The Witcher 2 - 1M Sales, 4.5M Pirated?

A good reason not to do that is that your forums and the whole interenet will get flooded with indignant "customers" complaining how broken your worthless game is - and potential "real" customers will actually believe it.

Yeah happens a lot. The number of people complaining about 'bugs' in the pirated version of some games I've help moderate massively outnumbered other bugs - I mean, really swamped the forums, even after we put up stickies explaining that X symptom was only caused by using an illegal version of the game and discussion of it was not permitted.

It also has a real cost on the support side of things.
 
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Too much uncertainty to take away much of use from this. But ultimately, I think what's most interesting to me - is that they sold 1M copies of this game. This means it can be profitable to make a serious and mature cRPG - regardless of how much more profitable it would be without piracy.
Absolutely - that's the real take home.

I wonder how Skyrim did on the PC? I know that the Xbox pirated version was out a week before official release - but for some reason, console piracy has no effect on the developer.
The numbers of people buying it on console again make it irrelevant - it's about sales at the end of the day. The fact that there are many more sales on console, despite the limited customer base compared to PC, is interesting. Either piracy is more prevalent on PC due to ease of obtaining or accepted culture, or people are buying loads of gaming specific PCs and then not using them for RPGs. Though sales of other games types don't seem much different (perhaps higher digital downloads for shooters, compared to RPGs).
 
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I don't know why developers don't bake in game breakers for pirates like Mass Effect did. The weapons would get stuck in an overheated state if the copy wasn't legit. Brilliant! Not sure how they did it but I find that hilarious.

Drakensang 1 was said to make people finding their character suddenly in a prison cell if their game was pirated. Also, the often asked question of "Barla is not there ?" (Barla is an important, story-related NPC) showed that pirates were punished by simply the story being blocked by the absence of the plot-giving character (Barla, that is).

One could easily spot pirates with that in the forums.

I think it was Sacred 1 where one would be transformed into a bunny (?) if the game was pirated.

A good reason not to do that is that your forums and the whole interenet will get flooded with indignant "customers" complaining how broken your worthless game is - and potential "real" customers will actually believe it.

Wasn't that the case with Titan quest ?
 
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Yes, Titan Quest.
 
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@RPGFool: Congrats. You must be the most dense person I have had the questionable pleasure of arguing with in a long time. You managed to completely either ignore or not comprehend what I wrote. Then you have no idea how exactly the software works that we were talking about but yet make wild claims and assumptions about its capabilities or lack of capabilities. Not bad...

@Moriendor - I have neither the time not the inclination to argue your ridiculous statements. You said the dl software worked because of dynamic IP addresses.

I never said anything like that. If I did -> quote.
What I did say is that IF (let me restate that a few times for ya: IF - IF - IF) there is or were a waiting requirement for a file hosting service THEN you can or could very easily work around that with the DL software by automating the disconnect/reconnect process, thus obtaining a new IP via a simple automated script command.
In the case of Rapidshare this is not even necessary because -once again- they do not have any waiting queues at this time. I even presented a screenshot as proof when I started a download of Skyrim for demo purposes. What more do you need?
Anyway, that's what I said and it is 100% factually correct. Feel free to point out what you find "ridiculous" about that.

I pointed out that that getting a new IP address requires modem reboot even in the rare times that it is available. You conveniently ignored that. You also conveniently ignored the extended lease times. It is you who is once again completely wrong.

Bullshit. As I pointed out, the vast majority of home users who are customers of the big ISPs are on dynamic IP addresses. There's nothing "rare" involved anywhere and I didn't conveniently ignore it either but already refuted your argument (or rather assumptions regarding the distribution of dynamic IPs) earlier. Did you even read my post? I guess not.

Rapidshare says that there are waiting times. You are simply wrong on this.

It is very clear now that you did in fact not read anything I wrote. I even presented evidence via demo'ing that Rapidshare at least currently has no waiting times. Zero. Zilch. Nada. None at all. What language do I need to say "nothing" in so that you may finally be able to understand this as well?
As I said, I have no idea why they (RS) did not update their site or if they intentionally left the waiting requirement for free users notice on their site to be able to reinstate it at their leisure but fact is that Rapidshare currently has ZERO waiting between downloads and it's been like that for a few months already.

Yes there is piracy. But the huge numbers that people claim for piracy are supported by nothing but supposition and speculation. Speculation based on partial truths that ignores real world numbers and real world problems establishes absolutely nothing.

I don't know about that. There are actual statistics out there, you know, like TorrentFreak stats for 2008, 2009, 2010.
Then we have a big number of devs telling us that it is a huge problem and it's not just the big devs but also people like RampantCoyote who pointed out in this very thread that his sales halved as soon as his game became available as a free copy. Or people like Jeff Vogel who blogged here that up to 90% of his "customers" might be playing a pirated version. Or then you have the World of Goo guys who claim similarly high rates. Or Bohemia Interactive who shoot very high with a 97% claim.
These are numbers we have previously only heard from players like UbiSoft & co. but here we have indie or smaller devs throwing around the same high numbers.
I'm not sure why we would want to artificially downplay the problem or doubt the numbers when there are so many knowledgeable sources telling us the opposite.

'Nuff said.

Yeah. Hopefully...

bjon045 said:
For the vast majority of people BT offers far more. It is rare for my BT's to drop under 2-3MB's a sec and it would take roughly 9 "free" fileshare hosts to match that.

As you can see from my demo screenshot I'm downloading from Rapidshare with no speed limit (1.3+MB/s and I have a 12MBit line so we're at max speed here). It's been like that for a long time now with Rapidshare. They dropped the waiting in line requirement and the speed caps a few months back. Whether temporarily or for good, I don't know.
Also, once again: Torrents are being monitored and getting tracked. Depending on which country you live in, you will get tracked down and zapped (fined by lawyers).
In Germany -where I live- if you fire up a BT client you're begging for getting a cease & desist letter. It's stupid. Over here only dumbfuck pirates still use BT (w/o using a proxy).
Anyone with fractions of a brain left has long moved to file hosting services which is evidenced by the fact that on the popular piracy sites you will mostly find links to Rapidshare, FileServe, Netload, Uploaded, BitShare, FileSonic, WUpload, Filejungle etc. etc. etc.
 
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@Moriendor -- Insults and cursing aren't terribly effective in convincing anyone of anything. Insults and cursing don't fill in the gaps of half truths and ignored facts.

I learned years ago to avoid bad odor contests with skunks. I'm done here.
 
In my opinion age of selling digital copies of any product is gone, any digital copy can and will be acquired for free. The only thing that can be sold now is a service that enhances your experience with given product in some way. Be it product support, additional content, access to online leaderboard, multiplayer, etc, etc.. That is what steam gets my money for nowadays - keeping my saves\games avaliable and patched to latest version on any computer that i happen to want them to be. Only time i may revert back to torrent tracker is when my preordered game is already there, and somehow not yet available in steam. I think all this is natural evolution, and no amount of drm will stop this from going this way.
 
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I like when people are wrong they just throw up a tone argument and pretend they've won and walk away. It's hilarious.

Also, as people in this thread have said, adding anti-piracy features that break the game for pirates is a very stupid measure. That's always ended in legit users getting hit by the problem and endless complaints of bugs in the games that people don't even realize aren't originally there. That Mass Effect overheating one that that other poster was so amused by? Yeah, that was fixed by the pirates in less than hours. That is very funny! Particularly since legit users kept hitting the bug well after the pirates had moved past it.
 
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@darkling - When someone turns a discussion into a personal insult match, I leave. It serves no good purpose to continue such discussions. Though you may enjoy abrasive behavior, most adults don't. It's not real complicated.

@KapitanUnterhosen - At first I thought that clip was from a new BioWare game, but then realized it was The Witcher. Really funny clip. Wonder if its real.
 
That clip isn't a deterrent and is more likely to attract people to the pirated version for the hilarity.
 
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All I can say here is that if the numbers are true it's a shame because of 2 things.
1. The game is so great that it's worth even more than they're asking.
2. No DRM ppl, if anything should be supported in recent games, it's that. Can't believe someone is actually pirating such game instead of supporting this.
 
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