Piracy and Small Game Developers

fish99 said:
It's not a guess, I checked before posting. Go look for yourself.

There are ways to track piracy. You can track torrents for a start, or you can make programs that call home with cd-key info. If it doesn't stop the game running it doesn't get hacked out. They're not my numbers though so I don't have to defend them, but until someone comes up with a credible source that shows something different then I'm gonna take them at face value.

Witcher did ok, but without piracy it could have done much better. There may be other games of equal quality in less popular genres where piracy is the difference between staying afloat and going under.

Btw just a little number you might be interested - 50,000 people downloading assassins creed on PC right now.
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Where did the number come from? a link would be nice or you may aswell just have made them up (apologies if you have i couldnt see it when skim reading to find it)

in addition you didnt mention if those figures include those who tried it pre-release then bought it, those you subsequently go on to buy it, the number of failed downloads so they had to re-download it, the number of cancelled connections resulting in retrys etc etc etc...
If any of the above are included then the numbers are flawed and no more useful than the bioshock console vs pc sales

Average gamespot user score 84%, that's not subpar and by all accounts it's a really decent game, although I haven't played it myself. People need to stop using this good game/bad game argument. Fiat make rubbish cars but does that entitle you to go out and steal them from the dealership? No. Is it ok to shop-lift from Primark because their clothes are rubbish? No.
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If you buy a rubbish car over the internet and do not like it when it arrives you can return it under the distance trading regulations
if you buy clothes online and do not like it when it arrives you can return it under the distance trading regulations

if you buy a game and do not like it, you cannot return it, you're examples are not the same thing
 
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so it ignores all the points i mentioned,
it essentially adds together connections so people with mutliple downloads on the popular torrents will come up as seperate people (he only filters the ones smaller then 250), so makes it pretty pointless to quote numbers from tbh
He also seems to concatenate language packs, addons, directors cut etc on to the numbers

It also doesn't take into account what proportion of those are going to go on to buy the game as mentioned before, so again shows no real representation of how it affects sales at all
 
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What recent games have people needed to download because of no demo?

I just don't follow recent games so can't think of any myself, but not gone searching for releases.
 
Bane said:
What recent games have people needed to download because of no demo?
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Luckily not many recently apart from The Witcher, which I downloaded and ended up buying.

I bought Crysis as I played the beta and demo of it and liked it. I pre-ordered Call Of Duty 4 as I simply love the series, and thankfuly I've not been disappointed.

I did download the full version of Bioshock though as I felt the demo didn't really give enough feel for the game, ended up deleting it very quickly as it just wasn't my thing.

So yeah recently has been okay for demos, but earlier last year we had S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which I downloaded, played for half an hour, bought and then realised I hated it when the bugs started to appear. This will only encourage me to play through a pirate copy more in future before deciding, if there's no demo.

We didn't have a demo for Supreme Commander, but I loved Total Annihilation so I bought it anyway.
 
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Piracy and Pc gaming..

Man Stardock rocks :D:D

http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512

Yes, treating the potential customer-base correctly is what it's all about.
Treat 'em well and you'll be rewarded. Presume they're all evil warez-users and you're in for a lonely time. One of my fave games is GTR ....horribly protected via rootkit. Fortunately Simbin got it 'right' [or better] with GTR2...at least it does NOT install what probably classifies as the ultimate low-point for PC Game copy protection. Since GTR2's release I have hardly run GTR....simply for that reason....
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