How much do you think piracy is affecting the PC Gaming market?

[Annisman*]

This is just a 'have it now' culture.

If somebody doesn't have 50 (or 60) bucks to purchase that new AAA title immidiately, the alternative is to pirate it.

Obviously with kids and young adults that kind of price is a turn off. As they just don't have the income of adults. If people were just more patient, and more aware of the moral crime they are in fact commiting, maybe they would wait a whole 2 months and get the game for 50% in a Steam sale.

 

[Arglebargle]

Sadly, the 'Pirates Excuse' was used almost verbatim by the middle level industry leeches in the past to tell us how taping was going to destroy the music industry, how videotaping was going to destroy the motion picture business, etc.

Music business contracts have such forward thinking models as jukebox useage from a hundred years ago, or breakage money-subtraction codacils based on percentages of breakage of shellac 78rpm records. Once something gets established, if it favors the business parasites, it will stay, and be seen as utter disaster if someone comes up with any new model.

Most bands would make more money per song if microtransactions allowed you to directly give them a dime per song, as opposed to the usual record contract.

Thinking that you are going to sell a game for $50 in China or Afganistan is kinda crazy. Also, there have been some arguments made that tiered release by country or region leads to piracy by folks who want to play it NOW, along with everyone else.

Mostly, piracy leads to an easy excuse for game developers who misjudged the market or released a poorly done game. And an excuse to set up rules that give more money to the leeches.

 

[Annisman*]

I always bring up this article when piracy threads pop up, if anyone wants to get truly educated on the subject in an in depth manner, check it out it's a great read.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

 

[jimrawr]

In the USA piracy probably has a minor effect on the market.

Outside of the USA, especially in countries like China, Korea, Russia, and so on - I'd bet piracy is about equal to actual sales. When I was in the Army in Korea, not a tenth of a mile outside the base were about 10 stores that sold nothing but pirated material (all known to the RIAA/etc; apparently its okay for troops to pirate).

Yeah same, in a couple countries in Europe I have visited they sell Pirated games out of suitcases on main roads. Same with music and movies.. I dont think many pay for the full version of the game

 

[smackababy]

Most bands would make more money per song if microtransactions allowed you to directly give them a dime per song, as opposed to the usual record contract.

While this might seem true, it would never work. Only established bans or people wealthy enough to take 6 months to a year off to write and record entire albums, not to mention be able to pay for studio time, producers, sound engineers, marketing to package the product and such, would be able to make music. Record contracts give money to artists up front so they can make their music to sell later. Without these, music either sounds like it was recorded by some indie hipster trash in a garage with a 4 track recorder. That is not a music industry I want to have around. Same can be said for book publishers and big development publishers like EA.

Now, does piracy have a negative impact on the industry? Of course it does. Without piracy, sales could go nowhere but up. The music industry was almost killed because of this. Don't think so? Go find a Tower Records or any other store that makes its income primarily from CDs. They were saved by a company that took advantage of this and had incredible marketing. Apple came along and said "Hey let us sell your music and take 30%. Don't like that idea? Fine, people will pirate your music and instead of 70% you get 0%." They made iTunes simple enough the average person could buy music, they marketed their iPods well enough the average consumer believed they played music better than any other MP3 player, and both industries were very happy with the results.

The effects on piracy on the gaming industry are a lot greater than people want to claim. CDPR debunked the theory that most pirates download the game so they can avoid whatever DRM was included. The Witcher 2 shipped with 0 DRM and was still pirated over twice as much as it was purchased. I do believe piracy is no excuse for poor sales, but it is a contributing factor in how well all games sell.

 

[blackened23]

There are two extremes on this issue, and the answer somewhere lies in the middle.

Pirates state that piracy never affects sales. I almost find this laughable. Let's just say that while not every pirate would buy a game, some of them would - so the answer lies in the middle..... games are still a viable business and can still make money despite piracy. Personally I find piracy to be a deplorable practice; everyone needs to understand that game developers work long, hard hours and DONT make a lot of money. They also don't have job stability. I know guys in the industry that have been laid off immediately after shipping a product and let me tell you, it sucks. For these guys whose livelihood depends on making games, they do not make a lot of money and they're working 12-14 hour days sometimes during the crunch period.

I'll get off my soapbox. But I think piracy sucks. If for no other reason, for the little guys who actually make the games - I don't have love for big publishers - but what makes them profitable makes game developers profitable. Maybe it doesn't affect sales to an extreme extent, but it does affect them somewhat - especially with day 0 piracy. For that reason I always buy my stuff, and I cringe when friends mention that they pirated the latest and greatest game; it really bothers me to be honest because I know guys in the industry.

 

[Craig234]

I think piracy affects some games a lot, and it's just wrong. 20 years ago, companies were reporting piracy rates up to 90% threatening their companies.

Even a company that opposes DRM like the publisher of Witcher estimates a very high piracy rate (for Witcher 2, he estimates for 1M sold over 5M pirated, maybe way more).

 

[Agent11]

Pirating is a huge problem for pc game developers. Obviously not everyone who pirates would buy, or will not buy because they have pirated... However if you look at the volume of games listed on TPB and the sheer number of seeders and leechers, pirating obviously has an impact.

 

[Geosurface]

I used to be DIE HARD against ever pirating a game. A big watershed moment for me was when my legit, purchased copy of Morrowind was running way worse than pirated copies because of an excessively frequent CD check to make sure the disc was still in my drive. This would make the game seize up a bit.

When I found out people who hadn't paid for the game were getting a better gaming experience than me, who had... it really pissed me off. I think that was the day I truly started to hate DRM.

That hate has only intensified since, and I'm not saying I've ever broken that old vow to never pirate a game... maybe I have, maybe I haven't.

But If I have, or if I ever did... it would be with games that I literally knew there was no way I was going to buy (or at least not at full price) - games I had a very baseline level of interest in. And if I did pirate a handful of games, the vast majority of them would end up being purchased later on Steam anyway.

The number of games I have on Steam that I've never played, or that I bought even though I already owned them and still had the disc packed away for them... is huge.

The PC game industries double dips on my stupid self all the time.

In the final tallying of the balance sheet between me and that industry, trust me they have NOTHING to complain about.

 

[Danimal1209]

I may have pirated games before. But, they're titles that I would never purchase anyway.
I have purchased Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2, though.

 

[wsaenotsock]

Let me just say that even though I have never had trouble finding a torrent of a game, or had problems with the quality of the pirated game, or installation of a pirated game, but it can take some time and effort to do all of that. Steam is so convenient that I don't bother wasting my time with torrents any more. It's always been an issue of convenience, and the price issue is really trivial.

There was a point in gaming history where your legally purchased product was LESS convenient to use than grabbing the torrent and to a degree that is still happening. That was the entire fucking problem that the publishers never really figured out. You can't punish your customers.

 

[smackababy]

Let me just say that even though I have never had trouble finding a torrent of a game, or had problems with the quality of the pirated game, or installation of a pirated game, but it can take some time and effort to do all of that. Steam is so convenient that I don't bother wasting my time with torrents any more. It's always been an issue of convenience, and the price issue is really trivial.

There was a point in gaming history where your legally purchased product was LESS convenient to use than grabbing the torrent and to a degree that is still happening. That was the entire fucking problem that the publishers never really figured out. You can't punish your customers.

Except the Witcher 2 already disproved that nonsense. You really believe if games were DRM free they wouldn't be pirated? The only convenience most pirates are about are those to their wallet. You can pretend you pirate games because they don't have any intrusiveness, but we all know it is because they are free. Free will always be better than paying any amount of money for the same product.

 

[TallBill]

I used to download shit. Cuz I was broke. Never would have bought the shit that I downloaded. Zero dollars lost. Not saying that I was right at the time. This was 12+ years ago, I've had enough money to buy whatever since then.

 

[Zenoth]

I think that piracy did have some significant impact a couple of years ago, but since Steam and the F2P business model kicked in things have changed for the better against piracy. With this said, however, and to reiterate I do think that piracy did have negative effects a couple of years ago. Also, PC gaming rentals, it died simply because it was obvious almost each rentals ended up being a copied CD-Rom at home and you ended up "owning" the game for the price of a blank rewritable disc.

My local game store used to have PC games for renting, a couple of shelves with brand new PC games, some of them were used though (but not many, most were just new). The only difference was the number of copies and the number of actual games they had. They would have had 8 to 10 copies of Goldeneye 007 for N64 to rent, but they'd have only one copy of Fallout 2 or FreeSpace. If I recall correctly the PC games shelves were emptied almost overnight and the clerk replaced it with PS1 and PS2 (and Dreamcast) games and he basically stopped renting PC games for obvious reasons.

That was back when security on retail PC games disc was minimal to none, back when a mere CD-key was enough for everything to work and all on-line features (when available) would work as well. During those years piracy really was an issue enough so that it did bring an end to PC games rental, at the very least. Then we know the rest of the story, security (DRM) increased, changed... we ended up with on-line features that would work only from "legitimate" keys, and false keys would only make your "offline" (single-player) part of the game work. Today, however, it's quite different. The whole digital download phenomena, the decreasing rental sells (in favor of digital purchases and downloads that is), the F2P model and the "always online" concepts have - I believe - greatly decreased the "incentives to pirate" in general, although it still occurs of course.

Now how much does piracy affect nowadays' PC gaming? Well I don't know, but I do not believe it's as bad as we're lead to believe from what big companies say, they also like to dramatize and I'm not taking their words for truth all the time. But I DO believe that piracy of course still exists, that's a no brainer... but it's certainly no where now as it used to be around 7+ years ago or so.

 

[Grooveriding]

Piracy is hard to quantify because it is an intangible. It's impossible to know how many people who pirated something would of bought it if the option weren't there to pirate it. It's even harder to quantify it as a theft when it's just a recreation of 1s and 0s, rather than a tangible object that was removed with a price tag on it.

Single player games are obviously the ones that get hit hardest. Any game with a strong multiplayer component will be freed of a lot of piracy, and always online games obviously see no piracy apart from fringe cases of private servers. Going forward we're likely to see a big shift to games being online only regardless of gameplay, likely a movement to cloud based gaming once latency and bandwidth becomes a non-issue.

I pirated a lot when I was in school. These days if I enjoy a game and am going to play it, I always pay for it. There is a lot of shovelware out there in gaming though, so I'm not surprised at how much piracy there is.

Piracy is not going anywhere though, no amount of lobbying on the part of MPAA, RIAA and gaming corps is going to stop it. Industries susceptible to it need to adapt to it and find ways to stay profitable in the climate of ever increasing high speed internet and easily accessed copyright content or they'll inevitably fold. I live in a huge city of about 8 million accounting for the GTA and it's damn near impossible to find a store that just sells music anymore, apart from niche places that carry vinyl etc. These days on a decent broadband internet connection you can download an entire blu ray disc in hours, so even high def content is going to see the same fate.

Apart from cloud-based and always-online client/server systems there is no stopping it. Companies need to adapt to it, seems they are wasting huge sums trying to fight it and losing the battle on all fronts.

 

[JoetheLion]

Lol sorry, but this topic us full of crap, numbers pulled out of nowhere, talk about how some countries were or are affected by piracy by people whom (I guess) were never there even for a holiday...

I don't want to fall on this level, since it's been quite some time that I read a research where the results showed that danger of piracy is and was actually over-hyped by companies, since people who tend to buy video games would buy them even if they are able to pirate them and most people who pirate vg would never buy them anyway.

 

[SMOGZINN]

I think this Ted Talk is relevant. People pay for things they love, even if you don't ask them to.

 

[Red Storm]

Except the Witcher 2 already disproved that nonsense. You really believe if games were DRM free they wouldn't be pirated? The only convenience most pirates are about are those to their wallet. You can pretend you pirate games because they don't have any intrusiveness, but we all know it is because they are free. Free will always be better than paying any amount of money for the same product.

Well obviously there's always going to be some people out there who pirate. But these people wouldn't have bought the game anyway, so it's not a loss sale. Still wrong, but not really a loss of money.

 

[Subyman]

I used to pirate when I was younger, before steam, amazon, and origin made demos easier to obtain. I haven't been in that scene for 8+ years. Pirating doesn't even cross my mind anymore, I'll wait for a sale if its a game that I think I'll enjoy. That and the fact that there are so many awesome games that I've missed over the years means I don't have to have games at launch. I'd feel morally wrong downloading a game for free now that I'm in the working world and see how hard people work to make those games.

I have no clue how prevalent pirating is now, but I'd think steam and others have had a big effect on the number that pirate.

 

[pcslookout]

Wow so many people here admitting to pirating. :O

Not.

 

[Childs]

I used to pirate when I was younger, before steam, amazon, and origin made demos easier to obtain. I haven't been in that scene for 8+ years. Pirating doesn't even cross my mind anymore, I'll wait for a sale if its a game that I think I'll enjoy. That and the fact that there are so many awesome games that I've missed over the years means I don't have to have games at launch. I'd feel morally wrong downloading a game for free now that I'm in the working world and see how hard people work to make those games.

I have no clue how prevalent pirating is now, but I'd think steam and others have had a big effect on the number that pirate.

I think thats just maturity. You get older, have more disposable income, you do things better than you did when you were younger. Like hanging out at 7-11. Only losers do that when they are old, but young people have no where else to go. And it doesnt cost anything.

If I was young and strapped for cash, Steam sales wouldnt matter, because a sale isnt better than free. For rich kids a sale doesnt matter, and they'll get the game whenever they want it no matter how much it costs, but most people are not rich.

 

[KeithP]

I estimate that 5-10% of revenues for a game is lost because of pirates who would choose to buy otherwise.

Did your proctologist find that number for you or is their some logic behind it that lead you to that conclusion?

-KeithP

 

[Arkadrel]

As others have said:

1) Multiplayer / mmo subs games = cant pirate and play.
2) Free to play games = game is free = uneffected by piracy.
3) easy of use (steam ect) (just as easy legally to buy, as it is to pirate)
4) Kickstarter (donations before a game made = less piracy to sale ratio?)
5) people that pirate usually cant afford to buy anyways, so not really lost sales = just broke college students.

"I think piracy in PC gameing plays a smaller and smaller roll."
(I think piracy was worse 5-10 years ago, than it is today)

Also I think people overexagerate how bad piracy is
(or use it as a excuse when game sales do bad (because they made a crap game))

And I remember reading a article about piracy in music, the people that pirated the most music, where also the ones that by far spent the most on buying legal music.
Whos to say if those people stopped pirateing, they wouldnt also buy less legal music?

In short.... piracy how bad is it? not as bad as most make it out to be (my guess).


***** I think the industry hurt the most by piracy is Movies, not pc games.

 

[Annisman*]

If this were my message board I would immidiately ban anyone who admitted to pirating. As it has helped decline the quality of one of the things I enjoy most, pc gaming.

 

[pcslookout]

If this were my message board I would immidiately ban anyone who admitted to pirating. As it has helped decline the quality of one of the things I enjoy most, pc gaming.

Agreed.