The thing that pisses me off the most about game pirates...

[vlad321]

twesterm said:

Oh!  Also, music online is $1 a song.  Yeah, I can pirate 100 songs and still spend a $1 and be counted in the positive section of your survey.

But anyways, here are some links for you from a quick Google search:

• The Cost of Movie Piracy in the US
• Software Piracy costs $34 billion dollars
• Music Piracy Costs Money, does fighting it cost more?
• How much did piracy hurt the Wolverine movie?
• Sims 3 downloaded nearly 200,000 times days before launch so we can assume that's about 125k copies not bought from one of your above links

As for the Sabateur, pretty tame is a long shot from a bad game.  Sabateur may not be a game of the year contender, but that doesn't mean it's a bad game (getting a 73-75 at the moment so still a good game).

And Ensemble burned through A LOT of money.  They made good games, but they also cost a SHITLOAD of money to make those good games.

And I'm not sure if these two points didn't sink in but I'll say them again:

1. You cannot predict if a game will be good before it's made.  At the very beginning of the project you have to set a budget and that budget isn't for a $15-30 game.
2. Mirror's Edge would have sold more, but not nearly enough to make money at $30 new.

And do you think Blizzard spent less money with a small team for WoW?

El. Oh. El.

Blizzard spent a crap load of money with a huge team developing that art style.  They were smart because they made something pleasing to look at that could run on most any somewhat modern computer.  Blizzard cost more than most games cost to make and not just because it was an MMO.

As for making games bigger and badder (as in more bad ass), I've talked about this problem a lot mainly regarding Final Fantasy.  Games set bars really high and if you don't hit that bar, you're going to be automatically seen as inferior unless you do something *really really* special.  If a developer makes a game that isn't on par with whatever is new, the game will likely fail.

My turn to criticize those. Not a single one of the first 3 you linked even looks at whether the pirates also spent more money than the people who don't pirate or don't. As the actual first article mentioned, the study only tracked the effects when they were negatives, but conviniently left out any positive effects. I also trust the RIAA and the MPAA the least when it comes to credibility on this type of subject.

About the Cnet article, while it's good it neither tells whether pirates also buy more software (in that specific area they probably don't) nor the fact that people try to sell their full priced products in placces where people make very little money (acerage salary in India is $800). That jsut means that the businesses have an utterly shitty business model, and instead of accepting that fact they use piracy as a scapegoat. Pirates are just unhappy customers, offer them a viable option an they will take it.

The third article is irrelevant. It talks about ISPs trying to combat piracy, which wouldn't exist if companies got their heads out of their asses. Also that $200 probably also does not count all the extra revenue they got from pirates who buy more than non-pirates.

The wolverine is also a bad example. You can go with the 15 million and I can use the same article to show it cost them 0. Also that doesn't factor in the fact that if people realized that the movie was not good (I paid to go see it twice, so i liked it a bunch) then they just didn't go to the theater. I can maybe even argue that MORE people saw Wolverine, since it was a workprint and unfinished, so it made people who didn't want to go to go, effectively being positive for the movie.

As for the 200k Sims 3 figure I'll just quote the article on that:

""Sims" games have sold more than 100 million copies since 2000, more than any other titles for the personal computer."

So I doubt those 200k actually did anything at all. I ealize it's all Sims games, but the rule still applies to Sims 3 as well, it sells truckloads easily.

As for The Saboteur, it's not the greatest game, so why should it be priced as much?

Whether they burned or didn't they still made money and Microsoft didn't even try to put an economic spin to their closure, which would have been the easiest for PR.

So fine, companies can't predict initial quality, but they can price drop within a week or two when they do learn. There are still a lot of potential buyers even after that short amount of time. If the game is good or bad it will be known within those first few weeks.

As for Mirror's Edge, I don't know how you can assume that because I can assume just as easily that it would have made enough money.

 

Finally, for Blizzard. I doubt they spent nearly as much money on the graphical side of things as the people who push polygons. Going by your logic, Retro sepnt as much money on their graphics for Metroid Prime 3 as Naughty Dog did on Uncharted 2, which is simply not true.

It's also funny you bring up the "up the game" part because I have only seen agmes being dumbed down more and more this generation. As an example, compare Neverwinter Nights with KOTOR. Fewer classes, far fewer feats, and far far fewer spells. That's dumbing down, not even matching. World of Goo and Portal managed to wow everything and innovate and truped all games that have been recently released, and they did it on a small budget (well, not so much Portal as much as the initial idea of the developers before Valve snatched them up).

 

In the end it all comes down to money. What you want is for consumers to adopt to businesses, which even under capitalism is utterly wrong and messed up. You don't make something and then force people to like it, you make something and if people find it valuable then they buy it. Obviously people don't find software as valuable (ESPECIALLY in countries and in places where they make little money) as companies think it is. You have to think those stats on torrent sites are worldwide stats, not just the US and modern countries (in one article you linked it mentioned the US has the smallest amount of piracy actually). I ask you, if people in the US don't find prices reasonable, what do you think people in other countries think?

 

Edit: It's funny you should mention AAA price tag this generation, because the 2 games I keep repeating are better than just about all AAA games this generation and they had minimal amounts of money. Again if you think of Portal as the game it was before they were allowed to used the Source engine.