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…

One such game I can name that this happened to was B.R.E.E.D.
OK the game was not diabolical, but it certainly did not live up to the hype it had. It was a shame as I knew the developers personally and I even assisted them testing it. There were other reasons that were documented at the time for the game not being reliable though.

Years ago when I was a kid, I had a commodore 64 and my mates all had spectrums, yes copying was done, but to me the scale was not on par with the piracy these days.
I do buy games now, same as then, I remember paying the huge sum of £12.99 for the last ninja 2. I still have a C64 and I STILL play that original game (I did have to purchase it again as the original tape snapped )

I have classes with several students who I know pirate computer games, and several times I have heard them complaining about the lack online or some other feature that their copy lacks, but apparently the inconvenience is not enough to drive them to buy the actual game. (Interpret that as you will.)

As a budding video game collector (primarily old console games), I will often hear about how such and such is a great game, but not having played it myself, I will look for a ROM of it. Usually after having played the ROM for a bit, I can tell if the game is worth buying. If it is, then I will try to find the real game, preferably with the box.

My previous paragraph brings up two important points. First, if a game is worth playing, a respectable person will pay for it, even if it is offered free, simply because he or she wants the developer to continue making great games. A poorly made game is not going to make much profit regardless of the presence of piracy. Second, including unique tangible bonuses with the boxed copy encourages people to go out and buy it instead of downloading a pirated version. Imagine if a company said, “Buy and download the game from our website and we’ll mail you a figurine!” I think that such a marketing campaign would be very well received by gamers.

In closing, I think that unfortunately, piracy is largely unstoppable, and that gaming companies are going to have to find ways to encourage customers to pay for their products despite being able to get them for free. (That doesn’t mean that it should be made any easier for pirates to do what they do though).

If you have a compelling product, people will buy it. People will prefer to buy your product *instead* of finding an illicit copy. You will make money, despite the existence of piracy.

As a for example, take, again, the Nine Inch Nails album “Ghosts”; released with multiple price points depending on packaging, from $5 for a downloaded copy to $300 for a full-on limited-edition package including high-quality vinyl pressing and so on. The electronic download version was distributed, as well as via the “official” site, via publically available bittorrents, and the licensing explicitly allows for copying. Surely, if people can get the product *legally* for *nothing*, sales would approximate to *nil*? Oddly, no. The official download servers were almost instantly swamped (to the point of not being accessible) by people who had bought at the $5 and $10 price points, and the $300 package sold out within hours. Yep, that’s people paying $300 for an album that they could get *for free*. I personally bought at the $5 price point, again despite the fact that I could have had a bit-for-bit identical copy for free.

If you have a compelling product, market it properly, and, to a certain extent, get lucky with regards to other near-simultaneous releases, your product will sell, and you will make money.

If you have a product that is not compelling, either due to its intrinsic “value”, or with regards to other contemporaneous releases, your product will not sell, and you will lose money.

Let’s look at TOCA 2, ’cause that’s the one Bruce has previously mentioned.

It was a reasonable title, and had some nifty features (not least of which was 4 way play). Still, it was just another racing game, despite its “backstory”, a market that was largely flooded on the PSX. Its main competition was probably Gran Turismo, which, by the time TOCA2 came out in late ‘98/early ‘99, was nearly a year old. TOCA2 was arguably a better game, but GT was massive, and has sold around 11 million copies IIRC. And, around the time TOCA2 came out, screenshots of GT2 were already in circulation, GT2 was certainly “coming”. So an initial surge of sales to those who had the game preordered, followed by relatively poor sales might well be attributed to the market for that type of game at the time, as much as to pirates (who had access to copies *before* TOCA2 even hit the shelves). GT2 was massive. TOCA2 wasn’t. Sometimes you just get unlucky.

The people who buy games to break the security do it because that is sometimes more fun than the game itself. They are smarter than I am, and they are probably smarter than whom ever you have designing security for the games. It isn’t going to change.

What can be done about it? How can you get people to buy games that might be thinking about downloading/copying/renting/borrowing/etc.?

The marketing study that I’d be most interested in is the large amount of people in Japan that buy new music. Music is probably the easiest thing to copy, why are they spending money on new releases?

From what I’ve seen, in Japan, when you buy a new release, you don’t just get a CD with some cover art. You get an experience. Generally they come with booklets that have lots of background info on the band, private interviews, and other things that you can not get outside of the new release.

Can that be done with games? Can the marketing department come up with something that would be worth having even if the game is boring/easy to beat/etc.?

Think along the lines of books. True books that are written in the same universe of the game. Back story. A story on a side character. Artwork on levels that didn’t make it… and why they were canned. Story lines that were left alone. Hints of things to come.

Make it worth the money to buy a game… and don’t do it on a CD/DVD that would be easy to copy or send electronically. Do it in print. Market the experience… not just the game.

I’m bored with video game marketing. If it wasn’t for word-of-mouth I probably wouldn’t by any games.

I know that most games come with a booklet. For the most part, there are two pages of back ground, and the rest is ‘how to play’ stuff that you can figure out.

Make it interesting. Make it worth the price of admission and make it known that you will do it every time and people might start looking for your games.