If the game is good enough, people will buy it, especially if theres multiplayer. Otherwise no one cares.

Soooo all games with a high piracy rate are bad single-player games?

Ye that's a terrible opinion

Indeed that is a terrible opinion... I, on the other hand, love single player games and tend to spend a considerable amount every year (Machinarium was one of them). Multiplayer doesn't buy me at all.

So, there are different people out there, and piracy has no excuse to hold itself (that wasn't my opinion until I started programming for a living) just because some of us are not so inclined to a game genre/type.

Although I do not condone piracy in any way, I think that one needs to take piracy figures given by companies and industry associations with a grain of salt. When a company states that it lost X dollars because of piracy or that only 5 to 15 % of downloads were paid for, it assumes that the lost revenue or lost downloads would have occurred if piracy could somehow be prevented.

The fact is that many (perhaps most) illegal downloaders would not have purchased the software if they had to pay for it.

In some cases, getting the game into the hands of more players can help spread word-of-mouth awareness and thereby entice more people to purchase the game legally. In the end, it is very difficult to determine how much revenue, if any, is lost due to piracy for any given title and whenever a company says it lost X dollars due to piracy, it is pure conjecture.

In a way, Dvorsky acknowledged this fact when he said, "On the other hand it also did some good PR work for us..." Unfortunately, not all executives are as enlightened when it comes to understanding the value of word-of-mouth marketing.

Finally, the article says that "Amanita didn't include DRM on their game as a matter of principle." Well, okay - I'll take your word for it. However, distributing DRM-free software can also be a shrewd business decision, as DRM implementation involves real costs, but offers questionable benefits. Also, I am sure the goodwill created by Amanita's decision to make Machinarium DRM-free earned it more than a few customers.

@ Zadic: That must be why the current top 3 active games on The Pirate Bay are critically successful, multi-player titles?

@david weasley:
Firstly, no one made the point that each pirated copy = one lost sale. Secondly, even if piracy gains you a few customers through word of mouth, or people who buy after pirating, that percentage is infinitesimal compared to the lost sales of trying to sell a product that is available for free, easily, elsewhere. Just look at the average amount of music bought pre and post napster. The only reason the music industry even exists today is because of the massive amounts of money they're making from licensing to movies and TV.

Making a PC game that doesn't have multiplayer that requires a unique login/purchase is a fools errand these days.

I think the piracy figures should be taken with a grain of salt because I don't think they have any way to know how many people actually downloaded the game. I'm sure a ton of people downloaded it but I think the "85-95% piracy rate" is a fabricated guess just to make a statement of it. I think they'd give out some definite figures if they had a real idea.

I think there is a lot of odd view of DRM when it comes to software. Primarily from developers that believe it in some way devalues the end user experience or in some way introduces usability concerns.

DRM can be approached as any standard function or feature of an application, whether it be game, application, or content. If you implement it in a proper manner with the proper concerns for usability, interface, footprint, impact, etc, you will create a solution that is clean and does not impose or interfere with an end user.

It is likely shortcuts and approaching it as an afterthought that leads to poor implementation, customer usage issues, and inevitably support contacts.

Many people that play games and use software want to pay for it. If acquiring your software through illegal means is easier than purchasing it, then you have an issue with your distribution pipeline. If activating or licensing your software is cumbersome and difficult, then you've failed to implement a smooth user experience. If buying your software is difficult because users have to find your website and are not given an option to license or buy it from within the program, then you are not even attempting to monetize from the pirated distribution, you are letting that free marketing not have any chance of a turnover.

There are lots of issues that DRM can surface, but the majority of them are caused by the developer or the publisher not focusing on their distribution pipeline, and the customer experience. Making a game or application is a lot of work, don't let yourself fall short by not thinking through your distribution, it can cost you.

I think it's a shame when the little guys get hit hard by piracy. Maybe people weren't going to buy it anyways but it doesn't give them a right to just pirate it, there's many lame excuses and reasons, but if it didn't exist, things would be much better.

@Jed

Nobody has the "right" to pirate anything, be it music, movies or software, but speculating about what the world would be like without piracy is pointless. Piracy is not going away, which means that companies need to develop effective strategies to deal with it.

I think Amanita Design has done a better job at tackling the problem than many larger studios. It is a strategy that eliminated significant upfront costs in areas such as DRM licensing, traditional marketing and advertising, distribution, etc. and it is a strategy that has helped Amanita build a strong customer base and goodwill. That does not mean that Amanita's strategy will work well for all companies, but it does demonstrate that Amanita understands the gaming market better than most.

The normal rate of piracy, 80-85%. That means that by not including DRM there was a difference of 15%, or put another way means they only made 1/3 of what they would had they included DRM. Understand that a few days there game will buried and receives almost no more sales.

Thought I support David Wesley's views more or less, there are a few things I wish to point out.

Firstly, David is right in saying "Piracy is not going away, which means that companies need to develop effective strategies to deal with it."
But I am doubtful whether Amanita's strategy is the right one.
By not including DRM they may have cut down the costs and achieved a strong customer base and goodwill.
But aren't they negating all that effort by presenting the game at a lower rate (75% off) to the very people who are supporting piracy. This would just kill of the goodwill that they created in the first case.
It is like they are supporting piracy rather than oppose it.

As a last word, we can discuss all we want, but the bottom line is that piracy is not going off anytime soon. So what do we (small independent game developers) do?

I see only one way for this to go: Some studio somewhere will make the online portion of its game like a MMO: You have to pay to play. Think Call of Duty, with WoW's payment scheme.

@David

I know it's me being a dreamer and it's wishful thinking, but we do need to start putting some onus on the person doing it, whether it be showing impacts, guilt or whatever. People really don't fathom how they affect developers, especially when if you have a computer and an internet connection, you have at least $20 to shell on an indie game if you like the demo or reviews.

I may be a bit jaded but I do a bit of music production for the dance music scene (dubstep & drum n bass), and it's gotten to the point where I know I'll never make a living off of it, but I still hate when I see people pirating my releases. I also make sure I always buy music cause it goes to the little guys/labels. I know I'm not some radically forward thinker, but maybe if people used a little more courtesy with small time game developers the odds would change.

I especially hate the, "I pirated and liked it so I bought it." argument, as I'd bet $100 that 50% of the people that say that are lying through their teeth.

The demo wasn't really that good beyond the art. The puzzles were often confusing due to how weird the game is and the game is basically just a pixel hunt in each self contained room. Okay, that was the first three areas and I didn't feel any need to get past that point.

Maybe I should take another stab at this after some sleep but so far I'm not too engrossed.

It does suck that people would steal this thing when they literally give people a free demo and then barely charge anything for the game. If room four and beyond get a little better I might actually purchase this.

@Bryson Whiteman

There are ways, from what I've seen, it's often a call home feature of the game, usually for scores or things. I remember one iPhone game that had a voluntary call home score feature, and 90% of the submitted scores where from pirated keys.

My assumption for things like the numbers that World of Goo or Amantia come up with is a simple equation of # of torrent downloads/(sales + torrent downloads) it isn't that hard.

There are certainly some people who are very vocal about their anti-DRM stance but what is the impact to sales? Is it a fact that DRM doesn't reduce piracy? Is it a fact that DRM causes more sales to be lost than a DRM free release? I just bought an electronic widget which came encased in a shoplifting prevention plastic shell. It was a pain to open and certainly contributed to land fill. But it didn't stop me from purchasing the item. Similarly, DRM hasn't made me stop buying games. I get the feeling that the people complaining about DRM are the pirates, not legitimate customers. Hard to imagine that people are so selfish that they can't understand why a company needs to protect their investment, especially when given the piracy numbers given in this article. What do they think would happen if CD/DVD thefts from retail outlets got anywhere near those numbers?

@Schimidt

I don't buy stuff with DRM.

Neither my friends.

Specially the one that had the same opinion as yours, and called us pirated when we said that using DRM was bad idea, then he bought Spore, to find that SecuROM disliked his notebook with two videocards, and that to play Spore he had to disable the second videocard on the bios.

Result: He had to crack Spore, and this made him upset (since he had a original version, but had to play cracked version), and later I discovered that he stopped buying legal games, and were mostly pirating them (he was fearful of virus and etc... but after he learned how to crack something to crack Spore DRM, he found out that it is easier than handling the DRM issues, so now he get cracked versions by default... sometimes he still buy games, but he still get the cracked version)

No, this guy is not me (I don't have money to buy a laptop, or even a desktop with two video cards), it is a fellow game design student.


High piracy levels are a SYMPTOM, not a CAUSE.

@Maurício Gomes, bad DRM implementations are not representative of DRM as a whole. I had tremendous troubles with getting steam to work. Steam's response was that they didn't support anti-virus or firewalls. I don't know on which machines they thought their games were going to run but the implementatiion and support were poorly executed. That didn't justify me stealing from them though, it just meant that I could vote with my dollars by not buying their product. If you choose to not buy games with DRM that is your right. But you are sadly mistaken when you claim that piracy is a symptom of DRM as this article clearly demonstrates with the high volume of piracy and no DRM. I've certainly read a lot of posts by pirates fancying themselves as modern day Robin Hoods when really they are just theives.

Digital media is different than standard discrete goods. The industry is trying to find its way with how to manage it. I personally think moving to a service model will be part of the solution. Spending $20 mil on a game that is essentially free to play is not an option in my opinion. The question is then, how do we make it as simple as possible for the users to validate their copy of the game. Using the carrrot is a good approach by rewarding people who register their games with additional content. Then again, I don't think typing in a security code is too much to ask.

This will kill the industry. It's painfully obvious that it the rewards for creating content are diminshed by people stealing the content, then fewer and fewer people will be inclined to create said content. It's obvious, yet people still pirate and use the following excuses:

1) I wouldn't have bought the game under any circumstances, so if I pirate the game then the game dev/pub isn't really losing any revenue.

2) I pirate because oppose DRM.

3) Only bad games get pirated and lose revenue. People who pirate good games just do it to test drive them and eventually buy them.

4) Piracy figures cited by game publishers and industry associations are always exaggerated and can't be trusted.

For the people that do download games illegally and use the above excuses, thanks a lot. You're killing an industry on two fronts: first, you robbing devs of hard-earned revenue. And second, you're causing publishers to react with increasingly cumbersome and annoying DRM, which only makes matters worse for the PC gaming.

@Maurício Gomes

"High piracy levels are a SYMPTOM, not a CAUSE."

Gotta disagree with this one, Mauricio. In my experience, people pirate because it's become increasingly easy and convenient to do so, and because younger generations (I'm in my mid-30s) haven become increasingly adept at convincing themselves that it's basically harmless. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, for example, didn't have SecuROM or any other kind of restrictive DRM and it was a critically acclaimed title....yet amazingly, that game was pirated 6 ways to Sunday (and this was before Activision and Bobby Kotick became the poster boys for evil game publishing). And please don't tell me it wasn't priated heavily. We all know it was. And we probably all know a "friend" or two that downloaded one of the incredibly available torrents out there. From my knowledge of the game industry, I strongly feel that DRM is a reaction to piracy and not the other way around. Yes, this new wave of piracy doesn't help things and probably does encourage piracy to a small degree, but the problem of illegal downloading was there first.

In any event, this argument is probably mute -- we'll all be renting games over the Internet soon and owning physical discs or even our own digital copies will become of thing of the past.

@Rob Wright

Call of Duty 4 was available on the places with highest piracy? No.
Call of Duty 4 was sold in stores that accept returns? Mostly, no.
Call of Duty 4 had a price that is acceptable? No.

I am not talking only about DRM, there are several other issues, Valve is spearheading the attempt to solve these, this is even more obvious with Gabe Newell saying once in a interview, that "piracy is only badly served costumers"

Here in Brazil, people BUY pirated stuff, even when it is MORE EXPENSIVE than the original copy, the reasons are these:

First, pirated stuff are easier to find (ie: the pirate dealers, had the great idea to leave all games in the warehouse, and put in the shelves only their covers, this allow for more games on the shelf space... also some put catalogs in their stores, showing all the stuff that they have).

Second, pirated stuff have BETTER support, pirated games dealers here accept returns, give warranty, localization, patches (including removal of everything annoying, even cd-rom checks... some games even come with patches that correct typos from the original publisher/developer), and some may even give their own personal cellphone number.

Third, pirated stuff is easier to install than games with heavy DRM

Fourth, pirated stuff is easier to use than games with heavy DRM, more easy even than Steam (that has issues with its offline mode)


I am not saying that I support piracy, what I am saying is that publishers are not doing their jobs.

And finally, I am talking that HIGH levels of piracy are a symptom, medium levels are completely normal and impossible to fight, it is part of the human nature to share stuff and information in general, you can do nothing about it.

Extra note:

Starcraft II in Brazil got 24.000 sales on the first day, considering the state of the retail market here, this is a record... How they did it?

They did it, offering the game for 27 USD, a price WAAAAY more acceptable than 60 USD.

Counter-Strike is also hugely popular here, how Valve did it? It is 5 USD on retail, has decent support, localization, etc...

Unless I'm mistaken, Starcraft II in Brazil also has a subscription fee after X months as well. They need to make their money somewhere.

And you seem to have what I consider unreal expectations.

The Pirated Copy Dealer gets his copy for free. All he has to cover is rent. He managed to sidestep that multimillion dollar bill called making the game. He also gets to tag along on any updates, sidestepping that customer support bill as well.

It's like criticizing bike companies because the guy who steals bikes can sell them cheaper, and isn't as strict on his selling. The thief doesn't have to cover making the product, or testing the product, or certifying the product, or marketing the product.

Unless he does negative work how can you expect to keep pace with someone who takes everything you do for free? All he needs to do is provide 1 minor bonus and he is providing more for only the cost of the minor bonus.

@Tom Baird

Yes, after 6 months... I disagree with it, but the strategy worked.


The pirated copy dealer, don't got stuff for free, first, he has the physical copies, that is already a cost, then there is the rent, after that, as I said they DEVELOP stuff, localization, patches, updates, this is not free either, it is not a MINOR bonus, what they do is what the publishers should focus on doing.

There is no point in spending millions in marketing, and not spend a few thousand dollars (at most) to localize and make decent patches... Yes some companies do that, but for example Ultima 9 from Eletronic Arts, the pirated version is WAAAAY superior, not only it has no DRM, but it also has graphic improvements, typo fixing, text nitpicking, localization, better data compression (thus smaller footprint on hard disk, something that was still important when the game was released), and so on... All this stuff is not free, yes, some of them originated in the warez scene, that did it for free (yes, the person like the game so much, that it IMPROVE THE GAME for FREE, while spending their own resources), but lots of other stuff was work of someone in the piracy chain line.


I too think that is sad to see a game pirated, when the person could be buying a legal copy of it, but you cannot go throwing the "criminal" accusation on everyone and ignore their issues.

Why aren't PS3 games selling 10X more than XBOX360 or than PS2 did in it's gold times? See, you can't piracy a PS3 game, so there's 85% more sales netting in, right?

@luis, I think everyone here knows that each pirated copy is not a lost sale, but neither does that mean that pirated copies are not potential sales either. Dealing in absolutes like that is generally simplistic and incorrect.

@ Mauricio
I understand that in Brazil they are not just providing a minor bonus, but rather large chunks. I was saying that was all they really needed to be an improvement over the original product.

They get all of any major publishers major investments for free.
They get free Game Development, free QA, free game marketting, free internal patches, free internal localization.

When they can sell their game for 90% of the price and incur only 50% of the cost, they have 40% of extra revenue with which to provide improvement to the existing product.

How do you compete with anyone who gets everything you do for free, but makes the same amount of money from it (because that money no longer goes toward making the original game, or toward global improvements, but rather to making custom improvements)?

The cost of physical media is very cheap (http://www.amazon.com/Memorex-16X-DVD-R-100-Pack-Spindle/dp/B0009MX5R4 almost 0.25 a disc) And so they have full game revenue to cover only rent (for the store, they don't have to pay for an office/dev computers) and whatever improvements they can get their hands on.

Unless we start seeing Volunteer Game Dev companies no publisher can possibly compete for value.

Edit:
I say about 50% of the cost saved because I am comparing them to a GameStop and not a publisher. And last I heard general markup was around 50%ish. But regardless of the markup it is still essentially a retailer getting free product (or product for the cost of a dvd), and then adding his own features to it and selling it as if it cost him for the original product.

Also if they had spent more money on localization of Ultima 9 people would still get the pirated version, because of Graphic improvements and typo fixing. And if they improved those, the retailer would find some other feature to put in there. You can't beat someone who automatically gets everything you do for free. Cause he'll just find another thing to add.

@Tom Baird

I know that, like I said, some amount of piracy is impossible to curb, it will always exist, but you can reduce a good amount doing stuff properly, if you visit an Ultima nitpicking site, you will see that the EA version of Ultima 9 is hilarious the amount of bugs and errors the game have, they have whole sections of the backstory ignored or wrong...

Now see for example Half-Life 2, the game was pirated? Yes, a lot. Yet it still sold a lot, and Valve don't complained about piracy... The game was a much better "finished" product, major patches were not NEEDED after launch, and it was sold at decent prices (the biggest example is the russian version, that was famous because Valve used as an example on how they penetrated the piracy dominated russian market, with a localized and cheaper version).

I am not saying that publishers should do the impossible, but they are ignoring some basics...

@Justin sawchuk

Except that the estimate is actually 85-95%, so that's 10% which you don't even know if it's actually extra.


Here's an interesting article about iPhone piracy BTW: http://gizmodo.com/5477732/the-myth-of-iphone-app-piracy

Apparently only 10% of iPhones are jailbroken, which is a requirement for it to run pirated games, which means that the game Eric McQuiggan was talking about could only have been pirated by 10% of the installer base... IMO the 89% of legitimate users that didn't buy that game should be more of a concern then the 10% who where very likely to pirate it anyway (having their phone jailbroken should be a hint), no matter how much % of the game being used was by them.

On the PC, for a game that will run on very cheap rigs the % of people who would will pirate it no matter what would be even bigger then on an iPhone because of places like Eastern Europe and big parts of Asia where 50$ is a huge amount for simple entertainment (but a PC is a tool they use to make money, or they even just go to a gaming center which also pirates it's games, or even allows you to d/l whatever game you want etc.)

I mean when CoD MW2 sells 10 million when it's 60$ (and it was available on torrents right away too) there are obviously people that are willing to spend money on games out there.