

More Evidence Of Overwhelming Piracy - lucumo
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-evidence-of-overwhelming-piracy.html

======
tumult
Welcome to software and the internet. Distribution is far easier, but so is
copyright infringement. If you've released your own software, 10:1 shouldn't
be surprising. Stuff like audio software is even worse, where the ratio
spirals completely out of control and small developers will often need a
second job.

Would all those people have bought the game if the bootlegging weren't
available? No way. But it definitely would have been better. Well, maybe? Hm.

It's a trade-off you're basically forced to make now, even if you don't want
it. It also doesn't help that lots of sales still come from boxed copies for
some reason (which costs money to produce..) and all of the piracy happens
over the internet (where it costs extremely little to distribute over) so
developers looking to increase sales of games have to pony up even more money
upfront to get boxed copies into stores.

~~~
jcl
I've seen a 90% piracy rate mentioned in several articles now; I wouldn't be
surprised if it's industry standard. If so, Stardock is actually _doing much
better_ than mainstream publishers.

[http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-
has-90-piracy...](http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-
has-90-piracy-rate/)

[http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/01/06/soccer-game-
has-90-pi...](http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/01/06/soccer-game-
has-90-piracy-rate-will-not-add-drm)

~~~
req2
World of Goo was later revised down to a little below the 5/6 seen here.

[http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/15/world-of-goo-
pira...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/15/world-of-goo-piracy-
rate-82/)

Conversion rate appears to be 1:1000 with piracy numbers this high.

<http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350>

------
Keyframe
This is really sad. I am in the process of making a game and am just thinking
of calling it quits after reading stuff like this. It seems like MMO's are the
way to go business side - since it is setup in a way that does not provide
piracy vehicle. Which is bad if you don't wan't to make a MMO. Also, it seems
PS3 hasn't been cracked yet and there are alot of PS3 owners deprived of good,
non-casual games.

~~~
kiba
I too, is in the process of making games. However, I alway thought of piracy
as a business problem or just "underserved" customers.

If they paid for the bandwidth, the computer, the hardware upgrade than surely
they have no problem for paying for goods and services that can't just be
simply be provided for free.

Gone are the days you can just sell a new game. You have to maintain existing
projects and games as if you were a open source developer developing your own
little corner of the world.

You may even have to sell t-shirts.

Whining about piracy make for great drama and gain sympathy, but it is not
going to help you win a single penny.

Whether or not you have the right to control what other people can do with
their copies of the game is another matter entirely.

I think we can agree on one thing, the importance of having something to eat.

~~~
Keyframe
I had a same train of thought up until a year or two ago. It is pretty much
unrealistic and too optimistic to think of piracy as undeveloped
opportunities. I lived last year, for half a year, in Thailand due to the
nature of my job (I am an animation director by training and it is my day job)
and was introduced to the wonders of SE Asia - and Asia in general, since I
had more time to explore it than several day trips. What struck me as obvious
is that people there behave regarding piracy in more open ways then we do - in
western world - however, it is pretty much the same way most of the people
think. For example, you can openly buy a pirate copy of whatever in the malls
in Bangkok and get a receipt for it. There are shops with pirate stuff as well
as shops next to it with legal stuff.

I've noticed that there are games, for example from EA, that are price-
tailored to Thailand, so that games are really affordable to Thai people.
However, I've talked to the sales people and everybody confirmed that pretty
much everyone buys pirate stuff next to the legal stuff, even when price is
close to it. For example pirate copy is around 90-100 Baht and Thai legal
version is around 200-250. Only games immune to piracy there are MMO's.

Now, consider that Thai model to other cultures. I live in SE Europe and I can
vouch the train of thought is the same. Why would I pay if I can have it for
less or free. There just isn't way around that, people do not like to pay if
they don't need to - does not matter if it is legal or not.

There are, luckily, people that _GET_ the consequences of this and pay up for
stuff - so that they can get new games, more stuff in the future etc... if not
moral satisfaction only.

Business-wise I don't think you can rely only on that kind of people. If you
read up some of the post-mortems on gamasutra and gasp at A title budgets, you
can clearly see that in order to make any money out of this is that you have
to have atleast 3 games in production in parallel and to break 200K+ units
push to the market. That goes for A titles, of course, but model is scalable.

I would just like to state that _the game_ I am doing is purely out of love
for games and my secret life as a programmer. If it makes any money when/if it
will be out, good - I can do that stuff then all the time with ramen on the
table, if not I don't care because I have other "stuff" I do. However, think
about it for a second if it where your full time job and people steal stuff,
ludicrous. No good demo, trial or whatever can compensate for the idea that
you can get something for free if you are average joe who cares only about
that game and dozens or so hours he will have fun with it. He doesn't care
about future of it, about you, about moral issues... No. Same goes with
movies/music. Only thing you can possibly monetize on is that if you have
advertising tie ins, online fee, collector/special editions where you actually
sell toys/package more than a game itself, and stuff like that - everything
but the game itself. Sad, because if at least 30-40% of people payed up,
instead of sub 10%, it would open up larger budgets for greater games, and not
only for run-of-the-mill sequels that take less budget because return is not
great.

sorry for the long rant, I just feel angry about all of this - not because of
piracy per se. Piracy is and always will be around, everybody pirated
something sooner or later, but not always damnit. Looks like both software and
entertainment industries are shifting towards some future model of business
that is still not on a horizon. Alternative would be that people who do both
software and entertainment will shift to other stuff, which will not happen. I
guess we are all in a twitter stasis now - great and all, but need a new way
to make money.

~~~
kiba
I don't look at this "sad". If people don't want to pay for it, they don't
want to pay for it. If it happen to be that 99% of
artists/muscicans/programmers etc can no longer find work in a post-copyright
world, so be it.

I don't even believe that there is some sort of moral obligation to pay for
copyrighted stuff anyway. Rather, I believe that the copyright system is an
artifical insitution that modify the result of the free market. It distort
incentive and direct resources to part of the economy where it wouldn't be in
the first place.

The fact that the free market is starting to break into and killing all the
players is simply reality intruding on people's illusions.

I am not here to suffer for a cause or anything but I want to survive so I can
make a living on games, whether or not the market size has drastically shunk
or expanded.

The thing that irate me the most is that game developers think that players
have a moral obligation to support developers or not do something that
percevied to hurt their revenues. We don't even have a moral standing to
control what other people can do with their copies of the game. So we used
words like "stealing" or "piracy" to justify oursleves as victicms of plunder
when in reality, they're just copying stuff.

Yeah. Life is really harsh that way. Sometime we can only blame oursleves for
being fools.

(on the other hand, 99% of all pirates are pussycats, losers, and cowards in
term of their characters, but that's just another matter entirely)

------
patio11
That's too bad.

I think in a few years America will be where China is today: you'll be unable
to buy PC games. Instead, you'll rent access to data on servers under the game
company's control. It is already pretty much happening -- the American PC game
industry might as well be called "WoW and friends" at this point going by the
sales charts.

That is the ultimate solution to piracy. And _it will work_. It works in
China. You can no more torrent a game residing on a server than you can pirate
Basecamp by downloading Firefox.

~~~
jcl
Yup. In fact, some groups are looking to push this solution even further, so
that all the game processing/rendering takes place on the server:

[http://blogs.amd.com/unprocessed/2009/03/27/server-side-
rend...](http://blogs.amd.com/unprocessed/2009/03/27/server-side-rendering-
back-in-the-spotlight/)

It sounds like they still have some issues with latency and bandwidth to work
out, but not all games need low latency. And this solution neatly solves the
piracy problem -- even for single player games -- as well as eliminating
publisher concerns over modchips, game resale, and client-side hacks. And it
has much lower client-side hardware requirements, too, so you don't need to
worry about who has what console.

~~~
frig
Server-side rendering actually will turn out to work amazingly well, and will
surprise most of the naysayers.

I think the strategy around bandwidth and latency is going to wind up being
parking container datacenters near various isp's so everything but long-
distance game state syncing stays on the local network; not perfect, and
higher upfront, but it works.

------
Goronmon
The problems were exacerbated by Gamestop breaking the street date even after
they were specifically told they couldn't. I think this all would have been a
much smaller issue if Stardock had been able to release the game when they
planned to.

In addition, I don't think that Stardock is necessarily surprised with the
piracy numbers.

------
swombat
I wonder if this article will increase their sales, btw... wouldn't be that
surprising. I, for one, never heard of this game, and now I'm going to go
check it out. I may not buy it, but certainly it's a decent marketing move. If
100'000 people are willing to play this thing (pirated or not), it's probably
decent.

------
sho
Pretty surprising that they would allow network play without a valid, paid
account.

~~~
Goronmon
They don't. The updates require you to have a valid account with Impulse and
the updates are what point you to the correct servers.

The problem was that with Gamestop breaking the street date, people were
playing with legitimate and pirated copies of the game before Stardock was
ready to support the rush of people playing. The issues were compounded by
various not-so-great decisions like having the game try to connect to the
servers and check for updates whenever it is booted up. So, you had thousands
of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login, causing problems for
the legit owners.

~~~
sho
_"you had thousands of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login,
causing problems"_

A few thousand failed _login attempts_ caused problems? Sounds like they need
a new systems administrator/DBA. A well configured authentication system
should be able to easily say "no" to practically unlimited numbers of login
attempts. "High value target" production systems often decline many thousands
of invalid auth attempts per _minute_.

Unless the client is unbelievably badly coded (ie keep trying to login every
second, indefinitely), that's not even the beginning of a good explanation.

~~~
Goronmon
I did say among other things, and one of the issues was that things were still
running on the beta servers initially, which were not configured for the load
they had come Monday through Tuesday.

I am trying to mention this from memory, so I may have the specifics wrong.

Edit: Again, this all stems from Gamestop breaking the street date, and not by
only a day or two either but the Friday prior.

~~~
sho
Fair enough, sorry for sounding like I was jumping down your throat!

Ha, I can imagine how it went down now. "Yes boss, we'll bring the production
servers online over the weekend, all ready for the launch on Monday" ..

~~~
Goronmon
Actually, the game was supposed to launch that Tuesday. I think they said a
lot of employees were supposed to have that Monday off for Easter weekend.

