While discussions of piracy are welcomed here, openly admitting to software piracy is not permitted. Please cease doing so, or it will result in the offending members posting privileges being suspended. - PC Gaming Moderator- DAPUNISHER
- well, i promised .. surprised me .. and it's a little long
http://www.quartertothree.com/...showthread.php?t=42663
^This is the original "Titan Quest" Dev post that started the original discussion in another thread here but this one is devoted to the claim of 90% piracy rate .. you are invited to find links and comment^
Almost too much information is available .. evidently there are several ways to track stolen games .. SecureRom's most restrictive DRM actually "phones home" to report stolen SW
:Q
first of all, all the Devs say it is huge and impacts the reason they are moving to consoles:
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/08...ling-pc-gaming-market/
at a QuakeCon Q&A, id Software co-owner Kevin Cloud put some blame on why developers are shying away from the PC market and turning to the slightly less-hackable console market.
Cloud is quoted as saying:
"Piracy is hard. It's really -- from my opinion, destroying the PC market. ... when you look out there at the number of games that are getting pirated, it is just devastating. It's the primary reason retailers are moving to the console. It's something that's on every PC developer's mind -- on how to reduce [piracy]. Because, if you like the PC, you hate to see it fall lower and lower down."
Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id, expressed similar concerns:
"... the problem that this industry faces above all else is the piracy. There is about seventy-percent of the landmass of the world where you can't sell games in a legitimate market, because pirates will beat you to the shelves with your own game. ... you may literally have more games being played illegitimately than being played legitimately. So when you're giving up that much market to people who aren't paying for the games, or who are buying the games in ways in which the developers aren't getting paid for it, it creates a big challenge. Not only for the developers and publishers. But also for retailers, because they have to make bets when they buy their game inventory."
http://fourzerotwo.blogspot.co...s-servers-servers.html
On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn't fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).
Not sure if I can share the exact numbers or percentage of PC players with you, but I'll check and see; if I can I'll update with them. As the amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding. It blows me away at the amount of people willing to steal games (or anything) simply because it's not physical or it's on the safety of the internet to do
more how they track it:
http://www.next-gen.biz/index....=view&id=9077&Itemid=2
The ESA says it based its estimates on local surveys of market conditions and other factors, including public and proprietary data on sales and market share and information from industry enforcement programs
This actually talks about "numbers" and it is really interesting .. Reflexive does their own DRM and tracks the results. They found that stopping piracy did not actually increase sales much:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-b..._index.php?story=17350
[very excerpted]
February 12, 2008
Casual Games and Piracy: The Truth
Casual Games and Piracy: The Truth [Just how rampant is piracy in PC casual gaming? In a startling instalment of his regular Gamasutra column, Reflexive's director of marketing Russell Carroll (Wik, Ricochet) reveals the 92% piracy rate for one of his company's games, and what worked (and didn't work) when they tried to fix it.]
?It looks like around 92% of the people playing the full version of [the pictured] Ricochet Infinity pirated it.? It?s moments like those that make people in the industry stop dead in their tracks. 92% is a huge number and though we were only measuring people who had gotten the game from Reflexive and gone online with it, it seemed improbable that those who acquired the game elsewhere or didn?t go online were any more likely to have purchased it. As we sat and pondered the financial implications of such piracy, it was hard to get past the magnitude of the number itself: 92%. ...
... in many cases improving the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system to be more secure can be more effective as it renders a large number of those links obsolete. This is tricky to be sure, because improving the security must be done without making the DRM so onerous that it keeps honest customers from purchasing games.
Reflexive, where I work, is in a peculiar position in this regard. Whereas most of the casual games industry licenses their DRM from a vendor, Reflexive has its own in-house DRM. Over the years it has undergone many improvements, including several changes made specifically to combat piracy.
With that background, my penchant for actual numbers, and a lot of help from Brian Fisher, Reflexive?s king of number crunching logic, let?s tackle the question of the 92% piracy rate on Ricochet Infinity. Could we realistically assume that stopping piracy would have caused 12 times more sales?
Beating the DRM
Pirates beat DRMs through Exploits, KeyGens and Cracks. Each of these approaches is distinct, and requires differing amounts of effort. A brief description of each, in order of least to most effort involved to make them work, can be found below.
[excerpted descriptions removed]
Fixing the DRM
Over the last 2 years, Reflexive has made a number of security updates to its DRM that were designed to make one or more of the existing DRM workarounds obsolete and thereby turn the people pirating games into purchasing customers. While the updates haven?t made the system unbreakable, they have made it so all known or search-engine-findable piracy tools ceased to function.
Fixing The Holes - The Results
Below are the results of Reflexive.com sales and downloads immediately following each update:
Fix 1 ? Existing Exploits & Keygens made obsolete ? Sales up 70%, Downloads down 33%
Fix 2 ? Existing Keygens made obsolete ? Sales down slightly, Downloads flat
Fix 3 ? Existing Cracks made obsolete ? Sales flat, Downloads flat
Fix 4 ? Keygens made game-specific ? Sales up 13%, Downloads down 16% (note: fix made after the release of Ricochet Infinity)
From the results above, it seems clear that eliminating piracy through a stronger DRM can result in significantly increased sales ? but sometimes it can have no benefit at all. So what does that mean for the question about whether a pirated copy means a lost sale? The decreases in downloads may provide a clue to that
As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale.
Though many of the pirates may be simply shifting to another source of games for their illegal activities, the number is nonetheless striking and poignant. The sales to download ratio found on Reflexive implies that a pirated copy is more similar to the loss of a download (a poorly converting one!) than the loss of a sale.
Though that doesn?t make a 92% piracy rate of one of our banner products any less distressing, knowing that eliminating 50,000 pirated copies might only produce 50 additional legal copies does help put things in perspective. ...
The question most of the portals ask themselves isn?t whether or not to fight piracy, but what is the best way to fight it.
Casual games is an industry still in its adolescence, and certainly as it matures, more and more lessons will be learned about what the best approach is to fighting piracy, and what the realistic returns are of doing so.
interesting read:
Secure PC gaming could bring prices down - Taylor
*details* of the 'how' here:
http://thegamingsource.blogspo...c-gaming-industry.html
For instance, Call of Duty 4 is being downloaded by 16,385 people from Miniova at the time of publication. The game sold 383K copies in 2007 according toNDP reports. If one estimates that it would take 2-3 days to download a DVD-copy of a game on average (average taken from some of the top seeded games), that would equate to 164K to 246K downloads a month. At that rate, more people have downloaded the game illegally than have purchased it in stores.
Using the same formula, Crysis, which is being downloaded by 6806 people, would be downloaded 68K to 102K a month, more than the game sold in its first month of release.
Unreal Tournament III is being downloaded by 3060 pirates, which would equate to 31K to 46K downloads a month, easily beating the 34K that the game sold in its first couple weeks of release.
Of course these numbers are only counting one torrent site.
they track it
More
http://www.canada.com/topics/t...a-40099252278d&k=25113
While PC game developers are losing money to piracy, companies like Nintendo are raking in enormous profits from the booming console market.
Top games like Super Mario Galaxy and Halo 3 would have been dubbed disappointments to company execs if they had sold less than a million copies in their first month. According to the NPD's year-end analysis only one PC game, the World of Warcraft expansion "The Burning Crusade" sold more than a million copies all year!
Call of Duty 4, one of the best-selling games of the year racked up almost 7 million sales accross all platforms, with only 383K of that figure coming from PC.
So what are PC developers to do?
Many are either switching, or porting their games to console. According to ShackNews, Crytek announced today that they will be showing off CryENGINE 2, the technology that powered Crysis, on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 at this year's GDC, which could signal that the developer is looking to make money from those platforms as well.
Some game publishers like Valve are looking at the situation as an opportunity for digital distribution to become a bigger factor in the PC game market, through services like Steam. Steam allows developers to sell their game through the Steam store and track game sales. According to NextGen.biz, Valve announced today that they have created a toolset so game developers can easily port their games onto the Steam platform. Game developers should be excited because the service has been very effective in an effort to crack down on video game pirates.
there you go
i edited the title to reflect the discussion better