Games Crysis 2

[nath]

Well naturally the more a game makes, the less people are going to give a shit about how piracy has affected it. However, that's not really the point here - the question is does piracy affect sales a significant amount. That's something I think would be very difficult to ascertain, it'd probably need a shedload of well conducted surveys mixed with sales data.

 

[rynnor]

Well naturally the more a game makes, the less people are going to give a shit about how piracy has affected it. However, that's not really the point here - the question is does piracy affect sales a significant amount. That's something I think would be very difficult to ascertain, it'd probably need a shedload of well conducted surveys mixed with sales data.

You can never prove it either way but in my experience there are many people who never download so early leaks etc. are irrelevant to this group.

Next you have the other side - people who only download - they can be discarded as they wont ever make you any sales.

Finally you have those in the middle - not hardened downloaders but who occasionally download - you will lose some of these to an early release the same as you will after the cracked release but its not possible to quantify.

 

[Talyn]

Considering it's hardly been downloaded, I doubt there's much to worry about...

Crysis 2 Leak Fails To Result in Massive Download Fest | TorrentFreak

 

[old.Tohtori]

Well naturally the more a game makes, the less people are going to give a shit about how piracy has affected it. However, that's not really the point here - the question is does piracy affect sales a significant amount. That's something I think would be very difficult to ascertain, it'd probably need a shedload of well conducted surveys mixed with sales data.

Exactly what i meant, the amount of sales the game makes, affects how much of an affect piracy ahd on sales

Significance is parallel to greed.

 

[nath]

Exactly what i meant, the amount of sales the game makes, affects how much of an affect piracy ahd on sales

Well it depends on how you look at it.

If a game makes 10 million bucks and 5million bucks worth of piracy has taken place then a third of potential sales have been lost. That's a pretty large and statistically significant number. However, if they made 10 million bucks then I expect most people will be very much "QQ publishers :". Still, that's a lot of money they may well have missed out on that one could argue is rightfully theirs (assuming the pirates would have otherwise paid for it).

Agh, anyway yes. The point is, no one can know how badly piracy affects sales. All they can know is how many people downloaded - and in *some* circumstances - played pirated games. That number is useless without context.

 

[Krazeh]

If a game makes 10 million bucks and 5million bucks worth of piracy has taken place then a third of potential sales have been lost.

While I see the point you're trying to make I disagree with your statement that a third of potential sales have been lost. Even if a hypothetical game was downloaded so many times that, using the publisher's recommended price, 5 million dollars worth had been downloaded that in no way translates to a loss of 5 millions dollars of potential sales.

 

[nath]

Well yeah, but I did say "assuming the pirates would have otherwise paid for it". It was a hypothetical and naturally in the real world we can never know how many downloads result in lost sales.

 

[ECA]

Biggest load of shit i'll read all day.

Xbox piracy is there but no way in hell is it the size of PC piracy.

Lol, xbox piracy is ridiculous. Sure people don't torrent xbox games as much as PC games, but every xbox torrent gets burned and sold/given to people a hell of a lot more.

 

[rynnor]

The Crysis 2 example is fairly extreme - its either a senior employee trying to sink them or serious industrial espionage - to get the game is one thing but to get the key as well seems extremely fishy.

 

[ford prefect]

I accept that games cost a lot to design these days, what with huge dev teams and dev times of what 2 - 2 ½ years these days? However, when you are charging somewhere in the region of £40 for a new release and now with the addition of chargable downloadable content, they have to have included a certain amount of insurance in that price to counteract the impact of any piracy.

I think actually the evidence is fairly straight forward - for the most part when patches are released they do little to combat piracy even though they are full aware of the methods used to copy their software. They would rather improve the game to try and insure future customers on future releases. It seems to me most software houses don't really care about it, they see it as an inconvenience and not a lot more.

 

[Wazzerphuk]

Indeed, but I disagreed in silence because I didn't feel like getting involved in one of those long discussions. Wazz disagreed vocally so I was interested to see what he had to say.

Nothing I haven't said before really. Unfortunately I can speak in vague terms like you have really.

Come on, there's *bound* to people out there who would purchase the game if it weren't so readily available via piracy. There's bound to be people who think "fuck it, it's 2 months prior to release, I'll nab that" and subsequently not purchase it despite having fully intended to.

Equally, there may well be people who purchase the game after pirating it thus treating it like a demo.

The real question is: what's the net result. More sales, less sales or no change based on piracy and in this case, based on a leaked version way before the release. I suspect no one here has the information required to make anything more than a guess. After all, you either have statistics that don't tell you whether people would have purchased the game otherwise, or you have anecdotal evidence "me and my mates buy the games we pirate!!".

The thing is, these statistics exist. They're not perfect, but they're about as good as you can realistically get (they will never be 100% accurate, but they're definitely just not guesses). The issue is that they're kept secret - why? Various reasons probably, none that I'm privvy to though.

Using the market trends, sales figures (particularly useful if you have a long standing series that traditionally shipped a certain figure nearly every time), economic trends and statistical evidence obtained you can gain a very good picture of how many lost sales piracy causes, and who is doing it.

A lot of the reasons production and developers don't "appear" to be acting on it is that DRM is very, very imperfect. It is either a complete waste of time, and very easily bypassaple, or it's very very good but restricts the user and can be problematic. Releases with some very strict DRM hurt these titles, and until a better solution is achieved you won't see much action.

 

[nath]

The thing is, these statistics exist. They're not perfect, but they're about as good as you can realistically get (they will never be 100% accurate, but they're definitely just not guesses).

One thing they'll never have, is peoples motives behind the piracy. They can make assumptions based on the things you've said, but they're just that, assumptions. Each game is new, regardless of whether there are trends for previous versions. It's entirely possible that there are other reasons for reduced sales and increased pirated versions.

Now it strikes me that if the latest Football Manager (for example) sold significantly less than the previous, and stats on the torrents were very high, chances are that they have actually lost sales there. However, as Ben Goldacre says - I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

 

[Wazzerphuk]

Yeah - it's a shame that we can't get anything more solid and significant.

Stupid people and their stupid complex brains.