I recently read this and thought it was a pretty good read, it discusses the way PC game piracy affects the price and quality of the games we enjoy, the necessary inconvenience of Digital Rights Management and the incentive it creates for developers and publishers to move to console platforms.

It's 10 pages long but you can skip the first 2 and it picks up a bit at pages 4 and 5 onwards. It was written in December 2008 but has been updated, an example is regarding Modern Warfare 2:

Quote :

The PC version had a staggering 4.1 million downloads via torrents alone compared with an estimated 200,000 - 300,000 actual sales via retail and Steam, demonstrating that the most popular game of 2009 was also the most pirated, and more importantly, that the actual number of downloads for the most popular game is now almost three times as high as in 2008, signalling the rampant growth of piracy. It is also interesting to note that while COD:MW2 sold around 300,000 copies on PC and had 4.1 million pirated downloads, the console version sold in excess of 6 million copies during the same period.

Another sad example:

Quote :

As an indication that not only is the scale of piracy generally high across all types of games, but more importantly, that it seems to have little to do with DRM, big greedy game companies, or the high price of games, let's take a look at a game called World of Goo, recently released by a small independent developer called 2D Boy consisting of a team of 3 people. It's available as a digital download, selling for less than $20 on Steam, it has no intrusive DRM, and it's received nothing but praise, reflected in a Metacritic Score of 90%/95%. This should be precisely the recipe for preventing piracy according to some, but unfortunately the truth is less convenient: the developer of the game has stated that World of Goo has an approximate piracy rate of 90%.

Some might already know this shit but I didn't really have much of an opinion on piracy prior to this, I assumed big companies like Electronic Arts could handle it but in the financial year ending march 2008, despite $4.2 billion USD revenue (compared to $3.6 billion the previous year) their net income was -$1.08 billion USD in the red. This makes it increasingly less likely that they as a publisher will invest money in other developers to produce new games, especially for the PC let alone a PC exclusive.


Quotes from Cevat Yerli - founder, CEO and President of Crytek

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We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy, to the degree [that PC gamers who] pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future.

Quote :

the PC industry is really, at the moment, I would say the most intensely pirated market ever. It's crazy how the ratio between sales to piracy is probably 1 to 15 to 1 to 20 right now. For one sale there are 15 to 20 pirates and pirate versions, and that's a big shame for the PC industry.

Quote :

at the end of the day, I think our message is if you're a PC gamer, and you really want to respect the platform, then you should stop pirating. We will see less and less games appearing on the PC, or less and less games pushing the boundaries of PC gaming. Or, in other words, speaking in terms of PC exclusivity, we would only consider full PC exclusives--if the situation continues like this or gets worse--I think we would only consider PC exclusive titles that are either online or multiplayer and no more single-player.

yea piracy is rampant in not just games but any kind of digital format. People wont pay for things if they are offered elsewhere for free. As far as I see it, it's other companies that have ruined it for those types of media. The invention of cheap high capacity hard drives, portable media drives (Thats all your flash drivers, usbs, ect.), burners and massive download quotas have a lot to do with piracy.

If we were limited in HDD space and had no burners and TINY download limits, piracy would be so much smaller, simple as that.

The other problem is that to buy a single PC game, the cost is more than most people's internet connection for the entire month (Who's quota has enough to download tens of games)

If PC games were a lot cheaper I believe a large portion of those who download pirated material would be swayed to purchasing the legit article. I always prefer to own original media.

MW2 claims to have sold around 300,000 units @ let's say for examples sake AU$99

that's $29,700,000

Lets say that a quarter of the people that downloaded the game would consider buying it at AU$49 (Half Price)

that's $39,200,000 (including the original 300,000)

And at AU$29 with half that downloaded the game buy it -> $66,700,000

You see where this is heading. The problem is that Publishers etc don't want that, they want all 4.5 million people to buy it at $99

You can't force people to buy, only entice, and if it's cheap enough more people will buy.

That's the same issue with the internet filter, if people wan't something bad enough, no internet filter or piracy law will stop them.

Dessicrater wrote:

yea piracy is rampant in not just games but any kind of digital format. People wont pay for things if they are offered elsewhere for free. As far as I see it, it's other companies that have ruined it for those types of media. The invention of cheap high capacity hard drives, portable media drives (Thats all your flash drivers, usbs, ect.), burners and massive download quotas have a lot to do with piracy.

If we were limited in HDD space and had no burners and TINY download limits, piracy would be so much smaller, simple as that.

well while that's the case it's just an unintended, unfortunate use of IT industry progress.

Wounded wrote:

In my opinion MW2 is a shit example to use for a ratio between purchases and pirated copies for the PC.

They fucked over the PC version so much that people didnt want to buy their product, didnt want to give activision their hard earned money, everyone knows the problems that surrounded MW2 for the PC prior to it being released and the boycott that people wanted to do.

Ppl still wanted to play the game they just didnt want to pay for a product that cheated the PC version of its 'standard' features. If they released the game with all the things that were complained about, then they wud have sold a fuckload more games for the PC.

I wasn't a big follower of Call of Duty so I knew IWnet meant no dedicated servers but I hadn't heard about the boycott and petitions, I didn't buy it so I don't know what multiplayer performance is like, I just played the campaign a few times on a cracked version.

I have recently gotten alot of cracked games and pirated TV shows from friends but in my defense I'm currently unemployed without any government benefits and looking for work without a car >< so I can't afford to buy most games and the fact is even if I could I'd rather go without most of this stuff. It's not like I'd spend money on 200 albums in music, DVDs for over 100 combined seasons of TV and then games that my friends want to LAN, that's alot of money lol. I'd imagine it'd be the same for many people and it's the same people contributing to piracy statistics so it's harder to judge just how many are lost sales.

It's just disappointing despite any future individual effort how PC piracy is encouraging companies to move to consoles and possibly stop supporting the PC platform or make shitty ports from console with sub standard controls and limited gameplay/graphics designed to perform on old console hardware.

Moving to only consol isnt gonna do change anything. Xbox can b chipped and u can then play copied games. I dont have 1 original game for my wii. At the end they will end up with the same results

The only console that hasn't been hacked so that it can play copied games is the ps3 but the pc market is still to big for companies to consider going only to consoles. And I found it quite funny how MW2 was pirated on pc as many times as it sold across all consoles/pc. Atomic the magazine did a very good article on this as well.

uhh actually the ps3 can be hacked mate. i don't own a single original ps3 game to date except for mw2 and GTA IV. its pretty much like a psp just a bigger version of it.

I for one can say i have torrented two games, because there was no point buying them. Now i don't pirate everything and encourage it, as I would rather have the full product and get what i paid for. But the bottom line is that companies like these are just bitching because they aren't getting even more money even though if say 35% pirate the game, the company still gets there huge sums of money.

You could say in fact they are greedy bastards for wanting more money which they are. Because they're still getting huge sales from consoles as well as PC's from the other 65% of consumers. But when you read this article, it's mainly a threat to scare pirates into buying their product rather getting it for free.

But in the end this whole world revolves around money and these companies will still be hungry for more even though they have had more then enough of an average share.

cake!!!!!!!!!!

Hmmm the article I read is quite old I suppose. Prob at the time it wan't hacked.

Wtf is this shit background, fucking stop it, if its you tulzer

what .....?

I can't remember the article I read this in, but it had some statistics on piracy I found more interesting to do with the iPhone:

80% of people didn't know what 'Jailbreaking' was (it was an American servey remember)

10% of people knew about Jailbreaking their iPhone or iPod Touch but didn't

2% of people posessed a Jailbroken iPhone or iTouch

8% of people posessed a Jaibroken iPhone or iTouch AND had pirated apps on them.

Hence the developers still held 92% of the market against piracy.

Make of that what you will.

and when was this article earz?

i lol'd


LONG LIVE PC PIRACY!

KarmaFTW wrote:

Wtf is this shit background, fucking stop it, if its you tulzer

?

Leave the companion cube alone

it was there for a total of 30sec, sorry for those who saw it, i guess it wont be happening again, or else the ban hammer will be after me

i jailbreak whenever the break can offer me something the normal phone cant. with ios4, it has everything the original breaks could offer so theres no point now except to get to my tether, which has nothin to do with apple and is instead optuscunts.

i pirate probably2/3 of the games i play since i dont have adsl. but i wasn't going to pay for them one way or another, so they should be happy for giving me the chance to experience their product.

That article was written earlier this year, thats all I can remember

NOOOOOOOOO THE CAKE IS A LIE!!!