Piracy will save us all?

And I'd like to know if piracy can really turn 10-100 sales into 100-1000, can we achieve the same results without piracy?

 

I'd like to think that is possible, probably through something like the Steam 75% off thing that happened recently. It's virtually piracy as I can't see anyone making profits on that low a price point, it's got to be a kind of loss leader approach to get people rolling on the "buy a game on steam" thing. Like piracy, Steam have managed to capture the essence of availability. Probably selling at an introductory price of 99p would help make a non-pirate, word of mouth audience, but I know I won't buy a game even for 99p unless I can see a video... (maybe 99p is too suspicious, as I know I've bought games for more based on nothing better than hype).

 

I think we probably could, by releasing free stuff in a controlled way, and it would probably be better for us.

But we don't have no piracy, so we can't actually achieve anything without it because we can't eliminate it.

 

Rather than have "no-piracy", we possibly could have very few fully activated games that are pirated. World of Goo did a good one on this with their online-scoreboard thing. Just add more of this kind of content to the game and only the game when fully activated, or add in player to player hinting like in DemonsSouls that adds to single player games but doesn't hinder too much if it's not there so the free versions still play well, up to a point.

 

Piracy can be eliminated by building games that only work whilst connected to a server. We are starting to see this in games like Tiger Woods Online.

But if piracy does have positive benefits as some people claim, is it possible to retain these positives after piracy is wiped out?

 

I'd like to see what happens if every single game in the world needs to phone home for permission to launch .. the infrastructure needed for it would be massive, peak hours would probably lead the permission thing to crash, and people would be furious that they can't play their game.

 

Any time you take a console game online it phones home. In fact many games connect to servers even when they are in single player mode.

 

yeah, but you don't have to have your console online to play the single player...

 

Online leaderboards are pretty much de rigeur these days anyway, so having every game phone in doesn't seem too far-fetched. It would have to be quite forgiving of periods of network downtime, though - because there will be.

 

maybe it isn't a big deal, I don't know, but I'd imagine the number of connections to go up by an order of magnitude

 

I'll admit, I'm not a fan of requiring the player to have a net connection. Some people don't have one all the time, some people don't have one at all. But a serial to unlock the full game, and also be your online identification number might give the benefits of both. People without on-line caps can get their game unlocked, those with on-line caps can access the on-line services through their legitimacy certificate

those who are on-line are more likely to pirate, so have value added for the key.
those who are not on-line are less likely to pirate (maybe).

 

Sounds like Steam to me.

 

yeah I guess
I like Steam, unlike every other mofo on here

 

snap. steam is fucking awesome, and anyone who hates it is a knobface.

THE ABOVE IS FACT

 

Alright, alright, I dislike it a lot less than I used to. It has got better, at launch it was like crawling naked across broken glass. I do still very occasionally get "can't connect to server so we're not letting you play the game you paid for" messages though so it's not all sweetness and light, and would it kill them to integrate it with the Windows Games folder a little bit better?

 

Steam had it's teething troubles, and they went on for a bit, but as a DRM tool, there are others that had troubles just as bad, SecuROM for instance. I remember people pirating SecuROM games because they couldn't play their bought copies.

make games cost less. $70 is too much for a game, i think.

 

yeah

 

It's a matter of units sold, not worth. If you get enough sales, $3 is good enough to pay for all your development costs. if you only get one sale, even $1000 a game isn't enough.

 

my point is that you'll get more sales if the price isn't so prohibitive. I would happily spend money every month on games if they weren't so expensive. and there's not even a good price tiering system, every title's AAA priced, even if it's got 5 hours of gameplay.

Who's costing the industry more? the games stores who sell pre-owned games (nobody thinks this is immoral, except the industry people), or the pirates?

maybe if the games were released at the prices that the pre-owned games sell at, we'd make more.

 

The $3 figure assumes a download I'd hope rather than retail. For a retail console game, no amount of sales at $3 will get you anything but more loss because of your fixed per unit costs.