BF2S Forums PC Game Piracy Examined

TheAussieReaper wrote:

Aries_37 wrote:

What else could the companies ever see the consumers as but dollar signs? They don't make games for shits and giggles. The only motivation to make a game good is the money that they can make off of it. The idea in the OP is that piracy removes the incentive to work (money) because like you say they are only in it to milk us of our cash. Knowing this then pirating is willingly killing the industry. The idea that a gamer would pay for a product because he feels that the game developers loves and cares for him is silly.

Have you ever heard of customer value? The whole reason companies invest large amounts of money into customer services? You never piss off your customer, that's the one rule every other company follows.

The companies should see as, as customers.

Freezer said he bought Quantum of Solace recently. Took him a few hours of game play to get 75% completed. He was really surprised how short the game was.

Does this sound like a game that's been designed to give as much enjoyment to a customer as possible, or just to quickly spew out a James Bond related title to tie in with the movie release?

Spidery_Yoda wrote:

Miggle wrote:

Not to mention torrents aren't the only way of getting pirated games. Which that article seems to think is true...

It actually says the complete opposite. Right at the beginning pretty much. The 2nd and third page deals with the various ways piracy is done. Seriously, just stop replying since you obviously haven't read a damn thing.

That article is something you don't see every day. It tries to cover everything. It's insightful, it's informative, and it paints a very thorough image of the industry and the effect that piracy is having on it. I make a thread about the article. I want people to read it so that they too will gain insights as to what they're doing, the effects its having etc etc.

But no. Expecting people to read an article was too much to ask wasn't it. Instead of thoughtful replies concerning the issues raised in the article, I get 'their games suck', 'Console companies make them sell out', and more mindless garbage. That has nothing to do with the article, nothing to do with the effects piracy is having on the games industry, and nothing to do with why DRM is in the games.

I've had enough.

Edit: I don't mean everyone. I'm happy with people giving their opinions. Just not repeatedly mouthing off about the article when they plainly havent read it

max wrote:

copyright infringement =/= stealing

Dictionary wrote:

steal - to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully <stole a car> b: to take away by force or unjust means <they've stolen our liberty> c: to take surreptitiously or without permission

Spidery_Yoda wrote:

Miggle wrote:

Are music and movie piracy killing those industries?

Music and movies don't have anything like a 'console' so its hard to compare. If you know what I mean.

Spidery_Yoda wrote:

No you don't understand what I mean. I'm not talking about the industry being killed. I'm talking about the shift from PC to console. I said all this already. Movies and Music don't have an alternate platform with less piracy and more sales to shift to. They're music and movies. They will continue to just survive. Like gaming.

Scorpion0x17 wrote:

I personally think the move to consoles has more to do with the installed user base and the rising cost of development than it does piracy.

PC vs. Console Install Base

Estimates of the total number of gaming consoles sold to date worldwide can be gathered from a range places including VGChartz, Wikipedia articles, NPD, as well as by those who compile their own data from various sources. Taking all these into consideration, the breakdown of 'next-gen' gaming consoles sold to date around the world is approximately:

Wii: 36 million
XBox 360: 23 million
PlayStation 3: 17 million

That's a total of around 76 million 'next-gen' consoles currently in use globally.

In the other corner, while the total number of PCs can only be approximated, Gartner Inc. places the figure at just over 1 billion PCs currently in use globally.

In both cases, it is recognized that the figures are not completely accurate, but they provide a very clear sense of the relative proportions of the install base of PCs vs. consoles - the ratio is at least 10:1 in favor of PCs. However to truly compare PCs to consoles, we need an indication of what proportion of the PCs would have sufficient graphics power to run the latest games.

Publicly available data from reports by Jon Peddie Research published in articles such as this one and this one provides us with sufficient information to deduce that sales of add-in graphics cards made by Nvidia and ATI total around 20-24 million units per quarter in 2008. Extrapolating the quarterly figure to an annual one equates to roughly 80-100 million graphics cards sold each year. This is the figure for only one year of sales, so it's a very conservative estimate of the base number of PCs with modern graphics cards. Of course some of these cards will be low-end, however since the data pertains to add-in graphics cards sold by Nvidia and ATI in the past year, not onboard graphics solutions such as Intel chipsets, then virtually all of them would be capable of some level of gaming. For example even low-end and two year-old cards can pump out over 30FPS or more in Call of Duty 4. Furthermore, since even cards released two years ago, such as the 8800GTS/GTX, can still game very effectively, it's still a low-end estimate of the total number of 'gaming' PCs in total. To add to the rough calculations above, this study claims that approximately 196 million gaming PCs were shipped between the third quarter of 2005 and the third quarter of 2008. One last piece of valuable information comes from Roy Taylor of Nvidia who recently stated that: "...there is a very large installed base of GeForce gamers. We estimate that we have over 180 million active GeForce users. That's a much bigger installed base than PS3 or Xbox 360."

Spidery_Yoda wrote:

Scorpion0x17 wrote:

180 million GeForce users, sure. But how many of them play games?

Go to your local highstreet PC retailer, or Dell, buy random PC worth more than £500 and it'll have either an nVidia or an ATI GPU in it.

And that's what the vast majority of consumers do - they just buy a 'box' they don't care nor know what's inside it or what it's capable of.

Well exactly. But that doesn't mean that there's a very small number either. Heck, enough people play gaming PC's to pirate Crysis almost a million times in 2008 alone. Probably a lot more in 2007 but there's no figures. The 970,000 (or so) figure for 2008 was released by a pirating website in its top 10 pirates games of 2008 chart.

Scorpion0x17 wrote:

Again these numbers are meaningless.

Numerous people have already stated in this thread that, though they pirate game, they pay for the ones they play a lot.

A person that pirates a game and who would never have paid for the game, ever, does not take money away from the industry.

Last edited by Spidery_Yoda (2008-12-15 18:03:11)

max wrote:

Flaming_Maniac wrote:

max wrote:

copyright infringement =/= stealing

Dictionary wrote:

steal - to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully <stole a car> b: to take away by force or unjust means <they've stolen our liberty> c: to take surreptitiously or without permission

your point being? When you infringe the copyright of someone you don't take anything away. The "victim" still has exactly the same things he did as before.

It's not like a stolen bicycle where I don't have it anymore and the thief does. It's like walking up to my bike, taking a picture of it and then building an exact replica.