Piracy and Profit

[cthulhu]

Yeah, ME2 dials home lots more infomation than just the achievements - stuff like 80% of players played a male, most play soldiers, but most people did use the facial editor etc. Achievements just scratch the surface, but yeah it's helpful for developers to see what happens with their games 'in the wild'

[Vnonymous]

In a shareware model I am not going to buy the game until I've finished the Demo. If I never finish the demo, I will never buy the game.

Cuts to sales will be vast (35% or so). That's a gigantic impact on the bottom line, indeed most games would become unprofitable.

Except we can see how drastic of an effect the shareware model has on game sales because people have already done it, and do you want to guess how successful shareware games were? You might not have heard of Doom, Quake and Half-life - after all, they did provide generous demos so they probably never sold many copies! World of Warcraft gives you the first twenty levels of the game completely free, and we've seen what a giant failure it was! Team Fortress 2 is now entirely free to play, making money off of microtransactions, and you can see how much of a failure it is.

Like Kaelik's said, games are fucking huge, and the vast majority of the art assets are re-used from start to finish. You would be completely wrong to assume any linear relationship between size of demo / size of game and length of demo / length of game.

30 minutes is nowhere fucking near as much time as you need to make an informed decision as to whether or not a game is worth shelling out full price for, and if those art assets are reused so much, MAKE THE DEMO WORTH PLAYING. If a game is actually good, three hours of it will leave people wanting more rather than less.

But this guy is seriously bitching that demo + full game will be a 30-50% total download size over the full game, so any intelligent person is going to pirate because "fuck that shit, I can't wait an extra two-four hours." It's fucking retarded. This is the age of digital distribution and widespread broadband and while broadband should be more accessible than it is, if you don't have it you're not fucking downloading demos anyway. He is using a couple hours of downloading as a legitimate breaking point for why people would choose piracy over demos + full-game. What the shit? Fuck that guy. He's stupid.

Check yourself before you wreck yourself. PC games these days, as he has pointed out numerous times in the article, are incredibly annoying to purchase. Buy a copy of a Ubisoft game that fucks your dvd burner and then refuses to work because you don't have a working disc drive anymore? Tough shit, because you're not getting that sixty bucks back. I never purchased anything when my computer wasn't as good simply because meeting the minimum requirements for a game was zero guarantee that it would actually be playable. I'd have been a lot more willing to throw down money on a game if I knew that my computer would be able to actually play it. The lack of returns, shitty drm and often times shitty customer service means that even people who fucking buy the game download and crack it.

A pc game is a much bigger investment than a movie ticket(in Australia it is literally ten times the investment that a movie ticket is), and when that game has a chance of not functioning at all on your computer you are going to be much more open to the prospect of a pirate release. In Australia, and a lot of countries that aren't America, internet connections have bandwidth limits. If you're going to spend 2 gigs dling the 30 minute demo, 6 gigs for the 20(or 10, whatever) hour pirate release starts to look a lot more tempting.

The rest of the article is of similar quality and bullshittery. It really is basically every possible uneducated, uninformed complaint PC gamers have ever stupidly muttered about piracy crammed into one place. Seriously, in one place he talks about the "hardcore PC gamer" as though that's an actual market-driving demographic. He doesn't know the first fucking thing about any of this.

Are you fucking blind?

There are MILLIONS OF DOLLARS in this demographic. THERE ARE MULTIPLE, COMPETING PRODUCT RANGES competing EXCLUSIVELY for this market. You have Alienware computers, you have the Nvidia/ATI graphic card wars. "Hardcore pc gamer" is a gigantic, wealthy market and if you include MMOs under hardcore it is bigger than consoles by a ridiculous amount. It is much bigger than the demographic of "people who play roleplaying games". If you can't see the existence of an entire marketplace devoted to hardcore pc gaming then you're a fucking moron who should be calling yourself out before you try and call out someone who meticulously researched the causes of piracy.

[cthulhu]

Except we can see how drastic of an effect the shareware model has on game sales because people have already done it, and do you want to guess how successful shareware games were? You might not have heard of Doom, Quake and Half-life - after all, they did provide generous demos so they probably never sold many copies! World of Warcraft gives you the first twenty levels of the game completely free, and we've seen what a giant failure it was! Team Fortress 2 is now entirely free to play, making money off of microtransactions, and you can see how much of a failure it is.

Wait... what? Amusingly the first two games are ones I never paid for because you got all the content you wanted for free. (did anyone ever finish quake? I didn't get past the shareware ending, but multiplayer was free if I remember correctly)

WOW and TF2 started on a pay to play model with a very limited free trial and TF2 didn't have a demo if I remember correctly, and yes they were huge successes.

Not helping your argument. The argument you're actually making is 'PC games should abandon singleplayer because Multiplayer is much easier to copy protect and much more valuable' which is clearly the model most people are running with. Indeed, it's funny that the franchises you go for as touchstones (except doom) are breakout successes on the back of their multiplayer!

Also, yah, the cost of an ATI card is way more than the cost of any game I am going to buy, but no Demos there... people buy them anyway I think.

[Vnonymous]

A videocard is a much less risky purchase than a videogame. If it doesn't work you can return it, and there are tons of review sites out there that are actually worthwhile and tell you what the specs of a graphics card will be. The only real "risk" is buying one just before the next line is announced or released.

That information doesn't exist for videogames, due to the abysmal state of the gaming media(see Ausgamers giving a 95 to TOR, a terrible game which cannot even be bought in Australia, or every single positive review given to Dragon Age 2).

Not helping your argument. The argument you're actually making is 'PC games should abandon singleplayer because Multiplayer is much easier to copy protect and much more valuable' which is clearly the model most people are running with.

No, the argument I am making is that purchasing a fully priced pc game is a big risk, and one of the reasons piracy exists is because people want to know if their computer can actually play said game or if it is actually any good. I pirated DA2 after getting burned with DA:O, and holy shit I'm glad that I did because that game was arse. I completely agree with you when you say that a long demo would smash the sales of some games, because those games are shit and deserve to have their sales smashed. This technically might be called a "lost sale", but it sure as hell wasn't due to piracy.

Taking Human Revolution for example, the one reason I bought the game was because of the leaked preview build, which contained enough of the game to really make me want to play more. It was the perfect size for a demo, if a little long, and it raised massive amounts of hype.

EDIT: Please stop adding extra sentences and points to your posts after I've already responded to them. It fucks up the flow of the conversation and looks stupid.

[Kaelik]

Yeah, DX HR is a really good example of demos being awesome. Everyone was kinda leaning towards invisible war level quality in our heads. Then all of a sudden, preview that is really good, worth it. Oh course, that preview was probably more than 1/16th the games size, and it was only 1/16th of the game or whatever, so... kinda shoots that complaining about Bioshock Demos thing in the face.

Demos are good, their size relative to the game, not that big a deal.

[DSMatticus]

Hardcore PC gamer does not mean what you think it means. When he said "hardcore PC gamer," he was not referring to anyone who ever owned any PC gaming product ever because that would be stupid. For fuck's sake, you mentioned alienware, a product line whose sole purpose is to trick gamers and their parents with too much money who know fuck-shit about PC gaming to buy their overpriced shit through ignorance of the hobby.

PC gamer =/= hardcore PC gamer. The first one is a huge demographic you can reasonably target with a big budget title, and they in general really know fuck all about anything except "ooh, this looks shiny. Buy!" The second is a niche group of elitists who think they're well-informed and sometimes are and possessed of varying degrees of stupidity, and they are very bitter that the industry never listens to them and some people (like the author) have trouble getting it through their head that they are actually a really small group because most of the people who buy PC games are not like them. If you are assuming that the second group is a driving market force, that's just lol-worthy. And he is determined to do just that. Wishful thinking, I guess.

[cthulhu]

Yeah, DX HR is a really good example of demos being awesome. Everyone was kinda leaning towards invisible war level quality in our heads. Then all of a sudden, preview that is really good, worth it. Oh course, that preview was probably more than 1/16th the games size, and it was only 1/16th of the game or whatever, so... kinda shoots that complaining about Bioshock Demos thing in the face.

Demos are good, their size relative to the game, not that big a deal.

I suspect DX:HR got really lucky there, but that's mostly because DX:IW was a huge turd. If DX:IW was actually good (hjahaha) or had never been published, we'd all have a huge erection for a new Deus ex game, demo or no.

[Parthenon]

By the way, an interesting article here says that the only proven numbers for how much money was lost by piracy in the US from pirated movies is $446 million a year.

As in all the money lost in the US from pirated movies was $446 million. source
The money made from ticket sales in the US alone was $10 billion. source
The money made from movies in the US in 2011 was probably around $40 billion. source

The whole SOPA/PIPA and anti-piracy stuff is to destroy the internet, free speech and reasonable use in order to get 1%.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

Most of the really hardcore (I define it as competitive, and will stop saying hardcore because nobody can agree on what it means) PC gamers I know are using computers that run their game(s) at max specs (and these are games like Starcraft I and II, League of Legends, CS, etc.) while running vent or teamspeak. My 3 year old desktop runs these games (can't speak for starcraft II, though) at max specs, and it was just a $600 rig.

I do see a lot of PC gamers going out and buying expensive things to run new games. They're the ones who really drive the market, unless you use microtransactions and a game with good competitive multiplayer.

Competitive gamers are a driving force for making good games with good demos or being run off microtransactions. The ranked matches in League of Legends are made up almost entirely of people who will throw down hundreds of dollars in microtransactions for a free-to-play game. One of my friends has been spending $10 or $20 a month for...a year now? That's more than two normal PC games, and he'll keep on doing it.

If a competitive gamer switches to a game they'll get a few dozen people to come with them because they're such an insular group. I've known entire guilds/clans/teams that would switch games and pay for everything. Still, they don't compare to the unwashed masses who buy the shiny games and MW3/Black ops/Nazis! every time they come out.

Basically, there aren't that many competitive gamers, but if you get one of them you'll get a fucking lot of them and they'll promote the shit out of your game for free (and drive away new people if they're assholes). I know I still try to get people to buy Smash Brothers Melee because I love it so much.

[Vnonymous]

Hardcore PC gamer does not mean what you think it means. When he said "hardcore PC gamer," he was not referring to anyone who ever owned any PC gaming product ever because that would be stupid. For fuck's sake, you mentioned alienware, a product line whose sole purpose is to trick gamers and their parents with too much money who know fuck-shit about PC gaming to buy their overpriced shit through ignorance of the hobby.

PC gamer =/= hardcore PC gamer. The first one is a huge demographic you can reasonably target with a big budget title, and they in general really know fuck all about anything except "ooh, this looks shiny. Buy!" The second is a niche group of elitists who think they're well-informed and sometimes are and possessed of varying degrees of stupidity, and they are very bitter that the industry never listens to them and some people (like the author) have trouble getting it through their head that they are actually a really small group because most of the people who buy PC games are not like them. If you are assuming that the second group is a driving market force, that's just lol-worthy. And he is determined to do just that. Wishful thinking, I guess.

You are a fucking moron. Starcraft II broke 3 million in sales, and Starcraft is not a game aimed at the casual gamer. It has an entire sports industry built around it(I consider a game that has its' own dedicated announcers, STADIUMS, etc. to be "hardcore"). Starcraft II was one of the biggest games in the entire industry, a success almost entirely on the back of "hardcore gamers".

[DSMatticus]

a success almost entirely on the back of "hardcore gamers".

If you're here saying that casual gamers did not buy Starcraft II, fuck you you are retarded. If you are trying to use highly specific career fanatacism in South Korea in which less than a thousand players actually participate as an example of why everyone who touches the game is a "hardcore gamer," fuck you you are retarded.

Nothing you said made any god damn sense. I would love to get my hands on battle.net's collected statistics, because you'll probably find that the median games played online is seriously something like "three." You remember Demigod? Stardock's little flop? About 50% of players touched online mode at any point. Seriously. That was basically a purely MP game.

Just fucking face it. The majority of consumers are not informed consumers. Why is that hard to admit? Is it too fucking depressing or something?

[Whipstitch]

It's a precarious situation because a big part of what makes Blizzard successful is that they have a degree of leverage with the hardcore gaming community. They've been able to make concessions to accessibility and crossover appeal that many hardcore gamers wouldn't accept (albeit grudgingly, in many cases) from another company. So while Blizzard certainly makes a lot of money off hardcore gamers, it's the fact that they can do so while also raking in money from a substantial number of casuals that separates them financially from the rest of the pack. For example, I know plenty of people who haven't really been into gaming since high school but they took time out of their schedules to buy SCII because blizzard made it easy for them to do so by keeping system requirements low and by assuring everyone that the single player was more than a bolted on tutorial like it is with an unfortunate amount of games.

[Vnonymous]

a success almost entirely on the back of "hardcore gamers".

If you're here saying that casual gamers did not buy Starcraft II, fuck you you are retarded. If you are trying to use highly specific career fanatacism in South Korea in which less than a thousand players actually participate as an example of why everyone who touches the game is a "hardcore gamer," fuck you you are retarded.

Nothing you said made any god damn sense. I would love to get my hands on battle.net's collected statistics, because you'll probably find that the median games played online is seriously something like "three." You remember Demigod? Stardock's little flop? About 50% of players touched online mode at any point. Seriously. That was basically a purely MP game.

Just fucking face it. The majority of consumers are not informed consumers. Why is that hard to admit? Is it too fucking depressing or something?

Demigod wasn't played online because as a game it was a piece of shit.

And I have no idea why you say that consumers not being informed matters at all. Yes, of the 6 billion or so people in the world, not too many of them are hardcore gamers! But that doesn't fucking matter, because the proportion that are is large enough for people to make a lot of money. Professional Starcraft players make a lot of money if they win, and a lot of people play it. Can't find exact statistics on it, but there are a lot of games being played on battle.net. SC2 is actually played a hell of a lot online.

And in other games, Evo2k is a giant fucking tournament and event that draws large numbers. SBO and other events in Japan draw huge crowds as well. The fighting game community is massive, and Evo2k drew over two million unique viewers(not counting physical attendance). I mean, yes, that's small compared to the horde of soccer mums who play angry birds, but if you're going to say that this multi-million market doesn't exist, then you are a gigantic idiot.

[PhoneLobster]

You remember Demigod? Stardock's little flop?

I certainly do.

It garnered MASSIVE interest and was pirated a lot. That WOULD have led to a massively successful launch with a huge active community except for one teeeeeeny problem.

See now the pirates were mostly just checking the game out, and may have had difficulty joining official multiplayer servers. BUT due to some crappy remnants of some anti-piracy crap that was not fully removed EVERY SINGLE COPY of the game REGARDLESS of whether the user tried to play multiplayer was logging in and sending data to the servers.

Combined with the unexpected massive interest the servers crashed all over the damn place and a game that relied on multiplayer spent much of it's extended launch period without functional online multiplayer. Oddly enough this pretty much killed the game in it's intended niche market.

See now THERE is a situation where piracy killed a game off. But the thing was that it was really some bullshit poorly written phone home code that really did it and WITHOUT that the game would have been considered an unparallelled surprise success to garner as much initial interest as it did. If only they hadn't undermined their own ability to deliver on that initial interest...

[DSMatticus]

But that doesn't fucking matter, because the proportion that are is large enough for people to make a lot of money.

When you are releasing a big AAA title, who do you target? A debatably large minority of the market, or the actual majority of the market? That's right, you target the majority. Because that by definition is a larger market share which can make you more money. Hardcore gamers/informed consumers/whatever that means are just not a large market share relative to people who buy PC games and being successful within the industry does not involve appeasing them. You can shit on them and be wildly successful. Most AAA titles in fact do just that.

Professional Starcraft players make a lot of money if they win, and a lot of people play it

How is this even relevant in your mind? Professional football players make a lot of money. What does this have to do with statements about the people who sit their asses in football stadiums? Again, South Korea has this weird professional obsession with Starcraft, but that doesn't mean everyone who touches starcraft is a "hardcore gamer" in the same way that every kid who's thrown around a football isn't a professional quarterback. It's just not relevant. And while lots of Starcraft games are played, what would be more interesting is the median number of games played online by someone who has purchased Starcraft 2. One person can play thousands of games, so raw number of games played online total is just not an interesting statistic.

[K]

"Hardcore gamer" is just a marketing buzzword.

In five years, the term will be as dead as "Extreme" which used to be tacked onto everything from corn chips to professional skateboarding.

[cthulhu]

Pretty sure SC II didn't have a demo either.

[Koumei]

People still use "casual gamer" and "hardcore gamer" as terms?

I mean, aside from in South Australia, where they haven't yet invented kitchen sink filters* and WWII has only just ended?

I do know that Yahtzee (of Zero Punctuation, and partial owner of the Mana Bars across Australia) is trying to get people to stop using the term "gamer", because of the connotations - specifically, people tend to refer to themselves as a fisher or footballer or accountant if they do those things for a living, they don't use labels to define themselves by their hobbies. People who play video games and call themselves gamers are at least partly to blame for their reputation.

*No really. Every house in VIC I've ever been in, there are those little metal plug-hole filters in the kitchen sinks so stuff you wash out of your bowl doesn't clog the drain up. Just... there. Like the lightbulbs and stuff. When I first moved to VIC, it was the first time I had ever seen such a thing, ever. And I have still yet to see them when I visit SA. They are literally trapped in the past.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

The best part is nobody agrees on what a hardcore gamer is, hence why it is a terrible term. Competitive is the way to do it.

I'd say Yahtzee is full of shit, though. The people who call themselves gamers are pretty much defined by their hobby and spend much of their free time pursuing that hobby. It shouldn't have negative connotations unless video games do. There are people who call themselves "sports nuts" or "history buffs" that are defining themselves by their hobby, but nobody gets upset about them.

Hell, it's easier for me since if somebody calls themselves a gamer I can assume they'll want to play almost any video game with me (because they are so damn lonely). If somebody says "I like Angry Birds" then I won't bust out my SNES and ask them to play Zombies Ate my Neighbors with me.

[fectin]

When you are releasing a big AAA title, who do you target? A debatably large minority of the market, or the actual majority of the market?

So, you're arguing that RTS fans are a majority of the video gaming market? Because otherwise you're left asserting either that SC2 wasn't an AAA title, or that it wasn't an RTS.

[Lago PARANOIA]

fectin, out of the millions of people who bought and played Starcraft, what proportion of those people would you say are casual to RTS?

Before you answer that question, consider this: I mean, insomuch as 'hardcore' and 'casual' gamer have any meaning, I'd be a hardcore gamer when we're talking about turn-based squad level strategy or c/jRPGs. But I play fewer first-person shooters than my old man and my mom could kick my ass at most puzzle games. If I was going to play a first-person shooter for example I'd feel more comfortable with a casual game like Team Fortress 2 rather than a more involved one like Modern Warfare 3. The fact that I play 15 hours a week gaming might make me better at picking up a title and getting into it than my grandma but not enough so that I feel like I'd have an 'in' with the hardcores.

[Ikeren]

Pretty sure SC II didn't have a demo either.

It does; the first 5 levels of the Terran Campaign, several of the "test thingies" (the ghost nukes one, the handful of units one). You could also play online matches, as long as they were unranked randoms, and you could only play terran. You also could play up to 4 player games with 3 AI, but the AI had to be on easy.

It was 6-8 gigs.

[fectin]

Lago: I'll grant all that, but the original point appeared to be that the only rational choice for a major product was to (attempt to) capture a majority of its market. That's completely untrue. But rather than bring up something farther afield like "chick flicks" or "Prius" or "melting pot restaurants" or "converse all-stars" or whatever, I'd stick with video games.
It is completely possible to make money in minority niches. That is a sound strategy, and is completely separate from whether you're making an AAA product.
I really don't care about "hardcore" for this; that term needs so much definition ahead of time that it isn't useful here.

[Lago PARANOIA]

There's a difference of course between 'niche because it takes some digging through the dungheap to get to the diamonds' and 'niche because of an alienating gameplay or concept' and 'nice because of a lack of market penetration'.

These of course all have some complex interplay in it, but I think that it's a folly to use 'it's a niche game!' on its own to cover for a marketing decision that you're aware is going to alienate the broader audience. Very well-made and executed games like Nier or Jade Empire have a hard ceiling on how many people they could attract with their first outing due to their underlying premises. But Starcraft has such a market penetration that the only reason why a later entry in the franchise wasn't well-received because they really went off-the-rails in premise or -- more likely -- that the gameplay sucked/was too baroque for most people.

[DSMatticus]

Lago: I'll grant all that, but the original point appeared to be that the only rational choice for a major product was to (attempt to) capture a majority of its market. That's completely untrue. But rather than bring up something farther afield like "chick flicks" or "Prius" or "melting pot restaurants" or "converse all-stars" or whatever, I'd stick with video games.
It is completely possible to make money in minority niches. That is a sound strategy, and is completely separate from whether you're making an AAA product.
I really don't care about "hardcore" for this; that term needs so much definition ahead of time that it isn't useful here.

No, that's not the original point. I'll admit that my wording was a little lax, but I was seriously expecting everyone to be on board about how targeting a genre is a different process than narrowing your target within a genre and I didn't have to be that explicit.

What I'm actually trying to say: you're trying to optimize your number of customers and that depends on I) size of market and II) expected market share. FPS is probably the largest market, but market saturation drives down expected market share so not every game ever funded by publishers is an FPS. In the context of AAA titles, we are already talking about games with huge budgets; many of them literally can't make money in minority niches, and they would definitely make less money appealling to minority niches than appealling to the larger market. Given that you are making an AAA RTS, you're going to go for the larger RTS market as a whole. Niche games do the thing where they avoid market saturation within genres by appealling to smaller internal groups. They're sacrificing size of market up front, and that comes with a smaller budget and smaller profit margins. Usually.

Now, as for the hardcore thing; I have no idea what the author of the article meant when he said it or the things like it. But he has this dismissive attitude of corporate practices that fail to target the "hardcore PC gamer," and I can't think of any definition of hardcore gamer for which that makes sense except "anyone who plays PC games." Those are some of the most successful corporate practices. CoD has a wonderful reputation of pissing off a vocal minority who certainly call themself hardcore gamers, and even pissing in the face of competitive PC gamers and the like, and its success has continued to be astronomical.