"relatively few gamers are pirates" : sadly, I don't believe that. I work in the games industry and I am surrounded by people who pirate. They also buy a lot of expensive games too, but they continue to pirate games and movies.
"Blizzard is one of the most successful game developers because create games that are designed from the beginning to work well with the mouse and keyboard" : Blizzard are successful because they created the first main-stream, polished MMO. MMOs are the future of games exactly because the server component cannot be pirated.
Blizzard are successful because they created the first main-stream, polished MMO.
Blizzard was already incredibly successful before World of Warcraft. The foundation of World of Warcraft is the brand Blizzard started to build in 1996.
MMOs are the future of games exactly because the server component cannot be pirated.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. There are tons of private World of Warcraft servers. And you can be sure the same will happen for Starcraft 2. It's the social aspect of the server, not the server itself, that can't be pirated.
MMOs are the future of games exactly because the server component cannot be pirated.
The man speaks truth. Look at China's game industry, where it is virtually impossible to buy games because folks stole them so much the industry gave up trying to sell them. Instead, everything is a "free-to-play" online game, with monetization through in-game purchases to get through the heaping helping of sucky grind added to the base game. US gamers are voting for this future every day with their purchasing habits -- namely, stealing anything that isn't nailed down while simultaneously making Blizzard and Zynga rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
I'm not in games but I do desktop software and web apps. It seems hilarious to me these days, but I used to actually worry mildly about piracy of my application. Three of the top ten search suggestions Google gives (which are created from popular search terms) for my product's name are incitements to theft, even in my decidedly non-technical niche.
Hah, those were the days. Now I sell SaaS. And just like that, poof, piracy vanishes from my radar.
I think that you mean it is virtually impossible to buy non-pirated games. The same goes for movies here: There are lots of them everywhere, but they are all pirated.
To your first point: Can you link to anything that would back this up besides anecdotes? I'm unconvinced that "I am surrounded by pirates" is more authoritative than the NPD's report.
To your second point: As devinj pointed out, there are a number of private servers that enable playing MMOs without connecting to the servers, albeit with a scale of a few hundred players. A few of them even tweak experience or drop settings for a "more entertaining" experience. In addition, Blizzard was well-known, successful, and loved before World of Warcraft so I'm inclined to lean more towards the notion that there success is because of quality design rather than MMO/DRM implementation.
I'll provide a second anecdote. The only pirated games that I have/have ever had were ones that were no longer purchasable. The same is true for all but one of my friends. And that one friend who does pirate games never purchases a single one.
I believe that MetricMike was trying to point out that your anecdotes are still just anecdotes and don't weigh nearly the same as an official study/report. Remember, the plural of anecdote isn't "data", it's not even "anecdata"...
Right, it's "experience". Or, if you prefer, "nonrandomly sampled data". That means they aren't representative of high confidence, nor are they imaginary.
> […] They also buy a lot of expensive games too, […]
That is the interesting point: gamers aren't divided between full pirates and full legit. Many people are both. In the case of the pirates who surround you, I notice that a significant part of their budget is devoted to the legal game market. So, if they suddenly couldn't pirate any more, would they buy more? To what extent?
Anyway, the fact that people aren't either full pirates or full legit can't hide the elephant out in the room: pirating behaviour is way more effective at downloading than legit behaviour is at buying. So 20% of piracy behaviour accounting to 80% pirated game doesn't sound odd: it just mean that when legit behaviour buys you one game, pirating behaviour downloads you 16.
Also, a gamer which is 80% legit and 20% pirate will download 4 games for each one he buys. And if you turn his pirating behaviour into legit behaviour, he won't give 400% more, but 25%. Significant, but not the catastrophe music majors would like us to believe.
Finally, 20% of pirating behaviour doesn't necessarily mean a 20% decrease in legit behaviour (and 20% revenue loss). It could just be a 25% increase of gaming behaviour (and 0% revenue loss). This is not all. Sometimes, games are pirated prior to purchase, to try them. Sometimes, players buy the game when they are finished playing them, because they liked it. And sometimes, not pirating the game would just mean not playing it at all.
I won't deny that piracy doesn't cause revenue loss. But we can't deny that the loss is much, much lower than the rate of pirated games. I bet that like in the music industry, the biggest costs are middle men. And the internet makes them less and less useful.
I have not bought a game in years. I have pirated several, but I have never pirated a game I didn't already own a license for. (And actually, by 'pirate' I mean downloaded a keygen to get around inserting a disc into the drive.) I now exclusively use Linux at home, which compounds the issue.
I suspect I'm not alone, and there's a large market of gamers who were more hardcore in high school and college who don't want to deal with the shit they're shoveling, and are quite content with the games we bought years ago.
Maybe there even is a correlation between pirating and buying lots of games? As a poor student, I pirated occasionally, and bought games I really liked. I also was much more up to date with respect to new games coming out.
These days, I have no idea what games are coming up (except biggies like Starcraft 2 that make it to HN). Since I will only buy one or two games per year, it is not worth the effort of keeping up with the latest developments.
What I mean to say is: with the lower cost because of piracy, it is easier to keep an enthusiasm for gaming going, which could ultimately lead to more sales. Also take into account friends talking about games they might have pirated.
Not counting 3rd world countries, where people wouldn't be able to afford non-pirated games anyway.
But you don't "pirate" the experience of playing with every other person who has purchased the game, being able to run into your real friends in a virtual world by sheer coincidence of numbers. Running your own WoW server is like running your own instance of Facebook—the network effects just aren't there.
"the experience" is hardly the same thing as "the server component".
Even so, this breaks down: this effect is (as you have noted) not just limited to MMOs. It actually applies to all games/services that use some kind of centralized network to connect players/friends. This means everything from Team Fortress 2 to Warcraft 3.
Sure. But the argument "it's useless to pirate WoW because you couldn't get on the server anyway" breaks down in this case because you could pirate WoW and run a server.
Yes, it's not as good as the real thing. Neither is running Starcraft without Battle.net, which doesn't stop it from being a fun game even in pirateable form.
Actually, a game being PC exclusive plays a part in my game purchasing decision. Not because of the control, though I have at least two console ports with absolutely HORRENDOUS (un-remappable..) controls (one even tells me to press the green A button to continue...), but rather that I find most (though obviously not all) console games of the kinds of games I like seem to lack depth. I don't know if they cant fit the content into RAM or what (Im sure that cant be it), but for some reaosn a lot of console games feel kinda cheap and lacking to me... I can only assume that its just in my head...
Also, some, though again not all, obviously, console games don't let me raise the resolution over the low low HD.
"relatively few gamers are pirates" : sadly, I don't believe that. I work in the games industry and I am surrounded by people who pirate. They also buy a lot of expensive games too, but they continue to pirate games and movies.
"Blizzard is one of the most successful game developers because create games that are designed from the beginning to work well with the mouse and keyboard" : Blizzard are successful because they created the first main-stream, polished MMO. MMOs are the future of games exactly because the server component cannot be pirated.