Piracy will save us all?

I've never been one that's all that worried about piracy in games, and now I'm thinking that it's not true. I previously held that people who pirated where just not going to buy a game anyway, that they weren't lost sales, they were just people that didn't want to spend the money that way.

Music and games and anything copyable, I've enjoyed being able to preview before buying. All the games I like, I own, however some I've pirated before buying (to see if they were good enough) and some after (because I've lost the media).

Now, I realise I was wrong. Pirates aren't even lost sales, they're free advertising. A great game that gets pirated gets more word of mouth advertising than a game that can't be pirated. Then you get even more people pirating it and they leak into the people that do buy their games and you get even more real sales too. Sounds like it's all profit to me. I know that I'm not going to put any protection on my game when I release it, in hope that people will pirate it and spread the word for me.

What's your view on free advertising through bittorrent?

 

I've always thought there's some bad sides and some good sides to pirating games. The 'reduced income' that people keep focusing on is a bad thing, the extra word of mouth you mention is a good thing. Then there's the sale factor: how many people that pirate it would actually buy it if they couldn't pirate. And there are probably some more things that go into the quite elaborate equation.

I'm still not sure if the outcome is positive or negative in the end. I am convinced though that it's not nearly as bad as RIAA/MPAA/whathaveyou organizations would like you to believe (Hollywood had its best year ever in 2009, for example) and probably not as good as Piratebay fans are proclaiming. As always, somewhere in the middle.

word_of_mouth - reduced_sales * sale_factor ... = outcome

Anybody else care to add to this formula?

 

maybe it can be put simply as:

if the number of people who buy your game when piracy is unavailable are greater than the number of people who buy your game when it is easy to pirate, then you should try to protect your game.

figuring out these two values is the contentious point.

My opinion is that free advertising almost always outweighs piracy. To the point that you can use free advertising from one game to promote the sequel and beyond, whereas DRM only ever affects the buying rate on one title at a time.

 

If the argument for piracy is that [the collective] you wanted to 'preview before buying', then this argument falls short when a demo is available.

Alternatively, if your theory holds true, you should be able to release a fully functional time-limited version without seeing any pirated versions appear.

Doubtful. Unfortunately, there are, and always will be, those who pirate for underhanded reasons - free is cheaper, after all.

 

The argument only falls short for those that do "preview" a game when a demo is available. And previewing "to the end of the game a couple of times" is also just not cricket either.

The last game I previewed was F.E.A.R. and it managed to engage me for about five minutes before I felt that I wasted my time getting hold of it. If you consider this to be piracy, then letting your friends "have a go" of a game in your own home should be considered piracy too. And I believe it is by the RIAA... which is unfortunate because it's not sensible.

 

If we except that piracy leads to word of mouth advertising and builds brand loyalty then the question we should be asking is: How can we achieve these goals without piracy?

People (especially students) who download Maya 3D often claim they do it to learn the software so they can then apply these skills in work environment. This helps Autodesk when selling copies of Maya to companies for lots of money. However, it does involve people pirating Maya.

A much better solution is the one used by Microsoft for Visual Studio. They give away the Express editions. This both encourages people to learn Microsoft's software platforms/languages and it removes the need to pirate Visual Studio.

 

Maybe we should make it easier to turn game demos into the full game.

It would be interesting to see XBLA some stats. How many played the demo and then upgraded to the full version versus how many ignored the demo and just bought the game. I suspect more people try the demo first on XBLA compared to full Xbox games despite the full Xbox games costing more. The XBLA demo to full game is an easy path.

Maybe demos should be bigger with enough content that people can become fans just from the demo. Shareware games typically used to give away the first third of the game.

 

Most of the game demos I've looked at downloading over the past year have been on the rather large side themselves. Perhaps this too isn't aiding the 'cause' if one could download a 2GB demo, or download [pirate] the 2.1GB full version?

 

It's true. And all too often, it's a 2GB download and only got half an hour of content in it. Not even worth looking at.

Bring back the days of Doom. Fully one-third of the game for free. I gather id became quite successful as a result, whatever happened to them anyway...?

 

For a purely single player, content and story heavy game, with no significant extras or built in social aspects (shared user levels or server based systems etc), I'd be a fan of releasing the first 1/3rd of the game free to play with a streaming-download for the remaining two thirds on paid activation in one or two stages. A sort of very very slow to pay coin op game. Expect a pirated version, but perhaps counter it with something like "first 10000 players get the game free" type things when sales are down and try create a one off buzz? (World of Goo is the example here I guess). Maybe try something very remarkable/risky/mad like contacting a second tier warez group and give them a pre-hacked copy or a drm free copy, as long as they promise to give credit and let them spread the word (eh, only for Indies I think, no shareholders of a publisher are going to stomach this.)

Alot of the casual games did a 1 hour free trial approach, regardless of where you were in the game. Perhaps the psychology of the 1 hour is that you had to make the most of it, and thus were more likely to focus and get into the game. Makes sense for non-content heavy games, like puzzlers.

Obviously alot of games are pushing hard at the social and server side aspects - with many on Facebook being free for the gameplay, but paid for the bits that your friends will notice, like your clothes or your special items. Piracy isn't really possible without a major server cloning task and worse, people are tied to where their friends are.

Outside of Facebook there are games like the Sims and Spore which only become more special for players the more they get into the social bits (story/character sharing), although they may only be a minority. Getting a hacked copy and putting their account for sharing at risk is pretty much out of the question for those players too. Not so much for the rest.

 

Autodesk in fact do the same with the Maya Learner's edition - but it's always nice for a student to have the real deal, I guess, and I assume there are also limitations on said Learner's Edition, such as inability to export/import or whatnot. Given that the real version of Maya is so expensive though... it's pretty much 100% certain that no student would ever, in the history of the universe, go out and buy it outright.

 

Autodesk discontinued the Personal Learner's edition back in 2008.

 

Ah. True, I guess you can only get a 30-day trial now - oh well, I guess it doesn't make much difference when most people seem to get the "extended trial"

 

I dont buy this "piracy isnt a lost sale bullshit"

I know "lots of people" * who used to buy lots of music, who used to rent and buy movies - but now they* just download them for free. If that's not a lost sale, then i'm great uncle fucking bulgaria.


* = not me guv.. honest!!!!

 

Yes, some people make the counter-point obvious, but people only have a finite amount of money, so there are (I believe, not know) many more pirated copies of games out there that couldn't be afforded than there are copies of games that could, but were stolen, which was the point of the word of mouth trade off. Sure, there are some lost sales, but if your game doesn't get into the hands of thousands somehow, you're going to remain obscure and unpurchased anyway.

I think my point is: would you prefer 10-100 sales with no piracy, or 100-1000 sales and 10,000 pirate copies flying around torrent space?

 

The mistake a lot of these piracy researchers make is that they count every pirated copy as a 'lost sale'. But that's not true of course. There's plenty of people that only play your game (or use your app, listen to your music, whatever) if they can pirate it from somewhere. If they can't, they just won't get it, and they won't sleep less for it too much either. It's not like your product is a unique and/or life-essential thing, after all. This makes it very hard to get a good insight into this whole thing.

 

Sounds familiar. But if matey couldn't have downloaded that particular movie, he wouldn't have rented it, he only downloaded it because he could - which made him aware that it was actually good. (and so the world was saved)