Another view of game piracy

arknor said:
i bet a lot of the budget for the majority of games is advertising and publishing costs
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i bet man power makes up a large chunk of the budget ;)

indie games generally have less ppl working on them, and the ones that are working on them, can do it in thier spare time.

so essenially they can creating them for free.

development teams for some of the larger games, could be 100's of people.

say you have a small team of 20 working on a game over the course of 3 years of development, and are getting paid an average of say £25,000.
that still comes to £1.5million, just on wages for a small team
 
say you have a small team of 20 working on a game over the course of 3 years of development, and are getting paid an average of say £25,000.
that still comes to £1.5million, just on wages for a small team
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how many recent games take that long? EA pump out sequels every 6-12months
 
It cracks me up that a lot of the big name developers seem really surprised we aren't willing to shell out our hard earned money on poorly-ported unoriginal console titles - complete with suicide-inducing drm, which does nothing but add fuel to the fire (hackers luv a challenge).
 
Thanks a lot OP!!

I've been awaiting Samorost 2 + World of Goo for quite some time now. Never thought I'd get them in a 'pay what you want' deal with several other games.

I paid twice to gift the second batch.
 
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arknor said:
how many recent games take that long? EA pump out sequels every 6-12months
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EA's sequels are quite often more like expansions to existing games, so it takes less time.

althou for a big company like EA, they can have a lot more ppl working on the games to cut the time down abit, but also can start much earlier.

its not uncommon for a large company to start working on the sequels engine before they've even finished the previous game, so even if there is a year gap between games, its possible they have been in development for much longer.

but then, not all EA games are released as quickly, just look at the sims 3, it was annouced a year and half before it was released, and it already had a lot of development done by that part
 
G_Wizz said:
It would be nice to see a major release at $10 to see the effect this would have on numbers sold vs piracy.
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Valve published a document a while back. Can't remember the exact details, but they said they made more profit when it was sold at $10 than when it was sold for $30.

Problem is for devs is that the publishers take a large cut - a proper release at $10 would leave them with practically nothing. In Valve's case, they distributed their game via Steam, so no middlemen to take a large slice.
 
Here is it:

“Last weekend, we decided to do an experiment,” he says, referring to this past weekend’s Left 4 Dead sale, which brought the game down to $24.99 through Steam – sales rose 3000 percent, and revenue far eclipsed the game’s sales during its launch window.

Meanwhile, Newell notes, retail sales did not change at all (full Steam integration allows Valve to monitor retail sales as well) – defeating the assumption that Steam sales cannibalize retail sales.

“One thing that really annoys me is the inefficiency of pricing we have in our industry,” Newell says.

When Valve held its recent holiday sale, titles discounted by 10 percent (the minimum) they saw revenue (not unit) increases of 35 percent. At a 25 percent discount, revenue was up 245 percent.

At 50 percent off, revenue was up 320 percent, and at a 75 percent discount, revenue was up an astonishing 1470 percent. Newell stressed again that those revenue boosts represent actual revenue dollars, and not unit volumes.
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I think that information about the sales increasing when the products is a cheaper may be a bit misleading. I doubt they would get comparable increased sales if they were cheaper originally.

Its a tactic which supermarkets have been using for years, you just get people to percieve that the price is cheap then they will buy it in droves.

They increase the price of something, and say that that is its normal price, when it isnt really at all they just have it at that price for the legal amount of time for them to say it is then they sell it at the reduced price with big bright stickers saying reduced from. Some items are almost permently on offer, and if you look closer the reduced price isnt really a good bargain. But because it says its a bargain it must be. They use all sorts of strategys like this to get people to buy stuff, sometimes going into grey areas of illegality.

People in general are stupid. If these developers wanted to make better profits then they would do the same sort of thing. Over inflated original price then subsequent offers in a cyclic manner at a normal or just less than normal price.

Its cynical but its true.
 
Nice read.

apatia77 said:
Haven't these games already been sold before?

Good games will always sell well, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2 probably will end up as the most pirated games ever but at the same time they will sell well and earn Blizzard millions of dollars.
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I for 1 intend to pirate Starcraft 2 (if i get it at all) because i'm 99.9% certain it'll be utter ****e, certainly not a lost sale because i wouldn't consider buying it. Who knows, maybe they'll release a demo...

Diablo 3 i'm undecided, maybe it'll get some good (unbiased) reviews and i'll get it, maybe it'll just look like its trying to ride on the back of Diablo 2 for some free sales and not actually be that good. Then of course i have to decide whether or not to actually buy it purely because the last time i used a CD/DVD to play a game was Oblivion and Blizzard use there own digital download system instead of Steam... oh and judging by there store page they actually seem to be trying to sell Diablo 2 + LoD for £19... i mean seriously?

@Calabi... you mean MW2? With its *epic* 18% off offers :rolleyes:
 
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