Comment by 9999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 9999 | Hacker News Reader

I think Sony overestimates the amount of piracy that this will enable. I softmodded my Wii long ago (in order to unlock the region to play Japanese and European games on a U.S. Wii). Ever since it's been an incredible pain in the butt to keep it updated to the latest modded firmware revisions in order to play legitimate games. Almost every time I buy a new game I have to dig through an incredibly dense array of sketchy forum posts and file sharing sites to find the newly patched custom firmware.

If a person were looking to play a game on its release day (legitimate or pirated), they would find the process so time consuming and annoying that I doubt more than 1% of Wii owners would bother with it. I would guess the same pattern would repeat for hacked PS3s. Of course, even a 1% loss in sales would be a pretty big blow for Sony and the other developers, but it's debatable whether or not that population would have paid for a pirated game in the first place.

Does anyone know if Nintendo ever announced how much they've lost in sales to piracy on the Wii? Has Sony ever released estimates on how much they might lose to piracy?

A realization I had when I first started working was just how cheap video games are compared to virtually any other form of entertainment.

Movie ticket = $10 / 2 hours = $5/hour

Amusement park = $30 / 5 hours = $6/hour

Dining out = $20 / 2 hours = $10/hour

Video game = $50 / 20 hours = $2.5/hour

I don't own any of the latest generation video game consoles, but if I did, I'd certainly be buying a bunch of them via download for their sheer economy in giving me entertainment value.

Never thought about it like that but it's true. At $60 a pop (£40 where I live), it's still a lot of money up front.

But in countries like this where every Console game needs to be imported, buying one is completly impossible (Even triplicating it's value), so for example if you go to a store, they won't even have original games: but pirate DVDs.

Thinking about my own recent expenditures:

Movie (Redwood City) - tickets $14, Popcorn+Drink - $8. + 15 minutes of commercial for 1:45 movie = $12/hour.

Dinner (at Flemings) - Entre $48, Drink $22, Salad $8, coffee $4, Dessert $7 - 2 Hours = $45/hour.

Video Game on my iOS Device - average $1.99, I've had some of them in constant rotation for 2+ years. Reasonably around 50 hours before I play them out Some only 20-30 hours, some 70 - though some (Field Runners, Slay, PvZ, MsPacMan, FlighControl, RopeNFly, Bloons, Galcon, Go) Have held my attention longer.. = $0.04/Hour.

I guess that's why I only go to Flemings once or twice a year, movies 8-10 times a year, and have spent $1000+ on the iTunes App Store in the last 4 years.

I'm sure I'm putting more thought into this than I should, but say $1000 in four years, that equates to one game every 3 days, so 50 hours per game would be pretty high.

Yes - I've conflated my AppStore Game purchasing with my App Store Total purchasing - I have a lot of purchases on my iPhone that aren't games. And, I don't get the same utility of, say, MotionXGPS, and GPSDrive, and Shazam as I do my games.

Well, you could save $8 on the movie by not buying popcorn/drinks, making the movie around ~$6-7 an hour, depending on where you go. (if you really need snacks, your girlfriend/wife's purse is perfect for that :) )

Not everyone can do it, but matinées are also great— you can see a movie for ~$5-6.

And some games provide a much longer entertainment value - Torchlight / Diablo / Starcraft / Zangband ;).

Hm, and this is topped by pen'n'paper roleplaying games, where a couple of rule books can last for years.

> years

Decades, if you don't buy all new rulebooks every few years like most of the RPG companies want you to.

In that case the player does a lot of the work to create he game, unless you buy campaign designs.

Dwarf Fortress = $0 / infinite hours = $Double 0/hour

Your chart assumes that entertainment is fungible though. 5 minutes on a roller coaster is probably better than 2 hours of Flubber.

To make the chart accurate, you should have net value = (fun value - cost).

If you value novelty and variety for fun, then video games are the ticket (as long as you aren't sticking to Battlecall of Warfighter genre titles).

Dwarf Fortress is shareware, not free. Not quite the same thing.

Isn't shareware where you only get a portion of the software and you are required to pay to get the rest?

If so, I'm not sure how DF fits that description.

No shareware doesn't have to be limited in anyway and often isn't apart from a nag screen. I agree donationware is more accurate.

Shareware has a legally binding price that in practice is not enforced. As noted, DF is not shareware.

Dwarf Fortress is donationware. You are not obligated to pay anything to play the game. But don't take my word for it:

http://www.bay12games.com/support.html

Bay 12 is dedicated to providing original games free of charge, but that doesn't mean it is free for us to make them. We've been online since December 2000, and you can help Bay 12 Games continue to thrive. If you've enjoyed any of our games, and you are able to give, we accept financial support. If you contribute electronically, you'll have the option to receive a story reward. If you contribute by mail and provide your return address somewhere on the envelope or check, you may receive a unique drawing, most likely in crayon. This option is available to electronic supporters as well. Upon receipt, you'll also have the option to be listed as a Bay 12 Champion.

Toady has been averaging $3-$4k/month lately:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=117156

Comparing those things on a cost/hour basis is ridiculous. They are not comparable on that scale since it doesn't account for the quality of amusement you're getting.

That aside, where are you getting those arbitrary hours? 20 hours on a video game is extremely rare these days, especially if you're not one that goes for the torturous achievements or sports/multiplayer FPS.

Most (high budget, modern) games will run you about 8-10 hours. If my estimate is accurate whatsoever, that would run the cost/hour down to $5.00 - $6.25/hour -- the same 'value' as a movie ticket and amusement park.

You only play video games one run through?

I tend to use the metric of "$1 per hour of play" with a small caveot where AAA games are allowed to breach that by some appreciable amount, usually putting them up to $2 or $3 an hour. Any more and I don't really see the point in owning it.

Then again, I don't buy most "high budget, modern games". I buy a few of them, and from companies I trust. Dishonored should last me 20 or 30 hours at least. I'll probably see 40 or 50 from Forza Horizon.

> 20 hours on a video game is extremely rare these days, especially if you're not one that goes for the torturous achievements or sports/multiplayer FPS.

What are you talking about? One recently released critically acclaimed game was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which players have averaged 75 hours of time on[0]. Even at $60, that's $0.8/hour.

And don't forget that unlike food or movie tickets, the price of a game goes down drastically over time. If you're willing to play older games, you can get them for almost nothing.

With Steam, I got L.A. Noire, a game released in May 2011 to pretty good reviews (83/100 on Metacritic for the PC version), for just $7.50 in July of this year. I've already played it for 43 hours (and still haven't finished it) - just $0.17/hour.

0: http://www.gamespot.com/news/skyrim-pc-players-average-75-ho...

I was one of those people who spent ridiculous number of hours in Skyrim, but that's a rare and far-between luxury. For every one great game like Skyrim, I pay for a dozen mediocre games that I play for maybe an hour or two.

The amount of time you need to commit to make it worthwhile is exactly the problem and introduces a high risk factor. If I see a mediocre movie, that's only 2 hours of value gone.

> For every one great game like Skyrim, I pay for a dozen mediocre games that I play for maybe an hour or two.

You're clearly doing something wrong then. I'm not a particularly big gamer, but by spending a minute or two online looking at review scores before buying a game, I've almost always been happy with my purchases.

> The amount of time you need to commit to make it worthwhile is exactly the problem and introduces a high risk factor.

I think this is less of a problem these days because you can get a pretty good idea of the quality of a game from online reviews, certainly better than newspaper-based movie reviews that people have relied on for the last half century (not that you can't find movie reviews online now as well).

Is it possible that I am using reviews and turns out I have specific things I enjoy or don't enjoy which isn't identical to everyone else?

For example, let's look at some of the highest rated games of all time list and see which ones I've bought and didn't feel I got my money's worth (just looking at the first page of metacritic top all time):

PS3: Assassin's Creed, Rock Band 2 (enjoyed Rock Band 1), Dragon Age: Origins, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare,

PC: Bioshock, Diablo 3 (big fan of Diablo 1), StarCraft 2 (big fan of StarCraft 1), Civilization IV.

Of course there are plenty of games where I did get more than my money's worth: Minecraft, Fallout 3, everything by Valve, GTA, WarCraft 3, Diablo, Elder's Scrolls, Baldur's Gate, etc etc. I'd say in any given year, there's probably at least as many games I've bought that were meh and just didn't grab me as there are ones that were amazing. That reminds me, I should probably send another donation to the Dwarf Fortress brothers.

It's not all about reviews, and not all games have demos on launch day (or even weeks later). Fact is, games are high-commitment (hours) and comparatively high-cost.

I was just as excited by MGS4 and Little Big Planet as I was disappointed when I had them. Reviews, hype and marketing did their job very well and I believed all of that. Luckily I was able to resell these turds.

Try to compare with a box of Chess or some other good board game. Or a ball.

Good board games are even less cost effective.

Eclipse is like $100 and I've only played it once for 6ish hours. Dominant Species also pushes a high price and I've played it 3 times. Ascencion was something like $40.

Good board games are EXPENSIVE; and so far the price-per-hour for me is still very high.

maaaybe.

We've only had our copy of eclipse for a short while, and since it's a big commitment to get a group to spend 4 or 5 hours together we've only managed 2 games so far. Roughly 10 hours for 100 bucks seems expensive, but what if you divide that across a group of 5 people? Then it's already down to 2$ per hour.

Every time the game comes to the table it looks like a better investment. All depends how you account for it, and how many plays you get out of it before you move on to the next new thing.

--- I admit I hadn't thought of splitting it among all the players, since I was the one that footed the bill. That works and is totally valid even in my rather rough $1/hr of fun metric. Good point! Same with Dominant Species and Android and other multi-player games, then.

That depends on how much you play them =).

I own about 100 bucks in Ticket to Ride Europe + 2 map packs, but we've probably played it for 100+ hours now...

On the other hand Battlelore sits unused because my friends don't dig it, so I'm at -$50 there =P

Eclipse is only $65 on CSI. It all depends on where you buy the stuff. The nice thing about board games is that good ones remain playable for years, unlike many video games.

Also, no DRM that requires you to be connected to the internet at all times.

Divide by number of players....

How about a deck of cards ? It can last for a looong time.

I only had an opportunity to play Eclipse once, so I don't know how much longevity that particular game has. But I never miss a chance to play Dixit, Neuroshima Hex or Dominion.

Good board games have no upper limit of how much you can play them. In contrast, many computer 'games' nowadays are story-based, and stories are almost always linear. How often can you read a (fiction) book ? With board games, you stop playing them once you're bored with them. There's no arbitrary limit.

I wish computer games returned back to roots (board games and pen&paper RPG games). The reason is highly value innovation and variety. With board games, rules are the distinguishing factor. By default, every board game tries to do something differently, if not by coming up with new things then by making a good mix of already known mechanics.

I think of buying a videogame as most comparable to buying a season of a TV show in a DVD box set: both are ~10-20 hour experiences to have on your TV set at home. The price of a videogame is basically on par in that comparison:

Video game = $50 / 20 hours = $2.50/hour

A season of The Wire = $30 / 13 hours = $2.25/hour

Videogames are at the cheapest they've ever been. In previous generations some games cost as much as $100, and in the cartridge based eras games rarely cost as low as $60 as they do now. And we're talking in 2012 dollars, which are worth much less that 1995 and 2000 dollars.

I remember buying games in 1980's. Over $130 in today's dollars. I do seem to remember them having a pretty good amount of play time in them. Of course, in the Apple II/Commodore world, we really didn't have to worry about keeping up with hardware upgrades. ;)

Not everywhere; In some parts of the world AAA games still cost $100. It's not just games either; in Australia the digital download version of Adobe Creative Suite is 57% more expensive than it is in the US. Thats a huge price difference when dealing with $4000 software.

Prices here have not come down at all; services like Steam should let us buy games at US prices but most companies use regional pricing on Steam so we still have to pay more (and accounts get locked if you try to sneak around buying games from other regions)

That's true. Software is definitely more expensive in other parts of the world. I was just thinking from the North American point of view. Thanks for bringing up a good point.

If that is your standard of valuing entertainment you should try reading a book sometime.

Maybe I'm an optimist, but I'd like to believe that Sony has managed to change the gamer/customer culture. Before PS3, it was quite normal and easy for people to pirate PlayStation games, even though they had means to buy them. Then came PS3 and people who used to play exclusively pirated games had to either leave the platform or learn to adapt to actually buying games. In many cases, the change from pirating to buying was a positive one: where before people would sometimes have more games than time to play them, now they have to pick and choose and enjoy their games.

Sure, maybe PS3 is open to piracy now, but people who have adapted to buying games will probably find it too cumbersome to revert, especially if the rewards are questionable.

Or that's what I would like to believe... ;)

Surely the platform only actually matters if you intend on playing online. I've got a PS3 and 360, but never play online (although I don't use them for copied games). I used to worry about gamer score or whatever it's called, but these days I only actually use the ethernet functionality of either when I need to update the firmware to play a game that requires it.

I don't know numbers but I'll agree with you what a pain it is nowadays to get a new game working. I've given up and just bought the game.

For PS3 I never even bothered to try. The games are so high quality the cost doesn't phase me, especially when the ones I miss go on sale for $15-$20 and Amazon/Toys R Us/Best Buy do buy 2 get 1 free or Buy One Get One 50% off.

Of course this is just you and I, no clue on how much piracy really goes on. The one console that it was TOO EASY to pirate was the DS/GBA Wait, no, Dreamcast would have to be the easiest.

By the time there are easy to use tools to pirate games in the ps3 (a year maybe as the most recent) there will be a PS4 out and it won't be as important for Sony.

I think its important to consider not only piracy but the effects of malicious users in online games. It only takes one person to ruin your experience in a game, even worse if you are cheated and can't do anything about it.

I have advocated in the past for Sony and MS that they are behaving as mostly rational actors defending their business interests. People using cheats and hacks in multi-player games is another strong case for keeping consoles locked down. More and more I'm questioning the methods they use to do so though. The constant firmware/system software updates that they roll out are incredibly obtrusive. Prior to this generation of consoles one of the things that really made console gaming superior to PC gaming was the ease of use. Buy game. Stick game into console. Play game.

Now you buy the game, download it (and wait) or stick it in, install whatever stupid update is required for the game (and wait), restart your stupid console (and wait), install the game (and wait, or don't install it and suffer awful load times), and then after all that maybe you get to play the thing. Meanwhile, PC gaming is way ahead of the curve in this new paradigm in almost every respect. Yes, you often have to download the game, but you can also start installing and playing before it's finished downloading (Diablo 2 let you do this, I'm not sure how common that is), and you don't have to restart your computer due to some stupid firmware update (that is really just there to prevent piracy).

Personally I think that Sony and MS are bigger targets for piracy since they have games more appealing to, well, people who would pirate games (18-34 men).

A seven year old's mom isn't going to figure out how to pirate Lego Harry Potter on wii. The casual market that Wii targets is also the one least likely to engage in piracy, in my estimation. Wii Fit? Not a target for piracy, even if the dongle wasn't a factor.

That said, the Wii is by far the easiest current gen console to play pirated games on.

7 year olds have 18-34 year old male fathers.

Without overcomplicating it, I think the 7 year old boys with pirate fathers account for a small percentage of Wii sales, and that they are also more likely to own and play other consoles.

Ive noticed that there is too much spam concerning PS3 on the internet, perhaps Sony itself or a contractor has the mission to pollute search-phrases like "ps3 hack, ps3 custom firmware" and so on. Before these where leaked the first 3 pages on google for anything relating to hacking the ps3, custom brew etc, where links to really sketchy forums with really sketchy downloads - all leading to similar archives of "custom" firmware for 4.10 for example, the size of ~250MiB which was password locked and you where told to fill out a form on several sites to get the password, basically just a huge time waste.

It makes sense, to combat piracy by using spam/scam techniques. That will keep the pirates or would-be pirates out.

I think the point is that the PS3 is now trivially easy to update to the latest without trouble. In fact, I'm sure there are people working on alternative market interfaces for the PS3 so that you can do it just like it were really connected.

Honestly, the Wii is the most annoying console to keep up to date. Since JTAG/RGH on the Xbox, it's just silly easy to pirate, cheat, mod, play old games you couldn't otherwise, etc.

I just laugh at this because I think overall you're absolutely right, that this probably doesn't tradeoff with potential sales much. That having been said, I have no sympathy for Sony.

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