M°°nblade said:
But it's not like you have data that supports your opinion that piracy has always been equally widespread.
Well, sure. What am I going to do, dig up the Pirate Bay logs for 1989? :lol
This is one of those historical facts that it's going to be difficult to "prove" "conclusively" because I don't have numbers, but any real familiarity with the gaming culture of the late 80s and early 90s should be enough. Not only were there similarly hyperbolic anti-piracy campaigns and increasingly inconvenient "DRM" schemes (in the form of copy-protection and code lookups, mostly) back then, but there was a similarly convenient "peer-to-peer" piracy network -- people just swapped floppies. It was quite easy to get a copy of pretty much any game someone was interested in, as long as there was someone -- a friend of a friend of a friend somewhere -- who was getting the original cracked releases off of a BBS somewhere and distributing them.
These people can actually measure piracy rate numbers.
They can check torrent downloads (which any of us can do) and they can report (sometimes) on pirates playing online -- neither of which really provides us with the information everyone's actually interested in, which is
how do these numbers affect actual sales?
I'd really be interested to see someone turn up with a strong
comparative case that tries to provide concrete evidence for piracy
changing sales numbers, but it'd be unlikely for anyone to have access to all the numbers needed to make a case -- you'd need something like two comparable series whose first entries were both piratable, with the sequel to one game uncracked but the other sequel getting a 0-day release, and then measuring the relative sales gains of each -- and we'd only ever see it anyway if it strongly supported the "piracy hurts sales a lot" argument.
They have the data and no reason to lie.
Nobody's really suggesting that they're
lying, as in that they are undertaking a disingenuous campaign intended to mislead people about the truth. (There are a lot of advocacy groups that do that about other aspects of copyright and piracy, but I really don't think
Rather, I think developers have a tough job -- they're laboring hard to create games under a shittacular business model that already makes it extremely difficult to break even, dealing with declining sales and an increasingly difficult and expensive development process -- and when something goes wrong they want to blame someone,
especially if they've done their job well and produced a good game that just isn't getting sales traction. Piracy is a very appealing target because it's unquestionably happening, it's pretty ethically unambiguous (it's easy to say "these jerks who are doing something bad are bad jerks!"), and it doesn't involve having to take on their publishers or any other part of the broken system that they're dependent on for their livelihoods.
I definitely don't blame developers for being mad at pirates, I just think it's a waste of energy. Inasmuch as blaming pirates goes beyond bitching in interviews (which is reasonable) and grows to spending an increasing amount of time and money on dubious anti-piracy measures (that are mostly a waste of that time and money) or advocating for stronger copyright laws (which is a bad thing whose relevance is way bigger than a few game devs),
then I have a problem with it. The Stardock position on it is the most sensible thing I've heard: if you develop games intended to appeal to paying customers instead of pirates, and budget them based on the number of paying customers you actually have, you'll be consistently successful.
jorma said:
And some of these pirates still pirate their games. But it is my opinion that most of them grew up, got an income - but retained their interest in gaming and are now paying customers. I think that yesterdays piracy play a major factor in gaming not being a niche hobby today.
Oh sure. Piracy has always been a lot more appealing to
children who have little ongoing access to money but
do have a lot of free time to waste doing various circuitous things in order to get access to pirated games.
TheYanger said:
Are you fucking kidding? You even in your little timeline point out how we moved from physically having to copy media
See, it's shit like this that makes me doubt your whole "yeah I know what PC piracy was like in 1992" angle.
Again,
no shit people had to copy physical media.
Everything about computing was different (and in many ways less convenient) then. Nothing was networked, nobody even had hard drives (when you go back far enough), buying a game involved going to a computer specialty store with probably pretty short hours and just
hoping that they had the title you were looking for. (And it's not like copying a floppy was some incredibly complex process. Stick it in, type "diskcopy a:," swap once.)
Sure you can hit up a torrent site at 2:00 am to score a pirated game now, but you can also just
buy it off Steam with a debit card the same way. In terms of how convenient piracy is
compared to buying, it's actually worse now -- back in the day once a game was cracked literally all you needed to do was pop it in to play, whereas nowadays piracy increasingly involves virtual CD drives, various configurations and patches, running resident programs to trick the game's DRM, etc.
M°°nblade said:
Besides, Epic is explaining why they shifted development towards HD consoles. Its a decision they made before they released UT3. It has got nothing to do with UT3 being a bad game or not.
And yet Battlefield: Bad Company 2
outsold its console versions on PC. Is it just coincidence that BFBC2 was a good game with an excellent PC version that was well-tuned to the precise interests of PC gamers (and it sold great on PC) while UT3 was a crummy game with a lousy PC version (and it sold like crap... everywhere)?
