93-95% PC piracy

[Rattlehead]

Originally Posted by Madfish

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?

Originally Posted by Madfish

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.

[fly_zo]

Originally Posted by Rattlehead

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]

Originally Posted by fly_zo

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]

Originally Posted by BadAim

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.