" the game doesn’t bother players serial codes or online authentication, but it’s also very easy to copy it "
Somewhat misleading. It's also very easy to copy all the super-DRMed games. In fact, the process is identical. Load up a torrent site, search, download.
At any rate, claiming 90% piracy (regardless of truth) to run a sale is probably a good marketing move. It's a beautiful game.
For the user this is easy to copy. For the pirate this is easier to pirate than a mainstream game, since the pirate doesn't have to figure out how to crack it or make a keygen. Instead they just upload the file straight from the company.
>Somewhat misleading. It's also very easy to copy all the super-DRMed games.
Sure, if you like your machine full of trojans and malware. There is no honor among thieves, and honestly I view people who pirate executables (particularly cracked), running them anywhere but in a tightly-bound VM, as either naive or foolish.
I'm not really an expert, but my understanding is the cracking groups do have quite a code of honor and do what they do for the credit. Of course who knows what's in any random torrent after it's been released.
Don't just make assumptions, there really isn't a risk from running pirated games that you get from torrents. People tend not to be malicious when seeding.
What seems to be missing, as usual from these piracy posts is that the 90% who pirated the game most likely wouldn't have bought it. Sure, pirating games is a bad thing. But, it doesn't hurt to have a little perspective on it. There was a post on HN a few months ago doing some analysis on this subject.
"What seems to be missing, as usual from these piracy posts is that the 90% who pirated the game most likely wouldn't have bought it."
We will never know this. When I used to pirate software in my younger years, I would buy software that I needed if I couldn't find it anywhere. I suspect that the number of pirates that would never buy are a lot lower than you claim.
The problem now is that piracy has muddied the waters. We will never know either way.
Some companies have done the unthinkable and actually run some numbers... Eliminating 1,000 pirated copies tended to result in 1 additional sale. You turn 10,000 copies into 1,009.
They put out new versions of their games that fix existing pirating methods and then measure how that affects downloads and sales. How do they know what portion of the pirates are downloading the demo and then applying the crack rather than just downloaded a previous cracked version from somewhere else?
This game is really really good. It's got beautiful artwork, awesome music and endearing characters. It's like everything that was good about the Lucasarts point&clicks without the insane puzzles (the puzzles get hard, but they still make some kind of sense).
A bought this game at the full price despite having the pirated version available. I really want to encourage them to make more! For what it's worth, I probably wouldn't have bought it if it had any sort of crazy DRM scheme.
I bought the game because of your comment, but I really really want to add it to Steam, otherwise I'll lose the files and I'll have to download it from piratebay or something... I emailed them twice so far, I wish I had a key I could add...
I've lost the game files once so far and emailed them, they let me download them again which was nice. I wonder if it's possible for them to let you add it to your steam account after you've bought it through there website, I think steam has its own payment processing things from which Valve must take a cut.
I think you should be able to add a game to Steam if you have a key, they do let you do that... If I lose the files (which I will), I'll just get them off TPB, I guess...
90% seems to the rate everyone comes up with when they actually measure it, judging from various independent games blogs and feedback from acquaintances in mobile gaming. I wouldn't be surprised if the rate holds for AAA titles as well.
On the flip side, I recall at least one set of statistics showing that most pirates don't run a game more than once. Presumably most pirates pirate huge numbers of games and simply don't have the time to play them all in depth -- which certainly supports the idea that they wouldn't pay for them if piracy weren't an option.
I've known a number of people through the years that would pirate hundred of movies, and only ever watch a handful of them. I've definitely seen the odd sort of compulsive hording you're describing.
It's not that odd, it's basically building a huge on-demand video library. Since videos take such a long time to download, you have to decide to get them long before you decide to watch them. Thus it makes sense to batch DL them all and then decide later.
Well, I've heard that rationalization, but the people I'm talking about tend to have literally hundreds of movies on hand, most of which they'll never actually watch. Actually watching them seems to be far less important than just accumulating as much as possible.
Sounds like the downloaders are treating the game as a demo. If I get a game for free I'm more willing to stop playing if it sucks. If I pay I'm going to see if I can get into it.
> If that 90% figure is accurate, that's really fucking depressing.
I think the focus needs to shift from, "This sucks," to, "This is what it is, how can we deal with it?" Like a lot of other industries, games are going to need to evolve.
Server-side data and good online connecting is a way. Platforms like Steam that take the hassle out of online buying is a way. Alternative monetizing might be a way. Tasteful sponsorship and in-game advertising? At this point, piracy is what it is, and it's not going away. Time to start thinking about ways to monetize those pirates.
Machinarium is actually available on Steam. I guess I'd like to think that for a lot of people piracy is simply easier than the legal alternatives - this is true for a lot of people outside the US for movies, for example. If I want to watch movies at home I either have to buy them or walk 15 mins to a video store to get a scratched DVD from a lousy selection. I'm pretty staunch about not pirating but it tests my patience when with bittorrent I'd be watching anything I like in far less time.
However due to being on Steam buying this game can't get much easier and people still pirate it. I agree the focus has to change but it is still a shame, this game is beautiful. I think the amnesty sale is a great way to draw attention to the issue (and the game too).
IMHO, bums me out about it is that it looks like a really creative, artistic game from an obviously talented team. And while I don't play many games anymore, I used to play a lot of games like that, and I hate to see the art form die out. And IMHO, it will die out if the developers aren't making any money. Or at least, become so damn rare as to be all but extinct.
At the bottom there might be a choice. 100,000 copies in the wild with 90,000 of them pirated or 100 copies, all legit.
If fact, its probably a continuum. Choose your point anywhere along that line. (Of course, you never heard about the one where only 100 sold, the developers decided they'd failed and gave up).
Interesting. So 90% of the people pirate the game (which has no serial number or protection). I thought the reason people pirated apps was because of draconian protection systems like DRM?!
People pirate games with DRM because the pirate version is better than the legit one.
You could easily argue that the DRM is increasing both the number and social acceptability of software pirates, which is basically the opposite of what it claims to be doing.
"People pirate games with DRM because the pirate version is better than the legit one."
How do we know that the people that pirate games with DRM aren't doing it because it's "easy"?
"You could easily argue that the DRM is increasing both the number and social acceptability of software pirates, which is basically the opposite of what it claims to be doing."
No, the piratebay is increasing the social acceptability of software pirates. So is the increasing rate of entitlement among people in their 20s.
This small example shows me that having no DRM (or any other kind of protection) means an application developer will not make any money on their app because most people will just pirate it. DRM at least helps prevent piracy to some degree.
Downloadable apps are on the way out. Because of piracy, I predict most companies will move over to web services in the future.
This should make most people happy because now, instead of paying for software once, you will need to pay for it every month/year.
Hardcore pirates will always find a new excuse. Most of them just don't want to pay. They can't be counted as lost sales if they never had any intent to buy.
Hardcore pirates will always find a new excuse, but well-implemented DRM is really helpful at encouraging mostly honest people to be as honest as they believe themselves to be. A huge segment of the population will be every bit as honest as you require them to be.
Within many game companies, the goal of DRM is to prevent people from pirating the game for the first week or two. They know better than anyone it'll be cracked eventually. But DRM definitely has an effect on sales if the pirates have to wait a few days to get the game for free. At least some of them will pay, if they have to.
"Hardcore pirates will always find a new excuse. Most of them just don't want to pay. They can't be counted as lost sales if they never had any intent to buy."
This may be the case, but allowing people to share your application freely will make it that much easier to create more pirates (IE: someone who doesn't know that much about computers searches your app on Google and finds the "free" version instead of your site).
if there's no registration, DRM, popup messages, etc., then i wonder how they got the 90% number.
i didn't pirate it, but i'd probably buy this game at $5. for what it is, a shorter single player, point-and-click puzzle game, i don't know that i'd pay $20.
Comparing the number of unique copies of your program running to sales made takes about ~20 lines of code. On first run, ping the website and mark somewhere that you won't do that check again. Count how many times your program accesses the website.
I might have agreed with you once. These days, Google Analytics tracks 2/3 of pages on the Internet. I already know you downloaded it -- if you think you have a legitimate reason to not let me track that you turned it on once, send me an email and I'll be happy to discuss the many benefits of paying Big Freaking Enterprise pricing with you.
I have no desire to do privacy-increasing mechanisms which only help the privacy of pirates, which is what opposition to phone home is (since all legitimate customers left download and purchase logs).
i'm not really trying to make an argument about privacy and your rights online type of stuff.
i'm just trying to make note of the fact that if you do have something that phones home, can you really say that your product is totally free and clear of that drm/registration/etc type of software practices? more similar to false advertising. "our product will NEVER do this. except, it does, but just a little"
It's also possible to put an online feature in the game like check the high scores or check for updates, and you'll be able to track usage while not having a DRM feature.
DRM is about controlling the right to run the software, and I don't think a simple ping back would count as that.
again, that isn't my point. i'm not arguing about what is or isn't DRM. here:
>"We released the game DRM-free which means it doesn’t include any anti-piracy protection, therefore the game doesn’t bother players serial codes or online authentication, but it’s also very easy to copy it," Amanita's Jakub Dvorsky explained. "Our estimate from the feedback is that only 5-15 percent of Machinarium players actually paid for the game."
1) they claim to not have any DRM, registration, pingbacks, etc.. they're saying that the 90% (average) number is purely based on feedback. how reliable is this number? i know i ignore most feedback mechanisms by default.
2) if they said all of this, and it turns out that the product does have a pingback or some form of automated feedback, is that not dishonest?
they claim to not have any DRM, registration, pingbacks, etc.
If you read what they wrote, they made no statement at all on pingbacks. They define what they mean when they say the game is "DRM-free". And since this definition does not preclude counting up the number of IPs from which the game accesses a particular online resource in the course of normal operation, I would have to say: No, it would not be dishonest of them to do that.
Perhaps another example would help: The Fedora Project estimates the number of active users of Fedora by counting the IPs accessing their update servers. Yet I don't think this causes Fedora to contain DRM, nor do I think collecting this information is particularly dishonest.
You can't "pirate" a car. If I took your car, you'd be less one car. If I copy a game, nobody is less anything.
It would be as if I had a device that could duplicate your car in 10 minutes, atom-for-atom.
Clearly this would spell big trouble for the auto industry. We might even introduce laws which make this act illegal, or otherwise induce artificial scarcity so that the price of a car doesn't fall to zero, because we decided, as a society, that the auto industry is something we want to encourage.
Maybe every car would require a special passphrase to start, and the car phones home via the cellular network so that no more than one passphrase can be active at a given time.
Hmm. That sounds familiar. On the other hand, I'm not stealing someone's car when I duplicate it, am I? Suddenly there's this third party (the car manufacturer or retailer) who cares a lot about what I do with me car. They'd say, "No, it's bad for you to copy other people's cars" and do what they could to stop me.
A very different situation from car theft today, which involves only two parties (me and the person I stole it from) and obviously and directly deprives said person of their car.
Copyright infringement isn't theft, not legally, not historically, and not morally.
On the other hand, I'm not stealing someone's car when I duplicate it, am I? Suddenly there's this third party (the car manufacturer or retailer) who cares a lot about what I do with me car. They'd say, "No, it's bad for you to copy other people's cars" and do what they could to stop me.
It's not the copying of other people's cars that's the issue. They'd object just as much if you copied your own car multiple times and gave them to your wife and kids, or friends, neighbors, colleagues or customers. So at that point, they decide that it's no longer your car, all the cars are their cars, they just rent or license them to you in order for them to get around what common sense says you should be able to do with a physical object that you have paid for. Then they'll realize they can go further and stop you taking your car abroad, or stop you modifying it, or running a taxi service, or using generic fuel.
This is why in the past we had three types of use: unrestricted use, fair use, and restricted (copyrighted) use. Now we only have fair use and restricted use.
Wow thats a great analogy. What if you had a nano-replicator? I guess at that point we would have to be nearing the end of scarcity, right? Because you'd only need 2 nano-replicators to turn dirt into just about anything.
And I guess at that point people's motivations would radically shift as money was no longer required, since everyone would have the same 'means of production' (assuming the nano-replicator propogates, like everything else, and that the world isn't turned into grey sludge).
But, until then, the people who make the software do need money, or rather to make software costs money and risk and the risk is undertaken with the expectation of making a return on their investment. Not in every case, but its usually pretty easy to tell whether something is for sale or not.
Morally its kind of like the prisoner's dilemma.
Its in everyone's best interests for people to buy software if they can afford it because it will lead to better software for everyone. But individually its better for pirates to not pay for the software because they get the software for free, and if enough people pay for it, they get the benefit of better software in the future. If everyone stole it, there wouldn't be any. Same for cars and whatever. It seems obviously wrong to me.
"you can't "pirate" a car. If I took your car, you'd be less one car. If I copy a game, nobody is less anything."
What if I "steal" your identity? Technically, you don't lose anything. I am just borrowing your information. Should this be okay too?
How about a website that posts valid credit card information. Before someone actually uses the credit card, it's just numbers and letters on website.
"Clearly this would spell big trouble for the auto industry. We might even introduce laws which make this act illegal, or otherwise induce artificial scarcity so that the price of a car doesn't fall to zero, because we decided, as a society, that the auto industry is something we want to encourage."
There is no "artificial scarcity". The talented people that actually make software, music, and movies are scarce. This is what you are buying. If this wasn't the case, anybody could make Photoshop (not copy) in a few clicks.
"Hmm. That sounds familiar. On the other hand, I'm not stealing someone's car when I duplicate it, am I? Suddenly there's this third party (the car manufacturer or retailer) who cares a lot about what I do with me car. They'd say, "No, it's bad for you to copy other people's cars" and do what they could to stop me."
Not "stealing" per se, but if you took the original developers work and put them out of business because you were copying (and distributing) it for free, isn't it almost the same thing?
I find these discussions really funny. A few weeks ago, there was a heated debate about the author from the thesis wordpress theme and wordpress. By creating the theme (and not giving back to the GPL), the author really wasn't affecting the original (since it technically was just a copy of some bits). Many people here were against him because of the political ideology behind the GPL. When the discussion leads to piracy and its effects (such as this one), everybody has a different opinion.....
"Copyright infringement isn't theft, not legally, not historically, and not morally."
It's counterfeiting, which is worse than theft. With theft, you aren't going to put a television company out of business because a few tvs got stolen out of the back of a van.
When software is pirated (like in this article), it really can put a company out of business and destroy their entire revenue stream.
> What if I "steal" your identity? Technically, you don't lose anything. I am just borrowing your information. Should this be okay too?
You can't steal identity. You are instead impersonating someone and you are defrauding someone else. 'identity theft' is a new word for the ancient problem of fraud.
"What if I "steal" your identity? Technically, you don't lose anything. I am just borrowing your information. Should this be okay too?"
Identity theft is a good example because it illustrates the way we call lots of things "theft" which aren't.
Similarly, we might say that murder is "stealing someone's life."
Anyhow, identity theft isn't theft, it's fraud. And if you pretend to be me so as to, say, extend yourself a line of credit, you're clearly doing harm to me (and my credit rating!), not to mention the counterparty you just (fraudulently) contracted with.
"There is no "artificial scarcity". The talented people that actually make software, music, and movies are scarce. This is what you are buying. If this wasn't the case, anybody could make Photoshop (not copy) in a few clicks."
You're parsing words here. Yes, the talent is scarce, but the means by which we reward that talent is breaking down because the marginal cost of media in a digital world is zero.
"Not "stealing" per se, but if you took the original developers work and put them out of business because you were copying (and distributing) it for free, isn't it almost the same thing?"
Well, personally, I distinguish between people who download something for personal use versus people who download something for the purpose of profiting off of it.
The law distinguishes between these two types of copyright infringement, too. The former is not criminal, while the latter is. That's why Grandma gets sued by the RIAA, but pirates operating on a massive scale get arrested by the FBI.
In any event, it's more about the macro trend of what would happen if such a technology existed. Right or wrong, it would fundamentally disrupt the economic system by which we produce automobiles.
But I think it's clear that duplicating my neighbor's car is not the same as breaking into his car, hot wiring it, and driving off without his permission, right?
"It's counterfeiting, which is worse than theft. With theft, you aren't going to put a television company out of business because a few tvs got stolen out of the back of a van."
Er, again, no. Counterfeiting involves fraud. It's fraudulently passing off something as genuine which is not.
That copy of Photoshop I download really is Adobe Photoshop (R), not a knockoff. I mean, it's bit-for-bit identical.
If I start selling DVDs of Photoshop from my storefront that's also not counterfeiting, but would probably be criminal copyright infringement.
If I were selling a DVD that I claimed was a legitimate, off-the-shelf copy of Photoshop with a license key and everything, but it wasn't, I suppose that would be both counterfeiting and copyright infringement. IANAL, so I don't know.
Anyhow, in conclusion, yes, if we had the ability to duplicate cars, atom-for-atom, at no cost that would be a huge problem for the auto industry. People would lose their jobs. There would be massive disruption, economic loss (at least in the near-term), and a call from auto manufacturers to ban the practice.
But it's still not theft. It's something else.
"When software is pirated (like in this article), it really can put a company out of business and destroy their entire revenue stream."
There are cases where that is true, but it's still not theft.
I have never considered pirate software to be "risk free".
I'm not concerned about getting caught. I'm concerned about running arbitrary binaries downloaded from god-knows-where which were prepared by hackers with less-than-honorable intentions.
After you've reformatted your hard drive for the 3rd or 4th time, you give up on pirate software.
Yep, I always cringe a little bit when my wife uses a download link to Photoshop from a "friend". I know that commercial software isn't without risks, but at least, you can raise a fuss.
Pirate, or the term for a "copyright thief" was coined somewhere back in the 1800's I think, by a poet or author describing the people who stole and reprinted his works. Its seems to have stuck though. I know I have the link somewhere to back this up, but cant find it right at the moment
World of Goo, another excellent indie game, also reported a 90% piracy rate two years ago. The developers calculated that percentage from the number of users on their high score board, which were much more than the number of actual online sales. They were very gracious about it, deliberately choosing not to put any DRM on their software.
Sad as it may be, putting DRM might not increase sales numbers significantly. It just makes crackers more determined. Such was World of Goo's reasoning against DRM.
Again, I think it's better to simply look at it as a sale price that comes after the product has become successful plus a little bit of guilting those that haven't paid for it to buy it.
Somewhat misleading. It's also very easy to copy all the super-DRMed games. In fact, the process is identical. Load up a torrent site, search, download.
At any rate, claiming 90% piracy (regardless of truth) to run a sale is probably a good marketing move. It's a beautiful game.