93-95% PC piracy

[Viking]

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-08-22-guillemot-as-many-pc-players-pay-for-f2p-as-boxed-product
I can understand the Steam choise now

Viking

[Flanker35M]

S!

Gotta start hoarding the games I want as boxed then..Soon have more games on the shelf than books :D

[fly_zo]

well, maybe if publishers would make sure their products are fully developed and working before publishing so customers wouldn't have to wait and download patches for every single game these days things would be different . ( not pointed to CoD here but rather as general trend) .

I honestly can't remember one game in last decade which didn't require patch of some sort just to work as it was advertised .

Heck even IL2 (original) had patch 75mb if i remember it right ( sound issues etc ) which at the time brought my dial up modem and bandwidth to its knees ( not to mention cost - it was pretty expensive "sport" those days in my part of the World )

just my humble opinion...

Z

[Gourmand]

should move to pilot's lounge :rolleyes:

[Untamo]

S!

Pie Rats will always pirate and buyers will buy. This is what the game companies should get. They shouldn't be trying to sell the game to the pirates by force(DRM), because they will not buy, no matter what. No DRM to date has worked against the pirates. Buyers on the other hand have to suffer the negative effects.

Some companies like Paradox Interactive have actually gotten this and they don't have copy protection on (most of) their games.

Another disappointing trend is the lack of demos. People actually have to pirate games in order to test them out.

EDIT: Just to point out, Steam doesn't work against pirates either. Torrent sites are packed with non-Steam versions of games.

[Rattlehead]

well, maybe if publishers would make sure their products are fully developed and working before publishing so customers wouldn't have to wait and download patches for every single game these days things would be different . ( not pointed to CoD here but rather as general trend) .

I honestly can't remember one game in last decade which didn't require patch of some sort just to work as it was advertised .

Heck even IL2 (original) had patch 75mb if i remember it right ( sound issues etc ) which at the time brought my dial up modem and bandwidth to its knees ( not to mention cost - it was pretty expensive "sport" those days in my part of the World )

just my humble opinion...

Z

Things would not be different. Movies and music never require patches, yet look at the piracy rate.
Completely invalid argument.

[fly_zo]

Things would not be different. Movies and music never require patches, yet look at the piracy rate.
Completely invalid argument.

nah movies /music are pirated cos of way to high prices for BluRays/CDs ( at least in my country ) ... anyways there is a silver-lining bands and singers have more tours these days ( no more: studio - CD - enjoy way too much money) .

but that's entirely different subject...

Z

[5./JG27.Farber]

93-95% PC piracy?

I must be one of the only people actually buying games then... :rolleyes: I dont believe this figure.

[Madfish]

It's complete bullshit though. No other word for it. He doesn't even have a source for this number, and ironically - as you cannot "steal" (pirate) games, he's unable to provide it anyways. They are copied, not stolen.

In the last few years 95% of publisher released games with multiplayer required accounts OR crazy DRM. It's impossible to pirate most multiplayer titles. If anything you can only have the single player experience.

Secondly it's not a PC problem but yet publishers always blame the PC because they are afraid of something very much different. Console players pirate as hell too - but they do not alter the content of games, mod them or even expect the ability to mod them. Instead they are used to being fed, just pirating a new game release instead.

THIS is the core issue here. Most publishers are actually afraid of F2P because anyone can do it and if they do then it will fail again. The only addition you can make to a F2P title is rubbish, content that a good community would create anyways. Models? Hats? Missions? Titles? Ranks? It's all either worthless or not a big deal compared to fundamental game mechanics.




There is no piracy. You can't steal bytes, you copy them. No one is missing them. And the sales, in 95% of the cases, wouldn't have happened if they had to buy it. There are also examples where pirace actually helped games. A games success is NOT just about money. Some of the most incredible and even lucrative games were sold for cheap and without any or much DRM. A games success is made by the community behind it and it's size.

The real piracy is within publishers, selling uncreative and unprofessional games for very hefty and questionable prices, especially in the EU or AUS etc. They make billions of profits and yet say "something was stolen". So where did it go then? If anything something wasn't bought. But seeing how much money Activision / Blizzard / EA / UBI etc. make I really wonder...


I own some of the games I loved like 5 times or more in some cases. But there was also games where I should've been paid just for wasting time and installing them.


This is just a big scheme of one of the biggest financial sectors - where a damn lot of investors is expecting high returns from the stocks they own and it's getting harder and harder to milk people. F2P is the incarnation of milking whales - and yes, the technical term for a paying F2P customer is "whale", referring to the whalehunt - aka making a damn big "profitable" kill. Search it and you'll see the motivation behind thecrap that Ubi guy is spouting. The only reason he can look into the mirror every day is because of the money falling out of his pocket when he thinks of F2P.

[von Pilsner]

93-95% PC piracy?

I must be one of the only people actually buying games then... :rolleyes: I dont believe this figure.

I agree with you, the figure is made up.

[TomcatViP]

Completely agree with that.

There will be piracy as long as the marketed price doesn't reflect the real value of the tittle. Who has not seen himself with the feeling of being stolen by an editor with a poor quality game just released with no real content (WoP comes into my mind).**

When the industry will understand that they do have to regulate itself then the user will trust what comes out of the box. Instead of that, we have critics (online or n magazine) that acts like marketing agents.

With high prices and such poor experience, I can understand that Piracy is the fastest way to test a title. And then when your pirated copy works, why bother to buy a boxed one?

Cinema have the press. And it's amazing how many people use to read the comments before actually going to see a movie.

It's time for the industry to come out into the bright light.

Why not a 3 weeks full time/100% access for all instead of surfing on paying to get the best weapon/ride/bonus what is the mirrored face of the F2P (RoF comes into my mind now). You know why ? because most of the games can be "ended" in this laps of time.

But it's always easier to found a short term solution and point by the finger some obscure and hardly quantifiable data.

~S

PS: I am not a gamer. Only got FlightSims on my PC. All bought at their time of release. But since 3 or 4 years I can see a marked trend to lower the quality of the content and spend high bucks on marketing. So, for who are the dev working you think ? ;)

**In the 70's a new marketing trend surfaced in the appliance industry: the break time. Products were build by the leaders of this segments with special parts designed to suffer from a mechanical failure within a carefully studied laps of time in order to raise the number of unit sold. before that you could keep your refrigerator, you washing machine or your toaster for years until you decided to buy a new one more fashionable or with improved capacity etc.. What came next ? The unit price went down lower and lower until new low cost leaders surfaced out on this market (Low cost labor countries like China at the time) .

Now, most of this product are only branded by those historic leaders (but not actually built or designed by them) that have now lost most of their market share . You can buy a toaster for such a low price that you don't bother to buy a new one if that one made it's time FAIRLY.

That what has happen here, the game industry sale toaster with no lifetime with the same marketing vision. The only problem is that it's hard for most of the individuals to stole a toaster from the manufacturer. Same vision but a different problems and poor (short term) management. That's all the recipe for another disaster.

[Blackadder]

93 - 95%, but I thought Ubisoft DRM is going so well

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/28/ubisoft-our-drm-is-a-success/

or maybe ubisoft just says whatever they want that fits their current agenda rather than worrying about actual facts.

Big drop in sales.....

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/07/opinion-ubisoft-piracy-and-the-death-of-reason/

must be pirates, couldn't possibly be shoddy games or horrible DRM which is giving ubisoft nearly as bad a reputation as EA.


I don't believe it for a second but it is a good line for the chairman to use, it is better to blame pirates for the companies poor performance rather than lacklustre leadership or counterproductive policies.

[WTE_Galway]

The "piracy" figures thrown around assume everyone that has a copy of a game, a song or an album stashed away somewhere would otherwise have gone out and purchased it.

If that were true my daughter way back when when she was 14 would have apparently spent in excess of $20,000 on music. In fact most of what she had collected was never even listened to once, it was just there to impress her friends or make it easy to check out a band if someone talked about it. In reality, despite her huge music "collection" she still went out and bought the CDs of the albums she really liked.

The other issue that is missed is that some of the biggest complainers in the media industry are the biggest pirates hiding behind corporate lawyers and money. Many recent movies are direct ripoffs of foriegn films with no royalty payed. A case in point is the 2010 movie "Book of Eli" which is an almost word for word copy of an Australian film from 15 years early.

In another example I know of people in the tabletop gaming industry that have released WWII armor rules etc only to have them stolen by major publishers and included in books and game packages. In one case the culprit was Penguin books, who when contacted told the author "If you think you can take on a multinational corporation in court go for it".

[Rattlehead]

Completely agree with that.

There will be piracy as long as the marketed price doesn't reflect the real value of the tittle. Who has not seen himself with the feeling of being stolen by an editor with a poor quality game just released with no real content (WoP comes into my mind).**

When the industry will understand that they do have to regulate itself then the user will trust what comes out of the box. Instead of that, we have critics (online or n magazine) that acts like marketing agents.

With high prices and such poor experience, I can understand that Piracy is the fastest way to test a title. And then when your pirated copy works, why bother to buy a boxed one?



It is up to everyone to do research for himself on a game, and to decide whether or not to buy a title. Whether or not that title is 'worth' the money is actually completely irrelevant because it's highly subjective.

A game is put on a shelf, or available for download via Steam. There is a asking price. You decide whether or not the title is worth buying for the price.
If it is, you buy it. If not, you don't. It does not entitle anyone to help themselves to a pirate version simply because they feel the asking price is too high. Gaming is a luxury, not a right.
Wait for the title to drop in price or whatever. Or just don't buy it.

[Rattlehead]

There is no piracy. You can't steal bytes, you copy them. No one is missing them. And the sales, in 95% of the cases, wouldn't have happened if they had to buy it.

It is a missed sale. What's missing is the revenue generated from legitimate purchases. Game development costs money; a whole lot of money. Programmers, level designers, 3D animators, writers, marketers, distributors etc. need to get paid for the work they've done on the product. They're doing a job, just like you and I.
Essentially, piracy is screwing these guys over, since a missed sale is a lost opportunity to make money on that sale.

John Carmack stated more than once how he felt slapped in the face by the PC community for Doom 3. It was a title that cost a fortune to make, and a hell of a lot of time to develop. The pathetic sales of Doom 3 ensured that id Software migrated to the consoles where piracy is a lot less rife. Now we have to put up with ports like RAGE.
That he's a millionaire is not the point.

I'd also like to know how you can state that 95% of sales would not have happened if people had to buy a game legally. Where is your source? You cannot accuse Guillemot of pulling stats out of his arse and then do the same thing.
Call of Duty 4 had 400,000 legitimate purchases on the PC platform, but had 4.1 million illegal downloads. Are you seriously suggesting that 4 million people would not have bought the game if they could not score it for free?


There are also examples where pirace actually helped games. A games success is NOT just about money.

True, piracy in a sense can help a small indie title get exposure, but I've yet to see a case where piracy helps a widely marketed, heavily promoted AAA title in any way.
And frankly, a game's success is heavily dependent on the revenue it generates. If Clod had sold ten times the figure it did, it would justify a larger development team, a bigger budget for marketing and promotion and it would result an altogether slicker, more polished package.

Conversely, poor sales leads to the publisher getting skittish about funding the developer, or worried about putting that game on a platform like the PC again.


Guys, you can try and justify piracy in any way you like, but at the end of the day, people pirate stuff because they're getting something for nothing. It's about greed and a false sense of entitlement.

Piracy is hurting PC gaming and it's causing us to have to put up with bullshit DRM, which would not exist if piracy didn't exist. DRM exists only because of piracy.
The hilarity of it all is that pirates justify piracy because of DRM, when it's because them that DRM exists in the first place.

[ATAG_Doc]

I don't believe these numbers. But if software manufacturers would add a digital thumbprint whereas to only allow one active copy to work and ran a check on the host system to verify it was legit we may get some where.

[fly_zo]

people pirate stuff because they're getting something for nothing. It's about greed and a false sense of entitlement.





well we here in Croatia have nifty little " Intellectual Rights Protection tax" included in price of any sort of blank media ( DVD , CD , Flash-drive) so we pay even if we store our personal stuff ( pics/ data ...) just as we would as we pirated someones work .

so it's not something for nothing ... it's just paying in advance ;-)


all rights holder institutions / individuals are very welcome to collect their fee from our government cos as far as i'm concern i have already paid for all my music and stuff .

Z

[tk471138]

honestly games used to be at least good enough to download (pirate?) but now i dont even bother with that...however being able to try a game for free whether its pirated or not, can be a boon for the developers...ARMA2 free edition got me to buy all their arma2 titles...but now MOST games are so crappy like call of duty or the battle field series, that its not even worth it to download the games for free let alone search for them...

i will never NEVER, buy a game with out trying it first and if that means i have to pirate (simply copy) the game then so be it... ( and i dont mean some demo that is highly controlled only showing the user the polished portions of the game think diablo 3, where the users could try the first half of act 1)

also when i pirate a game i dont have to agree to any BS terms or deal with DRM...i dont have to basically agree to a contract that says the developers and publisher can do whatever they want when ever they want how ever they want and the user has zero recourse...yea sorry as long as the terms of games read like that (and they all do) im not going to want to buy them...

[BadAim]

well we here in Croatia have nifty little " Intellectual Rights Protection tax" included in price of any sort of blank media ( DVD , CD , Flash-drive) so we pay even if we store our personal stuff ( pics/ data ...) just as we would as we pirated someones work .

so it's not something for nothing ... it's just paying in advance ;-)


all rights holder institutions / individuals are very welcome to collect their fee from our government cos as far as i'm concern i have already paid for all my music and stuff .

Z

But, Fly you miss the real point. Just because your government steals a given amount of money from you (taxes), does not give you the right to steal from the guy who developed the thing that is stolen.

This whole idea that extra expense and trouble created by thieves is somehow the fault of the person being robbed is bloody ludicrous. Screw all you thieves.

If you want to sit back and do nothing and get the benefit of those who work, you deserve nothing but a slow death by starvation. Period.

[adonys]

that Ubisoft guillemont guy is just delusional.

isn't just soo easy for their team to explain poor sales on a title by blaming piracy? while it would take ethics, brain and guts to acknowledge the fact that you just produced a crappy piece of software, and before start blaming others, you should first look in the mirror for the culprit.

it's the doom of the game development industry, leaded by high-floor empty-heads who take decisions based on out-of-reality numbers and marketing studies made by people not understanding a bit from what's happening on this market, or its customers psychology.

Ubi's failure to meet prognoses in sales numbers has rather to do with horrible DRM, crappy titles, milked franchises, game launches with ridiculous Q&A and their awesome game-post-release and general-customer support and, first of all, with losing the respect of the gaming community.

dixit!

[Sternjaeger II]

the only way to effectively tackle the issue (and yes, those numbers are ridiculous), is to completely change the approach to gaming.

Many developers agree now that the future of gaming will be with a new generation of ad hoc consoles that will work as terminals, and people will just connect to servers and play online the game they paid for via a fee or subscription to a service.

Thinking about it, gaming on PCs is a bit of an anomaly, one could even say a bad habit, that got pretty quickly out of hand and turned into a non homogeneous reality of different machines, pc spec etc... a true mess that favours hardware producers, but surely doesn't help developers or the gamers' pockets.

The best way to tackle the issue is again to completely rethinking the gaming structure, which would allow for better gaming experience, compatibility and ultimately R&D, and as faster internet connections are becoming widely available, cloud gaming is probably the incoming revolution.

[fly_zo]

But, Fly you miss the real point. Just because your government steals a given amount of money from you (taxes), does not give you the right to steal from the guy who developed the thing that is stolen.

This whole idea that extra expense and trouble created by thieves is somehow the fault of the person being robbed is bloody ludicrous. Screw all you thieves.

If you want to sit back and do nothing and get the benefit of those who work, you deserve nothing but a slow death by starvation. Period.


again it is not thievery if you pay in advance ... it is just how things are organized here


if you go to the restaurant and have an meal after paying to waitress you don't really care if restaurant owner gets that money or not ...

also if government takes fee for my medical from my salary every month (and they do) i don't need to pay doctor every time i need his services .

Why should we( the little 99% people) carry the burden for those 1% ... they are incorporated they have founds and army of lawyers so they can collect their fee. But having double payment , from final customers and from associations ( collected from taxes) is rather appealing for always hungry 1% ...

you should really wake up and stop looking at the world as black and white cos it is unfortunately only gray .


ah and i should mention earlier that i do buy my games ...

[adonys]

as the average age of a ww2 simulator is way over 30, I think we all are buying our games around here.

heck, I even have some 350 games on Steam only, and I don't think I've even started up half of them, not to talk about really playing.