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> We installed spyware on your PC, but trust us, we didn't use it, we only used it on the people we didn't like... And, yes, your AV is showing a false positiv

> We installed spyware on your PC, but trust us, we didn't use it, we only used it on the people we didn't like... And, yes, your AV is showing a false positive ;) [0] Also, piracy doesn't seem to have a huge impact (if any) on sales[1] [0] https://www.fidusinfosec.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Oct-2017.png https://www.fidusinfosec.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Oct-... , from https://www.fidusinfosec.com/fslabs-flight-simulation-labs-dropping-malware-to-combat-piracy/ https://www.fidusinfosec.com/fslabs-flight-simulation-labs-d... [1] https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-study/ https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s... https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/displacement... see page 79 for games

ravingraven 9y ago
I'm pretty sure that piracy does have a huge impact on sales for niche addons and games like that. The client base is very very small and anything that is not absolutely perfect quality does not get sold these days (seriously, look at the quality and effort that has gone into some PMDG planes or the ixeg 737, it's astounding). Small client base plus very good quality equals, everyone must pay their share for the product to be viable. That being said, what FSLabs did is of course inexcusable.
- slivym 9y ago
  That really doesn't change the argument surrounding piracy - the contention is that piracy doesn't displace sales. If that's true, it is literally not effecting whether everyone is paying their share. The people who pirated it simply were never going to pay for it whether they play it or not. I tend to agree with you though, if you make a game that requires incredible attention to detail, hugely time intensive modelling work, and know that the target market is a tiny niche then maybe the product is just not viable.
  - moomin 9y ago
    I think there may be some nuance to this, however. What you're saying is known to be to true at the macro level, but it may be more complicated at the micro level. For instance, it's well known that games companies aren't too fussed about games getting cracked after the launch window. The availability of a crack may not reduce your spend on video games, but it may reduce your spend on specific video games. This situation is made much much worse if your product is expensive, like this one is, and meant to make money over a long period rather than a short launch period. None of this excuses them, but I do wonder about how the piracy data actually pans out for small, expensive shops like this.
    - soundwave106 9y ago
      My impression is (based on what I've seen with music plugins and heard from plugin developers, which tend to be also produced by small shops) that piracy data does matter a fair bit if you don't do anything about it. Nonetheless, several plugin companies do seem to be able to nicely balance the ability to protect their software, while avoiding arduous copy protection methods. The method I think seems to work best is a combination "honey pot + time bomb" type method, where you provide an "easy" method for the pirates to "crack" and get on the usual sites, while also including a more difficult to reverse engineer that activates at some point later. (This kind of nudges those who kind of use piracy to "try and buy" but sometimes, er, need a bit of motivation to actually purchase the product. Even people who can afford the software and make a pretty decent living with the product have been caught with pirated plugins in interviews (https://torrentfreak.com/avicii-and-other-djs-produce-hits-using-pirated-software-150223/) https://torrentfreak.com/avicii-and-other-djs-produce-hits-u...). You definitely don't need to include malware to protect your product.
      - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
        > My impression is (based on what I've seen with music plugins and heard from plugin developers, which tend to be also produced by small shops) that piracy data does matter a fair bit if you don't do anything about it. The problem is nobody really knows that because it's nearly impossible to do a controlled experiment for this. What happens in practice is that a company's first product is unprofitable. So they go back and make significant improvements, spend five times as much on marketing, and add anti-piracy code. Then the new version is more profitable. The people who want the solution to have been the anti-piracy code credit it with the improvement, but there is no way to know if it was that or the product improvements, or the marketing, or more favorable market conditions at the time of the second launch, or the fact that the same marketing effort now produces 50% more customers because there is now an existing user base (including the pirates) who are easier to convert because they're familiar with the previous version, etc. To actually know the answer you would need a statistically valid sample of product launches where the determination of whether anti-piracy measures are taken is made at random. But as far as I'm aware no one has ever attempted this, and the choice to use anti-piracy measures has to be randomized or you could trivially be measuring the wrong thing, e.g. larger products with more resources are both more successful and more often include anti-piracy measures but the causation is reversed. So nobody really knows the answer and it's all just wild speculation.
  - ravingraven 9y ago
    >The people who pirated it simply were never going to pay for it whether they play it or not. I hear this argument a lot but can't see how it possibly be correct. Sure, not everyone who pirates would buy instead but at least some people would (it probably is a small percentage, but it is not zero). One can imagine that the effect of those few is amplified for titles with high costs per unit.
    - simias 9y ago
      If you consider this you also have to consider people who pirate a game and then decide to buy it later when they get the money or they realize that it's worth the price. It happened to me on several occasions. There's also the "photoshop effect", where piracy helps ensure that the application remains the de-facto standard. Admittedly this is less applicable for games but it might help with 3rd party controller support, modding community etc...
      - danielbarla 9y ago
        In the context of niche games with pricey DLCs, I now have a significant collection of TS2018 DLCs. If I was not able to "try out" that game a few years ago in a less than legal fashion, I likely never would have gotten into it in the first place. I have a similar trend with books; on several occasions I've ended up owning (legally) the entire work of some author, simply because a friend gave me their copy of a book. I also believe that in the age of Steam specials, refunds, etc, people who pirate your game are not "lost sales". They are usually doing it because their appetite for games outstrips their budget, and they were highly unlikely to pay for it in the first place. But there is a significant chance may convert to a paying customer, or at least market the game by word of mouth.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - dkersten 9y ago
        I’ll add my anecdote here. I haven’t pirated a game in ten years, but when I was a student, I pirated most of my games. Almost all of the ones that I played for more than a few days, I now own legally. Some of these games, I’ve become a big fan of the series and buy all new games (I pirated the original Witcher game for example, I now own it, the collectors edition of the second, the third game and am eagerly awaiting basically any game the developer releases. While it’s likely I would have eventually played The Witcher 3 anyway given how successful it was, I’d likely have missed the Witcher 2 and probably wouldn’t be such a blind fanboy of anything CDPR release) I also regularly NOT buy games (but nowadays also don’t pirate them, in the past I might have) if they hnave intrusive DRM
  - H1Supreme 9y ago
    That argument is bullshit, frankly. Before the advent of CD-Burners and Napster, you found a way to buy a CD if you really wanted it. Everyone had their own copy of an album. A select few would make cassette tape copies, but you were never satisfied with that. I've seen numerous people who could absolutely afford games, stealing them. Hacked Xbox's filled with every game imaginable. These people would have bought some of these if they couldn't steal them, without a doubt. Would they have just gave up video games? No way. So, it absolutely displaces sales.
    - Brockenstein 9y ago
      The reason why your comment is being downvoted is because of your ignorance, because you're trying to float widespread piracy as a recent phenomena and it's not. You just don't know your history. Before CD-RW lots of games were available on floppy disk, which were simple to copy. And even without a CD-RW you could copy the data off the CD. Perhaps you don't know about no-CD cracks? They were everywhere. There were plenty of ways to pirate CD based games without a CD-RW. It might seem difficult or complicated compared to 2018, but only if you didn't live through those times. At the time that's the way it was, and it was relatively easy. >Everyone had their own copy of an album. A select few would make cassette tape copies, but you were never satisfied with that. Forgive me, I never say this, but it's appropriate in this case: LOL
- madshiva 9y ago
  Most of the top games that was sell in 2017 was bad quality game on Alpha/Beta (PUBG, My Summer Car, etc.) 30 Millions of copy of PUBG sold, for a non-finish game, with bad quality. You argument are wrong.
- everyone 9y ago
  "I'm pretty sure" -- Do you have any evidence, data, metrics of any kind to support that?
aslkdjaslkdj 9y ago
The EU study does not say what the pro-piracy crowd wants it to say. The study only looks out the count of games and not the dollar amount spent. A non-pirate who buys a $60 game and all the DLC and microtransactions is counted the same as a pirate who buys one $0.99 steam sale game. It does say that sales for blockbuster movies are heavily impacted by piracy.
- croon 9y ago
  I don't see your point. I haven't pirated a game in over 15 years (basically since I started working), and I buy some games at full price and tons of games at dollar sales or humble bundles. The thing is that the ones I don't buy at full price are the ones I would never even entertain playing at full price, and statistically I rarely even play them after getting 5 of them in a bundle. What that means is that those games can have <$15 from me, or nothing. $60 was never on the table. And the games I buy at launch others won't bother with at full price. The only difference between me and the pirate in your example is that the pirate hypothetically would have bought "some" games at full price if piracy wasn't available, like I do. But that's not an assumption you can naturally make. Some people just don't care about playing games when they're new. I'm just as inclined to assume that a pirate only buying bargain games would have the same legal consumption without piracy.
  - cm2187 9y ago
    Beyond convenience and honesty, my thinking about pirated software is that in a world where malware and viruses are prevalent, the last thing I would do on earth is to execute some dodgy cracking utility or game from some random torrent website, unless it is in an airtight and up to date VM.
    - baud147258 9y ago
      I've downloaded and played dozen of pirated games, but I've been lucky enough to never have a problem. Or at least I never realized I had malware on my PC :-| For my part, it was not a lack of money, but rather ease of getting the game (when I was directly given an ISO) or because I don't want to wait for a sale, but the game still seems too expensive. I ended up buying two of them (KotOR on a sale and transistor full-price). But now I have a big enough library and I have less time to play, so it's not as appealing as before (and I also have more to lose on my computer).
HenryBemis 9y ago
I do understand the need to fight piracy, but breaking into my house, plundering through my stuff, taking photocopies of my files/ID/passwod/etc, is not the right way to do this (in my book). At least they were smart enough to make this AV-proof. One of my favorite lines is: "please disable your AV while XYZ application is installed". I do understand that some applications require access to files/registry keys/etc, but this means they've done a crappy work on building the thing, and they cut corners by asking us to compromise our security for their lack of due process. Random example [1]. [1]: https://www.taxslayerpro.com/kb/676/temporarily-disabling-a-firewall-or-antivirus-software https://www.taxslayerpro.com/kb/676/temporarily-disabling-a-...
- _jcwu 9y ago
  It's pretty ironic, because that "disable AV" line is what you will find on most pirated copy readmes.

ravingraven 9y ago

I'm pretty sure that piracy does have a huge impact on sales for niche addons and games like that. The client base is very very small and anything that is not absolutely perfect quality does not get sold these days (seriously, look at the quality and effort that has gone into some PMDG planes or the ixeg 737, it's astounding). Small client base plus very good quality equals, everyone must pay their share for the product to be viable. That being said, what FSLabs did is of course inexcusable.

slivym 9y ago
That really doesn't change the argument surrounding piracy - the contention is that piracy doesn't displace sales. If that's true, it is literally not effecting whether everyone is paying their share. The people who pirated it simply were never going to pay for it whether they play it or not. I tend to agree with you though, if you make a game that requires incredible attention to detail, hugely time intensive modelling work, and know that the target market is a tiny niche then maybe the product is just not viable.
- moomin 9y ago
  I think there may be some nuance to this, however. What you're saying is known to be to true at the macro level, but it may be more complicated at the micro level. For instance, it's well known that games companies aren't too fussed about games getting cracked after the launch window. The availability of a crack may not reduce your spend on video games, but it may reduce your spend on specific video games. This situation is made much much worse if your product is expensive, like this one is, and meant to make money over a long period rather than a short launch period. None of this excuses them, but I do wonder about how the piracy data actually pans out for small, expensive shops like this.
  - soundwave106 9y ago
    My impression is (based on what I've seen with music plugins and heard from plugin developers, which tend to be also produced by small shops) that piracy data does matter a fair bit if you don't do anything about it. Nonetheless, several plugin companies do seem to be able to nicely balance the ability to protect their software, while avoiding arduous copy protection methods. The method I think seems to work best is a combination "honey pot + time bomb" type method, where you provide an "easy" method for the pirates to "crack" and get on the usual sites, while also including a more difficult to reverse engineer that activates at some point later. (This kind of nudges those who kind of use piracy to "try and buy" but sometimes, er, need a bit of motivation to actually purchase the product. Even people who can afford the software and make a pretty decent living with the product have been caught with pirated plugins in interviews (https://torrentfreak.com/avicii-and-other-djs-produce-hits-using-pirated-software-150223/) https://torrentfreak.com/avicii-and-other-djs-produce-hits-u...). You definitely don't need to include malware to protect your product.
    - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
      > My impression is (based on what I've seen with music plugins and heard from plugin developers, which tend to be also produced by small shops) that piracy data does matter a fair bit if you don't do anything about it. The problem is nobody really knows that because it's nearly impossible to do a controlled experiment for this. What happens in practice is that a company's first product is unprofitable. So they go back and make significant improvements, spend five times as much on marketing, and add anti-piracy code. Then the new version is more profitable. The people who want the solution to have been the anti-piracy code credit it with the improvement, but there is no way to know if it was that or the product improvements, or the marketing, or more favorable market conditions at the time of the second launch, or the fact that the same marketing effort now produces 50% more customers because there is now an existing user base (including the pirates) who are easier to convert because they're familiar with the previous version, etc. To actually know the answer you would need a statistically valid sample of product launches where the determination of whether anti-piracy measures are taken is made at random. But as far as I'm aware no one has ever attempted this, and the choice to use anti-piracy measures has to be randomized or you could trivially be measuring the wrong thing, e.g. larger products with more resources are both more successful and more often include anti-piracy measures but the causation is reversed. So nobody really knows the answer and it's all just wild speculation.
- ravingraven 9y ago
  >The people who pirated it simply were never going to pay for it whether they play it or not. I hear this argument a lot but can't see how it possibly be correct. Sure, not everyone who pirates would buy instead but at least some people would (it probably is a small percentage, but it is not zero). One can imagine that the effect of those few is amplified for titles with high costs per unit.
  - simias 9y ago
    If you consider this you also have to consider people who pirate a game and then decide to buy it later when they get the money or they realize that it's worth the price. It happened to me on several occasions. There's also the "photoshop effect", where piracy helps ensure that the application remains the de-facto standard. Admittedly this is less applicable for games but it might help with 3rd party controller support, modding community etc...
    - danielbarla 9y ago
      In the context of niche games with pricey DLCs, I now have a significant collection of TS2018 DLCs. If I was not able to "try out" that game a few years ago in a less than legal fashion, I likely never would have gotten into it in the first place. I have a similar trend with books; on several occasions I've ended up owning (legally) the entire work of some author, simply because a friend gave me their copy of a book. I also believe that in the age of Steam specials, refunds, etc, people who pirate your game are not "lost sales". They are usually doing it because their appetite for games outstrips their budget, and they were highly unlikely to pay for it in the first place. But there is a significant chance may convert to a paying customer, or at least market the game by word of mouth.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - dkersten 9y ago
      I’ll add my anecdote here. I haven’t pirated a game in ten years, but when I was a student, I pirated most of my games. Almost all of the ones that I played for more than a few days, I now own legally. Some of these games, I’ve become a big fan of the series and buy all new games (I pirated the original Witcher game for example, I now own it, the collectors edition of the second, the third game and am eagerly awaiting basically any game the developer releases. While it’s likely I would have eventually played The Witcher 3 anyway given how successful it was, I’d likely have missed the Witcher 2 and probably wouldn’t be such a blind fanboy of anything CDPR release) I also regularly NOT buy games (but nowadays also don’t pirate them, in the past I might have) if they hnave intrusive DRM
- H1Supreme 9y ago
  That argument is bullshit, frankly. Before the advent of CD-Burners and Napster, you found a way to buy a CD if you really wanted it. Everyone had their own copy of an album. A select few would make cassette tape copies, but you were never satisfied with that. I've seen numerous people who could absolutely afford games, stealing them. Hacked Xbox's filled with every game imaginable. These people would have bought some of these if they couldn't steal them, without a doubt. Would they have just gave up video games? No way. So, it absolutely displaces sales.
  - Brockenstein 9y ago
    The reason why your comment is being downvoted is because of your ignorance, because you're trying to float widespread piracy as a recent phenomena and it's not. You just don't know your history. Before CD-RW lots of games were available on floppy disk, which were simple to copy. And even without a CD-RW you could copy the data off the CD. Perhaps you don't know about no-CD cracks? They were everywhere. There were plenty of ways to pirate CD based games without a CD-RW. It might seem difficult or complicated compared to 2018, but only if you didn't live through those times. At the time that's the way it was, and it was relatively easy. >Everyone had their own copy of an album. A select few would make cassette tape copies, but you were never satisfied with that. Forgive me, I never say this, but it's appropriate in this case: LOL
madshiva 9y ago
Most of the top games that was sell in 2017 was bad quality game on Alpha/Beta (PUBG, My Summer Car, etc.) 30 Millions of copy of PUBG sold, for a non-finish game, with bad quality. You argument are wrong.
everyone 9y ago
"I'm pretty sure" -- Do you have any evidence, data, metrics of any kind to support that?

aslkdjaslkdj 9y ago

The EU study does not say what the pro-piracy crowd wants it to say. The study only looks out the count of games and not the dollar amount spent. A non-pirate who buys a $60 game and all the DLC and microtransactions is counted the same as a pirate who buys one $0.99 steam sale game. It does say that sales for blockbuster movies are heavily impacted by piracy.

croon 9y ago
I don't see your point. I haven't pirated a game in over 15 years (basically since I started working), and I buy some games at full price and tons of games at dollar sales or humble bundles. The thing is that the ones I don't buy at full price are the ones I would never even entertain playing at full price, and statistically I rarely even play them after getting 5 of them in a bundle. What that means is that those games can have <$15 from me, or nothing. $60 was never on the table. And the games I buy at launch others won't bother with at full price. The only difference between me and the pirate in your example is that the pirate hypothetically would have bought "some" games at full price if piracy wasn't available, like I do. But that's not an assumption you can naturally make. Some people just don't care about playing games when they're new. I'm just as inclined to assume that a pirate only buying bargain games would have the same legal consumption without piracy.
- cm2187 9y ago
  Beyond convenience and honesty, my thinking about pirated software is that in a world where malware and viruses are prevalent, the last thing I would do on earth is to execute some dodgy cracking utility or game from some random torrent website, unless it is in an airtight and up to date VM.
  - baud147258 9y ago
    I've downloaded and played dozen of pirated games, but I've been lucky enough to never have a problem. Or at least I never realized I had malware on my PC :-| For my part, it was not a lack of money, but rather ease of getting the game (when I was directly given an ISO) or because I don't want to wait for a sale, but the game still seems too expensive. I ended up buying two of them (KotOR on a sale and transistor full-price). But now I have a big enough library and I have less time to play, so it's not as appealing as before (and I also have more to lose on my computer).

HenryBemis 9y ago

I do understand the need to fight piracy, but breaking into my house, plundering through my stuff, taking photocopies of my files/ID/passwod/etc, is not the right way to do this (in my book). At least they were smart enough to make this AV-proof. One of my favorite lines is: "please disable your AV while XYZ application is installed". I do understand that some applications require access to files/registry keys/etc, but this means they've done a crappy work on building the thing, and they cut corners by asking us to compromise our security for their lack of due process. Random example [1]. [1]: https://www.taxslayerpro.com/kb/676/temporarily-disabling-a-firewall-or-antivirus-software https://www.taxslayerpro.com/kb/676/temporarily-disabling-a-...

_jcwu 9y ago
It's pretty ironic, because that "disable AV" line is what you will find on most pirated copy readmes.