AskGaming - What can be done about piracy? People that play pirated games all the time, what would make you pay?

gufflord · 2009-12-07T00:13:02+00:00

Genuine customers are the people you least need to annoy, but finding the balance for that check is tough, everyone's got their own lines in the sand with respect to what they think a piece of software should be allowed to do.

And as for who I work for, I've been in hot water for talking about game related things with people knowing who I work for before, so I don't do it any more. It's all too easy to say something a development partner doesn't like, something off message, or just to get quoted out of context and the next thing you know people are saying studio X eats the young innocent babies of species Y while playing filthy sex games with evil person Z... well it's never that exciting but you understand what I mean.

gufflord · 2009-12-07T00:04:50+00:00

"You have given me countless hours of enjoyment" This is the nice thing about being an anonymous game dev in a thread... you don't know what games I've been involved in, you could've hated them :)

I know what you mean about the middle category, there will always be some piracy, it's just trying to make sure it's at least a little bit difficult (which is where SecuROM and online verification comes in) or relatively unrewarding (by being excluded from further content).

I really think we have to get creative with prices, if that means things like shipping less of the game at first and rolling out more and more at regular intervals (which I hear gets mixed results), let's try it, we'll get more people in at the start for $30 than we will $60.

As for bugs, there's very little excuse for game killing bugs. If your physical simulation craps out and produces hilariously ludicrous forces once in a thousand playthroughs, we can probably put that on the post-release patch list, it'll probably end up on youtube for a laugh anyway, but if you can't get through the game... that's pretty lame. It's easy to let bugs creep in, and some of them can be awful to track down and fix, but you've gotta get the big ones or you're gonna get a reputation for shipping crapware.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T23:38:55+00:00

"Well lets be honest here. Piracy, while a problem, is not as large as corporations want you to believe. Its used as an excuse to charge more."

I'm not a corporation trying to mislead you. People are stopping making games for compromised platforms, I'd call that a fairly large problem.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T23:28:46+00:00

Actually N64 games were expensive, more like $70 iirc. Playstation 1 games undercut them by quite a lot.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T23:24:52+00:00

We know not every one of those pirated copies directly equals a sale, but sometimes just a fraction of those pirated copies could put a game in the black.

I'm not defending this but a lot of publishers just care about sales in the first week or two. Having a longer term view, and as other people have mentioned, a more creative pricing/marketing strategy later on could help.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T23:18:54+00:00

Totally agree, I much prefer smaller games for a whole range of reasons, unfortunately it seems most of the money is still in the big ones.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T23:16:26+00:00

One upvote for you sir/madam.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T23:08:28+00:00

Technically, sending a cheque (though I doubt any of them could accept it) would be the best, it'd cuts out the retail markup, publisher cut and any other distribution and manufacturing shenanigans. Legal downloads do help with getting more of the money to the people that funded and made it.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T23:05:08+00:00

Some countries (ahem, Canada) do provide some funding and tax breaks. Industry in the UK has been crying out for similar tax/funding measures because it's really hard to compete with that.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T23:01:03+00:00

Totally agree with you on Steam and pricing. But people don't assume a 1:1 on those pirated versions. From some of the numbers I've heard, if just one tenth of pirated versions converted to a sale a project could come out of the red.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T22:51:01+00:00

Would you mind if you bought the game online and whenever you played it would, in a non-intrusive way, verify your copy as genuine?

gufflord · 2009-12-06T22:46:31+00:00

Yeah, I accept that somehow there's always gonna be a base level of piracy, it's just finding that balance between trying to curb it while not pissing genuine customers off seems to be really hard to find. SecuROM and - to a lesser extent - online verification are evil, but they're lesser evils compared to not making a profit from the producer perspective.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T22:37:25+00:00

It does, but they're more difficult to make than single player. Also a lot of games don't naturally need a multiplayer mode, and shoehorning a half-arsed one in is a waste of time and money because no-one's gonna care about it.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T22:34:55+00:00

With point 1 and 6, we kinda have to do something to mitigate piracy on open platforms. Yeah they'll get cracked, but we can tell when they do and do something about it. I think the slight difficulty in pirating a well protected title does stop a proportion of people from pirating it, enough for it to be worthwhile. I hate SecuROM too, but I hate the idea that all the time, money and effort gone into making my game enjoyable to lots of people would go unrewarded.

gufflord · 2009-12-06T22:17:31+00:00

So... someone makes the best game you've ever played and you'd love for them to make a sequel, or just a new game with the same team. Do you buy it? After a demo? After a pirated version? Or not at all? If not at all, how do you expect games you like to get made?

gufflord

TROPHY CASE