Zloth
I smell a... wumpus!?
The game will get pirated more for sure. The big question is, how much more? And how does the money lost to increased piracy compare to the cost of DRM (both putting it on and supporting it)?
It's ok to not buy a game if it has poor review scores, which on the sell-rate have the same effect as piracy.
As an aside, I often see references to "expensive" DRM - has anyone ever seen a reputable costing? I haven't. It's entirely possible it's as little as cents per disk, which would be almost irrelevant on a $10M development budget. I'd love to see real figures, not just assumption.
I generally stay out of piracy threads because you can only lose by entering one. Still, here I go. I lose.
I don't understand most of your points.
Books aren't a good comparison. They're not easily reproduced in a usable form and it's pretty hard for two people to read the same book at once, whereas a simple easy-to-find crack means both you and your friend can play most games at the same time. Books are also potentially cheap to produce; they are essentially the work of one artist and some authors are capable of producing several books in a year. Compare this with teams of anywhere of 10 - 200 developers and 2 - 5 years (yes, I'm generalising - pretty hard not to). They have zero support costs, multiple editions (usually at least hardcover and softback) and can continue selling indefinitely.
What does the cost of disk duplication have to do with anything? The development costs (then marketing and distribution) are the real costs of game development. These days, most AAA games well exceed $10M to develop plus marketing - that's what you're trying to recoup.
Yes, most of the money goes to the publisher. They paid for it. This is the way business works. Why the hell would a publisher give a developer $10M to develop a game if they didn't get a good return?
None of that means DRM works but let's not confuse reality with wishful thinking. As an aside, I often see references to "expensive" DRM - has anyone ever seen a reputable costing? I haven't. It's entirely possible it's as little as cents per disk, which would be almost irrelevant on a $10M development budget. I'd love to see real figures, not just assumption.
Gamespot:This exclusively depends on how good the game is. The game's average score on gamerankings is 78.6%. I am sure they will end up blaming piracy anyway.
You think game quality is the sole determinant? Why don't you take a look at the sales chart:
4. Spore
7. The Sims 2 Deluxe
9. The Sims 2 Apartment Life
12. The Sims 2 Mansion & Garden Stuff
13. Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy
18. Spore Creepty & Cute Parts Pack
19. IGT Slots: Little Green Men
I think that list suggests that one way to avoid piracy is to make games for the casual gamers who wouldn't know how to download cracked stuff.
By what measure though? Proportion of pirated copies to sold copies?I read somewhere that Spore is rated as the most pirated game though.
By what measure though? Proportion of pirated copies to sold copies?
The argument that removing DRM will result in a net increase in sales has no basis in fact based on the evidence at hand. Not only does gaming history show that unprotected games simply lead to more piracy, recent history also demonstrates clearly that simply removing DRM is not the answer to piracy. As we saw in the Scale of Piracy section, many popular games which have no intrusive DRM, such as Assassin's Creed, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and World of Goo, also have some of the highest piracy rates in 2008. Indeed as I write this, the new Prince of Persia game was released yesterday for PC (December 10, 2008) with absolutely no DRM protection, and a quick look at torrents shows that the cracked version is available, and on two popular torrent links alone there are over 23,000 people downloading the game within the first 24 hours. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear: DRM does not cause piracy, piracy results in DRM.
A recent highly-publicized PC-specific example of the 'DRM causes piracy' argument is the game Spore, and in some ways this is a unique case that bears closer examination. Much-maligned for its use of SecuROM DRM, some people even went to the trouble of giving Spore a one-star rating on Amazon.com to protest the use of DRM. Similarly, looking at Spore's Metacritic Scores, it got 84% from professional reviewers, but a lowly 45% from users, primarily due to the DRM issue. Despite this customer backlash, the game still sold over 2 million copies in its first three weeks alone, making it one of the best selling PC games of the year. To counter this success, one piracy site released the sensationalist claim that Spore is the most downloaded game ever at 500,000 copies during the same period. I have no doubt that some of those pirated copies were the result of people being scared off by SecuROM, however the entire Spore controversy is more important because it demonstrates the somewhat sinister side of the DRM debate. As I'm about to show you, the anger against SecuROM - and StarForce before it - is in large part propagandistic misinformation-laden scaremongering deliberately fuelled by various vested interests. For the moment, to counter the Spore example, bear in mind that the piracy figures we examined earlier show that the key determinant in how much a game gets pirated is how popular the game is, not whether it has DRM.
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
The Culture of Piracy
In researching this article I read literally hundreds of articles, studies, forum posts, blog posts and general comments from a wide range of people. What disturbed me more than the blatant misinformation and falsehoods regarding various aspects of the debate was the unashamed 'Culture of Piracy' which now appears to be prevalent around the Internet. Not only are the people who are pirating games openly bragging about it, they're flowering it up with a range of excuses, even suggesting that it's their right to do so. Back in the 1980s when my friends and I swapped copies of Amiga games, we didn't blame the copy protection for forcing us to do it, we didn't blame copyright laws, or assume it was our right to copy any game we want in the name of 'freedom', we didn't even make a point of openly advertising that we did it. We copied games for one simple reason: because we could.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and piracy has apparently somehow become a political struggle, a fight against greedy corporations and evil copy protection, and in some cases, I've even seen some people refer to the rise of piracy as a ”revolution”. What an absolute farce. Truth be told I have the greatest respect for the people who simply come out and just say that they pirate because they can, no more, no less. At least then I know I'm dealing with someone who's being honest and has got their head screwed on straight.
This game was terrible, One of the most idiotic things I have ever played in my life, no one would want to pirate this trash.
Not really.
#Critic Score 79% (5 reviews)
#User Score 87% (500 user reviews)
Thats a very decent review average.
This game was terrible, One of the most idiotic things I have ever played in my life, no one would want to pirate this trash.