The game industry has its share of myths.
I'm confused about the first point. Do you mean some retailer offers to "sell" 1million copies at $1 by basically buying 1 million copies from you for $1 and then selling however many copies they can at their retail chains?
Also, yes to the piracy issue. Going after pirates by making it harder to pirate doesn't WORK. They still find a way around it. But it does make things annoying as heck for legitimate buyers. So who cares how many copies they guesstimate are pirated if they would never had bought the game anyway. I don't think they can count that as "lost" income. So all these DRM measures don't result in that much extra income from stopping pirates but do make things more difficult for legitimate customers.
But I think alot of business people in the games industry aren't from the game industsry or gamers so they don't know what they're doing. That's just speculation on my part, but is that your experience from interatcing with other companies in the industry?
Roughly how big of a difference has Stardock seen between retail sales and online sales? Have you guys seen a trend of sales moving toward digital distribution and/or is retail still very important in terms of revenue?
I'm curious as an indie game dev. We're planning on the digital distribution route. But I'm curious as to how different things would be if we also managed to get into the retail space.
The first point is so very true. Return on investment and revenue per copy sold are more important. The videogame industry is bringing in record revenue, but many publishers (EA, Take Two, THQ) are bleeding money due to mismanagement and growing development costs.I think Frogboy once said that each digital sale of Sins gives Stardock/Ironclad 2x as much money compared to a retail sale. So if you moved 500,000 units at retail, you'd "only" need 250,000 digital sales to bring in equal revenue.
4. Multiplayer sells more, offline.
5. XBox & Japanese alumnis screwed up the whole dynamics of Boxed sets principle of distribution.
6. HardCore gamers own better PCs or Macs than anyone else.
7. Blizzard will eventually join forces with EA to unleash a wave of Steam_y titles as a CounterStrike against Independants.
8. Linux will replace all major OS'es, soon.
9. Internet is Virus proof since multiple security solutions are available to anyone rich enough to upgrade often or buy it all over again in a year or less.
Burning the midnight oil before GDC in SF?
I'll tell you one thing regardng myth #3, As a veteran buyer and player of games, I've ceased purchasing anything that requires activation, let alone has an activation limit.
In my case I went from pirating what the 'rents wouldn't get me when I was a teen to buying everything I wanted, so I can see that. There are cases where the pirates MIGHT buy the game, but it's pretty rare. However, it seems to me that I'm not the only one that went from stealing to buying, so I don't think it's accurate to infer that someone stealing today will definately be next year...
The only DRM I hate is Starforce, personally, since it often keeps me from using my purchased titles for one reason or another. It keeps me from buying games I want until I no longer actually want to play them anyway (ala DiRT and GRID.)
#3 is not entirely correct as there'd be some people who pirate who might buy the game (/operating system/graphics package) but for the exorbitant price, or things like a censorship board declaring it inappropriate and thus not obtainable in certain countries.
Basically, it's not just the "scum of the universe who never buy anything" that end up pirating some things. But whining about the reality of the situation isn't going to increase your sales. Stop adding awful DRM, stop releasing unfinished games and stop charging wildly different prices in certain regions!
Stardock seem to be one of the few publishers taking this to heart, the rest just continue to abuse their customers' loyalty.
But hopefully like the way the online music scene is opening up, so too will the gaming scene. Impulse is definitely a good start.
It's just a measurement. Like any statistic it can be taken out of context. Now is that Sins special edition, Sins normal retail, Sins digital, Sins + Entrencment? You can fudge your metrics just the same as any other publisher. Also are you talking about units shipped or units sold at retail as there is a difference between those two metrics?
Allow me to correct you on this. I will make it easy to read: FPS's dominate the game playing world. To be more specific: FPS's dominate on the three console formats. They are, compared to other genre's, easier and cheaper to make offer a generous ROI and their are plenty of existing IP's out there to exploit (again reducing costs). Considering most retail stores don't carry PC games I will report what I see upon a fleeting visit to Game. Wall, upon wall of console games piled 5 deep. The overwhelming majority of which are First Person Shooters. Hotly followed by some derivative of the platformer, racing games, 'kiddie stuff' and oddly enough an utter shed load of 'brain training' stuff.
You have already appearing in a thread where people stated quite openly a pirated copy of Sins led directly to a sale of that product (and possibly the expansion pack). That then is sufficent to negate your comment of 0%, it is however a metric that would require effort to compute which makes publishers highly adversed to doing it. Again as has been demonstrated, if the majority of releases for sale are First Person Shooters then it logically follows that the most heavily pirated genre would be... Cooking Mama... try again, here's a hint: F.P.S. If the market suddenly started pumping out CRPG's at the same pace they release First Person Shooters then we would see CRPG's leading in terms of shelf space, units sold (and units shipped) and number of pirated copies.
I would also take this opportunity to point out I asked a very simple question in that same thread, which to paraphrase myself is: if piracy is black or white (it exists, it does not exist) would you have wanted the sale if it came via (C) infringment or not?
I wish the majority of those games would actually be based on REAL scientific research.
And I wish more people would play those games.
That's just a tiny fraction of the amount of pirated copies. It's really negligible. Even though every single sale is important, I doubt any developer would prefer the small amount of sales through piracy over a world without piracy. Also, I would think that most of those who bought after trying a pirated copy probably would have bought the game if they couldn't get a pirated copy of any games at all.
To sum up the thread, the majority of 'converts' wouldn't of purchased before pirating. The thing is and it was rather my point, we think it's a tiny fraction of the total (and a tiny fraction is still bigger than an absolute 0% which was the OP's point), but no game publisher has stepped forward to quantify the numbers. If could be tiny it could be a substantial amount, until it's a quantified metric placed in to the correct context we're all just making assumptions based on our gut feeling. And we know what assumptions make.
You misunderstand Frogboy. He is stating thst people who pirated a game would not have bought that game if the ability to pirate it did not exist
I hate people who say that. However, I think its fair to say Linux (and OS X) will continue to see some increase in market share which should make them viable platforms to release paid-for products on to.
I think his statement can be read either way to be honest. As with the metrics issue i mentioned it requires clarification. Did he mean that 0% of pirates buy the product or that without piracy there would be zero 'converts'.
I must admit that when I was younger I couldn't afford games, so I pirated all the games I had, but as I got older and started working all the good games I enjoyed I bought and slowly stopped playing pirated games, mind you using piracy as a test of a game before buying a full retail copy has saved me money on quite a few occasions... NFS: Pro Street to be one time it saved me. Now days if I play a pirated game and it's worth buying, I'll buy it, without regret, but some games such as EA's terrible dribble of late aren't even worth pirating let alone buying.
The problem is the assumption that they'd have no interest. People generally don't bother downloading a game they truly have no interest in playing, regardless of whether they can get it free or not. The mere fact they're pirating the game in the first place would indicate they have an interest in playing, and presumably paying, for it. Where most publishers go wrong is that they set out to prevent the piracy in the first place, which is impossible, rather than ask what they could do to convert the freebooters to paying customers. I wonder how many people paid for Gal Civ 2 after playing a pirated version; I doubt an honest answer will ever be achievable, but I'm willing to bet it was considerably more than for most titles.
Icebergs have tips that float. It dawned on my that Kyro mentioned people appearing in the logs with pirated copies of games (and being rejected by the servers). Well it would be a simple matter to grep the IP address of all those people from the logs. Then grep the IP address and see if/when the person reappeared with a legitimate serial (and thus a legitimate copy).
Whilst the number of muppets who'd attempt to take a pirate copy online is very small, it does lead you to the tip of the iceberg. After that I'm stumped though, I suppose you could outright ask people making it perfectly clear it's for statistics gathering with no come back... possibly even tacking it as a valid option in the usual "how did you hear about product X" polls that appear.
I have the impression that most of the 'try before you buy' people if faced with a question, would give an honest answer.
That's true.
As a teenager I lived in Germany and for years I played a "pirated" copy of Doom II (I hijacked it on the high seas) because I wanted the secret levels to work (I _love_ shooting at Nazis), and the German version didn't have them. I finally bought every and all version of the classic Doom a few years later.
The same applies to many other games which were available in Germany but only in forced bad translations, i.e. some company bought an exclusive licence, translated the game badly, and it was then impossible to buy the original (working) version (that was before the Internet). The only way to get the game to work properly was to hijack a copy in a bloody attack on the high seas.
Excuse me while I go throw up in a corner over that horrible idea... and thanks for the many, many nightmares that idea is sure to spawn!
It's fair to say that the open-source 'marvelous legend of DavidvsGoliath' stuff has its fair lowly cut of a HUGELY important market. Should it be considered as the 'indirect' Pirate of the gang in slacky terms.
We're talking Myths, not opinions here... but i'd tend to agree that without Linux, this world of offers & demands for better or even less costly OS'es wouldn't evolve beyond MSonopolistic or a two-punch boxing match with an Apple being knocked out every rounds only to fight back like Rocky Balboa while a Penguin watches in awe sitting in the first row of spectators.
Please, don't hate me!
Wake up - it's a myth, it's a plane, no - IT's Superman.
Remember everyone, pirates are good for society as a whole. They counteract global warming for one.
what's the offical tally now?
As long as games are coded for DirectX, and Linux distro's have the "You need to be this nerd to use me" reputation, Windows isn't going anywhere.
I keep waiting for some brilliant dipshit at one of the major publisher houses to add a few more options to their "how did you find out about this game" survey questions...
The first, and painfully obvious one, you already fucking played it... I just registered Dark Messiah. My brother owns the game, but I didn't get it because he said so, I played the damned thing through. But can I tell them why? Hell no, the idea that someone would actually play a game and then buy it just doesn't occur to them.
The second one I never see is piracy. But if they listed that answer, they'd have to hide the result of the surveys from even their own employees, because someone would surely leak it.
They make you fill out the nonsense when you register, but they wont actually give you the responses they don't want to hear from.
FPS doesn't dominate consoles. 3rd person point of view action games do, if anything.
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