Most people who trade in games go spend that money on a newer but still second-hand game, netting the publishers/producers all of $0. Or so has been my experience, anyways. And the music industry absolutely complains about second-hand shops. They just know there's not a damn thing they can do about it. Truth be told, I think many would prefer to have their content downloaded than resold second-hand. For all they're concerned, it might as well be a pirated Chinese knock-off copy, since it's a copy of their product that's actually being *sold* and they're not getting anything from it. I can't speak for the industry, but I'd rather nobody get paid than someone who's not me get paid when content I produced is acquired.
I pirate alot and buy second hand alot and play lots of free games, or I just wait a few years till the game is cheap and patched. The last full price game I bought was stalker becuase it was an awsome game vastly underapriciated by the gaming press.
I've merged this news post with the thread to keep things neat. And, out of force of habit: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/03/06/piracy_sales_charts_revealed/1 Indie website RockPaperShotgun has done a breakdown of the top ten pirated games and the number of downloads for each.
If we realy want to help the game , music, and movie industry. Then the best action to take is takedown/shutdown the total p2p protocol. This will prevent 'normal' people to easy and freely get access to warez. Because that is the real source of all the problems anyway.
Except that people use it for legitimate purposes, i personally use it more for distros or large game patches more than i do for pirating. Stupid statements like that don't help the cause any.
Yep, P2P has perfectly legitimate uses. Banning P2P because people use it for piracy is like banning windows because people install pirated software on it. Those numbers are pretty scarily high, especially since it's just for mininova. However we'll never know how many of those were lost sales. Could be most, could be only a few. It also depends on how they worked it out, even with a well seeded torrent, I sometimes struggle to get a quick download of larger files, plus if I'm torrenting I'll only do it at night as it would slow everyone elses' internet down. So that means if their number is just going on adding up leechers per day then it's probably very inaccurate. Still they do say it's not very accurate but I wouldn't be surprised if it were roughly right.
I had to download myself a copy of COD4... after I had already paid for a copy via steam. Steam wouldn't let me run it, proclaiming some BS about the Keyserver being down. Only this has continued for like 5 months, and I still can't play the copy I bought. As for other stuff I've downloaded; I've had problems with Demos before. AKA I've downloaded a demo from some game, and had it work perfectly. Only when I go out and buy myself a copy of the Game, it refuses to work, sometimes even for months before a patch is released that actually fixes the problem.
Yeah I had the problem with Darkstar one, demo worked fine, I thought it was quite fun. Bought the game, it ran like total ****, and the actual full game was so dull, it was basically the demo on repeat. Had I known how the game had turned out I would never have bought it.
Do you get many Girl Scouts selling cookies in Cornwall? I put “Never” but realised nearly all my Amiga games were pirated. Way back when we lived in Cyprus we couldn’t get hold of legit ones so when ever anyone came over with a “real” game it would get copied and do the rounds. I’ve copied music (a few albums) I’d never have brought them as I rarely listen to music (other than radio/last.fm etc) but theft is theft. Those figures from the news article are shocking. Trouble is people will always want something for nothing or less. As for the second hand market isn't it more of a console thing. Good games must sell well 1st hand long enough to cover dev costs (surely??) as people want to play them. Bad games end up in the 2nd hand aisles quicker and thus (in my head at least) mean the 1st hand sales a low due to being poor or unmarketable game. The developer go’s back to the drawing board. Surely it helps to keep the market going, as low sales figures mean the developer improves its next project, and the previous 2nd hand sales, with higher profits for vendors, keep the vendors happy to stock games isn’t it win win?
torrent sites should ban files over a certain size put a 1gb limit on them that way games wont be distributed i dont know - i dont bother with torrents etc i have a life
LAMO, you mean like rapid share does, all be it a 100meg limit. Then you just get stuff like this happening. Check comments 4 & 6, split archive anyone? And thats not even a popular game so think how many file hosting sites will have split archives of AAA games on them. And you have a life, how much effort do you think it takes to torrent. Once the inital setup of port forwarding, finding decent trackers is done its just a matter of clicking a link, setting a download location and leaving alone.
That's not the answer either, there are games that are less than 1 gig (not a lot of new ones admittedly), but the whole point of P2P is it's good for distributing large files because it doesn't take all that bandwidth from a single server like it would if you downloaded it from rapidshare or fileplanet. It also won't stop stuff like films, TV, music, etc. being pirated.
I admit, I'm one of those bad pirates that download games and have no intention of buying them for the Single Player. And yes, I fall under the category that "I wouldn't of bought it anyways" which is true. What I do buy into though, is the online gameplay. Games such as COD4, Sins of a Solar Empire I bought because I want to play online! I know what I'm doing is wrong and wither or not it affects the publisher is arguable. Piracy is here to stay, and developers need to realise that there product is going to be cracked whatever protection they put on it, so they should probably stop affecting the actual buyers of the game with all the Copy Protection schemes that install system processes etc.
Alot of these are people testing to see if the game is worth it thats the only reason I downloaded games and I havent for about a year now. Any way as im sure somebody has said and this relates to all piracy a download does not equal anywhere near a lost sale.
Well, Cornwall, Hollywood, same thing really... Whenever articles like this come up in the press, I can't help but think of those design studios that have disappeared. I guess each has their own reason for closing but when names like Ion Storm and Troika Games bite the dust, I feel a little bit sad inside.
I don't know about that. If all the people who had downloaded the game went out and bought a second-hand copy instead, that would mean that there was an equivalent number of additional, original sales for the developers. But, I don't see second-hand shops suddenly stocking their shelves with millions of copies of a given title (or, enough copies to supply the pirate market). I imagine the second-hand market is very small compared to the number of people who pirate. I think it stands to reason that with the supply of second-hand copies exhausted, the would-be pirates would have to spend their money elsewhere and buy a new copy; however, they don't. They just go online and grab a free copy because it costs less (in both dollars and opportunity cost). Regardless, it still stands that when you download a pirated copy of a game, the developer doesn't make any money from an original sale. You are enjoying the fruits of the developer's labor without paying for that privilege. -monkey
I know they did some of the math in the article but just so you know for mininova and assassins creed alone. Its over 6,457,724GB of data being transfered 6.16PB of data. If you wanted 25 thousand copies of a locked assassins creed then on a 128kbs connection it would take 13 and a half years to download if you wanted tthem.
i'm in the try before you buy crowd, but i try while the game is a new release and costs $60, then buy when the game is old and boring and costs $30. is this bad?
