On the piracy that's "not occurring" in PC Gaming...

[Regs]

Originally posted by: mindcycle

Originally posted by: Regs
The solution involves the customer and business meeting each other half-way so that both are satisfied. A compromise.

Pirates are not customers. That's a concept many of you posting here fail to grasp.

I believe your problem is that you are oversimplifying and once again thinking in a 4 x4 box. I did not mention , speak in context of, or utter the word pirate in any of my above posts. Yes, piracy is a problem but not the entire problem, and both the customer, and the developers can concede to that. There are many reasons for example: high advertising costs, computer hardware conformity, the easy access to piracy, development time, and the competition from console ports.

 

[mindcycle]

Originally posted by: erwos
However, we're in a world with piracy. Timmy goes and grabs the torrent of Awesome Game X. He plays it a bit, gets his $30's worth (despite not having paid $30), and moves on. _The publisher never gets their $30. Would Timmy have paid $60? Nope. But he would have paid $30, and that's logic that never seems to get taken into account with the "I wouldn't pay $60 for it, so I'll pirate it and it's like they didn't lose money" rationale.

Therefore, Timmy is not a customer. Seems simple enough to me. The potential he had to become a customer was there, sure, but he chose not to become one. No DRM or copy protection is going to stop piracy so creating this story doesn't change the reality of anything. Instead he needs to be recognized as committing copyright infringement and that's the extent of it, plain and simple.

On the flipside there will be others that gladly pay $60 for the game, or who wait it out like you mention and purchase it for cheaper later. Those people are called customers. They are the people that publishers need to cater to or risk losing additional sales.

Let me quote Brad Wardell. He is a well respected publisher in the PC gaming world who has real data to back up his views without needing to create stories.

The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don?t buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary ? our customers.

When the focus of energy is put on customers rather than fighting pirates, you end up with more sales. It seems common sense to me but then again, I?m just an engineer.

http://forums.impulsedriven.com/349758

 

[mindcycle]

Originally posted by: Regs
I believe your problem is that you are oversimplifying and once again thinking in a 4 x4 box. I did not mention , speak in context of, or utter the word pirate in any of my above posts. Yes, piracy is a problem but not the entire problem, and both the customer, and the developers can concede to that. There are many reasons for example: high advertising costs, computer hardware conformity, the easy access to piracy, development time, and the competition from console ports.

Ok, maybe I am misunderstanding what you wrote. To clarify, how do you propose that customers meet publishers halfway?

 

[BladeVenom]

Originally posted by: erwos

Originally posted by: mindcycle

Originally posted by: Regs
The solution involves the customer and business meeting each other half-way so that both are satisfied. A compromise.

Pirates are not customers. That's a concept many of you posting here fail to grasp.

That's a massive oversimplification, and intellectually dishonest to boot. There is going to be, naturally, some percentage of people who don't feel like paying money for a game, and pirate it instead, but would have actually paid for it if piracy wasn't an option.

But piracy is always an option. Every game gets cracked.

 

[BD231]

Putting games out on the PC platform is like asking a stranger to hold your wallet, chances are you're only keeping what you took out of it before you handed it off. If anything is to be done, the burden must be carried by the only people they can still manipulate.

The land of no software verification will prevail.

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

Regarding "Try Before You Buy" - did anybody else read the slashdot article on the iPhone app piracy the other day? It is, to say the least, enlightening..

Quick summary: iPhone game accepts high scores from anyone, pirated or no. When it sends in high score data, it sends along information to identify it as a legit copy or not, as well as a device ID that ties it to a particular phone.

Not one device ID that was tied to a pirated copy later became a legitimate copy. In short, 'try before you buy' does not happen.

 

[mindcycle]

Originally posted by: PhatoseAlpha
Regarding "Try Before You Buy" - did anybody else read the slashdot article on the iPhone app piracy the other day? It is, to say the least, enlightening..

Quick summary: iPhone game accepts high scores from anyone, pirated or no. When it sends in high score data, it sends along information to identify it as a legit copy or not, as well as a device ID that ties it to a particular phone.

Not one device ID that was tied to a pirated copy later became a legitimate copy. In short, 'try before you buy' does not happen.

I don't agree with the try before you buy mentality that many pirates have. Especially with something that cost under $5 like that iPhone app. You and I share common grounds on that one.

However, I do wish that more developers/publishers would release demos for their products. Many do eventually, but it doesn't seem to be a huge deal to them. With a demo available there is no reason to "try before you buy" by pirating the game. And that comes back to giving your customers more incentive to purchase products, like I've talked about previously.

I especially like this comment from his article.

But as a developer, looking at that high scores chart, it is kind of depressing. Yet we are glad that there are plenty of paying customers out there, and we will do our best to reach them.

If I had an iPhone I would support this guy by buying his app.

 

[Zensal]

Originally posted by: PhatoseAlpha
Regarding "Try Before You Buy" - did anybody else read the slashdot article on the iPhone app piracy the other day? It is, to say the least, enlightening..

Quick summary: iPhone game accepts high scores from anyone, pirated or no. When it sends in high score data, it sends along information to identify it as a legit copy or not, as well as a device ID that ties it to a particular phone.

Not one device ID that was tied to a pirated copy later became a legitimate copy. In short, 'try before you buy' does not happen.

Looking at the piracy rate and then at the conversion rate, it almost made me cry. Really people?!? It's friggin $2. If I don't have the money, I go without. It's not justification to say "I wouldn't have bought it anyway."

That being said, developers: Don't cripple my game for those pirate losers. I'm not the enemy!!!

 

[Caecus Veritas]

Originally posted by: ja1484
- Until you start blaming the pirates for the mess rather than the game companies, don't expect game publishers to take you seriously.

hahaha. if a developer wants to continue blaming piracy instead of their crappy products for shitty sales, that's fine by me. because, really, me and my wallet don't need to deal with their crap and excuses.

they can blame piracy all they want, but here's some list of reasons why I buy a lot less (and more stringently) PC games.

1. Impulse buys have ALWAYS led to crappy products. i mean it's seriously a crap shoot.
2. Can't rely on demos (typical BS developer response: the actual finished game is A LOT more fun!! demo is not representative! ..... so then what's the point of the demo). Burned way too many times this way.
3. Oh gee, desktop, hello again! that crash bug they said would be fixed in the demo is still there! well, golly. i guess i'll just have to wait til they fix it next month~
4. hey, i think i'm missing some features they said they would have.
5. WTF? is this a complete game or a fking beta???!!
6. hrm, this game is VERY different from the hyped up preview.... this is not fun. well, there goes another 60 bucks down the drain.
7. DRM? now i gotta deal with this too???? why the fk is this starforce messing with my OS?? FCK this!

now, if a developer wants to leave the pc market, that's fine by me. whatever anyone says, there's money to be made. there'll be another developer who wants my money.

 

[mmnno]

Originally posted by: Regs
The solution involves the customer and business meeting each other half-way so that both are satisfied. A compromise.

If by "meeting each other half way" you mean "cut the price of irrationally DRMed games by 50% to compensate for the loss of quality", then the quoted sentence might make sense in some way. Otherwise, it's up to the business to make the game the customer wants to buy. If the customer doesn't want a hard limit of 5 activations, or a rootkit, or p2p hosting, the solution is not to buy the game anyway.

It's really not any different from games that ship with gamebreaking bugs and broken features. Yeah it's understandable, game development is hard and consumer-friendly DRM is hard. It's still the developer's (and publisher's) job to make it work, or else their game is going to flop. If you can do it on the Xbox and not on the PC, then make an Xbox game.

 

[coloumb]

Regarding "Try Before You Buy" - did anybody else read the slashdot article on the iPhone app piracy the other day? It is, to say the least, enlightening..

Quick summary: iPhone game accepts high scores from anyone, pirated or no. When it sends in high score data, it sends along information to identify it as a legit copy or not, as well as a device ID that ties it to a particular phone.

Not one device ID that was tied to a pirated copy later became a legitimate copy. In short, 'try before you buy' does not happen.

"Try before you buy" [or shareware as we use to call it] worked quite well back in the old days [demo was contained on a diskette typically bundled with a games magazine] - but today it's just too easy to obtain a free version [torrents are a major contribution].

As long as people think "We pirate because we can" - it's going to happen.

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

"Try before you buy" [or shareware as we use to call it] worked quite well back in the old days [demo was contained on a diskette typically bundled with a games magazine] - but today it's just too easy to obtain a free version [torrents are a major contribution].

As long as people think "We pirate because we can" - it's going to happen.

I am old enough to know about shareware. Rise of the triad and other goodness. It was just a demo, when you get right down to it, but the demos back then were a lot more generous. Ain't going to find any modern games where the demo contains a full third of the game.


But you know, I was under the impression it didn't work all that well back then either. Always got the feeling shareware games were shareware because they didn't have a proper published. And while doom, quake and the like did well enough to be as well known as they are now, you certainly had a lot of shareware games that just didn't get bought.