News Call of Duty 4 piracy is rampant

You can save files in 2007 as Office 2003 documents if you're going to be sending to people who don't have Office 2007.

 

Greetings!

So, whats the point on having a 2007-only document type? Just to lose any interoperability?

 

In a couple of years ...

 

Greetings!

Back on topic.

The article stated:

Activision claimed last week to have hit 7 million CoD4 sales during 2007, VG Chartz shows worldwide sales of CoD4, till 29/12/2007, of 3.893.700 for X360 and 1.792.009 for PS3.
That leaves only ~1.300.000 worldwide CoD4 PC sales.

According to VG Chartz, PS3 users were 8.842.596, at the end of 2007, almost 1 in 5 of those users managed to acquire legitimately the game (1:4,93).
According to VG Chartz, X360 users were 16.148.759, at the end of 2007, 1 in 4,15 of those users managed to acquire legitimately the game.

Applying a generous ratio of 1:6, PC supporters dont even reach the 8 million mark. There are a lot of freeloaders though...

 

I would have bought the game on Steam, but, after they decided to double the price to bring it in line with local retailers, I will be staying away.
http://www.kotaku.com.au/games/2007/11/call_of_duty_4_oz_steam_price_doubles_overnight.html
When Aussies stop getting the price shaft when it comes to games (we pay on average double what people in the US pay), I'll start buying games again.

 

That's ****ing rediculous for you guys, the reason it should be available to purchase on-line is that it should be CHEAPER not more expensive! Steam / Valve would make so much more money being cheaper, but i am sure they are pshed by retailers/distributers,a decent game wouldnt need any backing except from their coding team, get the game on steam for a price thats nice, itll sell well they get more of the profits and you dont need a middle man for distribution....

The price you pay is just under £40 for us, which is right for a new-released game over here, but we get it for $70 ( £35) off steam, or as i did i went to a well known store for being overpriced yet a big seller GAME and got it for £25, the limited version too!

I just don't understand why it is more expensive on steam?!

 

Well, you could argue that Steam is in a more difficult position having to track different currencies from a centralised location. However, steam also offers some extras above retail - auto updates, centralised system for easy access, VAC security etc. They also have the market cornered on digital distribution. Personally, I love Steam and, when if the prices line up as you say then I just buy it retail. It's not a big deal. As wit everything you just find the deal you feel is best for you.

 

Well first i must say.
Most games are way to expensive.
Why do I say so.
There are many medias who play around my money, and its seems like everyone thinks that everybody have a goldminer in the pocket.
I like to pay for what i like to use. But when the producer behaves like usurer it´s real bad. For an example When the vinylLP was the most comon mediatype in everyones home and there was a few gameconsoles, and just a few TV-channels i used to pay for every game LP and so on. I have always listened alot on radio so my needs to buy every single/LP or cassette where low. And i had alot of money left for games. Later on the CD was intrudused all sellers/resellers and producents said, its so cheap to produce a CD and its so much better quality so it will be cheaper for the private person to buy and at the same time more left for the producent/music groups/ and so on. But what happened? Initialy the CD was cheaper but the hardware where lot more expensive. After a while when noone or almost noone produced vinyls the CD began to rais in price, almost everyone accepted it but somewhere the crossed the line to become usurer. At the same time the CD recorders where introduced, well to a very high price, but i know many who buyed the Recorder and started to burn CD´s and sell it to half the price as the original. Even before that the selling statistics was going down fast. Well their way to act is and where really bad, but if the producers not had passed the line to usurer it wouldn’t happened. All media in the air also plays for the customers attention, so if the single media game or music, radio/Tv or movie sells less the whole mediaselling is so huge that its impossible to understand the pricing for the single product.

If I have corn to sell and noone seems to buy it a have to lower my price. But in the mediasector they don’t follow that rule. They just starts to whine and then the governments makes some new laws, and so it goes on and on and on again. Why do the mediamarket have the right to be usurers when other markets have to follow the rules on the market.
Lots of corn less of customers is equal to a lower price. But in the mediamarket the go the other way, less sellery compares to a higher price, then the piracy starts and they higher the price about $5-$10. sometimes I use to wait a year to buy the movie, MusicCD or the game aspecialy when it’s a singleplayer game. For online multiplayer games I mostly select one or two and play it to its death.

I cant say I guard the pirates, but I understand the forces behind it. The producers and sellers seems to negliate the customers and referers to old sellary when the set the price on a single game.

Now the whining have started again and we will see where it ends. I hope for my life that the governments will rice and say stop. And put the customers privacy in focus.
The only way to go is like the satellite-TV-producers did. They put the package in a high codescrambling hard to crack, at the same time they lowered the prices to around the half for the same product. If the gameproducers don’t understand the forces behind their losing strategy they will die in their own usurer grave.
Most of the games also must have better demos, for an example they can make in game movies so its realistic and also time limited in game time for each playable map. There are also other ways to go, like locking functions after lets say 10 or 20 hours playing. Anyway there will always be pirates and it have always been. But with the right price, the right demos, and the right gamemovies they will win.

So they have to choose or die. Other will still be there to start and make other games, to the right price at the right time. And will listen to the customers in any question. Also the producers who pay a big attention to updates, bugfixes, and “registered” user special offers like addons will be the winners.

So to win over the piracy they have to play another way, like they do there will be armadas of piracy grooving bigger and bigger, and the bigger the piracy becomes the harder it will be to go the other way and be the winners again.

So choose the right way. Lower the price for the games to a worthy level, and maybe its time to offer some resellers and let the customers buy from a lowprice game site. It’s a new time, in the world. We have to stop a lot of our running for buy and throw. So its time for the mediaproducers to take the step in to the ITAGE.

That’s my opinion and I respect others, but usurers opinion isn’t much for me.

 

And who the hell doesn't have the internet these days?

Seriously.

People who maybe have it on a lappy, and have no connection, then fine that's a problem, but it's something game developers need to sacrifice in order to raise their sales.

 

Lower the price of games? I don't buy PC games anymore (I game on my 360) but when I went into Gamestation most games were between £20 and £25 brand new. The games I buy for my 360 are between £30 and £40 which I am happy to pay because I understand what it's like to put effort into stuff and have it stolen from you.

 

People complaining that the PC games market is too expensive baffle me. Take Supreme Commander for instance, the game is just over a year old now and you can buy (in th UK at least) the original game and the expansion for......omg £17.99. Company of heroes (original) released just over a year and a half ago + expansion is now£17.99.

Fair enough some people may not be able to justify paying full price for a game, but it doesn't excuse piracy. You simply wait till the price drops into your (justify purchase) bracket. With soo many titles about, old and new, it's not like there's a shortage of quality titles about at a price you can afford.

Fair enough there's been enough bashing of people who pirate games (/guilty as charged). By the same token, people need to stop complaining about the price of PC games. Not everyone can afford new products, so you wait like the rest of us. When your old enough to buy a car, then come and share your sob stories (how much tax for a new car!).

 

Here's something about the piracy debate that bugs me...

Lets say me and some other random person both want a game that's being released tomorrow, but neither of us can afford it. I decided to hold off and end up not ever getting around to buying it and the other guy pirates it. What's the difference to the publisher? Sure, I can claim the moral high ground that I didn't pirate it, but the company made exactly the same amount of money off both of us ($0.00), and neither of our actions cost the company anything. Am I, by virtue of choosing not to buy the game, also stealing from the company? For that matter, isn't the person who waits until the game shows up in the bargain bin also hurting their revenues? I mean, they should have paid full RRP for it.

This is a lot more than a theoretical for me, there are a number of games I want, but right now i'm not bringing in much cash (time / money exclusivity principal at work) and so I haven't gotten a new game since HL2E1. I have a hard time seeing how my not buying games is doing any less harm than someone who pirates them. Neither is a lost sale because neither of us would have bought them right away, and we both might buy eventually.

Aside from the fact that some people like to get indignatly self-righteous, I have a hard time coming up with a reason to get mad about piracy.

 

By taking the moral high ground and not buying it you are potentially making the publisher money as you'll buy the game later on maybe, though probably at a reduced price. These bargain sales late in the lifetime of a game can make all the difference - just look at (sigh) Beyond Good and Evil. When it was first released it got major accolades, but bombed in the sales. Now, years and years later, people are still raving about it and you can pick the game up for less than a fiver. Those reduced price sales have buoyed the success of the game up so much that the sequel, which was originally canned when the first game failed, is now rumoured to be in development with the original dev team reassembled at Ubisoft.

If the reverse had happened and the game had never sold even at those rock-bottom prices because everyone had pirated it then the developer wouldn't have made ANY money out of the game and the sequel would never materialise. Michel Ancel would be crying his little heart out, instead of massaging his underground hit back to life.

 

You can say the same thing about DVDs, piracy is rampant there online but no-one is physically loosing out by your arguement.

Yet I still wait untill I see a £3 bargain on a DVD and buy it.

 

I don't buy the whole we're losing money because of people downloading stuff. I haven't seen the figures... doubt I ever will.... and how do I know what I am seeing is true? The fact is as someone else said, if the devs made good games then there wouldn't be an issue. I myself havent downloaded a game before, but understand why it happens. How can I tell how good a game is if you give me 1 car and 1 track. It's the same with music and films. I'd be more inclinded to buy something that I could listen too for more than 10 seconds. Parhaps having a few tracks, a few cars and having a time limit on the game (so many start ups?) My God I could go on forever about this.... I won't

 

So what you're saying is that because you wouldn't have bought the game if piracy was not available you're OK?

Next time you produce something I'll buy a cheap knock off that doesn't work of it and then let you wonder why you're poor.

 

So you're saying that if developers made good games there wouldn't be piracy? That's the most moronic arguement I've ever heard since my sister told me Lemmings couldn't be real because they were in a computer game.

Good games get pirated the most of all! Nobody bothers pirating blatantly shite games and games like Half-Life, Call of Duty 4 and so on were so good and so popular that people ended up almost killing them via piracy. That's why COD as a series is getting progressively more console-ish (because console piracy is much harder and less of an issue). Not every developer can do what Valve did and make themselves a secure, profitable platform to publish on.

Just go sit in the corner.

 

Do people think that game devs get paid a lot or something and can afford not to be paid for their countless hours of work?

 

OK, lets take a different tack at this. We agree that Steam is pretty piracy resistant. It's vsignificantly harder to pirate valve / steam games than, say EA games (just to pick a random example). We also know that a lot of the valve / steam proiducts are tremendously popular. So if they're both very popular and hard to piurate, shouldn't they be outselling the less good, easier to pirate games by a significant margin?

For that matter, what about the essentially pirate proof MMORPGs? Sure they sell somewhat better than easy to pirate FPS games, but not by the huge order of magnitude that publishers blame on piracy.

FPS games have three options, they can buy a game, they can pirate it, or they can go without. The game companies are asserting that a huge percentage of consumers are pirating and that if they couldn't pirate they would buy.

MMO players have two options, they can buy or they can go without. If the assertions of the publishers were accurate then there would be a massive difference in sales between the genres.

I know this theory has some holes in it, but do you see where I'm going here?

Somewhere in this is the answer to how much impact piracy has. Remember, a pirate who never buys is the same as a consumer who goes without. Both are zeros on the balance sheet.

The only people who matter are the people who actually buy the game. Instread of treating consumers like criminals, companies need to produce games that people want to buy, and ones that those who can afford it will choose to buy. Unfortunatly copy protection and DRM have only made piracy more appealing because those who pirate get a batter expierience than those who purchase.

My own feeling is that piracy is a zero sum. The small number of additional people who would buy if piracy were not an option is offset by the number of people who would not buy if they hadn't tried it first.

 

Agreed - Steam and MMO games are great for avoiding piracy. There are two problems though.

One, the MMO market is over-saturated and there's little room for new developers with WOW and LOTRO already there. Two, Steam isn't hugely popular with some crowds and is known to have a variety of problems - just ask Bindi about when he bought TF2 or nag me about when I bought AudioSurf.

You also have to remember that Steam is massively unpopular inside the industry. If a developer puts his game on steam then he has two problems. The first is that he is massively limiting his audience from the hundred or so million gamers total to the 15 million currently on Steam. True, that audience of Steam is growing - but slowly. Persuading more people on to Steam at this point is incredibly difficult and the main reason Valve is looking at casual games. If somebody isn't using Steam now then it's probably a deliberate choice or lack of awareness - it's very hard to advertise a game released as a Steam exclusive.

Let's take Garry's Mod as an example - one bedroom developer creates a mod for HL2 which is massively, massively popular. Then, at the height of it's popularity and the height of Steams success, he takes the Mod retail. The best deal he manages to broker with Valve is for a 50/50 split of profits from the game and he sets the game at a budget price of $10. So, he has cheap price, large community, large audience, and a great profit share on his side - yet he still only makes £50,000 off of it. A lot, sure, but he's just one man. Plus, you just need to look at my blog stats to see how many people stumble on my blog in an attempt to find ways to pirate the game. If you take that model and apply it to a bigger game then you're making more money probably and have a better profit share, but the other problems will prevent you from generating huge amounts of cash still - and for a big game that money needs to go further too; it needs to pay salaries.

That's why games are often sold in shops and then complemented by Steam sales. This happened with Sin: Episodes and even The Orange Box. Steam sales alone aren't enough to support a game - they need to be in shops and they need to be visible. The problem is that if they are then people will just try to pirate them (unless they sell in shops but then require Steam - but this just pisses people off, alienates more people and doesn't really stop people trying to pirate anyway).

The second problem for developers is publishers. When selling on Steam or online the developer can get profits directly, bypassing the publisher. This was the problem for Valve and Vivendi when Steam first released and Vivendi said "hey, you can't do that we're your publisher." to which Valve said "sod off, it's our game".

If a developer, especially a small one, pisses off a publisher then it can be crippling.

Saying that developers need to make games the people want to buy and at reasonable prices is, frankly, moronic. Developers often make games people want to play and they price them at a point which enables them to survive and grow. Console games which cost £50 are the overpriced ones because those developers needn't worry about piracy. £30 (or 17.99 online) for a PC game is not extortionate (especially when that price rapidly falls and there's a strong second hand market) for a game that took hundreds of people years to make - not when those people all need to be paid.

Go back and read the original news piece behind this discussion. Then look at GTA on the PC, Half-life 2, Quake, BioShock and any other game you liked from the past ten years. It's the big, popular and good games which are most at risk from piracy. Nobody is going to pirate a crap game they don't want to play - but everyone wants to play BioShock and nobody wants to pay for it (simply because they don't understand or see the after effects of that crime), so they pirate it.

Piracy is PRIMARILY hurting the good, clever and respected developers. Indie games can make it in the PC market (look at AudioSurf or Sins of a Solar Empire, even though one person in the discussion for the latter has openly pirated the game) - good, AAA games can't. They need more money to survive and that money is drained away by pirates. When those developers don't want to/can't survive on PC games alone anymore then they'll go elsewhere and you'll be left twiddling your thumbs and looking like an idiot when you whinge about how all good games nowadays are console exclusives. You're bringing that future upon yourself because you refuse to see the difference between purchasing selectively and making good use of demoes and just downloading a pirated version and saving your money for a console game.

Thats the real problem here.