The Gaming Den

cthulhu wrote:Looking Glass Studios is probably the counter example. Systm Shock 2 was a commerical disaster. However, SS2's piracy rate was apparently very high, it was a great critical success and it is widely remembered as a classic game. If piracy encouraged purchases or was a 'try before you buy' arrangement, then SS2 would have been a commerical success.

However, looking glass isn't in business....

Looking glass studios in particular is to me the biggest counterargument to this line.

I have some anecdata from Notch of Minecraft fame:

http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-is-theft ... or-110303/

So where does this leave us? Lets look at another example, lets compare sales from the first Xbox and the Playstation 2. The first Xbox was so easy to hack you could do it with just some software, you didn't even need to open the case. I assume modding the PS2 is very difficult because none of my acquaintances ever got theirs modded.

The top three Xbox games sold 8, 5 and 3 million copies respectively for an audience of 24 million Xbox owners. The Playstation 2 has an install base 6! times the size of the Xbox 1, about 150 million, and it's top three selling games 17,15 and 11 million sold. If we take a leap and extrapolate this we can see that an Xbox owner would have about as many games in their library as a PS2, if not more. If piracy made a big impact on how many games a pirate buys we should see the Xbox having fewer sales on account of how easy it is to mod.

cthulhu wrote:

Vnonymous wrote:http://insomnia.ac/commentary/pc_game_piracy/

Piracy is a solved question, pretty much.

A significant part of that guy's arguement is that Piracy is caused by games having good graphics.

I'm not even joking. He spends ages on this point.

Number of words in article: 16336
Number of words talking about issues caused by graphical hardware: 505

Vnonymous wrote:

cthulhu wrote:

Vnonymous wrote:http://insomnia.ac/commentary/pc_game_piracy/

Piracy is a solved question, pretty much.

A significant part of that guy's arguement is that Piracy is caused by games having good graphics.

I'm not even joking. He spends ages on this point.

Number of words in article: 16336
Number of words talking about issues caused by graphical hardware: 505

What? You haven't even read the article you've linked!

He starts bleating about demos in paragraph 5, and continues all the fucking way through the document. He goes over how demo's not being availible or to large to download, or are so large that it's almos thet same as downloading the full game, the he complains that the shareware model disappeared in the 90s and it goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

The size issue above is caused by art assets taking up vast amounts of space to power modern generation graphics, and his internet connection being shit

Indeed, just pasting the the entire demo section from the start to the end reveals that he spends TWELVE THOUSAND WORDS!!!!!! complaining about demos. That's literally 3/4ths of the entire fucking article.

So his argument is seriously that graphics are good, therefore piracy. It's fucking retarded.

edit: I'm not even counting the retardely huge excel spreadsheet where he extensively details basic facts like "Making a demo requires extra development time" No shit? I didn't know that cutting code took time, and "Games now are really big" I noticed that all my shit had suddenly started coming on multiple DVDs rather than a floppy fucking disk, but captain retard here apparently had not, demanding a return to commander keen era shareware systems.

Edit2: Then, at the end, he says that Gabe Newel''s fundamental philsophy for selling games (make it easier (gabe adds, and better here too) to buy the game than pirate it) is actually totally wrong. I think Gabe Newell's huge success as a game developer speaks to the idea that maybe Gave knows what he's talking about, but clearly some random blogger is the font of all knowledge and that the root cause of piracy is graphics technology has improved since Doom 2.

What the fuck am I reading?

Are you seriously saying that "People pirate because they have no way of telling if a game is good or not due to the shit nature of demos and the ridiculously onerous policies regarding pc game returns" is equivalent to
"Games have good graphics so people pirate them"

If you're not willing to understand the very basics of an essay then there's no point discussing it with you.

People pirate games because $60-$70 for a FPS clone that's been done a billion times, and only has about 15 hours or so of playtime is LAME.

They pirate the game, try it, and probably NEVER finish.

Some people pirate, because they are cheap douchebags, but most people pirate because times are hard, and 60 for a dubious game seems lame, but it's been so hyped they feel like they have to play it.

I pirated an indie game the other day because there was no option to buy it without installing some sort of client software. Haven't played it, and there's a real chance the game will appear in an indie bundle which I will buy and play without ever having installed the pirated version - this happened with Trine, and I paid $50 for the bundle.

Also, I bought the soundtrack, which is DRM-free.

cthulhu wrote:

Juton wrote:It's my understanding that piracy generally has a neutral or even beneficial effect on sales. The thinking is, if a person has X dollars they are going to spend on entertainment then they are going to spend about X dollars on entertainment. If that person pirates media then they are going to go out a purchase the media they like best, either to get a better copy or to support the creators.

Looking Glass Studios is probably the counter example. Systm Shock 2 was a commerical disaster. However, SS2's piracy rate was apparently very high, it was a great critical success and it is widely remembered as a classic game. If piracy encouraged purchases or was a 'try before you buy' arrangement, then SS2 would have been a commerical success.

However, looking glass isn't in business....

Looking glass studios in particular is to me the biggest counterargument to this line.

System Shock 2 is a demonstration of one important principle. Good =! Popular. When it comes to sales, popular beats good every single time.

Vnonymous wrote:What the fuck am I reading?

Are you seriously saying that "People pirate because they have no way of telling if a game is good or not due to the shit nature of demos and the ridiculously onerous policies regarding pc game returns" is equivalent to
"Games have good graphics so people pirate them"

If you're not willing to understand the very basics of an essay then there's no point discussing it with you.

That is totally his arguement though. He complains that, for example, the incremental cost of downloading the Bioshock warez version over the Bioshock demo is so low he may as well pirate it. That is actually in his essay - it is a direct statement he makes.

Why do you think the Bioshock demo is so large? Hint: Its the art assets.

So therefore we have this chain of 'logic':

If a game has good graphics, a game will have a big demo
If a game has a big demo, he will pirate it

Therefore, if a game has good graphics, he will pirate it.

That is his actual argument he is actually using. Good graphics = piracy.

What. The. Fuck.

http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/6974/wtfeh.png

"WHY ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE PIRATING GAMES IN AUSTRALIA, OBVIOUSLY WE NEED MORE DRM AND TO MAKE SURE THE AUSTRALIAN RELEASE DATE IS EVEN FURTHER BEHIND THE REST OF THE WORLD"

The funny thing is the guy never really addresses that - he's american, though he does talk about europe for a bit. But his conculsion there is that video game publishers should appeal for a new VAT.

But doesn’t all this seem to suggest that the industry needs to start putting its collective weight behind working out a better VAT class for games?

HAHAHAHAHA. Really? He wants the video game publishers to lobby for tax cuts, and their failure to do so causes piracy? Instead, he says this

You can make your own comparisons for whichever games you want based on your own criteria. I started to include the data on warez dates and sizes, but I honestly just don’t have the endurance to complete it. You’ll have to look it up for yourself if it’s not in the spreadsheet.

But for me it’s remarkable that at the 8Mbps i’d need for the demo to be interesting to me, the warez release starts to look a hell of a lot more reasonable. At 8 Mbps, 30 minutes for 30 minutes vs. 2 hours for the full deal with the added ability to really make my own decision. The deal is even more lop-sided for demos that contain one or two maps. Maybe I’m screwy. Maybe those one or two maps could be really long, too, but I can’t tell from the description.

Emphasis mine. The argument is seriously that good graphics causes piracy. Also that apparently he only wants to pay for things after he's used them.

The other retarded thing is that he also complains that he cannot buy SS2 any more, but then complains that the steam release of XCOM is just a money grab because they didn't add any additional features.

So then he holds up the remake of bionic commando as how to do re-releases proberly, but misses two points

A) The new version is a completely different game

B) It's shit.

What the fuck is this guy smoking? It's the worst article in the universe.

cthulhu wrote:

But for me it’s remarkable that at the 8Mbps i’d need for the demo to be interesting to me, the warez release starts to look a hell of a lot more reasonable. At 8 Mbps, 30 minutes for 30 minutes vs. 2 hours for the full deal with the added ability to really make my own decision. The deal is even more lop-sided for demos that contain one or two maps. Maybe I’m screwy. Maybe those one or two maps could be really long, too, but I can’t tell from the description.

Emphasis corrected.

cthulhu wrote:
That is totally his arguement though. He complains that, for example, the incremental cost of downloading the Bioshock warez version over the Bioshock demo is so low he may as well pirate it. That is actually in his essay - it is a direct statement he makes.

Why do you think the Bioshock demo is so large? Hint: Its the art assets.

So therefore we have this chain of 'logic':

If a game has good graphics, a game will have a big demo
If a game has a big demo, he will pirate it

Therefore, if a game has good graphics, he will pirate it.

That is his actual argument he is actually using. Good graphics = piracy.

What. The. Fuck.

Ok, so Bioshock is supposedly a 20 hour game, and the full version is 6.6 gigs.

1.84 gigs is the size of the demo, which last for "30 minutes". So for one fourtieth of the play time, you're expected to download a little less than a third of the filesize of the whole game.

Do you see a problem here?

Sure, but there is absolutely nothing the developer can do about it. Bioshock has great graphics. Graphics require large amounts of data. large amounts of data requires heavy use of storage. Why do you think that Bioshock is a 6 GB game whereas Quake fit on one cd?

Therefore AAA titles are going to have huge demos even if they only include a small amount of the total levels in the final product.

So yeah, your 'logic' leads to 'good graphics cause piracy'

cthulhu wrote:. Also that apparently he only wants to pay for things after he's used them.

Could you show me where he said that or is this another hallucination

The other retarded thing is that he also complains that he cannot buy SS2 any more, but then complains that the steam release of XCOM is just a money grab because they didn't add any additional features.

The fuck are you complaining about? My computer had issues with the steam release of Xcom, and when you buy a game and it doesn't actually work properly that's a damn good sign that there's a quality issue involved. And the SS2 scenario is where it is impossible for people to play the game at all. If I want to play System Shock 2 legally, my options are:


Big list, isn't it? Can you see any convenient options that lead to my money getting to the developer?

So then he holds up the remake of bionic commando as how to do re-releases proberly, but misses two points

A) The new version is a completely different game

B) It's shit.

What the fuck is this guy smoking? It's the worst article in the universe.

I don't know what planet you're living on, but in this one the reception for Bionic Commando Rearmed was actually this:

Bionic Commando Rearmed has been very well received by game critics. It averages 86/100 across all three release platforms at aggregate website Metacritic and average 87% across platforms at GameRankings.[19][26] Rearmed sold over 130,000 copies across all three platforms during the first week of its release.[27] As of year-end 2010, Bionic Commando Rearmed has sold over 113,000 copies on Xbox Live alone.[28] In a September 2010 ranking, IGN listed Bionic Commando Rearmed fourth in their top twenty-five Xbox Live Arcade titles of all time.[29] Overall impressions of the game gleaned comments of praise. IGN's Hilary Goldstein called Rearmed "the best downloadable game to date on XBLA and PSN"[24] and ranked it second on her top 10 list of Xbox Live Arcade games.[30] Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb called it "terrific in almost every way" and the reviewer from GameTrailers stated it was "one of those games that feels organic to play."[25][31] Reviewers praised the title's ability to remain true to the Nintendo version but provide enhancements to update the title

No I don't. Because I realize that to play the first 30 minutes you need a little sister texture, a big daddy texture, a splicer texture, a thug texture, ect. Oh yeah, and all the mechanics and AI scripts for all those things.

Things which get reused. So no, it does not surprise me that you need a large chunk of the game to play the game for 30 minutes. I see nothing wrong with a long download in order to play 30 minutes of the game free.

cthulhu wrote:Sure, but there is absolutely nothing the developer can do about it. Bioshock has great graphics. Graphics require large amounts of data. large amounts of data requires heavy use of storage. Why do you think that Bioshock is a 6 GB game whereas Quake fit on one cd?

Therefore AAA titles are going to have huge demos even if they only include a small amount of the total levels in the final product.

So yeah, your 'logic' leads to 'good graphics cause piracy'

No, my logic is that filesizes that are a third of that of the actual full game in return for providing one fourtieth(and that's being generous, some sources list a playtime of 25 hours for the full game) leads to piracy, because downloading the demo compared to the pirate release is a giant fucking waste of time and bandwidth. If you expect users to download a third of the game, GIVE THEM A THIRD OF THE GAME. Hell, people would be willing to accept a filesize of a third of the game for a quarter of the playtime. But a fucking fourtieth?

And no, that wouldn't increase the filesize that much, considering if the full game had the same playtime to filesize ratio it would be 73 gigs and come on 9 dual layer dvds.

Vnonymous wrote:

cthulhu wrote:. Also that apparently he only wants to pay for things after he's used them.

Could you show me where he said that or is this another hallucination

I've already quoted it - he wants the full game so he can make an 'informed decision' with the entire thing. Implication is that he wants to watch the movie, then having watched it decide if he wants to pay for it.

Also, Bionic commando re-armed (2008) is NOT 'Bionic Commando' (2009) - see how the names are different. Bionic Commando sold 27,000 units in it's first month and was a huge commerical failure.

Edit: If it takes you 25 hours to complete bioshock you are a limbless retard. Incidently, check Steam Achievements for progress through a game. Most people haven't completed 'good games' like Deus Ex Human Revolution. If you give away the first half of the game as your 'demo' most people won't buy it.

Only 55% of people played through to the second boss. Assuming that as part of your 'demos as shareware' argument, you want people to be able to carry saved game files foward, you're asking companies to release demos that demonstrably canabalise 45% of their sales.

FOURTY FIVE FUCKING PERCENT.

Are you retarded? Can you not see the problem with this? Or did I miss something and Deus Ex HR is a shit game, and people wouldn't have bought it if had a demo?

cthulhu wrote:
Edit: If it takes you 25 hours to complete bioshock you are a limbless retard. Incidently, check Steam Achievements for progress through a game. Most people haven't completed 'good games' like Deus Ex 2. If you give away the first half of the game as your 'demo' most people won't buy it.

Only 55% of people played through to the second boss. Assuming that as part of your 'demos as shareware' argument, you want people to be able to carry saved game files foward, you're asking companies to release demos that demonstrably canabalise 55% of their sales.

FIFTY FIVE FUCKING PERCENT.

Deus Ex 2 was actually a bad game though - Invisible War sucked, and if that game had a decent demo then it would have fucking tanked. And yes, a demo that convinces people not to play the game is something that will happen. If a demo of half the game is enough to convince people that a game is shit, GOOD. That means that there's an incentive for developers to create games that don't turn to shit after the first hour! Street Fighter 2 and Deus Ex continued to sell for over a decade after their release, because they are good games, and those are the sort of games that we want developers to release more of.

As for Bioshock playtime, I wouldn't be able to tell you - the game crapped out for me in the little girl orphanage, but I'd seen enough of the game by then to know it was no system shock 2 and not really worth finishing.

Also, Bionic commando re-armed (2008) is NOT 'Bionic Commando' (2009) - see how the names are different. Bionic Commando sold 27,000 units in it's first month and was a huge commerical failure.

Yes, and the part where YOU MADE THAT MISTAKE evidently went right the fuck over your head. This article was written before the game you are talking about even fucking came out.

PC GAME PIRACY
By Jon Rose / December 18, 2008

'Bionic Commando' (2009)

Vnonymous wrote:Deus Ex 2 was actually a bad game though - Invisible War sucked, and if that game had a decent demo then it would have fucking tanked.

I meant HR, DX2 doesnt have steam achievements, so I'm not talking aobut that one.

cthulhu wrote: I meant HR, DX2 doesnt have steam achievements, so I'm not talking aobut that one.

You've completely forgotten about the recent sales, where HR was very cheap. Three of my friends picked the game up and only got it installed just recently. If you've got the same data for the period before the sales then you'd have a compelling argument though.

This is fairly standard. You can check games like Mass Effect 2 which has by chapter achievements as well if you'd like (Mass effect 2 is much less ambigiously a 'good game' than DX:HR though).

The drop off between first and second boss is about 15% and a similar ratio between 2nd and 3rd.

Portal is another good example 25% of people who brought the game didn't even get to the part where they get the second portal gun, and only 50% of them completed it.

Portal 2 is a similar story. 80% of players got to the part where you wake up GLADOS, 70% to the first stalemate brekaing bit, but only 50% completed the game.


Big drop offs in player numbers of the course of the game.

Steam is a really special case simply because a lot of people on it will buy games and then not play them. Portal came free with the orange box, so it is actually entirely understandable that only fifty percent of players finished it, considering twenty five percent of players didn't seem to play it at all.

I really don't think people are actively going out there and saying "I'm buying this game and I'm only going to play the first half of it". There's a lot of noise in the steam achievment statistics(bundled games, unappreciated gifts etc etc) and I still don't see how people having trouble finishing a game would lead them to ignore purchasing a game in favour of a good demo.

Lots of games have a tutorial completion achievement that you can use to determine if someone actually played the game, like, at all. Mass effect 2 has the best stats on this and there have been a number of articles about the developers.

Going back to Deus Ex - 88% of the players got to the point where they hacked something or punched someone, 70% to the first boss, 55% to the second boss and and 47% to the third boss.

If your Demo was proportional to DL size, you're proposing giving away all the content up to the second boss (up to the first boss was like 80% of the final game size, so it might even have to be to the third boss) - so that's 45% of your actual sales, or 35% if you want to cut out the the weird 10% who have never really played it.

In a shareware model I am not going to buy the game until I've finished the Demo. If I never finish the demo, I will never buy the game.

Cuts to sales will be vast (35% or so). That's a gigantic impact on the bottom line, indeed most games would become unprofitable.

Vnonymous wrote:Do you see a problem here?

The problem is that you're being retarded.

Kaelik wrote:No I don't. Because I realize that to play the first 30 minutes you need a little sister texture, a big daddy texture, a splicer texture, a thug texture, ect. Oh yeah, and all the mechanics and AI scripts for all those things.

Like Kaelik's said, games are fucking huge, and the vast majority of the art assets are re-used from start to finish. You would be completely wrong to assume any linear relationship between size of demo / size of game and length of demo / length of game.

But this guy is seriously bitching that demo + full game will be a 30-50% total download size over the full game, so any intelligent person is going to pirate because "fuck that shit, I can't wait an extra two-four hours." It's fucking retarded. This is the age of digital distribution and widespread broadband and while broadband should be more accessible than it is, if you don't have it you're not fucking downloading demos anyway. He is using a couple hours of downloading as a legitimate breaking point for why people would choose piracy over demos + full-game. What the shit? Fuck that guy. He's stupid.

The rest of the article is of similar quality and bullshittery. It really is basically every possible uneducated, uninformed complaint PC gamers have ever stupidly muttered about piracy crammed into one place. Seriously, in one place he talks about the "hardcore PC gamer" as though that's an actual market-driving demographic. He doesn't know the first fucking thing about any of this.

cthulhu wrote:Lots of games have a tutorial completion achievement that you can use to determine if someone actually played the game, like, at all. Mass effect 2 has the best stats on this and there have been a number of articles about the developers.

Interesting. It never occurred to me that the online Achievement things would actually be useful for something.