Comment by memetichazard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by memetichazard | Hacker News Reader

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As a long time game industry veteran, allow me to tell you that this is simply not true. In fact, that is actually the internet's straw man counter argument, which is fueled by a couple poor PR incidents where a few people have made it seem that way.

I thought that was fueled by industry produced reports that blamed losses on piracy and assumed a 100% conversation rate between piracy and sales. (That may be more the music industry than the game industry, though)

What is that number? Who knows! But it's certainly greater than zero, and there's certainly enough impact of piracy to make it worth it to explore methods of minimizing that impact.

Yes, that number is greater than zero, but just how much greater than zero it is, is not insignificant. All methods used to reduce/eliminate piracy inflicts a cost of some sort. DRM annoys customers and is mostly ineffective in discouraging piracy.

For instance, Blizzard removed LAN from Starcraft 2. How many fans did that annoy enough to cause lost sales? How much piracy will that prevent? Especially since it seems there are BNet server emulators on the internet already.

I'm not arguing pro- or con-drm. I'm just stating that the article makes a few invalid assumptions.

Sales are lost to piracy, and it is always beneficial to find ways of turning pirates in to buyers, be it DRM or some kind of added value. I'd prefer it be the latter, but that's a much longer, harder, and more expensive route, as it requires added development.

Really, the only thing this affects (in terms of the entrenched game industry) is the PC. Piracy on consoles is low enough as to be nearly insignificant, due to the hoops required to pirate on console, coupled with the potential downsides.

I wish for a magic non-intrusive drm for PC so we could use it as a primary platform again. Sure, shoddy ports aren't helping, but at the end of the day, even non-ports have serious issues if they don't ship with a major online component.

I am completely anti-drm on most medias, but with games, there's a catch: They have no other means of income. When a TV show is pirated, well, they still get money from TV ads and dvd sales. When a movie is pirated, they still have the box office sales. When a cd is pirated, the artist still makes money at concerts.

When a game gets pirated, well, too bad so sad I guess. It's a difficult situation for everyone.

That's precisely why games have to stop using DRM and focus on creating additional revenue. For example, if your DRM blocks a pirated copy of your game for which you sell additional DLC, you won't get money for either the copy or the DLC. I know it's an oversimplified and exaggerated example, but I just want to illustrate the point.

I know people who pay regularly to go to the movie theater and see a new movie. A lot of those will later rent that same movie from BlockBuster because they liked it so much. And then they will make an illegal copy, because they liked it so much and also because it's the cheapest alternative to get a good quality copy. My point is that those pirates still contributed something to the revenue. One of the reasons why game pirates don't contribute anything is because there's nothing else to contribute.

Right, but creating additional revenue is difficult when costs are so high.

I don't know what the solution is. I guess the best one is to just make a multiplayer game on the basis of continuing to sell and support it for years at a stretch, like Valve. But that limits what kind of games you make, and would also put you in direct competition with Valve. Which... is probably just as bad as not doing it in the first place.

"it is always beneficial to find ways of turning pirates in to buyers"

You keep making that claim without giving any rationale to it whatsoever? If your way of turning pirates into buyers turns off other honest buyers, it could be a net loss.

It could be but only IF the amount of people turned off by DRM is greater than the amount of sales gained by it. People turned off a purchase by DRM are very vocal but are they numerous?

I don't know - do you? That is what I am saying, where are the numbers? At least the article in question her gave some numbers (at least for iPhone).

I think some people who do know are big games publishers. They have a large number of data points, they're the only ones with total daily retail and online sales figures and they also track downloads.

Where are the numbers? Well, why should they release them to someone who isn't part of their own company?

Presumably your DRM system (or whatever other approach you use) will cost money to develop (or buy in). So you need to make enough extra sales from the converted pirates to cover that cost. And there will be extra support costs from legitimate customers who encounter problems with the DRM system. And there might be running costs for the DRM system if it requires running a server somewhere.

Probably all small costs on their own, but they add up.

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