Other Piracy

[CardJoe]

Micheal Fitch has just posted this. Mike was the Creative Director of Iron Lore Studios, the makers of Titan Quest, who had to had to shut down last year. It's in the news.

I'm going to pop this in the Iron Lore discussion and the gaming forum too because I think it's very on the ball and, even though the first part only is relevant to piracy, it's a perfect example of how every little thing matters and how you can help support the developers you like by voting with money.

That said, I personally didn't care for Titan Quest.

I've attached a poll up above which I hope people will think about and answer properly. Too many people say that they only do it if there's no demo or that they then buy the game if they like it when this clearly isn't the case. I know. I've done that. I used to pirate games, tell people I'd pay for them if they were good and then not bother. Not anymore.

Originally Posted by Micheal Fitch

Greetings:
So, ILE shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.

Piracy
Piracy. Yeah, that's right, I said it. No, I don't want to re-hash the endless "piracy spreads awareness", "I only pirate because there's no demo", "people who pirate wouldn't buy the game anyway" round-robin. Been there, done that. I do want to point to a couple of things, though.

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of **** on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

So, for a game that doesn't have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game. What was the ultimate impact of that? Hard to measure, but it did get mentioned in several reviews. Think about that the next time you read "we didn't have any problems running the game, but there are reports on the internet that people are having crashes."

Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.

Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact.

Hardware
Enough about piracy. Let's talk about hardware vendors. Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare, and these guys make it harder all the time. Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they don't, the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware.

And it just keeps getting worse. CD/DVD drives with bad firmware, video cards that look like they should be a step-up from a previous generation, but actually aren't, drivers that need to be constantly updated, separate rendering paths for optimizing on different chips, oh my god. Put together consumers who want the cheapest equipment possible with the best performance, manufacturers who don't give a **** what happens to their equipment once they ship it, and assemblers who need to work their margins everywhere possible, and you get a lot of shitty hardware out there, in innumerable configurations that you can't possibly test against. But, it's always the game's fault when something doesn't work.

Even if you get over the hump on hardware compatibility - and god knows, the hardware vendors are constantly making it worse - if you can, you still need to deal with software conflicts. There are a lot of apps running on people's machines that they're not even aware of, or have become such a part of the computer they don't even think of them as being apps anymore. IM that's always on; peer-to-peer clients running in the background; not to mention the various adware and malware crap that people pick up doing things they really shouldn't. Trying to run a CPU and memory heavy app in that environment is a nightmare. But, again, it's always the game's fault if it doesn't work.

Audience
Which brings me to the audience. There's a lot of stupid people out there. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of very savvy people out there, too, and there were some great folks in the TQ community who helped us out a lot. But, there's a lot of stupid people. Basic, basic stuff, like updating your drivers, or de-fragging your hard drive, or having antivirus so your machine isn't a teetering pile of rogue programs. PC folks want to have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want with their machines, and god help them they will do it; more power to them, really. But god forbid something that they've done - or failed to do - creates a problem with your game. There are few better examples of the "it can't possibly be my fault" culture in the west than gaming forums.

Reviews
And while I'm at it, I don't want to spare the reviewers either. We had one reviewer - I won't name names, you can find it if you look hard enough - who missed the fact that you can teleport from wherever you are in TQ back to any of the major towns you've visited. So, this guy was hand-carting all of his stuff back to town every time his inventory was full. Through the entire game. Now, not only was this in the manual, and in the roll-over tooltips for the UI, but it was also in the tutorial, the very first time you walk past one of these giant pads that lights up like a beacon to the heavens. Nonetheless, he missed it, and he commented in his review how tedious this was and how much he missed being able to portal back to town. When we - and lots of our fans - pointed out that this was the reviewer's fault, not the game's, they amended the review. But, they didn't change the score. Do you honestly think that not having to run back to town all the time to sell your stuff wouldn't have made the game a better experience?

We had another reviewer who got crashes on both the original and the expansion pack. We worked with him to figure out what was going on; the first time, it was an obscure peripheral that was causing the crash, a classic hardware conflict for a type of hardware that very, very few people have. The second time, it was in a pre-release build that we had told him was pre-release. After identifying the problem, getting him around it, and verifying that the bug was a known issue and had been fixed in the interim, he still ran the story with a prominent mention of this bug. With friends like that...


Alright, I'm done. Making PC products is not all fun and games. It's an uphill slog, definitely. I'm a lifelong PC gamer, and hope to continue to work on PC games in the future, but man, they sure don't make it easy.

Best, Mike

[fwalm]

In truth I have never pirated computer games. Have seriously thought about it, but never have.

[Hamish]

i read this the other day and i'd like to know where his numbers came from on piracy
and also how piracy of say hl2 or orange box compared to the numbers for cod4 and bioshock he quoted

i voted "Yes, but I often buy the game too. Really."

[dom_]

Never have, but i used to pirate movies and music heavily. Until i grew up.

[DaveVader]

I have a couple of times, and will if the game looks good but not good enough to warrant £30 of my heard earned pounds. I hate demos, if I want to get the feel for a game I want to play the game, not some half arsed version. So basically, this is me: "Yes, but I often buy the game too. Really."
I'm quite materialistic when it comes to having a game, I like having a case, manual, disc etc. a reason as to why I wont buy off Steam.

[BlueTrin]

It happens to me to get a game not by buying it but really if it is only the kind of game I will never buy and trust me, I really buy ALOT of games, I must buy half of the game which comes out on the shelves of major retailers, including all FPS and RTS. I almost always buy a game instead of pirating if it is available on direct2drive or steam ...

[DarkLord7854]

I'll download the latest game, play it, if I like it, I'll delete the game and ISO and go buy it, if I don't like it, I delete the game and ISO and make room for more entertaining games

I wouldn't download if developers released good demos more often

[UncertainGod]

I download games occasionally, but normally if it was something that I hadn't heard of or was unsure about.

However I am a complete whore when it comes to grabbing movies and tv shows.

[Bindibadgi]

I completely agree with him on the "people are idiots" point and completely understand why people make games for locked down systems like consoles, more so now that they can be updated!

There is a massive difference between a bit-tech gamer and any other gamer - most people out there have no clue what so ever. They should be left to consoles and never let near a PC because their ignorance is astounding. Just go to any i-event or other LAN to see what I mean.

Truth is, I only don't pirate to see what it's like now because I can borrow it from Joe. If I do like it I will buy it - Stalker, Half Life 2, Zelda etc. Most of the games I've tried are just crap and I'd never ever spend £40 on it - they get dropped within two minutes.

I borrowed Crysis from work, but that was a plastic piece of arse. I will also borrow CoD4 in time to see what it plays like, given time. I haven't pirated anything since before joining bit - everything at work is legit - I've just fallen into wanting stuff to just work.

[Cthippo]

Isn't posting the same quote three times in three different threads a violation of the forum rules?

Closest I've ever come was I borrowed a friend's steam acccount and downloaded HL2 (with his permission, he only plays online FPS) played about half of itand then went out and bought it myself. Other than that, I buy the games i want to play, but I have so little time or money these days that it's maybe one game a year. I see STALKER is down to $20 in the stores, so I may pick that up soon. It will be the first game I've bought since HL2E1.

[Ryu_ookami]

Seems like he believes the entire world was out to make the company shut down and that every one was against him

1. Piracy === everyone in sweden and norway (if you believe the news and the riaa)

2. Hardware -- (yep ATI etc were out to get him)

3. reviewers - (see I know it had to be bit techs fault some where its all the bit tech reviewers fault)

4. Audience -- (nope i was wrong its everyone elses fault)

theres a word for thinking like this its called Paranoia.

[speedfreek]

If you get burned enough when you buy a game your going to want to go out and try the game before you buy. If a company has a reputation of making good games then people are more likely to just buy it, Orange Box comes to mind as I liked everything in the series so far and felt no risk buying the next one in the series. Anything else I tend to be wary about and want to get a better look than just a demo.

[DougEdey]

I used to untill I turned 16~, I finally had an income and I could afford to buy games, turned out that when I was earning a wage I could afford to keep a very good standard of living.

I now say to everyone not to pirate because I know how much effort goes in to games.

[Amon]

Yes. Now I don't anymore. And I buy the game if it was fun.

[chrisb2e9]

I understand why he hates stupid people and intergrated hardware. I remember when sims 2 came out. I was on the forum for the game constantly telling people that their 3 year old pc with intergrated video would not run the game no matter what they do. and it was always the games fault to them. even thought they wanted a game that was better than sims 1.

[Veles]

I used to until I got some money in the bank and I could actually afford games.

I'll pirate a game if
A) You can't get it in the shops anymore
B) I want to know if it's a waste of money or not

Although now I do little of B, last time I remember doing that was for STALKER, after a few hours playing I decided it was good, but due to my obsession with restarting RPGesque games I got frustrated, might pick that up now it's cheaper. Now I've had my ups and downs with awful games and awesome games, I can usually tell if I'll enjoy a game from previews and the like. I haven't bought many duds in the last year or so.

The only games I kind of regret buying that I've bought in the last 6 months or so is probably the club and eternal sonata. I've barely played them, but I did pick them up very cheap.

I picked "Yes, but I often buy the game too. Really." BTW

[yodasarmpit]

Have I pirated games, well yes.
But you know what, those I liked I went out and bought, those I didn't got deleted.

There are times I glad I did as it saved wasting money on a crap game, on the other hand there are games I might not have considered but bought them after trying them out first.

[Jamie]

I think my credit card bill speaks for itself.

[The_Beast]

My internet is too slow to pirate games

[CardJoe]

I voted for I used too. I used to pirate games all the time, but once I discovered the second hand market out there there was really no need. Now, because of my job, I don't really have to buy new games. I still do download some games - but only abandonware and even then I'd prefer a second hand copy. I went through a stage of DS pirating too - but not anymore.

The last major game I kind of stole was Half-Life 2 and that was a special case. At uni we had very poor internet and you needed it to run the game. Only one pc in the house could get online and that was in Bauuls room, so I used his account to play the game. Even then, when we moved out at the end of the year and I could get online properly I still bought the game to play it again.

Hell, even some new games (Like Audiosurf) that I could get review copies of for free I still buy if I really want them. Review copies in the office often aren't available to nab afterwards because Tim needs them for testing something or because we keep them in the office for relaxation at the end of the day.

And yeah, three times for that quote was excessive, but relevant in the previous conversations and worthy of seperate discussion here I feel.