most pirated games 2009

lunarwolf said:
lol,
1. most pc games retail under £30
2. i don't know which product you develop, but obviously you may feel differently if it was being pirated and it would costs your slaary to go down or simply lose your job
3. so executives get more - I don't understand your point that is true of any company
4. "Capitalism will take you for all you've got" what is your point? Nobody is forcing you to buy anything, stealing is unjustifiable unless it's food and you are starving - we are talking about games here!
5. where did i say or even imply that if there was no piracy games would be cheaper!!!
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1.
Console games are generally £40+
You know why PC games are "partly" cheaper? Because they know games are more easily pirated on PC and so have to temp gamers into buying. They are trying to find a price at which honest buying will outweigh the bad of stealing. Although if this doesnt factor in then they really have no idea.
2.
I would assume the sofware is too expensive and so will lower prices to what the consumer would think is reasonable before piracy of said products became rife.
3.
Reading between the lines isnt your strong point so i'll simply put; in most companys if more money is made on a product the staff wont see much if any of the extra profits. Executives wll charge what they can to get the most profit for the share holders.
4.
See point 3, i'll give you an further example -
Executive1: "Hey marketing says we can charge an extra £10 for this addon pack! However no one wants to buy it in Japan so we'll lower the profit margin, I mean better than no one buying at all."
Executive2: "Excellent i could do with a new Porche, oh btw developement team are a bit unhappy after working 12 hour days for the last year"
Executive1: "Oh yea, well we'll buy some lunch for them. We only need them for a month more and then we'll get some new guys in."
5.
You didn't imply, i offered the implication.
Its not the pirates that are going to cause this "possible" reduction of game warehouses. If a reduction of sales is linked to more piracy then its the fact that executives push for higher prices until we are generally left to moral balance situation where piracy is prefered.
Remember the news of the banks failing due to the greed causing gross incompetence. The excutives will keep pushing for the greatest profits not caring about the final outcome!
 
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serves IW/Activision right

spoonjaffa said:
1.
Console games are generally £40+
You know why PC games are cheaper? Because they know games are more easily pirated on PC and so have to temp gamers into buying. They are trying to find a price at which honest buying will outweigh the bad of stealing.
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erm no console games are always more expensive due to the licensing fee to a console maker
 
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I bet only a fraction of the people who downloaded Sims 3 would have actually bought the game had they not been able to pirate it. Tbh those figures are largely irrelevant to calculating lost sales revenue as they won't factor in
- Duplicate downloads
- People who downloaded the game who purchased it at a later date anyway
- People who would have never purchased the game regardless of downloading it

Without being able to make decent estimations of the above those statistics are meaningless.
 
FrenchTart said:
Many of the downloaders would have never bought the game anyhow.
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Exactly. Stating number of downloads and saying thats how many sales you lost is bull****.

Downloads corrupt/fail so you may have to do it again.
Some people may dl a pirate version even though they own the game as a backup.
Chances are people wouldn't buy the game anyway.

Some games i would never consider buying without a demo. Since half the devs don't bother releasing demo's, or at least, decent ones, i think i'll consider alternatives before i flush away £30.

As for CoD MW2, no way in hell will i buy that game, i've heard the SP is good, but if IW think i'll pay £30 for it they've got another thing coming.

Overpriced, overhyped and under-achieving crap is the reason for half the pirating. MW1 is the perfect example of a money grabbing game, as is the entire The Sims series with its constant releases of items that shouldn't cost a thing yet some idiots are prepared to pay for. MW2 would've failed spectacularly if it had been developed identically but by an unknown company.
 
As Steam have proven, give people an easy means to access the games and a cheap price and people will buy games. Hence the Xmas / New Years sale they have on is going really well. I've probably bought 10 games over Xmas.

If you make a game so DRM ridden you can barely run it, limit them to 3 installs, force people to have the media in the drive, etc. then people will go out and pirate the games mainly for convenience. It's interesting when game companies go on about PC piracy and they will move to consoles, well piracy is just as ripe there.

A cheap game good will sell in the bucketloads, an overpriced pile of rubbish won't.



M.
 
Well, personally If I didn't download the games I play, I certainly wouldn't be buying them, unless it was a really good game. I'm not going to lie, and say I only download to test them, or only download because I think it's good. I download because I don't want to buy it. I wouldn't buy it anyway.

There has of course been a few exceptions. Games with good online player, or games I think are worth the money.

It's such a joke for the number of pirated copies, to be considered as lost sales.

It's funny actually, I have been a member of the Overclock.net forums for about 3 years and I'm actually here today because of the last straw layed by the posts on this exact same topic over there. So many high horses, so many self-righteous. If people don't agree then fine, but I hate seeing people act like the pope goes to their house for dinner every sunday.
 
Still I bet that these companies made $$$ from each of these games.
Piracy can sometimes also be a good thing - like free advertising etc. ie you download a game and tell your friends how good the game is and some of them go and buy that game.

All good games with good online futures make tons of $$$.
 
Noel Gallagher said:
I'm surprised GTAIV isn't on the PC list! :O
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Probably due to the reviews saying it was a poor console port. Scared all the pirates from wasting time downloading 6 plus gig on a game which wasn’t going to perform well on their PC’s.

Just like Dom UK, I download games before I buy them but I havent done this for nearly 2 years. All PC games can be had for a decent price now (£23 or less) just a case of looking. A retailer out there is going to sell a PC game for a decent price even if its on the day of release or waiting a week later.
 
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Not surprising why MW2 was top of PC list really, after they dropped the bombshell of no dedicated servers in MP half of the playerbase didn't even want the game for MP anymore so thus pirated it just to play the SP campaign.

Who can blame people though? There was no need to do such a thing, and by doing it it's obvious how much of a profit cut IW took.
 
Game makers got take some the blame for piracy on the PC side when they don't take the time to test their games across a wide variety of PCs and end up letting players that buy the new game the first month be the beta testers and find out new game won't start on their computer.

How a bug like this get pass testing: In DIRT 2, you can not change the default " player one " name if have wheel plug into USB port. Have to unplug wheel, start game, change name to the one you want to use and then close game, then plug wheel back in and restart DIRT 2.

Also, online racing is a big hook to get players to buy a racing game. So why did Codemasters hookup with Microsoft's GFWL ( Games for Windows LIVE ) that only let the 26 supported countries race online? The other players from over 166 unsupported countries that paid $40-$70 for DIRT 2, are left out in the cold and can not race online and have to figure out how to force GFWL into offline mode to save their game while racing offline.

This came as a big shock to players around the world that are use to racing GRID online and now fine they can not race DIRT 2 online and were not properly warn about this before buying DIRT 2!!

GFWL stole my game

Attention. This game is a scam, as it works on Windows-Live

Will Codemasters give new CD-key to those players in unsupport countires that need...

Steam vs GFWL ( Games for Windows LIVE ) and unsupported countries.
 
Have been follwing this piracy debate on a few forums i use for a while now and it seems pretty much split down the middle between those with the holier then thou attitude and what i would call the realistic crowd. Main game i bought this year brand new at time of release was empire total war (i normally wait till they hit bargain bin :D) and having been royally screwed on that game for so long and even now it still not being what was promoted or advertised by CA i can see why piracy is happening.

Is it right to pirate i am not sure personally while i can see the whole moral argument against it and understand that i can also see the other side of the argument in terms of people paying good money to be beta testers for companys and some games being overpriced and frankly crap. Also lest we forget many of these companys treat legal purchasers like pirates witht eh drm included in the games and limits on installs even on steam.

Main reason i think piracy is happening on the pc and it just a personal view is because most of the games are all much of a muchness and once you've bought one you've pretty much bought them all in terms of what you get and so people don't see the point in paying time and again for the same thing so pirate newer titles.

For me i will continue with the bargain bin approach i never have pirated hell don't even know how you would do it and i am not interested as long as i get the deals i do i am happy like this xmas i got rome total war gold for £1.24 off steam and are now playing that again long after my original RTW disks got scratched to hell and wouldn't work anymore.

This is not a black and white issue and for it to be sorted out is going to take movement on both sides of the fence with a new approach from all sides charging as much for electronic downloads as you do for physical product and sometimes more for the download is not helping either.
 
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