Profits and Costs of Piracy: Fact and Fiction [WIP]

[Ellie]

One area where it does harm the company is this:

-An online game
Basically, that company has to pay for the upkeep of their servers, and for bandwidth, electricity bills, etc.

If people only bought the game, then maybe 20,000 people might buy it. That's 20,000 people to accomodate server space for.

If suddenly people start pirating the game, even if they would not usually buy it, suddenly you might have 10k more people playing the game. That means 10,000 more people to buy bandwidth for (and they haven't given you shiz in return).

So you put your prices up, maybe introduce a monthly cost for playing the game. Suddenly you don't get as many people joining up. Let's say you get 10,000 more players in the next year. You now have 30,000 people to pay bandwidth for. But because people don't like the monthly fees, more people pirate the game. Suddenly you have 100,000 people to pay bandwidth for, and only 30,000 people have bought your game.

*The figures in this post were made up. Don't sue me.

 

[Cruelty]

Wyatt, some (?) companies have made it either completely impossible, or extremely difficult to pirate online games (diablo 2, starcraft 2), and retain the online playability.

I'm not sure if all companies (probably not) employ the system they used, though..

I don't really think game developers are hurt all too much by piracy. Even though they often spend tons of money on creating a game, but game piracy isn't as popular, or easily accessible (ie; most average people simply dont know how to do it, even if it is rather easy) as say.. downloading music.. where people just go on limewire or something. There is no 'limewire' to videogames.

 

[paslechoix]

True Wyatt, but in the case of some games (or maybe many), it is not the official servers that pays, but the illegal server. Its often a free server that some people pirated the game and put it in it, but the bandwith is no longer Blizzard's (or whatever game company). Then problem comes in when people do not buy the box itself of course ':| where there they loose money. But i don't think monthly fees will be affected. Yes they get less money, but it costs less bandwith too. And it may be possible to hack a game and put in into torrent version, but the getting a cdkey-gen that works on internet (it can work for your installation but not multiplayer) and managing to pass all those stuff is nearly impossible, seriously.

In short, yes they loose money but less then we though. Oh and my friend did a calculation that i forgot all the numbers but even with the satellite stuff and all that, WoW still makes millions. Big companies never get into problem cause of piracy.

Edit :

Hey Cruelty you posted in the same time i was typing! Anyway, Diablo 2 is what i had in mind and without a cd-key fresh from the box the only place you'll get is single player.

Yes there is a limewire for games and its called P2P, i wont list the sites or how it works you can find almost anything.

But even with all the illegal stuff, at least half of the games teenagers play are brought, and aldults buy almost all of them since they have money from working so i think that honest people still are the majority.

 

[Ellie]

/\ @ "WoW still makes millions"

Blizzard has 2,700 employees according to Wikipedia.

If WoW made $10m a year ("millions"), that's only $3,700 given to each person if everyone is paid the same, and that's not a lot to live off.

So "making millions" is nothing to go by.

 

[PeteD2S]

Actually, my friend cracked D2 and plays it online. There are many private servers (they don't accept illegal copies but my friend is able to play anyways lol)

Also, World of Warcraft isn't something you can easily download an d play for free, atleast not with high enough quality. Me and a friend decided to try WoW, so we downloaded a client from a private server website. We liked it very much, but there were some annoying bugs around and the server lagged a lot. A month after that we decided to buy the game and play in Blizzard realms, and we don't regret that decision. The quality of the gameplay provided is much much higher than in the illegal servers.
Edit: Blizz doesn't make millions, they make billions a year.
If every player buys 6months of play time for 10.99 each, that is 10x9000000 = 90000000. that number x2 if they want to play the whole year.

Cruelty, you are wrong when you say that companies that make games aren't hurt much. If you go to those websites that provide torrents for download, you still see a significant number of people downloading great games like TES:IV, NFS and other popular games, years after they were released. That is a lot of money lost. They are still richer than ever but they could even be more richer. If they deserve having that money, they should have it.

There are two things forgotten here.

One of the reasons some peoples download pirated things is that it is more convenient. I seriously wouldn't mind paying that 5$ to rent two movies i want to watch but i need to get to the movie store. The thing also is, you need that 5$ bill and like 99% of my money is in my bank, or at least somewhere usefull like mutual funds.

For program like photoshop or rmxp illegal, im just a little user who is trying to do something fun. Everyone knows me as someone always on the computer and with rmxp i proved to all my friends that i made all the benifit from being in front of the computer, considering so much i learned. But whenever i feel ready to start a project i know i might be able to sell (or at least make people say wow), i will buy that legal version (whether rmxp or vb6). A reason to why prices are that high is that compagnies who will make maybe not millions but at least thousands are willing to pay those hundreds. If photoshop was designed uniquely for little users like me, i think it wouldn't cost that much.

You don't know how wrong you are do you? Yes, you are a small user. You don't use Photoshop for profit or anything, just for fun. But when you are downloading illegal copies, you are also giving them to other people, and that people give to other people, etc... Because you download that stuff through Torrent or Kazaa like programs. That is the same as recording a movie in cinema, make copies of it and give them for free to people that ask you for it. You are stealing and providing. It's as wrong as stealing a car, even though you just wan't to have fun.
I am not throwing rocks at you, because I also do my illegal downloads now and then. What can I do? There is stuff that I really want but I don't have an income because I don't have a job (underage), so I download it.
But then there is that kind of people that have money for it and still download it and some even sell them illegaly, I do throw rocks at that people.
About music, I buy the CD's legally, or if I just like 1 song that's really good, I go watch or listen in the internet, not morally correct but it's not illegal for me either.

 

[paslechoix]

Well, that post is 2 1/2 month old. Almost necropost.

RMXP, yeah at that time i was using PK. Ive downloaded the real one weeks allready. As for photoshop, mine is not illigal from what i know. I paid for it, only, i paid a little less since i brought it in a country where to currency is smaller (is that illegal now?).

I still rent alot of movies, but i live in a far place. Well, far enough to not have access to all of them. Oh, and the video store is not next door.

I never tried more then anything i need to know about D2, but is there really a private server or something? When i open the game, i click on battlenet or something and i log in. I know in the case of Lineage II you could select your server, not to mention every private group of servers had their own auto-updater to change a bit the content to thier style. I never played WoW, never will but from what my friend say it is quite laggy.

If you checked there is 2700 employees on blizzard on wikipedia, why are you saying 10 million? The number right above 2700 is 1.5 billion.

Of course they are hurt, how can anyone not see the effects of what you could say Steal? Difference is, how much do they have left? The difference between stealing an egg from a farmer and stealing a chicken from a nation is sorta different.

 

[Prexus]

I love the "If I wasn't pirating it, I wouldn't have bought it anyways." argument.

Because it's entirely true.

Most people who use Photoshop casually, i.e. Not Professionally, didn't pay for it. They either got it from their school, or with their PC, or pirated it illegally. And if they hadn't? They wouldn't be using it. The likelihood of someone buying a $600 piece of software to use casually is very low.

I know that is the case for myself and my friends/peers. I would never have played TES4: Oblivion if I hadn't pirated it. Same goes for TES3: Morrowind, Warhammer 40k Dawn of War, Diablo 2, Half-Life/Counter-Strike etc.

Yeah, it's not legal. And it's not right. But it can be justified. I got enjoyment from a product that costs money without paying for it. But I simply justify it by the fact I would have done something else with my time, otherwise, and not paid for it regardless. Again, not legal, not right, but justified none the less.

The companies still make their money, and still produce games. No harm done. There will never(truth pending) be a time when a game makes less money than it needs to to have been worth making, because of piracy. I'm sure it will happen plenty of times in the future because the game is poor, or the marketing is poor.

And as far as Music is concerned. I would probably not even know of 1/10th of the bands that I have seen in concert if I wasn't pirating music. Musicians make most of their money off merchandising and concerts, not off their album sales.

 

[paslechoix]

Just a small thing, any high-level software (Visual Studio, Flash MX...) are not just about extracting everything that's inside the install.exe onto a folder like zip folders do. They often put a batch of dll everywhere in your system and stuff like that, and downloading the missing dll from internet and putting wherever you want dosen't really work. I can copy a program that compares 2 texts and show you the differences from my school but certainly not Visual Basic. At least, something like that.

And for those who neither have money or aren't willing to pirate photoshop, they can always download Gimp. Certainly not as good, but can do the job. Besides, if you use it casually you don't need the proffesional tools. Same for programming, im sure there is a free compiler somewhere...

 

[PeteD2S]

I love the "If I wasn't pirating it, I wouldn't have bought it anyways." argument.

Because it's entirely true.

Most people who use Photoshop casually, i.e. Not Professionally, didn't pay for it. They either got it from their school, or with their PC, or pirated it illegally. And if they hadn't? They wouldn't be using it. The likelihood of someone buying a $600 piece of software to use casually is very low.

I know that is the case for myself and my friends/peers. I would never have played TES4: Oblivion if I hadn't pirated it. Same goes for TES3: Morrowind, Warhammer 40k Dawn of War, Diablo 2, Half-Life/Counter-Strike etc.

Yeah, it's not legal. And it's not right. But it can be justified. I got enjoyment from a product that costs money without paying for it. But I simply justify it by the fact I would have done something else with my time, otherwise, and not paid for it regardless. Again, not legal, not right, but justified none the less.

The companies still make their money, and still produce games. No harm done. There will never(truth pending) be a time when a game makes less money than it needs to to have been worth making, because of piracy. I'm sure it will happen plenty of times in the future because the game is poor, or the marketing is poor.

And as far as Music is concerned. I would probably not even know of 1/10th of the bands that I have seen in concert if I wasn't pirating music. Musicians make most of their money off merchandising and concerts, not off their album sales.

I don't know if you are beeing sarcastic, but you have no clue of what you are talking about. Downloading illegal copies of software from the Internet is the same as going to the store and take something from there. It's STEALING. Are you stupid enough to not realise that? You don't deserve the product if you don't pay for it. That argument you used is stupid and invalid. Doesn't matter if you wouldn't want it if you had to buy it to have it, the fact is that you download it and do USE it without paying.