Epic fail
- Thread starter Black
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Epic blames piracy for lack of PC support
http://ca.kotaku.com/5541266/epic-blames-pirates-for-console+first-development
What a bunch of crap... they went to consoles because M$ gave them bags of money to make games like GoW exclusive to 360.
I wonder how Blizzard, Valve, Relic, etc make money on this broken platform known as PC?
http://ca.kotaku.com/5541266/epic-blames-pirates-for-console+first-development
What a bunch of crap... they went to consoles because M$ gave them bags of money to make games like GoW exclusive to 360.
I wonder how Blizzard, Valve, Relic, etc make money on this broken platform known as PC?
The reason why Microsoft gave Epic money for Gears of War is because they are the publisher. Epic is going where the money(for them) is and right now it's consoles. Is Piracy a major factor in that decision? Of Course it is.
As for Relic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_40,000:_Space_Marine
And Valve is crosspatform. Blizzard has just been unnaturally successful since Starcraft.
As for Relic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_40,000:_Space_Marine
And Valve is crosspatform. Blizzard has just been unnaturally successful since Starcraft.
Re: Epic blames piracy for lack of PC support
And this is all aided by the fact that it's very hard to actually research this properly. Because when is something a lost sale and when is it simply someone who would never buy the game anyway?
But make no mistake: the decision to go for consoles instead of PC games is motivated by economic concerns. Whether or not the cause of those concerns is piracy is a different issue, but I'd be very sure that Epic switched to consoles because they can make more money that way.
Different markets, kind of. I really don't know why it's so hard to think that piracy can actually impact sales. A lot of gamers have a knee-jerk reaction that piracy isn't influencing sales, without ever really explaining why. It seems pretty basic that piracy will have some effect on sales: there will be people who would rather pirate than pay for games they may otherwise pirate. And sure, there may be people who use piracy as a demo system, but is that really going to make anywhere near as big an impact as people going "whoop, free games".rcorporon said:
And this is all aided by the fact that it's very hard to actually research this properly. Because when is something a lost sale and when is it simply someone who would never buy the game anyway?
But make no mistake: the decision to go for consoles instead of PC games is motivated by economic concerns. Whether or not the cause of those concerns is piracy is a different issue, but I'd be very sure that Epic switched to consoles because they can make more money that way.
Here's why piracy isn't hurting sales... because most people who pirate games wouldn't buy them anyway, if they had to. How is a sale "lost" if they wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
Give this a read:
http://kotaku.com/5533615/another-view-of-video-game-piracy
Give this a read:
http://kotaku.com/5533615/another-view-of-video-game-piracy
Re: Epic blames piracy for lack of PC support
The explanations are many, and the evidence we have to back up such claims is nothing more than our own behavior, and, well, the absence of any evidence of harm from the other part.
The general claim is that a pirated copy doesn't equal a lost sale. Sometimes it does, very rarely, most times it just doesn't. No one say it doesn't influence sales at all. We say it's negligeable, and we say it certainly doesn't prevent a good game/music from making enough profit to sustain a good level of quality.
Most people I know have a monthly "budget" they reserve to games/music/books etc... Whatever happens, they will more or less spend this sum. The pirating just allow them to explore ten to hundreds of times more medias than they would have otherwise.
The reason I haven't bought a single game these last years is not Piracy, the reason is games that suck.
If you manage to show me an example of a GOOD GAME that was released and got nothing in return because of the evil deeds of pirates, I could agree with you that piracy has done really bad things. Until you can show me such an example, I will be forced to assume the so-called bad influence Piracy has on the media industry is nothing more than contradicting and made-up statistics.
If there is no prejudice, there is no crime.
If you can't prove there is a prejudice, you're on your own.
Sander said:
The explanations are many, and the evidence we have to back up such claims is nothing more than our own behavior, and, well, the absence of any evidence of harm from the other part.
The general claim is that a pirated copy doesn't equal a lost sale. Sometimes it does, very rarely, most times it just doesn't. No one say it doesn't influence sales at all. We say it's negligeable, and we say it certainly doesn't prevent a good game/music from making enough profit to sustain a good level of quality.
Most people I know have a monthly "budget" they reserve to games/music/books etc... Whatever happens, they will more or less spend this sum. The pirating just allow them to explore ten to hundreds of times more medias than they would have otherwise.
The reason I haven't bought a single game these last years is not Piracy, the reason is games that suck.
If you manage to show me an example of a GOOD GAME that was released and got nothing in return because of the evil deeds of pirates, I could agree with you that piracy has done really bad things. Until you can show me such an example, I will be forced to assume the so-called bad influence Piracy has on the media industry is nothing more than contradicting and made-up statistics.
If there is no prejudice, there is no crime.
If you can't prove there is a prejudice, you're on your own.
That's a useless study because it attacks a part of the statistics that shouldn't even be mentioned: total piracy.rcorporon said:
The issue isn't total amount of piracy, because as I said earlier the issue is the people who would otherwise buy games. The fact that there are many more people who probably wouldn't does nothing to diminish that.
I can cite harm. I know several people who pirated games because that was more convenient and switched to Steam when it matured because that was more convenient.Arr0nax said:
See? Argument from my own experience.
As I said: the total amount of piracy matters not. What matters is the total amount of lost sales in comparison to the sales that were made.Arr0nax said:
Wait, what? The complaint is only valid if it caused a game to tank completely? So the idea that piracy harms sales only works if it's catastrophic instead of just bad? What a ridiculous threshold.Arr0nax said:
I'm not debating that piracy itself is killing PC gaming. I don't know that because I don't know the extent of the damage (and might I add, neither do you). What I am arguing is that it is hurting sales, and the mere fact that there are people who pirate games who would otherwise buy games would seem to support that.
UncannyGarlic
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
I have issues with breaking up MMOs from PC games (and the few that are console games), with game portals being questionable, while clumping all consoles and handhelds (DS is the highest selling "console" ever) together as it's grossly misleading. I'd wager that PC games have the largest share of the market as a platform in the US.Black said:
EDIT: I'd add that Newzoo is an advertising company, making their statistics even more dubious.
No one does and it would be both extremely hard and unfeasible (for legal reasons) to do a study. There are estimates but they are pretty much arbitrary modifications to piracy statistics.Sander said:
And no one knows shit about these amounts.Sander said:
But you see, the problem is precisely here. It's useless to say it's hurting sales if you haven't any mean of quantifying how much.Sander said:
It could very well hurt sales in marginal amount. I never pretended to know this amount, but when no one knows shit about nothing, you can't cry there is a wolf among the sheep.
If you balance this unquantifiable unnoticeable harm with the general progresses in cultural awareness all these IP violations have brought us, you could very well conclude that Piracy is not a bad thing at all.
We're just shifting from a cultural model where the producer get paid per-copy from a model where the producer will get paid per-production. Which just makes sense.
I'm all for this shift.
Yet gamers keep saying that they must be insignificant.Arr0nax said:
It could be, but it also could be hurting sales by a huge amount.Arr0nax said:
The instinctive lean of most gamers seems to be to the side that it must be insignicant, without any real evidence of that. I don't find it hard to imagine that piracy could hurt sales greatly, as it essentially gives people the choice between a free product and paying for the same product. Why wouldn't that hurt sales significantly?
And this has what to do with piracy, exactly? These things aren't caused by piracy in any way and seem to be completely separate from piracy.Arr0nax said:
Also that's not a cultural model. It's a result of the way business has grown: up-front cash to start production, distribution networks, large scale reproduction and commercial advertisements are (or at least were) all needed to make large profits in the entertainment industry and that's the role publishers filled. There's nothing cultural about that at all. Some of these jobs can now be filled by the artists themselves through the internet (though the need for financing AAA games and hence publishers won't go away any time soon), and as a reaction to that new model artists are gradually moving to the internet. But there's nothing cultural about that.
UncannyGarlic
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
Assuming the newzoo report is accurate, either PC games or a console (DS) is the biggest market share so it's irrelevant. Also note that sales on the chart include secondhand games, which is all but exclusively console games, and claims to include digital distribution, which is going to be most accurate for consoles and likely undershoot PC sales. All in all, it means that console games have an exaggerated market share and still are not split into specific systems.Sander said:
Sander said:
You're taking the problem in the wrong direction.
If you can't prove there is any substantial harm done, then there is officialy no harm until proven. Hence why we assume it's insignificant.
Sander said:
Piracy is the reason people know dozens to hundreds times more music/films than they would have otherwise. Piracy is what allows me to access books that I would never even have heard off just because some random guy illegally put it there (And I'm the first to be sad there aren't more ebooks shared on the bitorrent network)
Piracy is what allows you to effectively decide if any cultural good is worth acquiring before buying it. It's a world wide inter-cultural public library accessible from your home. If you don't consider this as a progress, I don't know on what planet you're living.
People surely don't bitch against public libraries. Like I said, if the tradeoff for this is a yet unknown impact on sales, I'm 100% backing this mutation.
Also, you can replace "cultural model" by "culture diffusion model" if you will, I'm typing a little too fast. I *think* we are talking about the modalities of how culture is diffused and accessed here, aren't we ?
Sure. But that still says nothing about the impact of piracy on PC games - we can't compare it to how it would be without piracy and we can't compare profit margins in PC and console gaming.UncannyGarlic said:
The burden of proof doesn't lie with you, no, but this is not a dichotomous issue. There's nothing wrong with saying "Well, it's possible it isn't hurting sales" since that's clearly true - but what you encounter most of all is people arguing that the harm must be insignificant. People polarise this issue into there either being extreme harm or barely any harm, and they leave no room for the other point of view without any real proof.Arr0nax said:
Eh...they do? Because you still have to actually know something before you can pirate it.Arr0nax said:
This claim seems rather outrageous and entirely unsubstantiated to me. I'm sure that some people use it to their advantage, but it seems to me that those would by and large be the people who would seek these things out anyway. And moreover, that the vast majority of people just use it to get the latest Ke$ha song.
A public library cannot be compared to piracy in this regard. And it's very simple why: public libraries pay to provide these books.Arr0nax said:
What the acceptance of piracy as a valid and legal way of distributing content would do is undermine the very creation of that content. Because if piracy does become that universal platform for content distribution, there is no incentive for people to make the products as they aren't profiting. And that won't change, unless a new model of profiting from creating those products is found - which would more likely be ubiquitous advertisements. Which would then promptly be stripped by advertisement-removal pirates.
Also note, don't say what you do and do not pirate and try not to actively promote piracy. I realise it's tough in a discussion like this, but if this goes too far I'll have to vat it for breaking site rules.
UncannyGarlic
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
Ah but it's missing the bigger, more important question which is, "Which platform is the most profitable?" Factoring out all of the crap that they did in order to make it look like PC games are the smallest, lowest revenue games (profit would be better to look at), it would appear that PC games are the highest, or second highest (DS is the only competitor for that spot, and they have far less overlap than non-handheld consoles), revenue games. This means that regardless of piracy, revenue is higher on PC than it is for the three major non-handheld consoles.Sander said:
Proof? Your logic is flawed, just because their is piracy does not mean that it is hurting sales, it's likely that it is, but as you have said, there isn't any reliable data to prove such. That is jumping to conclusions without data as much as anything else, it's just a much more general conclusion.Sander said:
Agreed, and that's the problem. People are making claims one way or the other without any data. It's possible that it may in fact be increasing profits for companies and it's also possible that it's causing massive amounts of lost sales. There isn't any reliable data so no one can truly say what effect piracy is having on sales for any platform.Sander said:
In fact, the argument that because there is more piracy on PC means that PC games must loose more sales to piracy than console games is fallacious. It fails to consider: the ratio of pirates who would buy the game if they couldn't pirate it, the ration of pirates who by the game after pirating it, and the number of games bought vs non-pirates.
Without studies, which are highly unlikely, it's a pointless discussion which cannot come to any factual conclusions, only anecdotal ones.
Profit is indeed the best way to look at it, and those are numbers we don't have. The presence of a large number of cross-console games but fewer games that also debut on the PC it would seem that it's easier (/cheaper) to produce a game for multiple consoles than it is for PC and consoles - which could significantly impact profits.UncannyGarlic said:
Eh...it would seem rather self-explanatory that it's possible that piracy isn't hurting sales. Just as it's possible that is is hurting sales.UncannyGarlic said:
'Possible' isn't the same as absolutely true.
That's true enough, but that doesn't mean you can't at least reason on it. In my experience, people are often driven by money - given the option between something free and something they can pay for they'll choose the free option (if there's no form of prestige associated with spending more money). So it seems intuitive that people do the same for games and that would harm sales - though that it's intuitive doesn't mean it's true.UncannyGarlic said:
I think the most convincing proof that it is hurting sales is that profit-driven multi-billion dollar corporations are spending money on trying to battle piracy. Assuming that these corporations are doing their own research on these things (which seems like a reasonable assumption) the harm should be at least equal to the amount they spend on combating piracy.
UncannyGarlic
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
Exactly.Sander said:
It's still a pretty big assumption and it assumes that the methods which the industry is using are accurate and that they can understand the data which they get. Surveys aren't perfectly accurate and if the questions are worded wrong or even the wrong questions are asked, the results can be inaccurate and misleading. If they simply use the number of different IPs torrenting their game you have the question of how they filter those results for things like dynamic IPs (one person can download it multiple times, artificially inflating the numbers) and that fails to take into account how many pirates actually end up buying the game or would buy the game if they couldn't pirate it. Then there are all of the common problems to deal with like sample size, removing bias, etc.Sander said:
All in all, without seeing their methodologies, data, and conclusions, I place absolutely no faith in their actions being proportionate to reality. They may have long term predictions which are guiding their actions, and the accuracy of those predictions seems even more questionable.
I think they have good intentions in increasing/preserving profit/sales but intentions count for jack and shit. It's very rare for DRM to be a company trying to actively fuck their customers, it's usually what they say, an attempt to protect their IP. The limited activations come to mind as something which I can see companies using to fuck their customers, even if it's mostly used to protect their IP and companies usually supply customers with more activations.
While these are all valid points, these are businesses that want to make a profit that we're talking about. I would like to assume that they spend effort on that and hire some experts on such matters - of course, every company does stupid things.UncannyGarlic said:
I think the main problem is that the vocal complainers on the internet represent only a tiny part of the userbase, and for a large part of the userbase these measures don't matter much.UncannyGarlic said:
Of coarse 1 pirate copy doesn't equal one lost sale but that doesn't mean 1 pirate equals zero lost sales. You can argue about the ratios but piracy is taking alot of money out of the PC industry. And when faced with increasing productions costs it just makes sense for traditional PC developers to continue moving into consoles.