If I wrote a post saying that Demigod sales were far below what we had hoped for and I said that the reason was due to piracy and that the answer was that we should have put some nasty copy protection on those DVDs to have prevented early piracy what do you think people would say?
I know what my answer to that would be. I would say that Stardock couldn’t blame poor sales on piracy but rather the fact that the game’s built-in multiplayer match-making was totally broken for the first day of release due to its underestimation of network resources that a mainstream game would take and even when that got addressed, the multiplayer match-making for two weeks and counting has been incredibly flakey which affected reviews and word of mouth. That’s what I would say.
And yet…
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23381\
Demigod debuts at #3 for top selling PC games at retail – bearing in mind that that was a partial week and that the majority of units sold were digital sales which weren’t counted.
But…but…what about those hundreds of thousands of pirates? Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you’re playing a pirated copy right now, if you’re one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you’re a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way.
The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don’t buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary – our customers.
As Ars Technica quoted over a year ago:
"The reason why we don't put copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count," Wardell argues. "When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue."
Even Demigod, a game that shipped with no copy protection on the DVD, was massively pirated, and has had, to put it mildly severe launch issues with its multiplayer match-making which has had a negative impact on its Metacritic score has still managed to debut at the top of retail sales charts (not counting our digital sales).
Why is that? At that point I can only speculate but the first reason is pretty straight forward: Demigod is an awesome game. Second, while the multiplayer matchmaking that comes with the game currently sucks, our customers know it will get fixed. Part of that is the demographic of Stardock customers. They’re more experienced, they know that some of the issues with the MP matchmaking aren’t due to rushing the game out or negligence but rather the fact that complicated systems sometimes don’t scale well and there is no substitute for time when it comes to fix them.
I think there are many lessons to be learned from Demigod. For example, if I had to do it over again, I would be inclined to require a valid user account to play LAN even if it only has to be validated one time. That way, we could also make it a lot easier for a legal user to have a LAN party with a single license. Anyone who has played Demigod on Game Ranger probably knows what and why I'm bringing that up.
When the focus of energy is put on customers rather than fighting pirates, you end up with more sales. It seems common sense to me but then again, I’m just an engineer.
Oh please wake up and smell what you're shovelling. If you pirate a game you have the money to own a computer , you have the money to pay for the internet, . Surely you can put aside the amount of money (relatively speaking) to pick up a game, and if you cant do it immediately, save up for it. Of course if you may feel perfectly justified in your povity to steal a computer and steal someone's internet connection, hey you feel justified in stealing games so why wouldn't you?
I'm giving up here, because all I am doing is repeating myself. db0 and others who condone piracy are not going to convince me, and I'm not going to convince you. I just hope that one day those of you who do pirate games feel the full weight of the law and pay the price for being the common criminals that you are!
No, what's preposterous is saying there are people that can afford to shell out several hundred dollars for a computer, but they can't afford to cough up 50 bucks +/- for entertainment.
So they're justified in DLing games they didn't pay for? Give me a break. If they can't afford gas for their car, are they justified in stealing it? You're talking about entertainment, not basic life necessities. Do they sneak into movies because they just can't afford to pay to go to the theater? I gues not. They probably DL them.
'Rich fingers'? How the hell do you get the idea that I'm rich? I work for a living and I have bills to pay like everyone else. I buy my software. If I can't afford to pay for a game... I don't play it. I certainly don't go to some torrent site and DL it, all the while telling myself it's okay because I'm too poor to afford it. Gods, the rationalizations are astounding.
You just go ahead and keep telling yourself it's okay and your friends aren't doing anything wrong because they're not 'rich'. Whatever makes you sleep at night. I'm done here.
After buying Demigod, I must say thanks to Stardock for not putting DRM in. After paying for a game I hate wasting time dealing with security that doesn't stop pirating anyway. And while the multiplayer part of the game has some problems right now, it sounds like you all are working hard on it, which is appreciated.
Hilarious game. Unfortunately, they screwed up with the propaganda attempt. The beneficial badguy is the easiest way to get the ideas into the people, just let it suck em in and guide them onto the guys in passing.
Even if this were true (and I can't name one single unpaid musician who could be described as "booming"), computer games require much, much more time and effort to produce than an album of music. They normally contain an album's worth of music on top of the actual game, in their soundtracks. That's worlds away from one guy and his guitar rocking out on Youtube.
It's true that piracy hasn't yet killed off the gaming industry. The reason why? Because lots of people still pay for it anyway. My hypothesis was the possible future, where everyone who currently pays for their games suddenly decide to stop paying for things too. That *would* kill the games industry as we know it. And I'm pretty sure the trends towards piracy have increased now that technology exists for one person to share a copy with hundreds of thousands of other people...
That's exactly what I said - in a world without scarcity, which doesn't exists, nobody would have to pay for anything, and we could all spend all day doing whatever we liked. But it's pretty obvious that's not the world we live in...
The trouble is... When talking about the 70% of people living in poverty, you're talking about people who, largely, have far greater concerns than getting to play the latest video games. If they're in a state poverty, they don't have enough food, yet you think they're going to have money to waste on PCs and electricity? Nope, sorry... If you're too poor to put food on the table, you're not going to be wasting your time and money on PCs. A PC capable of running Demigod costs more than the people you're talking about earn in a year.
Except that, as others have said, if you have money to buy a PC capable of running the latest games, pay for broadband internet, and pay for electricity torun your PC, you *can* afford to spend money on a PC game. That's kind of the problem. No matter how much you try to be high and mighty, "oh, please, think of the poor of the world, don't deny them this wonderful culture!", the genuinely poor people of the world aren't the ones pirating. They can't afford the equipment.
Your lack of arguments is showing.
Proving that it isn't hoever does. And since you don't have any plausible argument for the contrary, you have no base to stand to call others thieves. You're just exposing your arguments as the emotional buttons they are. And then you sprinkle them with schadenfraude just to make the point. You're laughable.
@jwinston2
You're basically exposing the shallowness of your argument. "I (or Stardock) arbitrarily define what you're doing as 'stealing', so you're thieves and should be treated as such! Because I say so!". That's just the original equivocation fallacy that I've refuted here many times already.
Actually it wouldn't. That is because music and games would still be made and people would still have to find a different business model to monetize it. As long as there is a demand for games, people will figure out ways to get paid for doing so.
Your argument rests on the assumption that the world is static and people can't think of any other way to make money out of games except through selling.
Clearly youve never been to asia.
Anyways pirating music, movies and old games are ok then, since it doesnt require some fancy hardware?
Read what I said again, carefully.
That *would* kill the games industry as we know it.
the games industry as we know it.
as we know it.
The games industry as we know it is still predominantly about boxes sold in shops. If everyone stops paying for games and just downloads pirated versions instead, as you so rightly observed, bang goes that business model. That's basically what I said. Thanks.
So yes, the games industry as we know it dies, and some new model tries to fill its place. MMORPGs are relatively safe (need to connect to the server to play). Things like Demigod (once it works) with online multiplayer and persistence of characters, again, relatively safe, although they would probably have to move to a MMORPG-like subscription model. Woo, £5 per month (assuming half the normal MMORPG rate) to play a game that, under the old regime, I could have bought outright for less than £30! If I play for > 6 months, I've spent as much anyway! Hurray! Another model being investigated for multiplayer shooters is free-to-play, with paid-for customisation (Battlefield: Heroes). Again, that might well work, and I wish them every success.
The trouble is... Nobody's really come up with a compelling alternative that would work for, say, a 40 hr single player RPG. Do you break it up into episodes? That would really hurt a game like Oblivion, and the episodes would just get pirated anyway. Do you turn it into a MMORPG? But I don't want to pay a subscription, or have to put up with MMO players. Where's the solution?
Somehow, I suspect that if the day comes that you can't make money selling games as units, we can kiss goodbye to:
Large-scale single player FPS (eg Halflife 2, Bioshock)
Large-scale free-roaming RPGs (eg Oblivion, KotOR (which has already given up and gone MMO!))
Single player 4X strategy games (eg Gal Civ, Civ series)
Assuming everyone will just download the pirated copy, and that any future content will also be pirated and not bought, where's the business model for these games? It doesn't exist. It's just not there. "Please donate" is unlikely to cut it when you've got teams of hundreds to pay.
I quite like all three of the genres above, and many others which would face a similar fate if pirating were to continue to grow unabated and erode the base of paying customers. Something to think about, anyway...
No, I've never been to Asia, but what's that got to do with anything? Broadband is an expensive commodity anywhere, and if you're really in a state of poverty, Asian or not, it should be among the first things to go. If you can afford $10.85 per month for broadband in China, you can afford to save up and buy a game. If you can't afford to save up for a game, you're living beyond your means and are a fool for having the broadband in the first place. Simple as.
Where are you from?
Personally, I'd say pirating a six-year-old game that's no longer sold doesn't do much harm to anybody. It's already made its sales, and (hopefully) enabled the developer to stay open and produce more games. In most cases a game makes all the money it's going to make within the first year. There are exceptions - MMOs, games which continue to introduce new content for years after release, "classics". But largely, after the first year, when it hits the bargain bucket, that's it for substantial sales revenue.
However, that wasn't my point. My point was that it CANNOT be the poorest people who are pirating the latest video games, because there is a price barrier to entry - you need a decent gaming PC. Owning a gaming PC strongly implies that you are not poor. I was not saying it's OK to pirate when you don't need expensive equipment. Please don't put words in my mouth
So getting back to the point, you asserted that the 70% of the world's population who are in a state of poverty are the ones pirating, which is wrong. Actually a truly poor person has as much use for a PC game as a fish has for a bicycle. I don't know for sure, but I suspect you'll find that most pirates are aged between 10-25 and are wealthy enough (or have parents wealthy enough) to have a broadband connection, electricity, a gaming PC, food, drink, a roof over their heads, etc, etc. People who, if they saved a little, or just bothered to put their hand in their pocket once in a while, can afford to pay for PC games. I know, I was one, and had friends who were too, but now that I have a steady job, and a little perspective other than "WANT, MUST HAVE, NOT PAYING, HAHA!", I can see what a freeloading douche I was.
A PC is an obligatory investment for any IT student and most universities offer them for cheap.
IT Students don't earn money.
IT Students pirate...and teach their friends.
Burn universities and you'll solve the problem.
(just joking)
Ello,
Just wanted to say what I think about the piracy issue.
I download games from torrents, not because I cannot afford to buy the stuff or because
I think "art should be free". I simply download because it usually is the fastest way to
get the stuff.
I also buy games when that is fastest, I got about 30 games or so on steam and perhaps
20 boxed games. Right now I buy about a game a month or so.
My point being: Demigod almost screwed up the european market by not having the same release
dates as the american market. Luckily the electronic download did not differentiate between american
and european credit cards
Point in general:
Give better service than torrents can.
-Get the game on a good electronic download day one
-use pre-download like Steam to be able to have the game opened up the second it is released
-have the same release dates in every country
-Use cool online material with registry keys rather than "real" (read non-functional) copy protection
Yeah it would be wrong for kids to experience culture they could not afford....
You refuted nothing; it is a straw man argument to say it depends on how you define a word. You do not get that chance as you had no involvement in the production of the product. The makers of the product get to decide how the argument and words are to be defined, if you cannot understand this I suggest you read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Stardock has clearly stated they consider piracy equivalent to stealing. Regardless if you agree or disagree you are incorrect as you are not the authority on how the terms are to be applied. Continue stealing the product but do not try to say for one instance it is not stealing because the "product" as defined by Stardock is consider stolen if it is pirated.
People who, if they saved a little, or just bothered to put their hand in their pocket once in a while, can afford to pay for PC games.
Well, I can't possibly afford to buy every game currently available on Impulse - I don't get paid again until 20th May, and I've got other bills to pay. Therefore you would argue that I have the right to just pirate them all in that case, then?
Besides, come *on*, I like video games, but you really can't be trying to argue that they're an important part of "culture"... What "culture" do they miss out on by not having a copy of, say, C&C: Red Alert 3? Odds are, if they didn't have video games, they might actually go outside and experience some real, quality culture, rather than just a load of recycled hero-fantasy wish fulfillment!
I enjoy games, I've spent lots of money on them, and I even try to make games in my spare time, but I've never played a game with more culture than a cheap B movie... Claiming that someone's life will be in some way diminished by not getting to play all the latest video games is just too much of a stretch!
You're really flailing around for justifications here, aren't you?
Not only is your argument inane, as being a developer does not in any case grant the right to redefine words, but you also don't know your logical fallacies. I suggest you follow the link you posted and learn what a Straw man fallacy actually is and why it doesn't apply to what I said.
In short: Don't try to sound smart by using complex-sounding concepts you're not familiar with.
I won't waste my time teaching you of course.
You should take your own advice.
The developers say that they consider piracy is stealing. The counter argument you have made is that you know the true definition and implied meaning of the words, stealing and piracy and the developers are incorrect. Everyone else is then suppose to accept your application and definition as face value when in fact the developers have already settled this moot point by stating that for there product they consider piracy is stealing, i.e. piracy = stealing. Further when someone calls you out on it, and points out that you have in reality used a straw mans argument in which you “create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position,” your solution is to attack the person?
I can see why anyone reading this thread would consider you an excellent authority because after all you have “defined” what stealing and piracy mean and everyone else, including Stardock is wrong.
Real quality culture? I believe video games to be one of the higher forms of art myself (something even those from your anti-pirate camp seems to be willing to admit in this thread) but each to his own.
Yeah exactly, if you cannot afford the game anyway and download it, it will not hurt anyone so I do not see why it would be a problem at all.
Piracy is a copyright crime, not theft. If you steal something it dissapears, if you copy something it does not.
Go watch "don't copy that floppy" again.
Again this is all dependent on how the words are being defined and used. Please see the definition of steal. Stardock is clearly using the word as such that you are stealing the code by the act of pirating it. Similarly if you steal a kiss you are not making something disappear but you are taking something without permission.
If permission was granted then you would be correct but I do not believe the code has an open source license unless I am mistaken.
It's too bad there isn't a way to capitalize on this stupidity. One more try for all the bleeding morons arguing nothing.
Because someone doesn't have the right to obtain something, does not make it wrong if they do. Labeling it as stealing doesn't change this anymore than moral outrage over copyright infringement does. To classify an act as wrong, it has to cause harm in some way, to someone. If you have no money and you copy a game, you've caused no harm to anyone. No lost sale, no harm.
Because copyright infringement isn't stealing, does not make it right. It's not, really. You can shut up now. Perpetuating in calling it theft is just making you look like an idiot. You can be morally outraged at the dick with a brand new two thousand dollar computer every year and ten thousand dollars in pirated software all day long. You don't have to call it theft.
Because someone can't afford to buy every game, does not make it right to obtain them through copyright infringement. Yes, that's right, you're a mooch. You have no right to someone elses work simply because it exists. That you are doing no harm to them by obtaining it without the means to purchase it, simply means you're a mooch of no consequence. Doing no harm doesn't entitle you to the action.
I will try to keep this really simple for you since you seem to think that I commented on whether this is wrong or not, which is a completely different discussion. Stealing is defined by Stardock as: : to take away by force or unjust means or to take surreptitiously or without permission. When you copy software in this manner which the producer of the software explicitly states you should not be doing you are taking the code away by unjust means and without permission. If the author wanted you to share it freely he would have included an open source license. Please remember the word stealing will always be defined by law and not morals.
Cussing and name calling makes only one person look like a fool.
You need to get outside and go walk round a museum or a gallery, or go see a play at a theatre or something... Video games are great fun, and sometimes they're really pretty to look at, but I can't remember the last AAA game I played that actually had any kind of complex message to convey...
Except that, if I waited until May 20th, when I get paid, I could afford to buy some games, but if I've already pirated them, what are the chances I'd pay? Approximately nil. So have I hurt someone? Yes, I've deprived the creators their fair dues because I can't possibly wait a fortnight to play their games. That's basically what it boils down to - "WANT, MUST HAVE NOW, NOT PAYING!". There's no higher thought process, no "sticking it to the man", it's just greed and impatience.
There's nothing "at face value" for people to accept. I've made 5 pages of argumentation showing why the developers were wrong.
You still don't understand the straw man fallacy. I didn't substitute the developers argument because the developers had no argument just an assertion that I challenged.
Back to Argumentation 101 with you
So culture must have a complex message to convey for it to be culture? I think you need to read up on the meaning of a few words man.
Maybe pirating stuff just because you cant wait to play them is some thing you do, but I take it that you do agree that piracy IS ok if the person pirating it would not be buying it anyway (would not be saving up for it regardless)?
Who decides what is right and wrong here? From the laws perspective, from GODS perspective, yours, or mine?
Fuzzy ground here
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
