Oh, well i guess that means the game isn't very good then.Carmel wrote that a few players had illegally downloaded the game and then decided to make a purchase, but added that those buyers formed a "very small percentage."
Nevermind, i guess that just means pirates suck and don't buy good games after pirating them.2D Boy won the 2008 Independent Games Festival for World of Goo.
This doesn't really help convince people to stop pirating, that they'd have to start a lawsuit to get justice. Who really has the time to do that, and lawyers are costly too. Most likely the stores will take it back so there won't be a need for a lawsuit, I'm just saying people don't like hearing about the possibility of getting screwed by a store.Originally Posted by ProgrammingAce
I actually bought and returned a game(successfully) because it had serious glitches in it. It was Broken Sword for the Gameboy Advance, a port of the PC game that was released years earlier. If you save the game while at certain locations, you'll be unable to proceed in the game, you'll have to delete the save and start over(I had to start over as I didn't know about the bugs ahead of time). There were several spots in the game that had this problem(and there's other serious bugs too), and since this was a port(not made from scratch), I felt that it wasn't up to par. I brought it back and exchanged it for another game(I said it was defective, I bought it used from EB Games).
I actually went to 2D Boy's website and they talk more about the pirating, pretty interesting to read the details of what they say.
http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
this is in line with a previous estimate by russell carroll (director of marketing at reflexive) for the game ricochet infinity. russell estimated a 92% piracy rate and i found his analysis quite interesting (check it out here if you’re curious). one thing that really jumped out at me was his estimate that preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale. this supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game aren’t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying.
in our case, we might have even converted more than 1 in a 1000 pirates into legit purchases. either way, ricochet shipped with DRM, world of goo shipped without it, and there seems to be no difference in the outcomes. we can’t draw any conclusions based on two data points, but i’m hoping that others will release information about piracy rates so that everyone could see if DRM is the waste of time and money that we think it is.
And here's an article with suggestions to prevent piracy. I feel that these methods could work well.
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1558
None of those ideas are new, unique, or even particularly useful.
1. Make sure the pirates can’t offer a superior product.
I'm anti PC gaming, and aside from some downlaodable content, DRM isn't too bad on consoles. As for PCs, If someone is pirating your game because they don't want to type in the CD Key, then there's no hope in converting them into a customer anyway. I'd be surprised if installing the game isn't too much work for them at that point.
2. Get closer to the community
That works the other way too. Bungie is probably the most community driven developer out there, and the halo series is pirated to high hell specifically because of the expectations the developers put on the game. CliffyB, Jade Redmond, CharlieOscarDelta, their games all get heavily pirated, even though they're active members of the community, and often times active in charities such as Child's Play.
3. Offer a demo
If you have the time and resources, then great. I'd love for all games to have demos. Sometimes a demo does more harm then good, look at Burnout Paradise city. The demo offered too little content and actually hurt the sales. Now that's the developer's fault, but sometimes it's just easier to sidestep the issue entirely and skip demo if you're hard up against a deadline.
4. Entice them with valuable updates
This one is just plain wrong. Go to any CD crack website and they'll have a crack for every patch out there. Worthwhile content updates can be fairly expensive as well. It'd be nice if all developers gave stuff away for free to their paying customers, but frankly the pirates will usually end up with the freebies too. Without any DRM at all, it tends to be difficult to tell a paying customer from a pirate.
5. Clean House
That's nice, but in reality it's insanely difficult. A game has to pass through so many different levels across multiple companies before it can even be certified for release. Then they send out copies to reviewers. A good percentage of leaks come from crooked reviewers, others come from the distributor, or the packaging company. Rarely have i seen leaks that came from a source internal to the developer. The only real option i see here is to convert the review and distribution into a download only medium, then load it up with DRM. But, as has been brought up before, no DRM is secure so you're still going to have leaks.
Last edited by ProgrammingAce; 01-19-2009 at 12:41 PM.
Stores that violate my consumer protection rights have everything to do with game publishers. The store is the human who is GIVING me your product, so they should go out of their way to not make me enraged as I still am after four years.
I pay for games that are good, or if a friend has said they are good - I bought Hearts of Iron II via direct download last month. Never again am I buying a game near it's release, though, and definitely not from a retail store. I might make an exception for Starcraft II, as Blizzard has a reputation for not releasing early betas as a 1.0 release (which is why I am giving them my money for full price instead of waiting until it's a bargain bin game for $15 like I usually do).
If I DL a game and it's shitty, I delete it. Mind that I haven't Dl'd a game in the last long while because of having bought a PS2 and am basking in the glory of $5 games. Why would I pay retail, or anything at all for a steaming pile of crap?
I think some companies are using piracy as a scapegoat for low sales figures on shitty games.
Well the demo of drake of the 99 dragons helped me. Helped me to run the other way by the same token some companies release broken titles with an emphasis on the we will fix it via patch. Last year I have bought a ton of games based off likeing them in the demo regardless of the review.
neo geo system
On the contrary, they have everything to do with the game publishers. The most likely reason why retailers are not taking returns on the alleged defective products is that they in turn cannot return them to the publisher for refund due to the publisher's return policy and other reasons such as the publisher asserting the DMCA.
You could cut and paste that argument into any time frame in question. I don't see how it's any more relevant now than any other time in question without any evidence backing up your assertion.
Also, it's based upon the (false) premise that there was been a decline of decent games over the last ten years. I know this is largely subjective, but I would imagine if that were the case, we see an overall drop in total number of games released in that time period, and I don't see that. If anything the games are getting better, especially in PC games. Blizzard is still around releasing A+ games. Valve is still hitting home runs. Don't forget Relic, Raven, DICE, BioWare, Obsidian, Infinity Ward, Epic Games, id Software, Monolith, Bethesda, EA LA (Westwood), Ubisoft Montreal and now Bungie may be back into PC gaming. We continue to see new versions of Total War, Civilization, Command & Conquer, Call of Duty, etc. every year or so. We seen many new titles rise up (Company of Heroes, Sins of a Solar Empire, WarHammer 40K, Crysis,Titan Quest) and many old lines reappear (Supreme Commander, Sam & Max, Team Fortress 2, Colonization).
Call me names if you want but your 3rd link makes a very important point:
Companies go bankrupt all the time, especially of recent days. It's due to poor management, inferior products, prices, a bad economy and tough competition against the big companies. It's easy to blame piracy without evidence. It's like in the 1700s when they called women witches. If enough people do it, then it becomes common belief instead of being proven rationally. Funny how the companies making good games like blizzard, square-enix, and nintendo are not going bankrupt due to piracy.Of course, it's hard to know what the true revenue loss is because you can't assume – by a long shot – that everyone who pirates a copy of a product would pay for it if they had no other choice.
I love the idea of demos! I bought a PS3 a while back and I always download new demos.If I like a game, then 6 months down the road, when the price becomes reasonable, I buy it new. I think it has been a good compromise from Sony and it's game developers that has kept me on the good side of the law. That way I don't waste money on crap and I buy their products new.
How is the digital millennium copyright act the most likely reason stores don't accept returns on open software?
Publishers accept returns all the time, there's no shortage of games returned to the distributor. If the store wanted to return merchandise, they would have no trouble doing so. If you have poor customer service from a store, don't blame the game publishers.
Personally, i've never had trouble returning a defective game for a refund so i have no idea what you're talking about. If you're going to bring the DMCA into this, i'd at least expect you to have proof.
How many break the law just to turn themselves in with a tape documenting what they did?
I've known people who download a PC game, run some cracks, then play through until they beat the game and remove. It's a real shame but there are many others out there, otherwise ISO/BIN sites and newsgroups wouldn't receive enough revenue to stay afloat. This is why they love torrents, drop bandwidth costs and raise revenue on hits.
For the record I've gone out and purchased some games multiple times just to have those extra CD keys for online and network play. A buddy of mine has 5 registration keys for both Diablo 2 and the expansion purchased years ago and shared between himself and his wife.
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i know i got to this party late, but i read the entire other thread, and i have this to say:
you are a douche. even if you believe you are the white knight of Microsoft, you shouldnt have posted in the thread saying you reported him, that proves you did it either entirely, or mostly, just to spite/screw over a complete stranger, who wanted to have an interesting conversation on a website devoted to OUR hobby. you are a piece of shit of a human being and i truly hope this will some how come back around for you, then again, with your attitude, im sure you will lose out on a lot of things in life.
i always had a lot of respect for you due to your knowledge and helpful replies. this is now changed.
You know what? You're absolutely right. I do enjoy calling people out for piracy. If you'd like to make sure it turns around on me, tell ya what...
I'm in the middle of setting up a display tracing development hardware all the way back to the Atari 2600. I'll be at MGC, if you want to inflict some sort of karma, that'd be the time to do it. I plan on bringing about $50,000 in dev and prototype hardware to the show.
If you want to make sure i get my "just reward", why don't you show up and make sure a couple of the consoles "accidently" get knocked off the table or something. That'll show me who's a real man.
It's easy to sit back and pirate the things i make, but let's see if anyone has the guts to to do it in person.
So people ask that industry insiders make themselves available to the community, which is something i've tried to do for years. But when people start openly discussing piracy, and i call them on it, i get called "scum", "douche" and "a piece of shit of a human being". You ask us to be members of the community, but demand we be silent when it comes to piracy.
I've been civil and i've been honest, and this is what i get in return. I will freely admit that DRM sucks, it's a horrible idea and has no benefit for anybody. But, of course, i'm the enemy. I've always tried to educate and inform people about what's going on in the industry, and that's not going to change.
Looks nice there, doesn't it.
I'd be much easier (and cheaper) to just wait until your shit gets released publicly. A week later, I can download the emulator and ROM set.
Isn't the internet a great place?
Come now, you'll have to do better then that to get a rise out of me.
Besides, let me know how that Xbox 360 emulator is working out for you... (???)
I'm not trying to get a rise out of you. It's called 'poking fun'.
Besides, let me know how that Xbox 360 emulator is working out for you... (???)
Perfectly well, thanks for asking.
It's good to know they're already on the right track then. What they're doing now is working great with reducing piracy, right?
I notice that you didn't respond to the quote I posted from 2D Boy. They claimed a 90% piracy rate(later reduced to 82%), yet they still oppose DRM(claiming that it really didn't make a difference) and claim that the people who pirated their game wouldn't have bought their software anyway. They're a developer experiencing piracy first hand, their opinion on the issue should definitely count too.
That's a main reason why people think piracy is ok, they assume that the developers and programmers are well off so they don't need a few more dollars. Most people who pirate are much poorer than the people they pirate from. It's like Microsoft starting a campain saying "By pirating you're taking money directly out of Bill Gates pockets". He's the richest man in the world, not many people will feel obligated to give him extra cash.
The second link you posted is interesting, the company went under in 1984. That was during the big video game crash wasn't it? The crash that almost killed video games, only being revived soon after by the NES.
Plus here's a quote;
Sounds like the retailers being greedy was a major part of why they failed.Our next tactic was to reduce our prices. To become cheap enough that customers wouldn’t want to copy because they could have the real thing at a low price. This tactic would have worked and eventually did with budget software pretty much taking over the 8 bit cassette game market. However we were ahead of our time and the retailers and trade threw a complete and utter fit at our price reduction. Mostly they said they wouldn’t buy our games off us anymore at the lower pricepoint. We were forced to keep prices up.
Piracy is a big issue around the world. In Asia, majority of gamers don't buy console games. They only buy PC or Handheld because the games are cheaper and you can pirate them easily. I was in Malaysia and Singapore in Dec and I was amazed how much the game cost. PS3, Xbox360, PS2 games cost about $65-90 USD per game while DS/PSP games can range between $50-75 USD. Imagine trying to work at their salary and buy a game. Most people there don't make $50 USD per day. It takes them 1-2 months before they can earn enough to buy a game. This is why majority of Asians resort to piracy.
I believe there are a lot of untapped potential gamers in Asia. It is just that N. American developers always ignore them. I feel pity knowing our market price drive their gaming price up the roof.
.:Collection Pics:.
I didn't comment because i agree completely. I've already said that PC gaming needs to eliminate DRM, and that consoles need to loosen it.
Lovely, but i've been in this industry since 2003 and until last year i was only making $25,000 a year. I'm still making significantly less then $50,000. Sure, i could go somewhere else and make more money, but i honestly enjoy my job. Not everyone makes $100,000 a year in this industry.
If you factor in all the people who make a video game happen, from the packaging plant, to the marketing people, to the game testers, i've seen figures saying the average salary in the industry is around $30,000.
For those of you who liked psychonauts, when microsoft dropped double fine, some of the employees went weeks without a paycheck.
It looks to me like he got pissed at what I wrote earlier, did a google search and posted the top 4 links without even reading them...a couple were ambiguous at best...but wait i'm a brick wall, so it's useless to argue with me
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