I’ve preordered World of Goo in June. Since then, my magic key somehow got lost inside my large mailbox. So, out of pure lazyness, I’ve downloaded a pirated copy.
Did you know that World of Goo is #2 top selling game on Amazon, just after World of Warcraft?
On a related note: If you like World of Goo, you will love Crayon Physics Deluxe. Preorder now. And no, I am not affiliated to either WoG or CPD developers. 
I have noticed 1 common thing when it comes to piracy, be it software, music or movies. If someone doesn’t want to pay for the item, they won’t. The person who is willing to pay for it will pay a price - and that price could actually vary a fair bit. One of the hard things about pricing is that its easy to put the price up, but hard to bring it down (hence sales and half price periods).
I have long had the view of minimal (if any) DRM etc… It just seems to make things harder for the honest user. The one that does not mind searching for a key/hack will just find a way around the DRM.
Bill Gate’s letter is very confusing. You can’t really conclude that the piracy rate was 90%.
The piracy rate could be only 51% (most of the hundreds of users of BASIC).
How many Altair owners were there?
If hundreds of users was 200 and there were 2000 overall Altair users, then the piracy rate could have been zero.
I wait for a year or so till the prices of the original DVD go down (or they come bundled along with expansion packs). The best part of buying older best-selling games is that your current hardware config is able to play it. No need to upgrade to the latest-and-greatest graphic cards!! I recently bought Far Cry for $10 and a 10-in-1 Command and Conquer First Decade DVD for $15.
But yeah, DRM is a pain. I hate inserting the CnC DVD in the drive everytime I want to play. The DVD is starting to get scratched. I cant copy the DVD either and run using the copy. It makes me want to get the game for free.
Why should the honest end-user who has paid for the game (not the DVD) end up in a loss ?
People still pay too little attention to the fact that not every pirated copy is a lost sale. I have tons of pirated stuff on my computer. If now someone invents an uncrackable piracy protection (not realistic, but let’s pretend it exists), would I really go and buy all this stuff? No. Actually I would start considering carefully what of this stuff do I really need and what stuff is nice to have but I can also happily live without it. The result is, I would maybe buy 10% of it, because I really need it and stop using the other 90%, because I don’t really need it and cannot afford to spend that much money on stuff I don’t really need. Actually the 10% estimation is already too high, because if I really need it and keep using it for years, I will sooner or later buy it, being afraid that one day they release an update that won’t have a crack anymore and I won’t be able to use it any longer. So I end up buying the essential software in the long run anyway.
And let’s face it, how much software do you really need? Do you really need a game? It’s nice to have, but do you really need it? I don’t think so. I can live happily to the end of my days without ever playing a game again in my whole life. I may miss it sometimes… or I may not, not even sure how much I would miss it. When I’m very busy I have no time for playing games and I don’t feel like missing it. I usually play games to kill time where I don’t know what else to spend it on. The more busy I am, the less of this time exists.
The really essential tools I need for daily work are all bought already. So I might skip 100% of the pirated stuff if I can’t get it for free any longer. Most software companies would be extremely surprised to see that their sales won’t significantly go up if they were starting using an uncrackable copy protection. That is my strong belief. Pirated copies are most of the time not lost sales, so why spending time and resources on fighting them in the first place?
I was like Jeff. When I had no job, I used to pirate everything I could get my hands on. In addition to the base money issue, you couldn’t exactly go to the local Walmart and buy software in those days either. The nearest software store was a Babbage’s in the mall in the nearest major city 50 miles away. My first software purchase was the end of my pirate days. I proudly marched up to the counter and paid for it, all $60, I think, with dimes and pennies from my overloaded pockets. I was really popular with everyone in the store that day. Especially the friend who drove me there, who looked like he wanted to be anywhere else.
These days, I’m saving a bloody fortune on software by not buying anything ever. I haven’t paid for a single piece of software since 2001, and I haven’t pirated anything either. Linux is a great conscientious choice for people who want to stop hemorrhaging money paying for the same stuff every few years, but who hate piracy.
I still think Linux would be a lot more successful if people weren’t willing to just rip off software. I know a lot of people who give me the Linux is for dweebs kind of spiel, and then they talk about how they don’t have to choose, because they have cracked copies of Windows, Photoshop, Office, etc., and it’s all free too. These same people never want to have anything to do with FOSS stuff that runs on their native platform either. Why settle for second class junk when you can just steal $5,000 worth of software?
The worst thing is most people don’t even think about it at all. I got a new computer, and then I went over to Bill’s house to ask if he could load Office on there for me. I tried your OpenOffice.org thing, but I couldn’t figure out what to do about something or other, Espresso, Pajama, something like that, but Bill hooked me up, so I’m good, thanks.
I’ve dedicated my life to this open source crap for six years, and I’m about ready to throw in the towel. It isn’t even that people are making a conscious choice to steal. They’re just so abysmally ignorant that they have no idea they’re stealing. Then when you point that out to them they start looking around a little and thinking, and then they say screw it, they’ve been stealing all this time, why start paying now? Everybody knows computers only run one operating system anyway. Everybody knows that, you weirdo.
Ah, bah humbug. Bah humbug indeed.
Wake me up if that game ever actually has a Linux version. I’ll buy a copy. For now, I’m not the slightest bit lured by that Linux beta coming soon on there. Sure it is. I bet that sign has been up for two years.
There are two kinds of pirating copying binaries and copying designs. If you copy a binary and then figure out how to break the code licensing scheme you are a first degree pirate. When you copy a business plan you are a second degree pirate
First degree pirates rip off things like autotune or photoshop and are essentially small timers. The software they steal would not have been bought to begin with these types of thieves have no money and will never get any personally or in a business. The software producers are partly to blame because you can build unbreakable licensing schemes but that takes creativity, money and hard work. So first degree pirates actually have little effect on the overall software business. I would guess that 90-10 is reversed. These pirates cost producers 10% of revenue at best.
Second degree pirates are more insidious they copy your business plan. Sun is a second degree pirate hence the inclusion of the post script below. A second degree pirate wants to be a competitor in a market space, analyses the competition, gets funding, and starts off.
Sun thought Unix should come to market (even if it wasn’t ready). Their technology was not better: ‘big Sun iron’ is no better and less reliable than the IBM mainframe Z series. Their medium iron was not better than Vax clusters. The Sun desktop is pathetic, even for free. On the processor level Sparc never beat MIPS or Itanium. These will have to be taken as axioms since this is not the place to debate technology.
Third degree pirates steal your morals. The whole Sun/Linux/Java Open Source is a chimera a fraud. It leads you to believe in fairy dust that is you can get something for nothing. The dot com disaster was a side effect of this. XP programming does this at the methodology level subverts morals.
Sun after 25 years has nothing to show for its effort but carnage. Their market share is too small to analyse any more they are dead as a company, zombies stumbling around with one foot in the grave, a stiff wind and they will fall over for good.
As 3rd degree pirates Sun nearly wrecked the mainframe business, did wreck the Vax business, and has devastated the software business with Java. What was just another oo language was spun into a cultural revolution of failure. Java as a fat client, puhlease! Java bloatware in the middle tier (you have to cluster because no single system will stay running very long). Java databases spare me.
The whole radical, cool, chic, XP programming is a scam. What is useful about it is testing, testing and more testing (truth is good developers were doing it anyway). Analysis and design went in the toilet. They even tried emergent design as a model. I tool XP guru Robert martin that emergent design is nothing but evolution which produces great works over millions of years with trillion of corpses for failed iterations. Great for biology and a planet, bad for a software product.
Scott McNealy and Sun are second and third degree pirates, much more dangerous than first degree. The BSA and SEC can do nothing about Sun, only IT managers can, time to sober up, the part is over, put the crack pipe and the bottle down and get back to work.
Sure this is a bile filled screed, but based on my observations there is a lot of truth to it.
P.S.
Of course it is sick, NO ONE writes software for free. This is the big lie of open source. All participants have ulterior motives, get a better job, be seen as an expert (when in fact you are not), start a money loser and hope deep pockets will buy you out with a big pay day so you really did not work for free (Red Hat/JBoss). Once the money never comes the old operant conditioning kicks in and the extinction response is on its way.
Bill Gates was right (as always) stop stealing software and pay for it! What about all the crippled enterprises that have bought all this half-ass ware? XP Programming where programmers rule, not managers, where schedules are impossible to predict (think about that one). The code is “too cheap to measure” like java: write once, debug forever.
The worst thing a business can have is someone else’s source code, they want a product that works and support that goes with it.
Sun has the been at the forefront of wrecking the IT industry with this disingenuous crap. Solaris lost on the desktop, it lost in the data center and is draining the American economy with the illusion of free ware.
Here’s the source code is a virtual ‘F*ck You letter’. I learned that bitter lesson more than 15 years ago when a vendor called and asked where I wanted the 1 million plus lines of source code escrow to be delivered. I said the null file!
I purchase all of the games I want to play. I must say as a paying customer NOTHING angers me more than CDs being required to play. If I wanted to swap CDs in and out to play games I’d buy a console.
…less than %10 of Altair owners have bought BASIC
It’s an interesting figure: less than 10% of the users had actually purchased a copy; the other 90% had pirated it.
Interesting, and wrong. That’s only 90% piracy if you assume every single Altair was running Micro-Soft BASIC.
I love world of Goo (and paid for it) could not agree more.
I’ve written a shareware product and 90% sounds about right… maybe a little low. I could defeat the problem by having the software phone home at startup to validate that the product was purchased, but I find this sort of thing unethical (e.g. what happens when the product is discontinued? or my site goes down? etc).
To help combat the problem have a Lite version of my product that’s free. Its good enough for most people, so it gives them less of a reason to pirate my software. I’m sure this has cost me some paying customers, but I hope its encouraged some to pay for the extra features if they need them in exchange for me being nice enough to offer some of the features for free.
Re: gsgiles on December 29, 2008 06:17 AM
gsgiles inasmuch I do agree with your points about XP and Open Source (definitely not agree about Java, for variety of reasons) - I think you need a hug
@Chuck: Free-to-play is not the future. As you already pointed out, IT DOESN’T MAKE MONEY.
You got me all wrong. Do you really think i would have made my comment if it had such a fundamental flaw? Duh!
I repeat: if the free-to-play users, less than 5% spend money on it and less than 1% produce most of the income. However: many FREE TO PLAY GAMES ARE PROFITABLE and some even highly so. The margin of profit is often higher than for AAA titles if you factor in development costs, marketing, and such while the risk to develop free-to-play games is low. Whereas with a AAA title especially if it does not have a strong online component the pressure to be successful is often immense.
See for example the Petroglyph story and why they are committing to free-to-play. You’ll find other examples if you dare to google.
http://www.edge-online.com/news/why-petroglyph-is-venturing-into-free-play
Michael, see:
We Don’t Use Software That Costs Money Here
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001097.html
World of Goo does that, yet isn’t effective against piracy. Your conclusion is flawd, so the entire article is.
Possibly. I think you have to add items #3 and #4 to my list:
as LKM noted in one of the earliest comments, above.
iTunes is a good example of a previously pirate market working, if you meet all four rules.
Nice article, Now that I have money, I buy and play, aslo i don’t share game and software like I used too. But what do now is I play the game nad if I like it I buy it. Now that I can afford to buy, I bought all the games that I played and liked, and I still enjoy playing them. But if the game is too costly, I wait for few months when the gaming company release jewel case or a less priced box of the game or buy it when there is a discount sale, but I make sure I buy a legal copy of the game. As per software goes, I started using the open souce software or free software, or wep apps. Yea I do download movie, tv shows torrents, but I don’t distribute them, so that makes me a small time pirate. I support the concept of ‘Try and Buy’ Try a software/ game for few days, if the user/ gamer like the software/game they will buy it, I mean the developers should make sure that the software/game should be interesting enough/provide enough functionality, and price the software/game affordable to attract the user/gamer to buy the software/gamer. I bought few games adn softeare after trying the demo version. The policy of returning the software/game if the user/gamer is not satisfied is good one, that way the developers will make sure that the game/software is great not only in demo version, but also in the full/ retail version.
Well… the fair price point is exactly what is going to solve this problem…
the World of Goo is 20$… only 10% of users buy it…
Sell it for 10$ and if original games percent goes to 30% - there is more profit… Why don’t game companies realize this point…
Especially game/software prices are high for Asian countries like the one I live in - India. There is a huge market… as 1/6th of the world population lives here and guys we are developing rapidly now and have a huge customer base too…
I do think that the people who think DRM doesn’t cause piracy are more than a little deluded. Take Spore, for example. It was the game most pirated in 2008, and the main reason was because people didn’t want to pay for the DRM that came with it. They didn’t want to tell EA that SecuROM was ok.
As for me, I only pirate things which are so old as to be incredibly difficult to find or I can’t afford on my 3-day-a-week-minimum-wage job. Not quite justified piracy, but piracy on it’s best terms, I believe. As long as you want to pay for it, I suppose?
less than 10% of the users had actually purchased a copy; the other 90% had pirated it.
That’s not what he wrote.
Less than 10% of the Altair owners had bought a copy of Altair BASIC, but that doesn’t mean that the remaining 90% used pirated copies. I’m sure a fair share of them did, but aren’t you jumping to conclusions when you assume that ALL Altair owners used BASIC?
This is one reason why many of the game development studios, including the one I work for, are releasing on consoles months before they release on PC. This way they get the revenue from the console releases (since they are the most difficult to pirate) and then later on when the initial console sales have declined, they release it on PC to get a bit more yardage on the title. The income from games these days drops off fast after the initial release and even faster due to piracy.