On the other hand, I am quite tech-savvy and run mulitple game servers off of a private box based on donations from a decent sized community. I recently went out and purchased a bran new game, it looks awesome and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. It’s a racing game, and my platform of choice is the PC so I went so far as to order a new controller. Well, I have my game but I can’t play it. You see I buy most of my games thru steam and this is the first game I have purchased a hard copy for in about 3 years. I popped the game into a dvdrom on my media server and shared the drive across the network and got the game installed with no issue. When it came time to actually run the game, it wanted the dvd. I had just installed it via shared rom drive, but could not play it? You see, activision published the game and included the latest copy of secureROM. Try as I might, I could not play the game that I had bought. I made backup copies, mounted them, nothing worked (not even the virtual cd hiding software). So fine, I pulled my rom drive from my other computer and slapped it into my gaming machine, I WAS going to play my game. It refused to play. Why? Honestly, no one really knows. At best guess, I had tried too many ways of not playing with the cdrom physically attached that securerom added some registry keys that I was unable to remove (literally windows told me … the admin acct … that I did not have permission… even on super user win7). I frantically deleted every file with a creation stamp for the day. No dice. I had to reinstall windows entirely to play the game that I had just purchased. I lost 6 hours of my time overall and I had yet to enter the cdkey. Meanwhile, I have 6 friends on steam that have been playing a cracked version of the very same game for the past few weeks. They don’t care that they can’t play the game online, even though it’s a game based on multiplayer, because they never intended to play it. They would have never bought it to begin with. It fell into their laps while bored at a lan event and decided to kill some time.

The pirates do infact win, but they aren’t at odds with the real consumer nor the publisher, nor the developers. The pirates win b/c they had nothing better going on, found something to kill an hour of time (that was the extent of their focus for most games) and were unbothered by DRM tactics. However, the real consumers face annoying DRM, pita procedures to validate cdkeys when they are in-hand, and overall poor quality software (there are still major bugs in some of my 3 year old games that have not been patched). Due to the hardships that real consumers face, they buy less and less. This doesn’t mean they pirate more, but they certainly avoid certain hassles and buy less. This is where the developers/publishers suffer.

Now I’d like to make a distinction between the developers and the publishers. You see the game I bought is also available on steam, but I was suckered in by a coupon to purchase in store. A good game, created by skilled and creative developers will still do well in electronic sales despite the DRM added by the publisher. Activision may have got my 20$, but the developer is going to get close to 40$ when I re-purchase the same game on steam.

I am a gamer. I play over 40 hours a week every week. I have bought one game this year, and one game last year. You see, the truly fun and rewarding games, get played for long spans of time beyond the attention span of the pirate. I play valve games, run valve servers, and avidly support good developers. I am a software developer, and a gamer.

In that very article, which I’ll assume you’ve read since you posted it, it was indicated that for every 1,000 pirated copies eliminated, only 1 sale was made. Quite simply: the people who are pirating your game were never going to pay for it in the first place.

Take the money you’d invest in anti-piracy and spend it on better marketing or development. Don’t blame the non-customers you didn’t lose for your company’s insolvency. You brushed this point aside with the dense statement that those people simply moved on to another game that they COULD pirate… which proves my point.

How are the pirates destroying the industry again?

Nothing was “stolen” from Activision. If someone pirates a game, they have not stolen it, they have not committed theft. They have committed infringement.

Activision still has their property, which they would not if someone had stolen it. Instead, pirates *infringe* on their copyrighted works.

That $304 million most certainly was NOT stolen from Activision, as there is no possible way that every illegal download represents a lost sale.

Publishers need to stop worrying about piracy, and instead worry about creating value that pirated copies of games do not have. Extra features via online accounts such as Valve’s Steam platform, and physical extras such as maps, strategy guides, and game-related books are all ways for publishers to increase value and turn potential pirates into customers.

This is closely related to the DRM issue.

I look at the piracy issue this way and I believe companies do too but they won’t admit this to you:

Piracy doesn’t hurt companies one bit and they know it. If they make 1 million copies of a game at a set price and they send to market all 1 million, they figure how much cash they stand to make on those games. If they reach their target number of sales, the company considers that game a success for them.

Now lets say another 1 million copies were pirated. This is great for the game company because they get more exposure and chances are better than not that sometime in the future some of those folks will purchase a game from that company. It’s free advertisement. None of those pirated games will cause the game company to lose one penny of those targeted 1 million sales because for every kid who has a pirated game there will always be one willing to buy the game off the shelf. Thus they get all the money they were after. The game companies know this. Only if a semi truck with 50,000 copies ran off a cliff and the games were destroyed on the way to market, would they lose any money.

This to me is very logical. Even in America we are surrounded by media propaganda every day and we just fail to see it. The game industry had yelled for so long now that piracy hurts their sales that we have come to believe it like sheep. They are then able to use this and other means to justify things like a heavy DRM.

You show me any study that proves 100% beyond any doubt that because a game is so heavily pirated it kept people from walking into a store and buying a game off the shelf and for that reason alone a company could not reach their targeted sales, I will kiss your feet in public on National TV. Come on, that’s laughable. It can’t be done. For a company to expect me to swallow that bull, means they haven’t really thought it through.

Bottom line, the Piracy issue is a fallacy made up to force us to accept a companies right to control the use of their product anyway they see fit. Of course they have the right to do that anyway with their product, but this way they will have the mainstream popular consensus on their side, and that means less hassle for the company.

1) Support your developers (ie Sony for GOW team, I bought BOTH of these titles instead of ripping them)

2) Allow your developers creativity to stream into your money hungry ways. Meaning: Publish the entire game minus the ENDING, but make sure the game throughout has bits and pieces that TIE INTO the ENDING.

3) If the game is good, it will sell itself. No need for DRM and other stuff.

4) Follow the Nine Inch Nails model. I am going to buy the whole set. Why? Because Reznor did get it right.

I don’t support Software Piracy in general terms. But when Micro$haft, $Phony, PeeAway Arts decide to make it tough on the regular consumer, people get pissed.

I have played many games, but only a few are worth buying. It’s RARE I say “Hey now that is worth buying!”

5) DEVELOPERS: Make something original. Stop focusing on the GRAPHICS and latest hardware. NO
I do not want to buy the latest Core 10,000,000 Quadruple Processor with the 50K PC just to be able to play CRAP like Crysis. Make an ORIGINAL FPS. I don’t care how fancy you make things look, its still the same old shite. So I refuse to spend more and more money on newer hardware. Mainstream computers are VERY powerful machines, USE the existing tech instead of making me purchase a new Video card everytime you release and ‘update’.

6) If you want to stop Piracy, don’t give people a reason to ‘Steal’ your stuff. Help your developers who work VERY HARD and usually have good ideas, until Deadlines, and other beauroeconomicalpolitical BULLSHyTe gets in their way. I would rather pay your Programmers/Developers/Artist on PayPal than pay your Greedy manipulating Corporate Lawyers.

I can Ramble on, but the truth is, people will copy your games as long as you use bullying tactics against the consumer. Last year alone I spent close to $5000 in games and movies. That coupled with the amount of money I pay for my High Speed Internet. Fight for Net Neutrality. Encourage online play. You will find that the more you offer, the more you will be offered in return.

As someone stated earlier. Type 1 will buy no matter what. Type 2 will be careful what they buy. Type 3 will just Pirate no matter what. Thats the nature of any industry. Look at the fundamental reason why Piracy and other ‘Crimes’ exist in the first place. If people felt FREE to make a choice, chances are, they as your consumer would turn around and help you. I just love when you Publishers/Distributors find a Cash Cow then order your developers to come out with Version 5 millionth of the same bejebus Game. Get your head out of your @rsus and I bet you will fare better with the average consumer.

i remember my econ professor also proving using the utility theory model why voting is useless. the actual REAL WORLD ODDS of being the deciding vote in even a high school election is ASTRONOMICALLY low. you get more utility using the time spent voting doing some volunteer work in your community, making real change.

1 end user pirate thinks to himself ” im just one person”
1 end user pirate has negligible effect on anything.
redistributor pirate is the real criminal.

oh and the day my vote counts 144 times is the day i feel my vote will really make a difference. i dont need to say how i arrived at that number.

sometimes i think each person should get as many votes as IQ points they have. stupid ppl should not be in power. and voting is power of a real weak sort. they should have less, smart ppl should have more.

off topic i know. but end user pirates are next to nothing.

piracy is not stealing also- by definition. no object is deprived. IP can only be infringed upon, not taken.

and i hardly think the end user pirate deserves jail. they can still be productive healthy members of society. i dont see the crime.

For one, nearly every platform you mentioned died at the end of its lifetime. The PSX was not defeated by piracy. It was defeated by the PS2. The PSP was not defeated by piracy. It was massively outflanked by the DS, which is, if anything, easier to hack than the PSX, due to the R4, which has been around through its entire lifetime.

You’ve basically blamed everything that’s every gone wrong in the game industry on piracy, and it’s ridiculous.

The fact is, piracy is a long-used backup excuse for any product selling well. You’re a PR man Bruce – it sounds better from a company perspective to say “Our games were pirated!” than “We wasted all our money and made awful games”. I personally don’t priate games, but I understand the thought processes behind it.

Games in most forms are homogeneous products – there’s no obvious difference between a copy of, say, Mass Effect, a pirated copy of Mass Effect and a counterfeiter’s version of Mass Effect. Now given the price of a proper version, the pirated version and and a counterfeiter’s version, which do you feel people will buy? They will go for the free one, and then the counterfeiter’s version, seeing as it is probably a third of the price of the original. This also applies to the preowned market – there is no difference between a second-hand copy of Mass Effect and the original, and you still get no money from their perfectly legitimate purchase.

I’m getting sidetracked, however. Back to Mass Effect: What if Bioware were to mae say, a limited edition copy of Mass Effect, with extra juicy bits in the form of little booklets and a nice tin case instead of a plastic DVD jewel case? I’ll go ask my housemate, he has one upstairs.

Like people have mentioned with the NIN album (and to an extent, Radiohead’s) discriminatory pricing is the way to go. Give your users something extra along with their game. Encourage them to actually buy it for some added bonus.

The car analogy was awful as well. A better example would be a Rolex watch – you can get a cheap knockoff and pretend it’s a Rolex. Still, though – you’ll know deep down that it’s just a cheap version, rather than the full thing.

As someone who’s worked in the computer industry all of his working life (most of it within the game sector), and followed it from right back at the very beginning, I feel more experienced then most to comment.

I have seen pirates and their methods come and go. Be it tape to tape, CD copying or Bit torrent, there will always be a hardcore copying sector. It doesn’t matter if it’s games, music or the latest hollywood blockbuster, the fact is some people are too tight to pay for it. So as you correctly pointed out, perhaps lowering the price is one way to correct this. The other way would be to make a product realistically priced for what you’re buying. Microsoft are a case and point that really highlights this. You can go out today, and spend £300 on the most reliable version of Vista, or you can buy a version of Home Basic for £30, and the reality is you are tearing your hair out because the £30 version doesn’t work. £30 down the drain, and so you either begrudgingly pay for the better version, kissing goodbye to the £30, or you get the better version from an illegal source. If you do this too often, you’ll eventually miss out the middle man and go straight for the dodgy source. So piracy is a problem, I agree, but until we get something that’s 100% reliable, 100% value, and 100% what we want, piracy will carry on at epidemic levels, and manufacturers will not ever get their losses back. Chicken and egg…