Piracy ratio is about 20:1 ?!?

[Ionstormsucks]

That's right.

But only for "private use".

Nothing else !

Nowadays, you can make a copy for "backup purposes", too, as far as I've understood it.

But that's what we're talking about the whole time. We're not talking about commercial piracy. That's a whole different thing and most people reject it - as I think rightfully.

You can indeed make a copy for backup purposes, but the software that would allow you to copy a commercial game for example is forbidden and usually not sold in Germany. It's a paradox situation that the state puts you in.

. . . If everything was free, NONE would produce movies, games , DVD's. Is it really that hard to grasp?

This is really how I have thought a few years ago. The topic however is much more complicated than "if no one buys it then it won't be made". First of all one has to see that copyright is a relatively new right in terms of law. So if what you're saying is true then no one would have produced a piece of art before the copyright, but as well all know: art existed long before the copyright. Now, clearly there is a difference between now and back then and commercial art has become important part in our lives. Today we like big commercial blockbuster movies and high quality games which cost millions of dollars... and someone has to pay for it. So yes, you're right - if no one pays for it the market would change. Certainly we would still see movies, listen to music and play games, but probably the stuff would be of lower "quality" and there would be less of it (quality here meaning "not as expensive in production"). Fact is however that if we're looking at the content industry we're seeing fairly healthy markets. So someone IS obviously paying for all that stuff. The movie and games market is expanding and the music market is doing better after some years of crisis.
The essential question in terms of economics (not morality, that's completely different) is: What impact does piracy have on the industry? The industry tells us that it has a major impact. Piracy is rampart and everyone is pirating their stuff, etc. The industry loses billions of dollars every year. But you know, if you claim something like that you should be able to back it up and prove it. And that's exactly where the content industry fails rather miserably. Since years we're getting numbers here that seem to be utterly utopian. If you hear those numbers you think - wow that's bad, and then you come across people - academics and experts who show you that these numbers can't be real because they don't make sense.

I know games that everyone and their mother played, but the company still went bankrupt, because everyone pirated it.

With all due respect, but I seriously doubt that there is even company that went bankrupt solely due to piracy. It's some kind of Myth that people like Michael Fitch want to make us believe. Fact is however that usually there are several reasons that lead to bankruptcy, sometimes piracy might be a part of it and sometimes not.
Of course it's much easier to blame an external factor if you fail than to admit that you yourself may have made some mistakes...

I hear people here complain how the PC games market is dying, yet in this thread some people are speaking in supportive terms about piracy?

The music industry is dying since years... and let me tell you: it's one tough bastard. The PC games market isn't dying - it's declining. The assumption that this has anything to do with piracy is exactly that - a wild guess. You know, usually the argument goes - yes publishers go over to consoles and therefore people follow and then no one will develop for the PC. That's rubbish. Consumers are not cattle that you can drive on another pasture whenever you want. Fact is that people accept consoles, they are willing to pay money for this form of entertainment. If no one would buy the crap, publishers wouldn't publish games for consoles. Recent history shows us that the industry several times tried to introduce new technology and failed and that tells me that not the industry dominates the consumer, but vice versa. Now, as we all know the market for computer and video games is limited. It seems pretty clear that in one way or another the two dominant gaming platforms, meaning pc and console, are competing with each other. I can see it every day really. A lot of my friends have a pc and a console and although they play a pc game once in a while they nowadays prefer to sit in front of a TV and play a console game. Consoles are in. They are a product of convenience. You put in your DVD and play. No hassle with wrong hardware or copy protection. That's the secret why consumers accept them.
The same really goes for the content industry in general. No matter if music, movie or games they all will at some point yell: OMFG, our revenues did not grow by 150% over the last year. That must be piracy. That's bullshit. People spent more money on entertainment than ever before in history. The problem is, that as alternative forms of entertainment emerge, the old ones might suffer since people do not have an unlimited amount of money to spend on entertainment.
For every crisis that the content industry saw in the last few years there exist a dozen reasons what might have triggered it. And the industry names exactly one: Piracy... that's what I call propaganda.

 

[Ionstormsucks]

You can already buy most PC games online on steam or direct to drive, so that the "developers do not keep up with the times" is a very poor excuse.

I think no one claims that digital distribution alone does the trick. From a strictly economical point of view P2P is digital distribution, so why should someone download a game and pay 40 bucks if he can download it and pay nothing? You named Steam... they are doing fairly well. In an interview the guys from Valve said that piracy is not a primary concern for them because they offer a service that no P2P network can. And that's the trick! Offer something that the competitor can't.
Plus, even 9 years after Napster there is not even one legal system to buy digital content that is based on P2P technology or the concept of sharing stuff. So no, the industry has by no means offered a real competitor to illegal file sharing.

Second, I think you have to separate music and movies from this discussion as they have one MAJOR difference from games. . . .

There are certainly differences, but there are also similarities. I don't think you can or should do some clear cut separation. Take the music industry for example. It's true - artists can make money by selling merchandise and concerts, but publishers have more or less the same problem as publishers in the gaming industry. And believe me... no one starves to death because of piracy. We can learn a lot from the music industry and how they basically did one mistake after the other.

. . . This is taken directly from users of a forum that deals in piracy "I gave up and bought the game, since there is no hack out yet!"

Yes... well, that's one quote from one user. That's not really what you can call empirical evidence. We know these people exist. The question is: Do all people think like that. And here all studies say: no. Even the content industry itself accepts that not everyone who pirates a product would actually buy it if he could not download it from the internet. The BSA thinks that one out of ten pirates would buy a product. You probably know about Reflexive that made some tests with the casual game Richochet Infinity. 92% of all players used a pirated copy. So they eliminated these pirated copies, but for every 1000 pirated copies they eliminated they could only sell one additional copy. Oberholzer and Strumpf came to the conclusion that about 5000 downloads equal one less music album sold. We cannot really be sure what the ratio would be when it comes to big commercial games, but it seems pretty clear that it is not 1:1.

I do not really get the direction this discussion took from some people. First of all, if a game is so bad that I would never buy it, why on earth would I download it from a piracy webpage? Just to kill sometime when I was bored? yeah might be?

Well, for once you usually don't know how good or bad a game is before you played it. I recently bought AITD V and thought it would be good... oh well - let's not talk about that. There are very few people who pirate stuff for real evaluation. I won't say there are none, but very few. I think that a lot of people pirate because they can. But that doesn't mean they would necessarily buy the product if they couldn't pirate it. When I'm driving to university every morning, there are always these guys who give out newspapers for free, you know, to test them and so on. Whenever I'm offered one I'll gladly take it and in fact very often read it - but honestly, I've never bought one of their newspapers. It's simply not worth it to me. I spend a lot of money on different kinds of academic magazines and stuff like that and this particular newspaper simply isn't worth it to me. I guess a lot of people feel that way about warez. I won't deny there are people who would actually buy a game or whatever if they could not get it for free, but certainly not everyone. I mean, look at how much stuff some people are downloading, even from a financial point of view it wouldn't be possible to pay for all that.

But fact remains there were developers who spent several 1000 hours of there time to make this game, and they might be going to sleep without food, and unable to feed their family . . . . if you play it buy it! if you don't like it enough to buy it, don't play it.

Yeah well, who doesn't know these poor game developers who end up on the street asking people for money so that they can buy some food for their families... c'mon now. Let's not get overly melodramatic. In most countries artists and copyright holders are already compensated for sales lost through piracy so it’s not like they don’t get anything at all. You might say that’s not enough, and I agree, but I seriously doubt that there are many starving game developers out there.
Again, pirates are not devilish beings without a heart. That's how the content industry sees them, but it is NOT true. Every single study that's out there comes to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of pirates know that what they are doing is morally wrong, but they are doing it anyway. If you're saying "these heartless bastards - they know it's wrong and they are doing it anyway" then it won't you get even a step closer to finding a solution. You have to look at the reasons why people pirate stuff. Pirates are not one homogenous group of people - there are many different types of pirates. Some are assholes who give a damn shit about art or its creator... well, forget these, you'll never get these to buy a product no matter what you do. But apart from this rather small group there are many other people who pirate for reasons that are much more understandable. Take me for example. When I was still studying and basically had no money at all I downloaded from the internet whatever I needed or just got it from friends. All my friends, who were also studying or learning a profession, did the same. The bit of money I had, I spent on the cinema, going out with friends, sometimes I even bought a game if I had some money left. What should I have done? Live like a monk and not listen to music, play a computer game or watch a DVD?
Nowadays I'm buying all my stuff... why? Because I can afford it. It's much easier to buy a music album from itunes then search for tracks in dubious file sharing networks. Half of the files you download there are broken, erroneous, fake or of a shitty quality... and if you're really lucky they contain a virus as well.
We know that biggest group by far that pirates stuff is that of people under the age of 30. It’s not really surprising that piracy is widespread among young people who don’t have that much money I’d say. But I don’t want to be overly melodramatic myself – it’s of course not only poor students that pirate. I think we’re also seeing the emergence of a new mindset. It’s really a generation thing. A lot of young people instinctively know that downloading software from a P2P network is NOT the same as stealing a car. The production of every single car costs money – you steal it, the money is lost to the company that produced the car or the shop that wanted to sell it. That’s very different when it comes to digital content. Morality is changing – people think: If I pirate something I wouldn’t buy anyway or could not afford to buy then no harm is done to the artists. And as strange and morally wrong that might sound to some ears, we cannot say that this statement is completely rubbish. If we want solve the problem of piracy we have to get away from traditional concepts of morality because they will do more harm than good in the process of finding solutions to the piracy problem.

EDIT: I'm terribly sorry for two extremly long posts...

 

[blatantninja]

It's some kind of Myth that people like Michael Fitch want to make us believe.

While I think Fitch and his company made some huge strategic mistakes in their game, he did have a very good point that it wasn't the actual pirates that were taking sales away, but rather that the bad word of mouth from pirates that had pre-release versions that still had bugs or got hit with their non-obvious DRM schemes that caused many people who might have bought the game to avoid it, even though they would never run into those problems because they wouldn't be avoiding the DRM and those pre-release bugs had been worked out (obviously the game had other bugs though.)

I think that is a valid concern about piracy. It's one thing to do like Sins of a Solar Empire did and just ignore piracy and 'make the game for the people you think will buy it.' But if weeks before the initial release you're getting ripped in user-forums by people that think they have a finished copy but really don't, it's going to impact your sales. I know I've avoided games that I've read negative things about, but really I never verified how accurate those comments are.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

We're not talking about commercial piracy.

But it exists.

 

[blatantninja]

No doubt. I see it every day in the subway stations in NYC.

My wife bought a couple DVD's once and I told her that we don't need to be buying stolen goods. She responded "But I PAID for them!" She really had no idea that A) they were illegal copies or B) that is was illegal.

 

[GothicGothicness]

You guys are that naive? I am 100% sure piracy is killing PC gaming. I know a lot of gamers, they are almost all saying just like Ionstormsucks said , "why pay for something if you can download it free?", even added after by are you stupid?

Many of them does not even own a console, but one of them bought a WII, he wanted a PS3 but it is not possible to pirate games for the PS3 yet so he bought a WII. But they love to play games, PC games, some of them never bought a game in their life. Some of them only bought PC games before you could download them for free, due to broadband not being here.

You will say like, yes just because you know people like that it does not prove anything, and just because you know people who know people like that it proves nothing, and there is no statistic to show that people would buy instead of pirate.

Yeah the developers are blaiming pirates, and switching to develop to consoles. Since there are much more console gamers? the only PC games to sell well are MMORPG's yes people have to pay for them, people pay for them, since they cannot pirate them.

Believe what you will, PC gaming is dying because of Piracy, no other reason. some of you said it yourself, why buy if you can download for free?

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

As I'm making scans of those tiny little cards that came with the special edition of BG2 I bought two months ago for 1 Euro on a flea market, I came across a different "piracy problem".

Once, I suggested making and publishing scans of cards of the long discontinued trading card game called "Dark Force" for The Dark Eye RPG system.

I once asked an employee of the holder of the overall license of TDE about it. I assumed he would know how to handle this. ( I don't remember anymore whether he from Fantasy Productions [FanPro] or from Ulisses, then. FanPro gave the license to Ulisses, which handles everything nowadays.)

He told me that I had - from his perspective - the rights to scan and put them into the TDE Wiki.

I also asked the current holder of the brand name of "Schmidt Spiele". Schmidt Spiele, was the former board games company which had been holding both the license of TDE and Dark Force, before it went out of business, and sold the license to FanPro, before it was closed down (?) (I mean Schmidt Spiele) and the brand name of "Schmidt Spiele" was sold to another board games company.

So I asked via e-mail the company (forgot its name) which holds nowadays the brand name of "Schmidt Spiele". I assumed that it has bought up all of the licenses (except TDE) which the *original* company of Schmidt Spiele had been holding.

I was told (in this sense) that they knew nothing, and therefore did not mind me publishing the scans.

(Later, I was told by someone of Games-In , who seems to have relations to the original Schmidt Spiele, that - that's what he said - all original employees of the original company had gone and therefore no-one actually knew about the TDE things at the nowadays holder of the Schmidt Spiele license. Which meant that they most likely couldn't help me at all, due to just no knowledge.)

At the DSA4 (TDE4) Wiki, however, I was told that I must NOT do this. I was NOT allowed to do scans and publish them, at least until I had asked the individual graphic artists for the cards for a permission.

Oh, my, I thought, how do I find them out ? Where do they live ? Where are they ? Who actually are they ???
Because the cards revealed nothing but their names.
How would I be able to research them ? I asked byself,
and gave up.

This is a problem of piracy that is there, too. One actually has to ask the individual artists before publishing their works on the 'net.

Even worse : In our law, one even has - in principle, at least - to ask each individual person whether he/she wants to be on the vacation photos we take !

This is in principle even true for buildings : In principle, the architects or their heirs or/and the owners of the building must be asked whether I might get a permission if I want to take a photo of that building.

If I *really* follow this rule, THEN 99,99999999999999 % of all pictures on the internet MUST be instantly deleted, because there was NEVER given such an permission.

Things have become increased in complication, yet, nowadays.


Bottom note : In principle, we I must ask the graphic artists who did the cards I just scanned for permission.

And who actually did the cards, then ?

 

[blatantninja]

Believe what you will, PC gaming is dying because of Piracy, no other reason. some of you said it yourself, why buy if you can download for free?

If you think that is true, then YOU are naive. Not saying that piracy doesn't have an effect, but two things that has killed PC gaming are:

1) having to program for an infinite combination of hardware. When KOTOR came out, I had a buddy by it and spend a week trying to get it to run on his PC. He had a good gaming PC for th time as well, but he finally gave up and exchanged it for the XBox version.

2) Having so many PC's that come with onboard video that can't even handle the most basic of new games. That REALLY limits the potential customer base. PC gaming flourished when the graphics card was important, but not the main determining factor.

I don't see there being much you can do about 1, but with some of the endeavors by Intel, perhaps number 2 may not be a problem as much in the future.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

Believe what you will, PC gaming is dying because of Piracy, no other reason. some of you said it yourself, why buy if you can download for free?

Developing only ONE "solution" for a problem is kind of narrow--minded, if the problem consists of several individual sub-problems, imho.

To me, the overall "PC gaming is dying" thingy is an utterly complex field, to which no singular, simple solution or interpretation fits in.

To me, it's several factors, all combined into one, big, mess.

 

[GothicGothicness]

1) having to program for an infinite combination of hardware.

Yes, especially Gothic 3 was horrible, I had to hack for hours to get it to work well.

If the developer didn't have to worry about pircay they could have enough time to make a proper configuration utility. NOLF2 had it, it is easy to program, I programmed one for my game. But they just don't have enough time or resources to do it because of piracy.

2) Having so many PC's that come with onboard video that can't even handle the most basic of new games.

Yet everyone has a PC good enough to play a MMORPG ? WOW does not work well with crappy onboard videocards either.

To me, it's several factors, all combined into one, big, mess.

That one big mess is piracy, I can directly relate all of PC gamings problems to piracy. Try me!

 

[Pladio]

Does CP actually help ?
The games are probably cracked one or two weeks after they're out in stores ...

 

[GothicGothicness]

Does CP actually help ?
The games are probably cracked one or two weeks after they're out in stores ...

In usual they are out and hacked one or two weeks before they are in stores. That is another problem, you can get it online even before you could in the store.

CP helped a little for Bioshock since it used a new and more complex system, but it also hurted it a lot since many people didn't buy it because of the complicated way to activate it and limited installs.

That is another big problem of piracy, the company feels forced to protect their games with piracy protection which also costs money and resources and makes the game more complicated to run.

The main good thing about copy protecting is that everyday joe cannot burn the game for all his friends. Which would make piracy even less risky since you would not risk being detected online while downloading it, and it could spread even within areas that has no internet.

 

[blatantninja]

If the developer didn't have to worry about pircay they could have enough time to make a proper configuration utility. NOLF2 had it, it is easy to program, I programmed one for my game. But they just don't have enough time or resources to do it because of piracy.

They'd have more time sure, but they'd fully solve the problem. It's been a problem since the earliest days of PC computing and it's just gotten more complex over time.

I remember playing Ultima VII (which I don't believe had ANY DRM attached to it) and getting to a certain point in the game where it just locked up. Nothing could fix it. Origin even sent me new disks with the latest build, still didn't work. There was just some command that wouldn't run properly on my Dad's rig. A year later I got to college and had my own PC which was only marginally better, the game ran completely fine.

Yet everyone has a PC good enough to play a MMORPG ? WOW does not work well with crappy onboard videocards either.

WOW runs just find on 3-4 year old hardware because the graphics are 5-6 years old. Show me a title using technology (IE graphics) developed in the past 2 years that will run on the majority of systems out there.

 

[GothicGothicness]

WOW runs just find on 3-4 year old hardware because the graphics are 5-6 years old. Show me a title using technology (IE graphics) developed in the past 2 years that will run on the majority of systems out there.

I meant when it came out. Yet people bought it like crazy. We had different numbers on piracy ratio also, but no matter which number is right, we can be sure that the majority of pirates can play those games on their system otherwise they'd not download them.

I remember playing Ultima VII (which I don't believe had ANY DRM attached to it)

Hehe yeah, Ultima VII and those DOS games was horrible to get to play! But DOS was the prime days of PC gaming so many fantastic games came out, and Ultima 7 sold well! Enough to found both U8 and UO. Acctually those games were much more complicated to run than todays games they even required a boot disk and you could forget about graphical instruction setups, and you could get an error like Violation accses memory B9, most people had no clue what to do. Ultima VII had a copy protection requiring the manual hehe, you had to look stuff up in the manual to answer certain questions. Unfortunately pirates also included a text file with the manual for these games at that time, it was a common way for copy protection anyway, and piracy was not as widespread at that time thanks to the internet not being widespread.

But today we have directX , we have windows GUI's , we have openGL, we have openAL , and we have fmod. Which works immidietely with most windows plug-and play devices. We can make great auto-configuration and at the very least reccoemnd a setting low , medium , or high. The guys who want to get the optimal out of the PC game might need to do some hacking. But this optimal would be much better than we could get out of the console.

I wrote a very simple auto-configure for one of my games, it didn't take me more than a week, it was not that long ago. Worked great.

Check which model of graphics card, for example Geforce 7 series, 8 series, or ATI 18x 19x 20x etc etc series, check the amount of memory of the card, check AA , support, check AF support, check shader version. If memory lower than 256 MB set low res texture no AA, if 512 MB and card better than 7 series 18x series, set medium texures, if card 8 series, or 20x series and 1024 MB memoery set high res textures. I have written a much better one for future use. Which you'll get to try out later hopefully!

Sure it takes some time to write that, but time a developer could have, and it is technically possible.

 

[Ionstormsucks]

You guys are that naive? I am 100% sure piracy is killing PC gaming. I know a lot of gamers, they are almost all saying just like Ionstormsucks said , "why pay for something if you can download it free?", even added after by are you stupid?

I'm not naive, I just read alot about it and I am beyond the point where I believe everything the industry tells me.

You will say like, yes just because you know people like that it does not prove anything, and just because you know people who know people like that it proves nothing, and there is no statistic to show that people would buy instead of pirate.

Actually there are...

Yeah the developers are blaiming pirates, and switching to develop to consoles. Since there are much more console gamers? the only PC games to sell well are MMORPG's yes people have to pay for them, people pay for them, since they cannot pirate them.

There are MMOs that sell well and such that do not sell well. If you look at most MMOs then you'll find that they didn't sell much more copies than single player games did. People see WoW and think, yeah that's it! But WoW is the big exception in the MMO genre.

Believe what you will, PC gaming is dying because of Piracy, no other reason. some of you said it yourself, why buy if you can download for free?

Why buy botteled water?

 

[GothicGothicness]

Why buy botteled water?

Because except for Sweden many other countries have horrible quality crane water and polluted lakes which would make you sick and in many parts of US it is undrinkable.

There are MMOs that sell well and such that do not sell well.

MAybe take a look at how many MMORPGs there are in the PC market, and how many of them have a player base that are willing to pay each month.

Everyquest + WOW + Ultima Online + EVE online the revenue of this alone could probably make up for the single player PC sales for several years. There are several thousands more, not all of them are succesfull, that is normal. But MMORPGs are still going strong on the PC, and the PC is still the main platform for the biggest releases. Because??? yep MMORPG's cannot be pirated, the developers can invest a lot, and know they get a return, and they are more polished and easier to setup also, no need to hack forever to get it to run. Because, yeah the developer had the funds to make a decent configurations utility.

 

[Pladio]

I know this is off-topic, but water in Belgium, the UK, Scandinavia and many European countries is good enough to drink from the tap. I still buy bottled water though when I'm in Belgium, but not when I'm in the UK.

I'm not buying games anymore either, but I'm not playing new games neither, so ...

Still in Battle for Wesnoth !

 

[Ionstormsucks]

Because except for Sweden many other countries have horrible quality crane water and polluted lakes which would make you sick and in many parts of US it is undrinkable.

In Germany, where I live, crane water is perfectly fine and most people still buy bottled water. Same goes for France and most European countries really.
You can look at other products as well. As I said, most people have coffee at home and still go to a café where they pay a lot more for their coffee. That you cannot compete with free is a myth...

MAybe take a look at how many MMORPGs there are in the PC market, and how many of them have a player base that are willing to pay each month.

Everyquest + WOW + Ultima Online + EVE online the revenue of this alone could probably make up for the single player PC sales for several years. There are several thousands more, not all of them are succesfull, that is normal. But MMORPGs are still going strong on the PC, and the PC is still the main platform for the biggest releases. Because??? yep MMORPG's cannot be pirated, the developers can invest a lot, and know they get a return, and they are more polished and easier to setup also, no need to hack forever to get it to run. Because, yeah the developer had the funds to make a decent configurations utility.

Excuse me, but what exactly do the subscribtions or revenues each month have to do with copies sold? That singler player games don't have monthly revenues is not a problem of piracy it's a problem of how a game is structured an programmed. What counts is the number of copies sold and here the statement that MMOs in general sell more copies than other games is wrong. There a few that sold exceptionally well, but there are also a lot of singler player games that sell very well. If you name games like Everquest and WoW, be so fair to mention games like Vanguard, Ryzom and Anarchy Online, which despite huge investments became failures.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

In Germany, where I live, crane water is perfectly fine and most people still buy bottled water.

Yes it is. We have quite an sophisticated system for that, as far as I know.

I'm not 100 % sure, but I believe that a part of studying Hydrogeology at Universities covers that.

 

[GothicGothicness]

In Germany, where I live, crane water is perfectly fine and most people still buy bottled water. Same goes for France and most European countries really.

France, I was warned not to drink their water or I'd get sick. If the water is fine, how come people still buy bottled water, really hard for me to believe. Why not just take a bottle and put water inside it So they are fine to pay for water which they could have for free legally, but they want to break the law to play games?

well, I could never understand germans

Anyway sure I could also buy bottled water if I am out on a hot day, and there is nothing to drink there. But to buy it and bring it home were I can get free water legally ? never ever.

Everquest and WoW,

Tell me which PC single player game sold 6 million ? The point of the monthly fees was that people are willing to pay and keep paying, if they cannot pirate, and people have money and can afford paying. A lot of people also complain how horrible it is first I have to buy the MMORPG and after that I have to keep paying to play, really horrible, but so many still do it. If you could pirate MMORPGS, how many players do you think would still pay? ( and with pirate I do not mean to play on a warez serves with lacking functionality that might go down any minute )