4 ms·
I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.
by cogogo 10mo ago
I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.
- ekianjo 10mo agoPiracy is much less endemic nowadays.
- Ygg2 10mo agoYeah, because rather than pirating from cracxxxed.warez I can buy the game on Steam/GoG sale for $1.4.
- t-3 10mo agoExactly. Games are just software, there's no real unit cost to factor in when setting minimum prices, just market strategy. Running sales with different levels of discounts is as close to optimal as possible $/customer without doing stuff like individualized pricing (which surely requires a vast amount of computing power and human effort to do at scale). Only the truly penniless or retro-game fans need to pirate nowadays.
- kevml 10mo agoThe real unit cost is worker development cost. Like any other tech company, this cost gets muddied in the platform/framework development costs versus more product focused costs.
- CDRdude 10mo ago“Many people pirate” is a different statement than “too many people pirate games to make that a viable business”.
- chii 10mo agoIt's because the poster assume that each pirated copy ought to have been paid for - which if they had been, then a previously failing game would've been viable. But this doesn't make the statement true - because the assumption that each pirated copy would've been paid for had there been no piracy. This is the same incorrect logic that music/movie copyright holders use to count pirated works' financial "damages".
- dmantis 10mo agoIt doesn't prove that DRM free is not a viable business. I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating games for more than 10 years now. A few bucks costs much less to me these days than a headache with finding a cracked version and installing potential malware on my computer. Not even talking about supporting the artists and developers. Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you have proper easy installers, easy buying, easy refunds and you are from a middle class and higher - it doesn't make sense to download random executables from the internet. And if you have low-income, you won't buy stuff regardless of DRM and just wait someone to crack it.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- djtango 10mo agoYeah this - people who grew up gaming in the 80s and 90s now have significant disposable income and are time poor. A game that offers tens or hundreds of hours of entertainment is seriously cost effective when a movie ticket costs half a videogame or a round of drinks. Malware is potentially very expensive if you have any capital (tradfi or defi) that is anywhere near your gaming rig. Even a brokerage of 5 figures isn't worth touching something that could have malware. Most the games young players play are all service oriented games anyway
- SOLAR_FIELDS 10mo agoThis is a valuable lesson I learned when I worked with someone, not at Elastic, but who had previously worked at Elastic. Elastic was one of the original companies who made FOSS but with enterprise licensing work well. We were discussing in a meeting at this place we worked how to design license checking into the product. What the guy said I found very insightful: he said that you don’t really need to spend a bunch of time and effort creating sophisticated license checks, you just need perhaps a single phone call to a server or something else that can be trivially defeated for anyone with a reasonable amount of technical knowledge. Why? Because the people who would defeat it are the kind of people who make horrible enterprise customers anyway. So in a way it’s just like a cheap lock. Won’t defeat anyone determined, because it’s not designed to. It’s designed to keep already honest people honest
- Sayrus 10mo agoPeople pirate Steam Games anyway. Stating that people pirate too much to make it viable is purely opinion and not based on numbers. Sure, for AAA games you get 2 to 3 months without a cracked version, but this stops afterward. For non-AAA games, the steam version is usually crackable from day-1.
- dark-star 10mo agoSeriously, for cracking steam games, all it takes is to drop a single DLL inside the game's folder. It can't get simpler than that. Yes, that obviously only works for offline games, but yeah, cracking Steaam games is as easy as cracking any other game, maybe even easier
- tommica 10mo agoThat is cracking, but one still has to download the files from somewhere before they can crack it. Finding legitimate files is still time consuming.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- dark-star 10mo agoYeah, but you just need anyone who bought the game on Steam, a friend or co-worker for example, not some shady website. You want to avoid shady websites for the game download, and shady websites for the crack download. You can do both of this with Steam
- nalekberov 10mo agoGames are cracked at day one, sometimes hours after. Apparently DRM is not a solution here. If pirates know that, people at Valve certainly do.
- croes 10mo ago>The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion. That's not the opinon part. That pirating is the reason a game business isn't viable is. Would you have bought every game you pirated? How much money did you spend on gaming because you got hooked because you could play more games than you could afford otherwise?
- trinsic2 10mo agoIt's an opinion that "Most" people pirate games and it's also an opinion that pirating games translates directly to lost sales. As Gabe said and I agree with him piracy, if it's anything a service related problem. You don't need DRM to overcome that. You just need to make a good product and respect you audience. The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies.
- georgeecollins 10mo ago>> The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies. That is also an opinion. Also-- as an aside-- I am curious what you think the "right" reason is for piracy. DRM free games is not a new idea. They have always existed and people have tried different models with them like including advertising. Do you remember the Ford driving simulator? The skittles game. there have been other models and there is a huge universe of DRM free games for decades. If you don't gain much from restricting copies, please explain to me why it is so common in the best games?
- jaapz 10mo agoHave they actually tried releasing those same games DRM free? Just because everybody does it is not really a convincing reason Also many DRM games are cracked quite quickly after release. How does that help sell more copies?
- nottorp 10mo agoAre you confusing the absence or presence of copy protection with how a game is supposed to make money? > why it is so common in the best games? What best games? It's common in design by commitee predatory crap like EA/Ubisoft titles. Thing is, a pirated copy isn't a lost sale. It's more like free marketing. It's possible that the above assholes would make more profit if they stopped spending on copy protection and advertising and just made and sold games. In a world where it would be impossible to pirate software, I bet they would have at best 25% more sales. No one can afford to pay for every game, especially at launch price, so they'll just make do with fewer of them. Linky about marketing costs: https://www.trueachievements.com/n53671/aaa-game-development-costs# https://www.trueachievements.com/n53671/aaa-game-development... Juicy quote: the CMA says that "this publisher also submitted that for one of its major franchise’s development costs reached $660 million and marketing costs peaked at almost $550 million."
- jandrese 10mo agoIf the Apple II had something similar to Steam do you think you would have pirated as much? Ignore the fact that the tech wasn't ready yet and imagine a world where buying Apple II software was as frictionless as buying a Steam game. Also imagine that the software went on deep discounts regularly that allowed you to build up a big backlog of games to play. Do you think you would have been motivated to seek out the seedy underbelly of the software world looking for illicit copies to add to your backlog? Certainly there are some people like that, but they might be a fairly small minority. And then suddenly DRM isn't really helpful because even if it might stop a minority of people who weren't going to buy your game in the first place it always costs you in frustration for paying customers.