Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

“There Is Not Really a Business Case Anymore for Making Single-Player PC Games.”

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 6, 2011

The above quote sounds like it might come from the head of a big, fat studio.

But no, it comes from one of the more successful indies – who made his business (until recently) out of making single-player PC games.

The pirates have won.

Of course, I say this as I’m wrapping up development on a multi-year single-player PC game project, so I’m even more terrified than I was before. 99.8% piracy? I used to think it was a gross overstatement to claim the pirates were the ones destroying PC gaming, but now I’m not so sure.  This sort of thing is incredibly disheartening as a guy who really, really WANTS to make games for the PC, and who loathes onerous DRM / copy protection.

There’s a glimmer of hope: CDProjekt announced last week that their PC-only, single-player RPG The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings sold through 400,000 copies the first week.

(Oh, and incidentally, for those who don’t know (I didn’t until I was in the biz): “Sell-through” numbers are very different from “sell-in” numbers.  The terms are tied to the brick-and-mortar business model. “Sell-in” refers to how many units were delivered to the stores. Sales numbers traditionally referred to sell-in counts, rather than sell-through numbers, as the latter referred to sales to actual customers which was harder to obtain. But with digital distribution, it’s all sell-through.)

And Jeff Vogel is reporting that his copy protection for his new game, Avadon: The Black Fortress, the most lightweight yet, but it sounds like it is breaking recent sales records.

I don’t know if the answer is, as Cliffski suggests, to make every single game with some kind of online component. I really don’t want to bolt that onto my game ideas. But these numbers are pretty disheartening. Pirates will make excuses (they’ll say, “I’d buy your game if you did X and Y,” but then still pirate it if you do X and Y anyway…), developers will give up on the platform in disgust and make quick-and-crappy little titles that can still be profitable at $1.99 on the iPhone, and PC gamers who will happily buy a game that caters to their needs get the shaft.

Hopefully there’s still enough of the latter two remaining.  The PC remains my gaming platform of choice. Playing a few retro titles from GOG.COM recently has helped remind me just why that is the case.


Filed Under: Biz - Comments: 32 Comments to Read



  • Bad Sector said,

    Way to ignore the rest of the thread (and other people who are also successful – see CasualInsider for example, according to whom, btw, the game in question was far from flawless) by focusing only on what Cliffski said 😛

    9x% (where “x” has a big margin of error) of piracy is something known for years now. If you notice, it was even mentioned in Masters of Doom about the sales id made in early 90s (something like “one out of 100” would buy the game, etc). This “9x%” is mentioned in every “piracy stat”. And in fact it was only a couple of days ago that i saw it mentioned on Reddit by some 18yo making an iPhone game (i think). At this point you *have* to factor that in your calculations (assuming you make calculation :-P) or at least expectations when making decisions.

    Yeah, it sucks that the piracy is so high, but it is part of the medium. I don’t think that if an answer this issue wasn’t found the last 30 years it will be found any time soon. At least not without locking platforms and hardware down and even then it isn’t bulletproof. Also personally i prefer my platforms open because the positives outweigh the negatives.

  • sascha said,

    But then again: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/piracy-are-we-being-conned-20110322-1c4cs.html

  • Enry said,

    Well, to be fair the guy that said your title quote in that thread also said:

    “Making it really awkward and inconvenient for pirates to get a working, legit full copy of your game is pretty easy. All pirate sites allow anonymous membership, and anonymous uploads. Why make it easy for people to pirate your work?”

    Which shows he knows exactly _nothing_ about how pirate sites or piracy works.

    Even with as little respect as I carry for Jeff Vogel as a person in general, he actually has real-world experience, as opposed to cloudy theoretical musings, and I would listen to him before I listen to that other guy.

  • Jason said,

    Quoting anything on IndieGamer as relevant, and especially anything Cliffski has to say about piracy is pretty clueless.

    That said, there’s a lot more money in non-single player games, but the bar is higher in what it takes.

  • BellosTheMighty said,

    So in other words:

    1) Everyone gets pirated.
    2) Some games are successful despite piracy.
    3) Some games aren’t.

    Seems reasonable. Solution: take a look at the games and the figures, find out what distinguishes games that are successful from those that aren’t, and don’t make games that aren’t going to be successful. (Or, if you have to make them for the aaaaaahrt, do so understanding that you’ll probably be releasing them freeware.)

    Working hypothesis: games that aren’t successful despite piracy aren’t very good games.

  • sascha said,

    “developers will give up on the platform in disgust and make quick-and-crappy little titles that can still be profitable at $1.99 on the iPhone”

    Also, I don’t think this statement holds much truth. Big business devs might give up on a platform but indies like you and me aren’t giving up PC just because of piracy. We’re way too attached to this platform and know all the advantages of it.

    It’s the current trend of the mainstream of targeting mobile platform with cheap and crappy games that have everything but depth. But at some point people will be fed up with this and looking for more.

  • Max said,

    TL:DR version – USE STEAM

    Just some perspective from long standing ,semi reformed pirate ( I only pirate music and movies now). I grew up in USSR and then in Russia -100% of all our software everywhere was pirated at my time. There was some mythical “boxed software” no one saw and no one could imagine paying $40 (or more ) for something which only cost 50c (cost of media)

    When I moved to US I kept pirating for 3 reasons
    1) Pirate software is easier to download (just one click)
    2) Pirate software is better quality ( DRM removed) – I dont need CDs in drive etc
    3) Pirate software comes at reasonable cost ($40 ? -get real, I used to make that much in month in Russia)

    Nowdays I try to buy most games on Steam ( I boycott buying stuff from EA and from few others for political reasons). Why? -main reason to support devs and feel better about it. But other reasons steam is good in 1) and to lesser degree 2). And it gets close on 3) when on sale . I bought witcher 1 on d2d and I still use pirate copy of witcher ,because d2d drm is obnoxious. I swear nothing pisses me off than DRM -if I am determined I would find way to run it without paying you a dime.

    I ran all starforce games (harders one to run typically) – I probably spent a week finding ways to do it but I did it. Just in spite ( and it was a great game). During my 15 years of pirating I only found one game I couldnt run (was one of the splinter cell’s ) – and it mostly cause I didnt care enough. Most of cracks and mini-images are ready to download of sites like gamecopyworld .

    I wrote my own cracks for obscure indie games and beta versions (sins of solar empire I cracked myself) . You will not stop piracy by DRM. When I was teen I would try crack stuff just for fun and there will be always people like me.

    Now make it simple . Make the cost reasonable. make it hassle free. Don’t try to challenge one’s intelligence with DRM. If you do – one guy will find the way and make it easy for 99.9% on other to get it from piratebay

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    To the contrary, Cliff Harris probably knows more about piracy and countering piracy than 99.99% of indies. He’s been a very active anti-piracy crusader, sending tons of take-down notices, uploading false versions of his games on pirate sites, gained a lot of notoriety for his dialog with pirates where he engaged them in a frank discussion about why they pirate games. His games in particular. The responses were mixed, but responded.

    And he’s one of the more successful indies out there.

  • Enry said,

    Well he sure didn’t show it on that post is all I can say.

    Implying you can complicate piracy by getting on pirate sites yourself and uploading bad versions of your own game is absolutely ridiculous and amounts to nothing more than a newbie’s wishful thinking – as anybody who has spent even 5 minutes looking at how that stuff works could tell you.

  • Menigal said,

    Piracy is a bad thing, but largely an excuse that companies use to justify focusing on trendy mass-media systems. Most of the “research” I’ve looked at doesn’t ever look at causes of piracy, like a game not being available in a certain area or not offering a demo to see if it’s worth paying for, or address how many pirates would end up buying the game if they couldn’t pirate it, and then compare this to people who just don’t want to pay for it. Not had the change to read through this link yet, so possibly it does look at these issues.

    Yes, piracy happens. No, piracy is not the main reason for poor game sales. If people want it and you’ve made it easily available for a reasonable price, the really interested ones will pay for it. To hell with the people who download it, play around with it for an hour and move on to other things.

  • Calibrator said,

    Oh noes! Another piracy debate!!!1

    More seriously, though, if something isn’t protected it will get pirated *instantly*. Fact. Dedicated groups exist for several *decades* now that have nothing else on their agenda than to crack quicker than their “competition”. They don’t care who’s distributing the cracks to whom and which profits (and companies) get annihilited in the process. For those deranged individuals it’s about “honor” and “respect”.
    If there is some sort of protection it gets cracked, whatever the cost and whatever remains of the product (no video? pah! no single-player campaign? who cares?). If there is no protection (to support the paying customer): Great! A round on the house!
    They crack and distribute what’s available. If nothing is available then nothing will be cracked and they’ll turn their worthless existence to something else.
    The moment a games company supplies some product again they’ll be back and doing their “work”.

    This and nothing else is fact.

    But what about the “playing side” of this mess? The guys who should be paying customers?
    The majority of those won’t pay unless forced to. And I don’t speak about more or less poor people from countries traditionally fucking the software industry.
    Yes some of those are pupils and students with next to no income like I was back then (I got games mostly as birthday and xmas presents but I imagine that todays teens rather prefer cellphones and other status objects).

    I bet the rest of my teeth that the majority of users of pirated software is solvent enough to pay for a few games per month but think they are clever by avoiding that!

    Don’t believe the posting Jay linked to? Well, read up some postings by shareware authors then. Remember, these are the guys who relied on the honor of the player to pay after he got a (full) product and was able to ascertain its quality.
    The reality is, practically nobody paid for shareware which is why this business model is practically dead.

    What to do then? Where to draw the line between *reducing* piracy (you won’t prevent it!) and “hurting” the paying customer (the one who still pays your rent) by enforcing more or less brutal restrictions?

    Well, I was the first person to shun Ubisoft for providing their online copy protection and a lot of things still don’t add up.
    However, I admit that I began to symphatize with such measures like that or at least with an *ideal* connection between publisher and player which will benefit both.

    But – and this is a big one – it’s also a fact that today’s big publishers rather fuck their customers and squeeze every penny out of them instead giving them real incentives to stay a – for example – Ubisoft customer who buys the next installments of their franchises, which, given the nature of the whole sequel business, would make a lot of sense, wouldn’t it? Jeff Vogel lives on returning customers, too, and he is churning out sequel after sequel, too. I mean, this guy even pays you your money back if you don’t like his games!

    But speaking about the mainstream:
    – Why no free online content for paying customers? A sucky little bonus weapon for a limited edition buyer?
    – Why costly expansion packs that are often a joke, content-wise? Bethesda, I hope you hear me!
    – Why $1,99 for a measly avatar costume?
    Because it cashes in big time: Next to no expenses but thousands of players buying that online (the network provider gets a cut of course). We have discussed this to death here.

    So, yes, while offline single-player games still make sense all mainstream publishers may eventually turn itself into software services that sends you a runtime.exe that loads everything on the fly as needed.

    Don’t like this idea, having paid for a Quadcored, Geforced, 16GB machine and no money for software?
    Well, you asked for it, dude.

  • Enry said,

    I mean, yes sure, you’ll get someone to download the bad version of your game – and inconvenience them for all of 3 minutes before they get back on the sites and re-download from a reputable rip-group, thus taking the time to learn about the complex (yet very easily accesible) systems of reputation and trust that pirates keep among themselves to protect themselves from viruses and hack attempts, never mind “wrong versions” of a piece of software.

    And in the end all you did was teach the pirate to be a better pirate.

  • Menigal said,

    Ah, I see the Coyote’s already linked to one of the bits of research that actually talked to pirates.

  • T-Boy said,

    There are some unanswered questions about the linked post and the thread so far:

    1. So if the piracy rate for a videogame aimed at 24-45 males scores a 99.8% piracy rate, does the value change when the demographic changes? By how much?
    2. How many people, right, when faced between dealing with videogame pirates and developers who are convinced that you, the player, are out to bilk them out of their well-earned income… just stop paying for videogames altogether?

    Not stop playing videogames. Not rely exclusively on pirated games. Just… playing video and computer games, but not giving money to anyone. In short, relying on open-source and freeware games.

    Because I’ve been doing it for nearly a decade now. I decided that rather than feeling guilty, or feeling insulted, I’d just… stop. I mean, sure, I’d buy the occasional game. But the last game purchase I made was Torchlight. I haven’t bought anything else since.

    I can’t imagine I’m a majority anywhere. But… you know, between the choice of buying legit and pirating a game, most people don’t consider that giving it up is a viable alternative. After all, we are talking about an industry that produces a luxury.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    I didn’t really intend this article to be about piracy, but about the odds being stacked against offline PC games. Rampant and casual piracy being an apparently major factor in this.

    Maybe I’m acting a little like a dinosaur, but I feel the “change your business model” cry is, at this point (for digitally distributed indie-created games) more of a cry to “make a different kind of game.” I reject that notion, though I acknowledge that the approach to making those kinds of games may have to change.

    The problem is that digitally distributed games are not immune to the law of supply and demand. The real root of the problem is that games (and music, and videos) freed from technological ties to a limited physical resource, are effectively in infinite supply.

    Infinite supply means that perceived value with a finite demand is going to trend towards zero. That’s economics. And that’s a big problem with something that takes a really significant effort (and cost) to create.

    The approach that seems to working, now, is to change games from being a product to a service. A game is more of a living vehicle for the suppliers to keep selling you stuff. Like being in a restaurant. The analogy grows thin quickly, but that’s at least a part of the approach.

    I’m just exploring (as I do, periodically) the problems inherent in the model. People really get up in arms when you say something like, “Piracy is bad.” It is, but it’s not a winnable war for the developers. Escalating with more and more draconian DRM is not the answer. But it’s stupid to ignore the truth that piracy has gotten to the point where people consider it “normal.” And where the massive undertaking that is a game is expected to be priced below the price of a fast-food combo meal.

    That’s the landscape. It is actively hostile to game developers – at least makers of single-player games on the PC. Period.I don’t even think that’s a point worthy of debate.

    “Hostile” doesn’t imply “impossible.” But games – and game developers – need to adapt to survive, and so I go through this exercise on a regular basis to try and figure out a better way to make it work. I take a look at what other (successful) game developers are saying and doing, but I don’t necessarily want to ape their approaches. In some cases, I couldn’t if I wanted to – in many cases they succeed mainly by being the first out of the gate or the biggest one to try it, thereby drawing attention to their approach that a smaller johnny-come-lately can’t hope to achieve.

    But it’s something we have to keep exploring. ‘Cuz, as a gamer, I still want the kinds of games only indies make anymore, And I want them to keep making them – voting with my wallet and my efforts to draw attention to their creations.

  • WhineAboutGames said,

    TL:DR version – USE STEAM

    *stabs Max with forks*

    Not an option for the majority of people! Steam is NOT AN OPEN PLATFORM!

    (Not grumpy at all, oh no…)

  • Fumarole said,

    This is about books and not games, but it is interesting nonetheless that free online copies of books can increase sales.

  • Andy_Panthro said,

    A few of the things I’ve noticed about piracy (in its many forms) over the years…

    1. People will pirate almost anything.
    2. The more popular it is, the more it will be pirated.
    3. Your DRM will be cracked.
    4. Piracy statistics count everyone equally (by which I mean the teenager with no money from Argentina who downloads a game that is not available in his country counts as much as the man from the US who makes a choice not to pay for the game that he could buy for $30)
    5. Making it online-only doesn’t help (there are Ultima Online Free shards for example)

    When I was younger, I lived in a country where games of any sort weren’t sold in the shops, legally anyway. If I wanted a PC game, I went with my Dad to the computer store and for a little bit more than the price of a 3.5″ floppy disk, you could get games like King’s Quest!

    Without this introduction, I may never have become the avid PC gamer that I am today. Over the years I have paid rather a lot of money for my hobby, more than I have paid for books and movies (all formats) combined.

    My days of piracy are long behind me, and yet the DRM has evolved far beyond the serial key or code wheel. I support indie developers in particular since they are more likely to produce the games I like to play. I’d hate to see those potential games in jeopardy, but I also can’t condone DRM measures that will ultimately inconvenience me far more than any pirate.

  • getter77 said,

    Piracy has been a thing the world over in all realms of software, just one of those things.

    My own plan is straightforward, if a roll of the dice same as many other potential ways to go about it: Can’t afford DRM stuff, can’t be bothered, aim to make as best a game I can with little to no budget while keeping it lively and courting as much of an enthusiastic audience as I can reasonably wrangle in the long haul.

    Maybe some other Indies will start to actually try to take GoG up on their offer to do more stuff with Newer games and such so long as all is up to snuff with the usual content level of a Gog release? While they didn’t scream it from the mountaintops in one of there FAQ videos a few months back, I’m rather certain it was thrown out there as an “If only people would come to us in good faith and try…”

  • skavenhorde said,

    Here are a couple of old article from N’Gaia when he worked at Newsweek’s blog, Level UP. It was an interview with Vic Davis on his game Armageddon Empires. I know it’s not an RPG, but it is an indie singleplayer strategy game that did very well despite piracy. He was very frank with his numbers.

    I had to find these articles using “The Wayback Machine” because I couldn’t find them at Newsweek anymore.

    Interview with Vic Davis: http://web.archive.org/web/20080517013650/http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/archive/2008/05/12/180-degrees-the-secret-of-armageddon-empires-indie-success-part-i.aspx

    He did a model on why Armeggdon Emopires was such a hit. First the AAA model for success: http://liveweb.archive.org/http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2070/2484303781_4c5693af8e_o.jpg

    Vic Davis’ model: http://liveweb.archive.org/http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3273/2484303727_035b34c1e0_o.jpg

    I’ve used this interview and model many times due to the fact that Vic Davis was very frank with his numbers and his sales.

    Now while I’m sure his game was pirated day in and day out, but that didn’t matter. He still did very well especially after word-of-mouth started to reach interested customers (like me).

    Also, I should add that Armageddon Empires was not on Steam, Impulse or GamersGate and he still did very well.

    Piracy has always been an issue even back when piracy just meant a friend copying the game for another friend (Why do you think they had those codewheels for Starflight or the Goldbox games 🙂 and yet there are plenty of games and indies out there who are still alive and well…..maybe not “AAA Superstar well, but well enough” Jeff Vogel’s been in this business for quite awhile and there are more popping up every year. Basalisk Games, Heroic Fantasy Games, Soldak and a few others keep popping up every year. This year it will be Rampant Games and Gaslamp Games that will be added to the ever growing list of indie developers to have released a product(what’s with all the “games” in the title 😛 )

  • skavenhorde said,

    Sorry, I forgot to include the second part of the interview where N’gaia did the sales model for Armageddon Emprires (it’s at the bottom): http://web.archive.org/web/20080517151728/http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/archive/2008/05/13/180-degrees-the-secret-of-armageddon-empires-indie-success-part-ii.aspx

  • LateWhiteRabbit said,

    This is argued endlessly, but I think counting all piracy figures as lost sales is a fallacy.

    I would argue that as few as 10-15% of those pirated copies are actually lost sales.

    Listen to the stories in this very comment section on people from countries like Russia and other poorer countries. It IS nonsense to expect those people to pay a month’s wages to buy your game legit. Would it perhaps be morally more upstanding for them just not to play it? Of course, but the point is you NEVER LOST A SALE. They would never have bought it. Could never have bought it anymore than we could drop $2000 on a movie ticket.

    Yet those same pirates are counted just as equally in these percentages as everyone else. Students, young teens, foreigners, all these are people with computer access and limited or non-existent funds for games. They pirate, and developers list their numbers and shout from the roof-tops, “Look at all the copies I could have sold if not for the damn pirates!”

    Piracy has always been a factor in EVERY medium, we are just able to track it much more accurately now. Shakespeare’s theater troupe and others had to employ crowd spotters and watchers to keep people from copying and writing down the play as it was performed! Early publishers had to worry about pamphlet copies of their books being produced on the black market and sold on the cheap. How many songs were copied off the radio and passed around on mix tapes?

    Hell, look at this:
    http://books.google.com/books?id=ISUEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT67&lpg=PT67&dq=gramophone+piracy&source=bl&ots=rUGehPxAdb&sig=tuV2FZ_G8dBiXfaL9BiuzVC56k8&hl=en&ei=4-DtTZ35K4Hz0gHVzrmcCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=gramophone%20piracy&f=false

    That is a magazine article from 1979 claiming that their LP record has sold 10,000 copies, but PIRATES have sold 7-10 times that! Why does that figure sound familiar? That’s right. They are claiming a 70-90%+ piracy rate. And I also quote, “Very soon, they’ll find they have nothing left to pirate.” Yet here we are, 32 years later, and people are still making music, still making money off of it, and yes, people are still pirating it.

    And Rampant is right. Supply and demand still applies. Only we have now made good on the old thought exercise they use to give Economic majors. “What if supply was infinite?” The answer is your economy is broken and you’re screwed. An old sci-fi story once had a economist screaming at scientists who had invented a replicator that they had doomed society, and the only hope was to invent something that couldn’t be replicated.

    People have an innate sense of what “something is worth” and a lot of it has to do with supply and demand. If you went to a store and saw the owner had tens of thousands of chocolate bars, you wouldn’t expect to pay as much as you would if he had only a single bar, now would you?

    That is why to sell things like bottled water, the companies have to create a PERCEIVED VALUE for the product. “Mountain spring fresh. More pure than tap water. Healthy. The drink of winners.”

    Successful game developers do the same thing. They foster a community. They reward customers and loyalty. They don’t care about pirates. They just make everyone else feel special.

    Now, none of that works if the game isn’t great. I’m sorry, that is basic Business and Economics 101 as well.

    I am just tired of developers blaming pirates. Yes, pirates are bad. But piracy in a lot of mediums for decades has been this mythical 90%, and I’ve pointed out why that is crap. 90% of the people playing your game may have gotten it for free, but the majority wouldn’t have bought your game ANYWAY. It is likely, that the actual number of copies you sell is the most your game could sell at its current level of quality and marketing. Period.

    Think about it, if EVERY game has 90% or higher piracy, then that is a default given in any business model or calculation and cannot count at lost sales. I find it HIGHLY suspicious that the piracy figure across all media for decades is quoted at around 90%. Maybe it is true, but again, that would mean it was always a fact of the businesses involved and has no relation to the success or failure of YOUR business. Unless ALL businesses in the same media have failed, I.E. that entire field of business and profit has gone extinct, then it can be surmised that if your business is not doing well, piracy cannot be SOLELY blamed. Something else you are doing is either not right, not efficient, done poorly, you have poor marketing, location, whatever else it may be, etc.

    Simply put, budget accordingly. If the best selling PC games from Triple A companies sell 400,000 copies in your genre, you can pretty well guess that to be the ceiling. A best, best case scenario. Now look at other PC releases that are less successful but are still very popular. Keep weeding it down to arrive at an actual realistic number.

    There is a reason professional design documents always start with market projections for that type of game.

    Now, if you have calculated that you can only realistically hope to sell 1000 copies, and you know that to be competitive, you will have to price the game at say, $25 dollars or less, then you know that realistically, you can’t spend more than $25K on development or you will never break even. So let’s say you have to shoot for developing the game for $15K or less. Now you have to decide – can you do that? Is it worth it?

    My business professor at college when I was getting my economics degree always said that a business had to innovate its model at least once every ten years or it would shrink. Let it go on long enough and it will die. Woolworth’s and Sears. They used to be as big as Walmart in the United States. They didn’t change. But the world did.

    Pandora’s Box has been opened. We all live and work in a realm of infinite supply for our medium. We have to find a way to make that work. We have to innovate and adapt. I don’t have the answer – if I did, I wouldn’t be telling you all, I’d be getting rich. But I know blaming piracy is a poor excuse.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    I hate to only speak to a tiny section of your comment, LWR, but if only 10% of the pirated copies were lost sales, then the above quoted over 99% piracy rate would have potentially sold 10x as many copies of the game.

    The rumors I have heard is that the increasingly draconian, customer-punishing DRM schemes these mainstream games are adopting do seem to work by the best metrics they can use, which is why they keep going back to that well, which I personally feel may be sacrificing the long-term health of the industry for short term sales, but what do I know?

    I do think 90% piracy rate is pretty much the default and has to be assumed. But it’s not the actual piracy rate that’s the concerning issue… it’s the effect piracy has on devaluing games. You’ve got loud-mouthed jerks already saying things like, “$20 is too much to pay for this game, I’ll just pirate it.” If a game is too expensive, fine, don’t buy it. But the entitlement mentality seems to be spreading — “I want to play it, but don’t want to pay for it.” It’s not as stigmatized even as much as it was 10 years ago (and things were bad then).

    So yeah – that’s gotta be built into the business model, which is the point Cliffski was making, IMO. Sure, you can try and fight it head-on, as they are doing with DRM, but that’s ultimately a losing battle. Or you can abandon the field entirely, and go make the kinds of games that are far less vulnerable to piracy (online, mainly). Or… what?

    I think there’s a lot of room for “what,” but it’s going to be a lot of work.

  • skavenhorde said,

    Well, minecraft is doing extremely well. I wonder how many people would pirate that game if they could? I’m not kidding myself either it probably already has been pirated, but since it’s server based I would assume that it isn’t as easy to pirate and play as say your normal singleplayer game.

    I’m just guessing here and using common sense/personal experience, but if a consumer can get something free and easy they will. If you make it just a little bit more difficult or you make it easier to buy the thing they want then they won’t pirate it.

    Take me for instance; I have these damn region restrictions on what I can and can’t buy and download for my Xbox360. Now there is a way around those restrictions using a VPN and a lot of trickery from my computer. But you know what, it’s just too much work to buy it than it is just to hop on my computer and play something there. I don’t understand the reasoning behind region restrictions nor do I care, all I know is that I want to buy something from them and they won’t let me.

    This is just my experience in trying to actually buy a freaking product with idiotic region restrictions. I’m not even trying to pirate the damn thing. I want to spend my money they just won’t let me.

    That is a whole different can of worms, but I think it applies here as well. Make a product just a little bit more difficult to pirate and see how many of these “casual” pirates will still get it for free or will just buy it if they want it.

    So while I’m against starforce or DRM like that, I do think that in the future even indies will need companies like Steam who make it just a little bit more difficult for pirates to play the games for free. It’s annoying, but I don’t really care. Steam offers me other services that make it easier for me to enjoy my games like constantly updating any game and I don’t have to search through my library for a freaking DVD dongle key.

    The key here is to make it easier for consumers to purchase, play and enjoy a game while at the same time making it difficult for pirates to copy and play that game. The obvious answer is Steam and that would be ok with me as long as they don’t disappear off the face of the planet or take away all my games for idiotic reasons (they have done this to a few people).

    One thing I should mention before I end this, Witcher 2. That game is doing extremely well even with NO DRM what-so-ever. That right there throws a monkey wrench into my little theory. If that game can do very well without any DRM what-so-ever then we have our answer. Make a product as easy as possible to buy, download and play.

  • LateWhiteRabbit said,

    @Skavenhorde

    Minecraft has indeed been pirated. As have all the Ubisoft games that require a constant connection to play.

    You probably DO want at least a little DRM, but probably nothing more than requiring a serial key. This will deter casual pirates, but not unduly inconvenience paying customers.

    But yes, games without DRM can do extremely well – see the Witcher 2, Galactic Civ 2, any Stardock game really.

    It goes back to my argument that a great game will be okay and do well, even with piracy. The 10% or so of actual “lost-sells piracy” has less and less effect on the life or death of the game the more copies it sells.

    @Rampant

    10x WHAT though? How razor thin does your margin have to be before 10% lost sales are fatal to your business? Again, figure 10-15% rates of actual lost sells into your business model. If that doesn’t happen, you’ve gotten a 10-15% bonus. If it does, you’ll survive just fine.

    I mean, everytime I read about the 90% plus piracy figure and how it has killed some indie developer, I see figures like “less than a hundred games sold” or “just a couple hundred games sold”. That means those games weren’t going to be a success or make back their money anyway.

    It is far easier to blame pirates than the fact that your game may not have been very good or your marketing non-existent.

    The very fact that we see a lot of successful indie games means it can be done, piracy be damned, because you can believe they are getting pirated just as much or more than you.

    I think a market like Steam or GOG.com is ideal – Steam has built in DRM that is unobtrusive, and both have something invaluable – built in marketing.

    I know people shout about how Steam is not an open market, but really it just looks like they are very picky about quality. The whole package has to work for them – gameplay, graphics, etc. And why shouldn’t they be picky? It is what keeps them on top, and they offer invaluable services, namely free advertising. The first day your game releases, and probably for the next few days, you are guaranteed 4 million+ eyes on and aware of your game A DAY. Even a 1% buy-rate off that figure is a massive windfall for indies.

    And people rail against Steam’s sales of indie titles, but it puts those titles back in the spotlight when they have faded. More sales.

    Steam makes buying and playing indie titles mandatory for unlocking it own big AAA title releases early, or for earning hats in Team Fortress 2. So indies get to ride in the wake of big title marketing.

    I don’t know the specifics of the deal developers make with Steam, since that is private, but I’ve never heard anyone speak badly about those deals except for those that COULDN’T get a deal.

    In case you haven’t guessed it, my suggestion for success is massive, huge exposure marketing. You do that and your game is great, it will get the sales it deserves. Sites like Steam and GOG.com are potential avenues to do that.

    Big Triple A titles sell so well not necessarily due to quality, but because HALF their budget is often marketing. Indie developers often miss that or don’t do it well.

    It doesn’t matter if your game is the next best thing to sex and chocolate if no one hears about it.

  • WhineAboutGames said,

    I know people shout about how Steam is not an open market, but really it just looks like they are very picky about quality. The whole package has to work for them – gameplay, graphics, etc. And why shouldn’t they be picky? It is what keeps them on top, and they offer invaluable services, namely free advertising.

    I don’t object to Steam being picky; it’s their site, they can choose what they want.

    I do object to them sometimes trying to give the public impression that they’re more open than they are, and to the way a lot of the public reacts by accusing and attacking developers whose products are not on Steam.

    I yell so much about ‘not an open market’ not because I think Steam has an obligation to be one, but because I want everyone else to recognise that they’re NOT, and to quit hassling developers about things they can’t change.

    On a less urgent level, ‘quality’ is a subjective thing, not an objective one. ANY gatekeeper is going to make choices that you or anyone else won’t always agree with. There are games on Steam that I think are complete wastes of disk space. There are games I’ve paid money for and think are awesome that were rejected from Steam. There are games that were rejected point-blank from Steam only to be turned around and accepted later on (generally after the game got more public attention).

    It is not “Any game can be on Steam”. It is not “Any good game can be on Steam” or even “Any sufficiently good game can be on Steam”. It is “Any game Steam likes can be on Steam” and that distinction needs making. 🙂

  • Silent said,

    I’d probably have a lot to say about piracy, as both a pirate and a buyer (I do not think these things oppose, not even for one same product : I’ve often bought copies of things I had already stolen, and stolen copies of things I had already bought – language localisation being one huge factor in that, as original versions are extremely difficult to find in a foreign country, and localized versions can be irritatingly awful). Most people I’ve seen pirating a certain kind of marchandise were also the people I’ve seen buying the biggest amount of it, and I -naively?- suspect that the pirated quantity of one product has mostly to be added rather than substracted to the quantity of sold copies. But to be honest, I feel all this and all the rest on this subject has already been said too many times, here and in many other places.

    However, I’m always interested in the borderline question of second-hand acquisitions, and people’s stances on it. Many of the games -and most of other things, books, films, etc- that I buy, I buy in second hand shops. This is getting increasingly difficult for PC games (steam in particular forbids this), and that evolution seems to be supported by moral argument that don’t seem to be applied to other kinds of products (cars, furniture, litterature…). I’m interested to understand why. Especially, as I’m myself uncertain about the moral status of second-hand acquisition (which I’ve often used as a way to buy a game cheaper without remorse, not being quite sure why I felt so).

    I suspect that the paradoxes of second-hand can shed a light on the question of piracy, but it is seldom discussed. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some interesting points about it were to be raised on this specific website, given, I must say, the general quality of local discussions.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    I’m personally a fan of secondhand games, especially console titles. I feel the developers are well within their rights to do whatever they want to do to de-value secondhand games, too – such as tying it to an individual user account. But I don’t believe there should be any legal barriers to re-selling or giving old games away.

  • Silent said,

    Did you manage to pinpoint the reason why you don’t feel you’re cheating an author as much as if you were pirating the game ? Is it because you reward another person (the re-seller), or because you purify yourself by punishing your wallet (almost) all the same ? Or because you feel it only concerns one copy as opposed to the numerous ones that are implicated in pirate networks (even though you’d also pirate only one), or is it a matter of simultaneity versus politely-waiting-in-line, or a mix of both (the acquired copy won’t “grow back” without people investing more in the source, even though, very theorically, a tiny number of copies could be re-sold ad infinitam) ? Or do you still feel you’re cheating someone ? Are we second-hand clients just unsupportive hypocrites, closer to piracy than we’d like to think ?

    I for one never managed to solve this conflict, I only (used to) push it aside. Could this be a zone where the universes of self-defined pirates and self-defined legitimate buyers overlap ?

    Am I asking awfully bad questions ?

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Actually, it’s known as the Right of First Sale, which was recognized by the supreme court that the right to transfer ownership of physical goods applies equally to copyrighted works. At least that’s how it works here in the U.S. and in many other countries.

    I have no problem with doing business with a used book store, either.

  • WhineAboutGames said,

    The existence of a secondhand market makes it easier for some people to buy the games new, knowing they can resell them if they don’t like them or need the money.

    The existence of cheap used copies also helps keep people in the habit of buying games legally, even people whose funds are limited and might be tempted to just take them. A lot of people buy games cheap/used if they’re low on cash or uncertain if they’ll like the title, but will pay full new price for something they like a lot.

    If Alice buys the game for $50 and then sells it to Bob for $25, it’s not substantially different from Alice and Bob having gone halves on buying the game in the first place. Sure, that breaks down a bit if the game is passed on to its twentieth owner, but how often does that really happen?

    Some grumbling starts when you have used copies that aren’t being sold directly but are instead passing back to a middleman who makes progressively more money off the same copy every time it’s resold, while the original dev doesn’t. Then it’s not sharing, and it does start to feel a little more like loophole abuse, but, well, shrug.

  • LateWhiteRabbit said,

    @WhineAboutGames

    I understand what you were saying about Steam now, and pretty much agree with all your points.

    For the record, I like your games and their quality.

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