More Evidence Of Overwhelming Piracy | Hacker News Reader

More Evidence Of Overwhelming Piracy

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

14 pointslucumo29 comments

Welcome to software and the internet. Distribution is far easier, but so is copyright infringement. If you've released your own software, 10:1 shouldn't be surprising. Stuff like audio software is even worse, where the ratio spirals completely out of control and small developers will often need a second job.

Would all those people have bought the game if the bootlegging weren't available? No way. But it definitely would have been better. Well, maybe? Hm.

It's a trade-off you're basically forced to make now, even if you don't want it. It also doesn't help that lots of sales still come from boxed copies for some reason (which costs money to produce..) and all of the piracy happens over the internet (where it costs extremely little to distribute over) so developers looking to increase sales of games have to pony up even more money upfront to get boxed copies into stores.

I've seen a 90% piracy rate mentioned in several articles now; I wouldn't be surprised if it's industry standard. If so, Stardock is actually doing much better than mainstream publishers.

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-has-90-piracy...

http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/01/06/soccer-game-has-90-pi...

World of Goo was later revised down to a little below the 5/6 seen here.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/15/world-of-goo-pira...

Conversion rate appears to be 1:1000 with piracy numbers this high.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350

This is really sad. I am in the process of making a game and am just thinking of calling it quits after reading stuff like this. It seems like MMO's are the way to go business side - since it is setup in a way that does not provide piracy vehicle. Which is bad if you don't wan't to make a MMO. Also, it seems PS3 hasn't been cracked yet and there are alot of PS3 owners deprived of good, non-casual games.

But... but... but... don't you think the pirates are helping promote the game?

I know you're being facetious, but it is certainly possible that their sales would be even less without piracy. Plenty of games sell less than 18,000 copies.

I too, is in the process of making games. However, I alway thought of piracy as a business problem or just "underserved" customers.

If they paid for the bandwidth, the computer, the hardware upgrade than surely they have no problem for paying for goods and services that can't just be simply be provided for free.

Gone are the days you can just sell a new game. You have to maintain existing projects and games as if you were a open source developer developing your own little corner of the world.

You may even have to sell t-shirts.

Whining about piracy make for great drama and gain sympathy, but it is not going to help you win a single penny.

Whether or not you have the right to control what other people can do with their copies of the game is another matter entirely.

I think we can agree on one thing, the importance of having something to eat.

I had a same train of thought up until a year or two ago. It is pretty much unrealistic and too optimistic to think of piracy as undeveloped opportunities. I lived last year, for half a year, in Thailand due to the nature of my job (I am an animation director by training and it is my day job) and was introduced to the wonders of SE Asia - and Asia in general, since I had more time to explore it than several day trips. What struck me as obvious is that people there behave regarding piracy in more open ways then we do - in western world - however, it is pretty much the same way most of the people think. For example, you can openly buy a pirate copy of whatever in the malls in Bangkok and get a receipt for it. There are shops with pirate stuff as well as shops next to it with legal stuff.

I've noticed that there are games, for example from EA, that are price-tailored to Thailand, so that games are really affordable to Thai people. However, I've talked to the sales people and everybody confirmed that pretty much everyone buys pirate stuff next to the legal stuff, even when price is close to it. For example pirate copy is around 90-100 Baht and Thai legal version is around 200-250. Only games immune to piracy there are MMO's.

Now, consider that Thai model to other cultures. I live in SE Europe and I can vouch the train of thought is the same. Why would I pay if I can have it for less or free. There just isn't way around that, people do not like to pay if they don't need to - does not matter if it is legal or not.

There are, luckily, people that _GET_ the consequences of this and pay up for stuff - so that they can get new games, more stuff in the future etc... if not moral satisfaction only.

Business-wise I don't think you can rely only on that kind of people. If you read up some of the post-mortems on gamasutra and gasp at A title budgets, you can clearly see that in order to make any money out of this is that you have to have atleast 3 games in production in parallel and to break 200K+ units push to the market. That goes for A titles, of course, but model is scalable.

I would just like to state that _the game_ I am doing is purely out of love for games and my secret life as a programmer. If it makes any money when/if it will be out, good - I can do that stuff then all the time with ramen on the table, if not I don't care because I have other "stuff" I do. However, think about it for a second if it where your full time job and people steal stuff, ludicrous. No good demo, trial or whatever can compensate for the idea that you can get something for free if you are average joe who cares only about that game and dozens or so hours he will have fun with it. He doesn't care about future of it, about you, about moral issues... No. Same goes with movies/music. Only thing you can possibly monetize on is that if you have advertising tie ins, online fee, collector/special editions where you actually sell toys/package more than a game itself, and stuff like that - everything but the game itself. Sad, because if at least 30-40% of people payed up, instead of sub 10%, it would open up larger budgets for greater games, and not only for run-of-the-mill sequels that take less budget because return is not great.

sorry for the long rant, I just feel angry about all of this - not because of piracy per se. Piracy is and always will be around, everybody pirated something sooner or later, but not always damnit. Looks like both software and entertainment industries are shifting towards some future model of business that is still not on a horizon. Alternative would be that people who do both software and entertainment will shift to other stuff, which will not happen. I guess we are all in a twitter stasis now - great and all, but need a new way to make money.

I don't look at this "sad". If people don't want to pay for it, they don't want to pay for it. If it happen to be that 99% of artists/muscicans/programmers etc can no longer find work in a post-copyright world, so be it.

I don't even believe that there is some sort of moral obligation to pay for copyrighted stuff anyway. Rather, I believe that the copyright system is an artifical insitution that modify the result of the free market. It distort incentive and direct resources to part of the economy where it wouldn't be in the first place.

The fact that the free market is starting to break into and killing all the players is simply reality intruding on people's illusions.

I am not here to suffer for a cause or anything but I want to survive so I can make a living on games, whether or not the market size has drastically shunk or expanded.

The thing that irate me the most is that game developers think that players have a moral obligation to support developers or not do something that percevied to hurt their revenues. We don't even have a moral standing to control what other people can do with their copies of the game. So we used words like "stealing" or "piracy" to justify oursleves as victicms of plunder when in reality, they're just copying stuff.

Yeah. Life is really harsh that way. Sometime we can only blame oursleves for being fools.

(on the other hand, 99% of all pirates are pussycats, losers, and cowards in term of their characters, but that's just another matter entirely)

Well, on the bright side, they did sell 18,000 copies, so that's $720k. I couldn't see any information on how much the game cost to develop, so we don't know if they still made money or not.

To me it's "sad" in the same way that being able to voice calls from your PC is "sad", if you work for a telco that is. People found a cheaper way to get what they want. Good luck betting against that.

> To me it's "sad" in the same way that being able to voice calls from your PC is "sad", if you work for a telco that is. People found a cheaper way to get what they want. Good luck betting against that.

There's a "minor" difference there. The telco competes against an independently developed product, while the game maker competes against his own product.

There are differences, yes, but the take home lesson is similar - businesses based upon specialised delivery of information are doomed in the presence of a general network. The problem the game makers have is that their whole model revolves around customers not being able to acquire the information they want (ie, a game) unless they buy it from the producer. Unfortunately, this is no longer true for many people, who have found a much cheaper transfer method.

The challenge for the producers is to find a way of making money which isn't reliant on being the sole source of the raw information. For game producers, this could be to charge for playing the game, a la WoW. For movie producers, the cinema. For musicians, the concert. Charge for the experience, not the delivery.

Hope that makes sense.

That's too bad.

I think in a few years America will be where China is today: you'll be unable to buy PC games. Instead, you'll rent access to data on servers under the game company's control. It is already pretty much happening -- the American PC game industry might as well be called "WoW and friends" at this point going by the sales charts.

That is the ultimate solution to piracy. And it will work. It works in China. You can no more torrent a game residing on a server than you can pirate Basecamp by downloading Firefox.

Yup. In fact, some groups are looking to push this solution even further, so that all the game processing/rendering takes place on the server:

http://blogs.amd.com/unprocessed/2009/03/27/server-side-rend...

It sounds like they still have some issues with latency and bandwidth to work out, but not all games need low latency. And this solution neatly solves the piracy problem -- even for single player games -- as well as eliminating publisher concerns over modchips, game resale, and client-side hacks. And it has much lower client-side hardware requirements, too, so you don't need to worry about who has what console.

Server-side rendering actually will turn out to work amazingly well, and will surprise most of the naysayers.

I think the strategy around bandwidth and latency is going to wind up being parking container datacenters near various isp's so everything but long-distance game state syncing stays on the local network; not perfect, and higher upfront, but it works.

The problems were exacerbated by Gamestop breaking the street date even after they were specifically told they couldn't. I think this all would have been a much smaller issue if Stardock had been able to release the game when they planned to.

In addition, I don't think that Stardock is necessarily surprised with the piracy numbers.

I wonder if this article will increase their sales, btw... wouldn't be that surprising. I, for one, never heard of this game, and now I'm going to go check it out. I may not buy it, but certainly it's a decent marketing move. If 100'000 people are willing to play this thing (pirated or not), it's probably decent.

Pretty surprising that they would allow network play without a valid, paid account.

Yes - that shows an astonishing lack of business sense.

I was going to chime in that the smart thing to do when your business model ("build standalone software and sell it") isn't worthwhile anymore is to adapt that business model ("build networked software and require a paid, verified licence for networked functionality"), rather than to rant about piracy.

But in this case, they did build a networked application/game - but they forgot to actually charge for the networked part! That's pretty silly tbh. Unless the networked activity is bringing you additional revenues, you should charge for access to it.

Ideally, what you want to do is build a product where the networked portion of it is so essential that very few will bother cracking the software and running it standalone. A good example of that would be WoW - some people have cracked it to run on homebrew servers, but they're by far the minority. Most dutifully pay their monthly licence.

When your business model becomes obsolete because of changing technology, you should adapt, not fight it. What's true for the music industry is also true for the software industry, I'm afraid.

> A good example of that would be WoW - some people have cracked it to run on homebrew servers, but they're by far the minority.

I don't know what the global numbers are, but it's the opposite in my vicinity: there's a number of local WoW servers and most local networks have clients with patches for them. Only a few players ever tried the official server, majority uses the local ones.

Same thing with Lineage, Ultima and others.

This doesn't however invalidates your main point: those players are not likely to pay for the official server, even if there would be no local ones (I blame bandwidth costs and difficulties in money transactions).

Anyway, the fact remains: there's a lot of people playing the local servers.

Where are you?

Sounds like South Korea to me, happens a lot there.

Ukraine.

I guess the situation is the same in any region where providers are small region-based ones: that, and high bandwidth cost for external access spawns strong local communities, with lots of services from chats and forums to huge file sharing storages, game servers, etc.

From the comments: "Haven't they ever heard of a CD key?"

They don't. The updates require you to have a valid account with Impulse and the updates are what point you to the correct servers.

The problem was that with Gamestop breaking the street date, people were playing with legitimate and pirated copies of the game before Stardock was ready to support the rush of people playing. The issues were compounded by various not-so-great decisions like having the game try to connect to the servers and check for updates whenever it is booted up. So, you had thousands of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login, causing problems for the legit owners.

"you had thousands of pirated copies hammering the servers trying to login, causing problems"

A few thousand failed login attempts caused problems? Sounds like they need a new systems administrator/DBA. A well configured authentication system should be able to easily say "no" to practically unlimited numbers of login attempts. "High value target" production systems often decline many thousands of invalid auth attempts per minute.

Unless the client is unbelievably badly coded (ie keep trying to login every second, indefinitely), that's not even the beginning of a good explanation.

I did say among other things, and one of the issues was that things were still running on the beta servers initially, which were not configured for the load they had come Monday through Tuesday.

I am trying to mention this from memory, so I may have the specifics wrong.

Edit: Again, this all stems from Gamestop breaking the street date, and not by only a day or two either but the Friday prior.

Fair enough, sorry for sounding like I was jumping down your throat!

Ha, I can imagine how it went down now. "Yes boss, we'll bring the production servers online over the weekend, all ready for the launch on Monday" ..

Actually, the game was supposed to launch that Tuesday. I think they said a lot of employees were supposed to have that Monday off for Easter weekend.

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