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World of Goo piracy rate: 90%

Relix said:
Game sharing = Copyright Infringment?

I am sorry, but I am gonna rant about this. 15 years ago, on the SNES days, me and my friends would share our games. I would lend in Super Mario World and he would lend me Street Fighter 2. And it was FINE! No one said anything, it was all nice. But... PSN Game Sharing piracy?
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Your friends deserve the death penalty for their crimes.
 
lowrider007 said:
As this thread is up I thought I'd ask something that was on my mind recently in regards to piracy.

What do you guys think about people that only pirate multi-platform games that they've already purchased for one of their platforms, say for example someone that purchased COD4 on day one for the 360 but pirates the PC version ?
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They deserve death penalty. All their relatives should be imprisoned and their goods be delivered to Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo.
 
Speevy said:
Your friends deserve the death penalty for their crimes.
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Okay.

Is copying a CD different from borrowing a CD?
I would say yes, it most certainly is.

One is borrowing someone else's license, at that current time, the original owner can't use it. The other is essentially copyright infringement.
 
stuburns said:
There is a zero percent piracy rate on the Wii SKU.
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:lol :lol :lol

As someone who has homebrew on Wii and PSP, it is easier than you can imagine to pirate games on both those systems, almost laughably so. It's one of those cases where the only thing that stops you are how strong you feel about the subject morally and that's what stops me from doing it. It's a shame that you can't get all the benefits of CFW without also opening doors for those who do want to pirate.

And there is even a demo on the PC, right? you can't even use the scapegoat of saying you 'just wanted to try it' to justify the piracy.

One day when I don't have a large amount of game sto play I will check out World of Goo, but just from the reception it has gotten it's a bt sad that it got pirated so much.
 
stuburns said:
Okay.

Is copying a CD different from borrowing a CD?
I would say yes, it most certainly is.

One is borrowing someone else's license, at that current time, the original owner can't use it. The other is essentially copyright infringement.
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That's not what sharing is. It doesn't produce a limitless supply of free game copies.

Do you even own a PS3?

Does this hole you've dug for yourself give you even the slightest impression that you may be dead wrong? Since the whole "You're a fucking moron, thief." thing didn't work out for you, I think it would be wise for you to just leave.
 
Speevy said:
That's not what sharing is. It doesn't produce a limitless supply of free game copies.

Do you even own a PS3?

Does this hole you've dug for yourself give you even the slightest impression that you may be dead wrong? Since the whole "You're a fucking moron, thief." thing didn't work out for you, I think it would be wise for you to just leave.
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I do own a PS3, and I support developers by paying for their productions.

I still think you're a thief, I've seen no reason to think otherwise.

It doesn't produce limitless amounts, but it does supply an amount beyond the SINGLE license which comes with these games.
 
James Power said:
Oh fuck yeah it does! It makes it righter than right! You don't deny food or clothing or videogames over some stupid law! It's the other way around. Laws are there to make people happy, not the other way around. You all just don't want to help Mike and I happen to find this disgusting.
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Help Mike in a legal way, not by stealing or breaking the law. Simple as that.

Theft is theft and your selfrighteousness won't change that little, annoying fact.

I know, I know, you want to justify your piracy with some deluded tale, but at the end of the day, you are breaking the law.

Hey guys, it makes me happy to go on a rampage and kill people, therefore the laws preventing me from doing it (and thus make little Mike smile, because gushes of blood raining on him make him happy, think of little Mike!) are wrong, they are morally wrong!

Can't you understand that your little tale (because that's all it is, a fairy tale) has no substance whatsoever? You are stealing, end of the day. If making little Mike happy is your concern, I advise you to check the THOUSANDS of FREELY GIVEN GAMES by their RIGHTFULL owners. Yes commercial games. But I guess little princess Sarah needs to play brand new spanking games and not 5 years old free games, right?
 
stuburns said:
I do own a PS3, and I support developers by paying for their productions.
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So do I.

I still think you're a thief, I've seen no reason to think otherwise.
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Mods?


It doesn't produce limitless amounts, but it does supply an amount beyond the SINGLE license which comes with these games.
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The single license, which my account is permitted to download on up to 4 PS3s. The license is the same. The account is the same. The PS3 is different.

It's not illegal. It's encouraged. It's not stealing. It's not piracy.
 
Im not sure why so many have such a sense of entitlement. Somebody made the thing you are stealing. If you enjoyed the game you should buy it. People make up such bullshit to justify the fact that they are stealing. The people that make these things should be paid for their effort, espeically the indy devs.
 
lowrider007 said:
As this thread is up I thought I'd ask something that was on my mind recently in regards to piracy.

What do you guys think about people that only pirate multi-platform games that they've already purchased for one of their platforms, say for example someone that purchased COD4 on day one for the 360 but pirates the PC version ?
Click to expand...

Any serious opinions on the above please ?
 
First, and most importantly, how we came up with this number: the game allows players to have their high scores reported to our server (it’s an optional checkbox). we record each score and the IP from which it came.
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Couldn't a single person just dominate the score boards?

This seems kind of flawed you know.
 
James Power said:
Copryright infringement is not stealing. It's replicating something through a process you won't even notice. Or rather you will only notice because of the increased sales you get from the resulting word of mouth from people who would not have paid attention to your work otherwise.
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So piracy increases sales now?

Seriously, put aside all legal and moral issues for a moment. What's really at stake here is the health of the entire video game industry, which should be a top concern for ALL video game enthusiasts.

The people who make these games are only able to dedicate so much of their time and effort to it because of the money they earn. If you take away the money no matter how much they love making games they can't do it. They'll have to get some other job because they have to support themselves and their families.

Can't you see that pirating software is really just biting the hand that feeds you? You say you love games but the more you pirate the less money developers have to make more games.

In the past piracy hasn't had any real devastating effects which gives pirates kind of a false sense of security, but it's getting worse and worse every year and if it continues at this pace there will be a breaking point.

Dreamcast was the first mainstream console that was pirateable without any specialized hardware. It barely survived it's first year and died soon after.

PSP was the second and despite it having a worldwide user base larger than 360 and PS3 combined software sales are dismal and most game publishers are now avoiding it like the plague.

PC has never needed hardware mods to be able to pirate software but as high speed internet has become available to more and more people the piracy rate has been increasing with it.

This is already having a chilling effect on the industry. Ubisoft is now delaying the releases of their major titles so the PC version is only available well after the console ones. Epic isn't even bothering to release a PC version of Gears of War 2. The average number of big budget PC games released is dropping every year. You and people like you are entirely to blame for this.

You can try to justify piracy any way you want with the "we are just poor fans" and starving children sob stories, but you can't escape the very real consequences piracy brings. Software piracy has never been worse than it is right now and the industry is feeling the pinch. Eventually something's got to give and it is us, the fans, who will be hurt the most when it does.
 
Thanks to whichever mod did that.


Back to World of Goo.

Great game it seems, shame some people don't want to pay for it.
 
Brilliant Game, right up there with WipeoutHD and Castle Crashers as one of the best Download games this year.

EVERYONE pirating it should be very ashamed. This is one case (and no cases of piracy are okay) where you are DIRECTLY screwing over the little guy. Those people who work at 2D Boy and poured all their effort into this game and gave up nights with family/friends to see it turn out as best it could are being SLAPPED in the face by your GREED. I hope everyone who pirated it steps on a rusty nail and falls backwards down the stairs.

I love world of goo.
 
CoG said:
I hate these bullshit stats. It's not like most of those people would buy the game in the first place. Pirates suck, but if they think every one of those was a lost sale, no way.
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I've heard this argument before.

"I would normally buy that artists album, so if I pirate it, it's not like their losing a sale"

Really? Are you serious?
 
VideoMan said:
So piracy increases sales now?
.
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Well actually... I only discovered the demo becuase of this thread! I might buy it right now, unless there's some advantage of waiting for the steam version.

whitehawk said:
I've heard this argument before.

"I would normally buy that artists album, so if I pirate it, it's not like their losing a sale"

Really? Are you serious?
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CoG is right, but he hasn't read the article, because 2dboy AGREE
 
whitehawk said:
I've heard this argument before.

"I wouldn't normally buy that artists album, so if I pirate it, it's not like their losing a sale"

Really? Are you serious?
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the developers of World of Goo are serious. from the OP article you should have read but did not:

"one thing that really jumped out at me was his estimate that preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale. this supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game aren’t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying.

in our case, we might have even converted more than 1 in a 1000 pirates into legit purchases. either way, ricochet shipped with DRM, world of goo shipped without it, and there seems to be no difference in the outcomes. we can’t draw any conclusions based on two data points, but i’m hoping that others will release information about piracy rates so that everyone could see if DRM is the waste of time and money that we think it is."
 
The only people in the piracy equation that matter are those who could be convinced to purchase the game if there was no other way to play it. Things like the Steam sales are a good way to reach those people, since they will bite when the game is under their price threshold.

I also believe having no interest in your game would be worse than having it pirated, because the publisher may still be able to make money through alternative revenue streams, such as in game advertising or DLC.
 
Lich_King said:
90% of the people in the world can't buy this game, so what would they expect?..
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Joke post?
The Wii version is available on WiiWare. PC versions are also available on Steam, Direct2Drive, Beanstalk, and Greenhouse.
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It's on the PC and if you don't own a PC then Lulz?
 
chubigans said:
It's worked wonders for PSP software sales!

...oh, right.
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That is a very flimsy straw man you're erecting there.

Who's to say the PSP would even still be on the market if it wasn't for piracy? Is there any doubt it would've sold a significantly fewer number of systems?

You can make a case either way. Piracy might be why the PSP isn't doing well, or it might be the only reason its even still kicking.

As for the Wii, if Nintendo doesn't get on this soon they will have a full fledged PSP level cluster fuck on their hands. Custom firmwares are already reaching 100% compatibility with "backups", before long it'll be just like the PSP and every firmware updated Nintendo comes out with the hackers will have the cracked version out within a week or two.
 
SapientWolf[B said:
]The only people in the piracy equation that matter are those who could be convinced to purchase the game if there was no other way to play it[/B]. Things like the Steam sales are a good way to reach those people, since they will bite when the game is under their price threshold.

I also believe having no interest in your game would be worse than having it pirated, because the publisher may still be able to make money through alternative revenue streams, such as in game advertising or DLC.
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Indeed.. problem with ads and dlc is that they usually inconvinience people that buy games... same as with DRM.

Complete issue is really fucked up and there is no single correct answer...

Whatever the software company does to actually prevent privacy will inconvinience people who paid it... from simple entering of cd key, to draconian anti-copy measures (aka drm).

Piracy is real issue in many parts of the world - here in Eastern Europe, you buy PS2 and 360 already modded and then spend 3-5 Euros for the game. Only games that sell are online - WoW, and PS3 games (PES)... and PC games that are 1/3-/1/10th of the price (older games). I would assume it is the same pretty much everywhere except for NA, Western Europe and Japan... which means that this is huge issue in these parts of the world.

For movies, they are trying to be smart and now you can buy original movies between 4 and 10 Euros (pirates sell between 3 to 5), and music between 3 and 6 euros (pirates 1.5-2.5 euros) and I hope it is working out for them.

For Gaming it is a lot more complicated since market is smaller than music/video and they are harder to replicate as well.

We develop popular software, and as small developer that has full control we have tried various approaches to the problem, for some markets we have lower pricing but then our resellers told us that in their opinion it doesnt work, since people are used to one click download will not suddenly spend even $10 to buy software (instead of $20), they will still want to get it for free. So you lose revenue from the people who already decided to purchase their software.

As I said, it is complicated issue, and there is no simple answer for it. It is much bigger issue for PC than 360/Wii/PS2 because you dont really have to mod anything, just download, which makes it a lot easier to do even in western europe/NA/japan.

Purchasing something will never be as convinient as one click download for free...
 
K0NY said:
Thread title should be changed to 82%, as stated by the link in the OP. Also, the developers seem to agree that, for every 1000 piracy attempts only a single sale is lost. That means if ten million people pirated the game, 2DBoy only lost about 10,000 sales.
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I guess it varies with different software. I am sure that statistic is probably true of something like Photoshop (I really think more like 100 to 1 though, those odds are too far out there) but something like Windows, I am sure for every 100 stolen copies, MS probably lost 50 sales. It would be more however some of the installs are upgrades to existing OSes that would not have been bought if they had to pay for them.
 
d[-_-]b said:
Joke post?

It's on the PC and if you don't own a PC then Lulz?
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not a joke post, much more people in the world have internet than those who have any way to pay electronically. well, for example, in Russia there is no PayPal, credit cards are not that common, and even then most of them wouldn't be accepted for payment in western systems - I don't know why. So no retail version means no way to buy this game, and of course I can't tell for sure, but my guess is it's like that in many other countries. Would be interesting to see breakdown of those IPs by country
 
Last Hope said:
I guess it varies with different software. I am sure that statistic is probably true of something like Photoshop (I really think more like 100 to 1 though, those odds are too far out there) but something like Windows, I am sure for every 100 stolen copies, MS probably lost 50 sales. It would be more however some of the installs are upgrades to existing OSes that would not have been bought if they had to pay for them.
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even for Photoshop, stats are higher than that. For Windows and Office, they are way off the charts.

For "random" software that there are alternatives too, especially for games that are not huge, i think those stats go down a lot.

In this case, indie dev doing some game that they cant market properly and that nobody has even heard of, yeah many of the downloads would be "just because"...

However for games like Gears 2, Civ IV, Sims, etc, percentage of people who would actually purchase the title if not being able to pirate it is much higher than some indie game.
 
whitehawk said:
I've heard this argument before.

"I would normally buy that artists album, so if I pirate it, it's not like their losing a sale"

Really? Are you serious?
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Do you really think those people you run across with a terrabyte of MP3s would buy that many CDs? People pirate games like console users download demos. It's there, it's easy to get, and it's free if you ignore all morals.

It reminds me of this graph of some guy who was playing pirate Gears2 Gamerscore someone posted here a while back . His score shot up from like 3000 to over 10,000 in a couple of weeks and someone was like, "guess when he got his mod?"
 
World without piracy :
_World of goo is out, 2 people buy it.
_4 people don't buy it but know or tried it and like it
_x people don't know a shit about it

World with piracy
_World of goo is out, 2(same 2 !) buy it.
_20 people pirates the game
_40 people won't buy the game but know or tried it and like it.

It's better i think !

But i personally bought the game for pc, and it's great !
 
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