InBlack wrote on Nov 25, 2011, 08:45:
shponglefan wrote on Nov 25, 2011, 08:18:
It wouldn't surprise me if 95% of copies were in fact pirated. Didn't the World of Goo creator release stats that ~90% or so copies of his game were pirated? I dunno why people are getting their panties in a knot over that.
Why? Because its a blatant lie. There is no statistic that can show this, in fact there is NO DATA at all on this.
There is indeed data. There was a PC game recently, it might have even been project zomboid beta? Anyway, they didn't have any authentication in place for updates, and the game checked amazon cloud servers for updates, and they got charged for a crapload more downloads than were purchased.
There's been other similar cases too. For instance, I think even demigod had a similar problem on release as I recall. Something about all the requests from pirate copies essentially ddosing the servers since they didn't have authentication in place.
There's been cases like this in the past where pirated copies so outnumbered legit copies, it caused problems when devs didn't plan ahead to make sure only legit copies could access things like downloads and updates, etc.
Edit: And the world of goo (which had no DRM) numbers indeed have some factual basis behind them:
http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/They talk about how they checked how many IP numbers submitted scores to the central score server, and it was much higher than the number of purchases (they talk about methodology and average numbers of IP's per legit customer, etc if you are curious about the numbers)
I don't know the exact % of piracy, and regardless of if its 50% (I doubt its that low) or 95%, its still a problem.
But is it the ZOMG THE SKY IS FALLING problem some companies like to say it is? No. There's still quite successful games on PC, both ports and PC exclusives.
Look at EA's financials, PC money basically equals or exceeds ANY other platform (xbox 360, ps3, wii) and is more than mobile, DS, and PSP combined.
GoG games have ZERO copy protection, if piracy was the OMG SKY IS FALLING problem people say it is, surely they would have almost no sales? Instead, they are doing so well they continually add to their catalog and are even working on getting more recent games.
Edit 2:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350Reflexive mentions some interesting things about their efforts to combat piracy. They quote a 92% figure but don't say where its from. Here's the interesting parts though:
we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads.
...
The sales to download ratio found on Reflexive implies that a pirated copy is more similar to the loss of a download (a poorly converting one!) than the loss of a sale.
Though that doesn’t make a 92% piracy rate of one of our banner products any less distressing, knowing that eliminating 50,000 pirated copies might only produce 50 additional legal copies does help put things in perspective. This comment was edited on Nov 25, 2011, 09:28.