is to be expected. Its mention is not really a counter-point to desertcircus's post.

His point was that the industry is replacing their roster of artists with those which "sells to people who don't know how to use torrents" and are deemed more risk free. I pointed out that these bands are in fact the ones which are being the most downloaded so it nullifies his point in this regard.

amacachi wrote: »

Just out of interest, would anyone on this thread object in about 10 years time when games on the current consoles are unavailable if people then started to pirate them?

Ah this is an interesting one alright. Personally, if people wanted to play a video game I created 10 years ago I'd love to enable them to do so with minimum hassle. As such I'd see no issue with them being able to download them for free if they couldn't legally buy it. This is the basis of abandonware imo and it's something which should be encouraged, not cracked down upon.

The main obstacle, of course, is the issue of IP and companies wanting to protect it in order to monetise it down the line. For instance, look at the Virtual Console on the Wii, there's still loads of interest in old classic SNES games on that and Nintendo can clearly make money from it. This makes the issue harder to deal with unfortunately.

Retr0gamer

amacachi wrote: »

Just out of interest, would anyone on this thread object in about 10 years time when games on the current consoles are unavailable if people then started to pirate them?

That's a damn good point. I'm all for the preservation of videogames, just look at the film industry and how many lost films they have from the early days of film, it would be a shame if the same thing happens to videogames. A lot of old japanese home computer games on systems you never heard of where going this way until there was a massive undertaking to try and collect them all and still some are missing and are at the mercy of shaky filesharing sites. A lot of games that are considered classics would have also ended up lost in licensing confusion when the companies that own the IPs went bust but have been kept alive by pirate copies.

Overheal

Duggy747 wrote: »

How can they tell how many consoles have been chipped? People who download these games usually do so because they can and wouldn't be bothered playing certain games in the first place because they cost money.

Take number of console sales and deduct the number who havent purchased their own copy of Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Based on the flawless logic that everyone will want to play Hello Kitty Island Adventure, there are currently 1.8 Million illegal copies of Hello Kitty Island Adventure out in the wild.

They can't say much about lost revenue when the reason I didn't buy spore is because I pirated it, the reason is SecuROM. Bought or stolen, they can shove that piece of crap back up the colon it came from. I'll keep buying and playing games that don't infect my computer.

desertcircus

gizmo wrote: »

His point was that the industry is replacing their roster of artists with those which "sells to people who don't know how to use torrents" and are deemed more risk free. I pointed out that these bands are in fact the ones which are being the most downloaded so it nullifies his point in this regard.

It doesn't really, though. It's not about making sure that your pop releases are horrifying to anyone who knows their way around a torrent, but about making sure that your pop releases sound fantastic to people who don't. If pirates happen to download loads of it, fair enough. It's about who you're trying to sell it to - and Whip My Hair by Willow Smith is a pretty bloody clear indicator of who they're trying to sell to. They don't care if pirates download copies (well, they do, but it's not the primary focus); they care that non-pirates buy copies.

If your entertainment can be fed down a fibre-optic cable, then the people making it will focus on the people who pay money for it. If the people who pay money for it are children and the middle-aged, then you get entertainment directed at children and the middle-aged. Music may actually do better than cinema and games, as the entry cost of actually producing music is so low - you can produce a pretty absorbing album on a MacBook with a good pair of headphones, that gets just as many repeat listens as a major label production. It's harder to do that with movies and games, and the only reason we haven't seen it quite yet is because pirating music became feasible bandwidth-wise much earlier.

Ask yourself a simple question: if you were in charge of a major gaming studio, and your job was to produce a profit, would you focus on complex, richly patterned games that cost a fortune to produce and carry a higher risk of piracy, or shovelware for kids? Hell, you don't even have to choose shovelware; given the margins, you can probably hire pretty talented people as long as the game they produce is sellable to kids.

gizmo

desertcircus wrote: »

It doesn't really, though. It's not about making sure that your pop releases are horrifying to anyone who knows their way around a torrent, but about making sure that your pop releases sound fantastic to people who don't. If pirates happen to download loads of it, fair enough. It's about who you're trying to sell it to - and Whip My Hair by Willow Smith is a pretty bloody clear indicator of who they're trying to sell to. They don't care if pirates download copies (well, they do, but it's not the primary focus); they care that non-pirates buy copies.

That's simply playing the numbers game though and it's slowly running out for those relying on selling more copies of something than people download, in order to survive. Think of the number of people who knew how to use bittorrent five years ago, now look at the number.

desertcircus wrote: »

Ask yourself a simple question: if you were in charge of a major gaming studio, and your job was to produce a profit, would you focus on complex, richly patterned games that cost a fortune to produce and carry a higher risk of piracy, or shovelware for kids? Hell, you don't even have to choose shovelware; given the margins, you can probably hire pretty talented people as long as the game they produce is sellable to kids.

Well every company I've worked for has done the former and is still around to tell the tale so between that and my own desire to make AAA games, I'd pick that one too. As for the profitability in shovelware, well sure there is plenty of money to be made but not as much as you think. Many publishers saw the Wii as a gateway to massive sales of these titles and that turned out to be an expensive mistake. The 360 and PS3 don't often play host to many successes either, with licensed titles being the odd exception. Which of course leaves the PC but there the main success stories have been edutainment titles rather than proper shovelware.