I have to say I'm in two minds about this.
Sales of computer games have increased year-on-year for nearly 20 years now. Although the PC has lost ground from being the number one games platform its sales have still been increasing year-on-year as well.
There are some costs to take into account:
- The cost of creating a game has increased substantially over that period
- The level of piracy has increased substantially over that period
- The amount spent on advertising has increased substantially
Still, with all those factors taken into account, software houses, big or small, should not be finding it difficult to turn a profit.
I don't disbelieve the guy when he says that the game experienced a 92% piracy rate, but I have to question why it was so high. This number is way in advance of figures the BSA quote as the average level of games piracy. In fact, it's so much higher that you have to wonder what exactly was going on with that game.
Piracy is a strange thing. If we change media for one moment, and look at films, we can see that, in the last five-six years the profit that MPAA organizations have made has actually tracked the amount of piracy of their products - the more piracy there has been the more money, in that year, the studios have made. It could be argued that this is simply because piracy tracks peoples interests in a product and thus if there are better products out in one year there will always be higher levels of piracy that year. I don't find this argument compelling though because I feel it fails to take into account that, as piracy is free, people will download something even if they have a vague interest in it - in the absence of something better to download.
If you're trying to stop piracy all you have to do is develop a system sufficiently complicated enough that it stops piracy for the first 6 months of a product's lifespan. It is in this first six months that most of the profit is made and, as such, any loss of profits after this are comparatively minor. People unsure whether to play a pirated copy of a game or buy a copy will, in the most, also give up waiting after a few weeks and buy a copy. How to make copy protection last six months is near impossible though. Certainly building in online content helps, but I can't help coming to the conclusion that we need to go back to the early 90's solution of physical devices. Whilst a very small custom-USB dongle would add to the cost of the game you could have a single device per developer to off-set the cost and, with it being firmware upgradeable, new ciphers for new games could be added relatively simply. It's a solution that wasn't popular in the past due to the added cost and hassle, but I think both of these can now be ironed out with the increase in tech.
Whether piracy should be destroyed though is, as I've previously indicated, debatable. This is because:
- Piracy acts as a viral marketing tool - people start reporting how amazing the game is even before it is 'officially' released
- It increases the user base, which in multiplayer games specifically, is very important
- It gets people in to playing games who might not otherwise
- It helps build children's exposure to games, which as the recent government white paper on creative Britain details, is vitally important in motivating people in to moving in to the creative industries when they grow up
Currently the most pirated 'console', by a huge margin, is the DS, which is also the best selling 'console'. It's not stopped developers making games for it nor has it made Nintendo stand up and try to do something about it (such as modifying the hardware/firmware to stop it) and, as such, there's at least an implication that developers and console manufacturers alike aren't as bothered about piracy as they seem to protest they are.
I currently have 13,000 words of notes on these issues
dissertations are, like longcat, looonnnnnnng.
, not sure on the amount needed to recoop before it goes into the developer 
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