Piracy ratio is about 20:1 ?!?

Konjad said:

You're right, but I think there's nothing to do about that. The only way to make piracy lesser is to make games multiplayer oriented. .

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That's a completely horrible idea and would never work anyways. There are far too many people who enjoy single player games for developers to just stop making them. The devs would lose a lot more money by not making the games at all.

Konjad said:

You're right, but I think there's nothing to do about that. The only way to make piracy lesser is to make games multiplayer oriented. Singleplayer games will be just pirated by most of the players. They even hacked Steam, so I do not believe the piracy ratio will go down, it's just going to be higher and higher, because today it's so easy to download a game even for a someone who use computer rarely, not like 10 years ago or so.

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So, if you can't beat them, give up. Is that it?

I think I understand your logic (multiplayer client server relationship requires a valid key etc), but to abandon singleplayer games entirely on account of piracy is the same as giving up. In that case I say bring on the CP, the DRM and the StarForce and people's personal rights be damned. I, for one, would much rather have to deal with all kinds of CP related technical issues to play the games than not play at all.

I would estimate for about every 5 games sold one is not sold due to piracy. 99% of the people pirating would never buy it even if they could. That is still pretty costly for any industry though, if supermarkets had losses like that food would be twice the price it is now.

fatBastard() said:

So, if you can't beat them, give up. Is that it?

I think I understand your logic (multiplayer client server relationship requires a valid key etc), but to abandon singleplayer games entirely on account of piracy is the same as giving up. In that case I say bring on the CP, the DRM and the StarForce and people's personal rights be damned. I, for one, would much rather have to deal with all kinds of CP related technical issues to play the games than not play at all.

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This isn't about giving up, but about accepting facts. You can impose whatever DRM you want, the only ones you'll bother with it are the honest customers - not the pirates who download a cracked a copy. "And peoples personal rights be damned"? WoW, that's a great idea... let's all give up things like data protection and privacy so we can play video games and make an idustry that's already making a lot of cash even richer. An industry that already criminalized millions of people through extensive lobbying. Because one thing should be fairly clear - people did not suddenly became criminals with the emergence of the internet or video games, they are just doing what they always did - they copy stuff. Since years law is becoming more and more strict when it comes to copyright law. One day you're doing nothing wrong, next day you're a criminal. Private copies, right to make a backup cd, freedom of information - who the hell needs these things? Just buy a video game and shut up.
What we need is a reformation of copyright law, a restriction of drm systems by the law and a solution that actually serves both parties - the people and the industry. Such solutions exist, but the content-industrie does not want them because they fear they would lose a tiny bit of money...

Konjad said:

The only way to make piracy lesser is to make games multiplayer oriented.

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I fear that this is the road we are looking down.

Ionstormsucks said:

This isn't about giving up, but about accepting facts. You can impose whatever DRM you want, the only ones you'll bother with it are the honest customers - not the pirates who download a cracked a copy. "And peoples personal rights be damned"? WoW, that's a great idea... let's all give up things like data protection and privacy so we can play video games and make an idustry that's already making a lot of cash even richer. An industry that already criminalized millions of people through extensive lobbying. Because one thing should be fairly clear - people did not suddenly became criminals with the emergence of the internet or video games, they are just doing what they always did - they copy stuff. Since years law is becoming more and more strict when it comes to copyright law. One day you're doing nothing wrong, next day you're a criminal. Private copies, right to make a backup cd, freedom of information - who the hell needs these things? Just buy a video game and shut up.
What we need is a reformation of copyright law, a restriction of drm systems by the law and a solution that actually serves both parties - the people and the industry. Such solutions exist, but the content-industrie does not want them because they fear they would lose a tiny bit of money...

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And what I'm saying is that if the choice is between getting my video game fix through all sorts of DRM, CP and whatnot or NOT getting my video game fix because that is the only way the publishers are willing to provide my fix then *I* know that my fix is more important to ME than maintaining a bunch a principles and rights I don't use anyhow.

Now, if I remove my black and white glasses, then I understand what you're saying and I agree ... but we both know that even though the world would be a better place if the pirates would stop pirating, if people would greet each other with a smile instead of indifference and be understanding of other people's opinions instead of dismissing them at first glance as being stupid, foolish or just plain old wrong, etc, etc, etc, ... it just isn't going to happen. If you can somehow manage to convince the publishers to be reasonable then I applaud you but should you fail to do so, then I would rather have a game full of annoying protection than no game at all.

As long as game producers continue their work we have nothing to worry about... I highly doubt they will stop making games because of piracy

fatBastard() said:

And what I'm saying is that if the choice is between getting my video game fix through all sorts of DRM, CP and whatnot or NOT getting my video game fix because that is the only way the publishers are willing to provide my fix then *I* know that my fix is more important to ME than maintaining a bunch a principles and rights I don't use anyhow.

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Well, that's not really the choices you have. As it was said several times now, the content industrie won't stop producing things just because of high piracy rates. Have a look at the video games market, it's rapidly growing, not shrinking or anything. Ok, the pc games market is slowly declining, I seriously doubt however that this has anything to do with piracy.
You really have to keep in mind how important such rights as data protection and privacy are. Sure, I admit it myself... very often we're inclined to say, "Hey, I've got nothing to hide, I don't need that stuff," but in the great scheme of things such rights matter. Just imagine your son (I don't know if you have children, but you know what I mean) downloads a few mp3s from the internet, or a stranger uses your wlan-network to download some copyright stuff. Suddenly you are dragged to court and the music industry asks you for 200.000 dollars cause you downloaded 25 mp3s... do you think that's ok? If you're lucky they'll settle with a few thousand dollars, but in anyway it will be a real costly affair for you. They can only do that because right now the state can sniff around in your isp's log files (well, in some countries anyway - thank god Germany recently put an end to that practice). Even if it was really you who downloaded the stuff, and not your kid or a stranger... do you think that's fair? I mean, honestly now - do you only have stuff at home you bought? Even long before the internet people swapped stuff. Who hasn't a pirated music cd at home, that he got from a friend or a family member. The problem is that 5 years ago that was perfectly legal and now it's suddenly a criminal act? Don't get me wrong, I think it's ok, if the industry tries to catch people who want to make money with warez or people who offer like 3k mp3s in emule, but somehow it doesn't make sense to me if they are suing people who downloaded 10 or 20 songs they probably would never have downloaded legally anyway. The sums of money they're asking for are hilarious, not just in the US, but everywhere.
Privacy is something that concerns us all. What we're seeing at the moment is just the tip of the iceberg. Coming up next Radio-Frequency-Identification technology - awsome for the industry, bad for the consumer. Good copy protection, but unfortunately for you and me, it makes us very transparent human beings.

fatBastard() said:

Now, if I remove my black and white glasses, then I understand what you're saying and I agree ... but we both know that even though the world would be a better place if the pirates would stop pirating, if people would greet each other with a smile instead of indifference and be understanding of other people's opinions instead of dismissing them at first glance as being stupid, foolish or just plain old wrong, etc, etc, etc, ... it just isn't going to happen. If you can somehow manage to convince the publishers to be reasonable then I applaud you but should you fail to do so, then I would rather have a game full of annoying protection than no game at all.

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It's not the content industrie we have to convince of anything, it's the politicians. The content-industry is chronically stupid as it has vividly proven the last 15 years. Right now our system is utterly unfair. There are those that pay absolutely nothing for music, movies and software and then there are those that pay too much because they go to a store and buy the stuff. You'll always get your video game fix, I'll promise you that... but I also promise you, that there will always be people who'll get it as well - and for a much better price because they simply pirate what they need. And while you're struggling to get that new game installed, because your dvd-rom won't play that dvd with the newest drm, they'll happily enjoy their cracked game.

Remus said:

One of the many factors i think, ultimately it's the quality of their games make them well known and increase the sales. How many multiplayer games sell as good as Blizzard's?. More people willing to buy Blizzard's games so the number of pirates won't impact the sales.

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Yeah diablo2 with over 4 milj. sold copies is the best selling pc "rpg" known to man. Im sure its just a funny coincidence that this best selling game (alongside with its quality) also has an almost unbreakable DRM.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

The only way to make piracy lesser is to make games multiplayer oriented.

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I fear that this is the road we are looking down.

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Blizzard took that road ten years ago allready - look where they are now! All their gameseries warcaft,starcraft,diablo,wow have big MP-parts or are completely MP. And the way they have done MP through battle.net is just brilliant - it really forces everyone to buy the game.

Sure they have talent too but that alone cant explain the amazing success that is blizzard. They have games that are like ten years old but are still sold today. Quality alone cant explain that. Multiplayer DRM does.

IMHO the industry isn´t trying hard enough to find solutions which both fight piracy and please their customers. At the moment it´s a mixture of draconian DRM, resignation ("everything will be cracked") and pretending to do something. The latter means they do apply CP & DRM they know will be broken quickly as sort of an insurance that the shareholders can´t sue them for doing nothing. So they´re protecting themselves, not the product.
I´m pretty sure the industry could come up with much more satisfying solutions if they invested a significant amount of money into R&D on DRM & CP.

Product quality is only of secondary concern nowadays. If a publisher has the choice to invest 10M in a great new game or buy a big movie license for 5M and slap a game together on 3 platforms for the rest of the money he will almost always prefer that. Marketing sells games, not product quality.

Gorath said:

Product quality is only of secondary concern nowadays. If a publisher has the choice to invest 10M in a great new game or buy a big movie license for 5M and slap a game together on 3 platforms for the rest of the money he will almost always prefer that. Marketing sells games, not product quality.

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Yes, that is very true. I saw a best selling list for game in 2007 and 3 of the games in the top 5 was movie tie ins like Ratatouille, Pirates of the Carribean and Spiderman 3. All of which was mediocre at best judging by the reviews.

zakhal said:

Yeah diablo2 with over 4 milj. sold copies is the best selling pc "rpg" known to man. Im sure its just a funny coincidence that this best selling game (alongside with its quality) also has an almost unbreakable DRM.

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Well, if you look at the list of best selling games, then you also find quite a few games without online multiplayer. So that alone can certainly not explain the huge success of Diablo2. Plus, I would not think of multiplayer as a DRM, it's a feature that you can use, but which don't have tu use. I'm not an all too big Blizzard fan, but let's face it - in the eyes of many gamers they deliver high quality games. Blizzard even managed to win the markets in Asia which is not quite easy. And if you can achieve that you basically need no DRM at all.

Gorath said:

I´m pretty sure the industry could come up with much more satisfying solutions if they invested a significant amount of money into R&D on DRM & CP.

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Yes, they could. Some of them already did. Take Valve with their steam distribution. But other solutions would be possible as well, which were even better in my opinion. We could, for example, begin taxing internet access based on bandwith used and compensate artists with the money. It's a system that exists for years now on the offline market (think about blank cds, printers, coyping machines, etc.) and works. So why not take it one step further. A lot of experts think it would work for the internet as well and speak in favour of such a variable "culture flatrate".

As we become a more and more wired (or wireless I guess) world, I can see more games being delivered online, not necessarily with a subscription, but where the actual game files and such reside on a server somewhere. So long as they make it so that you can upload mods or whatever, I don't have a problem with it and it would pretty much eliminate piracy for those titles overnight. Of course, some people won't like the online concept for an essentially single player game, but I'd rather we go down that rode than a road where there are no single player games.

Ionstormsucks said:

Well, if you look at the list of best selling games, then you also find quite a few games without online multiplayer.

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50% of the top10 best-selling pc games are either fully or good part multiplayer games atleast according to wiki.

Ionstormsucks said:

So that alone can certainly not explain the huge success of Diablo2. Plus, I would not think of multiplayer as a DRM, it's a feature that you can use, but which don't have tu use.

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Multiplayer is a big part of all blizzard games especially diablo2. Many even in this site have agreed that diablo2 singleplayer is secondary to the multiplayer. And you cant play diablo2 multiplayer with warez version - you need to buy the game.

Ionstormsucks said:

I'm not an all too big Blizzard fan, but let's face it - in the eyes of many gamers they deliver high quality games.

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I havent said that they are not quality games - I only guessed that quality alone is not the only sales factor here considering the success of blizzard (which goes beyond measurable). But without real evidence your guess is as good as mine. Btw customer-friendly&working DRM could also be called quality.

Gorath said:

IMHO the industry isn´t trying hard enough to find solutions which both fight piracy and please their customers.

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I agree. In the music busoiness, things are similar : The lowering sales of music CDs are en block said to be lowered by people copying things.

But no-one really asks about Quality.

The people in the music business aren't doing what I know by the German word of "hinterfragen" - it means asking what's BEHIND the lines.

As long as they've got a scapegoat, they are happy.

zakhal said:

I havent said that they are not quality games - I only guessed that quality alone is not the only sales factor here considering the success of blizzard (which goes beyond measurable). But without real evidence your guess is as good as mine. Btw customer-friendly&working DRM could also be called quality.

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Well, it's hardly one aspect alone that should obvious. Nonetheless you simply have to see that Blizzard somehow managed to find entrance to the Asian market and that alone would explain why they are usually selling more copies than companies that can only sell their games in Europe and North America. Part of that has of course to do with multiplayer, but not with multiplayer as a DRM, but with multiplayer as a feature. But I guess we're not so far apart here anyway.

I mean, you said it yourself, only 50% of the best selling games have a online multiplayer option, so how do you explain the rest. I won't deny that games with online capability usually sell more copies, but as the list shows it's not a must. So why did they sell so well? In my opinion quality is a likely candidate. I mean, it doesn't have to be my taste or yours, but very obviously these games had something that people liked (I freely admit that I have no idea how Dungeon Lords could be sold 1 million times).

What pisses me off a bit are companies like Crytek who spent 16 million euros in a simplistic shooter like Crysis, which might look awsome, but plays like every other shooter out there and on top of that only runs on high end systems and then blame online piracy for selling only 1 million copies. Did they lose a few copies on that, sure they did as does everyone who develops for the pc - we know piracy is rampart there. But I mean, they made some money with it so it can't be that bad, can it? But Crytek thought, "you invest a lot of money - you'll make a lot of money" a formula that simply does not work. Your game must have a perceived quality that Crysis very obviously did not have, at least not to an extent that Crytek expected. I mean, it's their first game and they thought it would become an extraordinary success. And what do they do? They piss off all their honest customers by announcing that they will no longer support the game and instead begin working on Warhead... because they can make more money on that (well they didn't say that, but that's the reason). How do they expect to forge a community like that? In my opinion that's part of Blizzard's success - they always supported their games for a very long time. Crytek on the other hand gives up after the second patch, despite the multiplayer part of the game having severe bugs. I take it if Warhead fails they will again blame piracy, but more likely will be that all the pissed customers that bought Crysis and now feel left behind will simply not buy Crysis Warhead.

With all such statistics I feel moved to ask - how are you getting your data, and may I see it please?

Dyne said:

With all such statistics I feel moved to ask - how are you getting your data, and may I see it please?

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Depends on what statistics you're talking about. The list of best selling video games can be found on Wikipedia - I can't say anything about it's reliabilty, but considering the fact that most of the entries refer to news bits from gaming magazines I'd say it's probably the most reliable numbers you can get. For things concerning Crytek, check the net - there are several interviews in which Crytek said they invested 16 million euros and sold about 1 million copies. If you really want to know anything about file sharing and online-piracy you should check the internet as well. Most studies on this field are available online and you should have no trouble to find them. Same goes for the numbers of the ESA, MPAA, RIAA, BSA, you name them... you can find all that stuff online. But I can tell you right now, that without having read a lot - and I mean really a lot - of different studies, articles and books about the topic it is very hard to get a clear picture of the situation. The problem is that most studies contradict eachother. From "file sharing hurts the industry" to "file sharing helps the industry" you'll find pretty much anything.
When it comes to the 20:1 ratio... well, I'd like to know that myself because I know of no source which would even imply such a ratio. If you're asking me it's probably a wild guess of some game developers which is spooking around. But then again, for piracy being such a huge problem, the gaming industrie is pretty secretive with their statistics, more than the music, movie or software industrie anyway.

Sorry for not being clear. I was referring to the OP's quote of Crytek's claim of 15-20:1, the general figures bandied about by the industry, and making a snide request to Crytek, the ESA et al to publish their methodology regarding how they arrive at these figures.

Crysis has, according to EA's Q3 Earnings Conference call, sold in excess of the 1 million platinum mark and thus "exceeded expectations". Considering the scaremongering over how demanding it is on the hardware side and the nebulous threat of piracy, that's good going. Granted it's nowhere near the upper echelons of the best selling PC games of all time (according to Wikipedia's list, anyway), but it's comfortably in the mid-range. I'm wondering what forecasts Crytek had for their sales that made them seemingly disappointed by its performance, while EA seem more than happy.

Dyne said:

Sorry for not being clear. I was referring to the OP's quote of Crytek's claim of 15-20:1, the general figures bandied about by the industry, and making a snide request to Crytek, the ESA et al to publish their methodology regarding how they arrive at these figures.

Crysis has, according to EA's Q3 Earnings Conference call, sold in excess of the 1 million platinum mark and thus "exceeded expectations". Considering the scaremongering over how demanding it is on the hardware side and the nebulous threat of piracy, that's good going. Granted it's nowhere near the upper echelons of the best selling PC games of all time (according to Wikipedia's list, anyway), but it's comfortably in the mid-range. I'm wondering what forecasts Crytek had for their sales that made them seemingly disappointed by its performance, while EA seem more than happy.

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That's exactely what I thought when I read it... 1 million copies sold is really not that bad. I guess Crytek simply realized that they could make way more money going multi-platform, so they saw a chance and took it.