Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.

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Anakha56
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Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.

Post by Anakha56 »

http://tommyrefenes.tumblr.com/post/456 ... han-piracy
Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.

I think I can safely say that Super Meat Boy has been pirated at least 200,000 times. We are closing in on 2 million sales and assuming a 10% piracy to sales ratio does not seem unreasonable. As a forward thinking developer who exists in the present, I realize and accept that a pirated copy of a digital game does not equate to money being taken out of my pocket. Team Meat shows no loss in our year end totals due to piracy and neither should any other developer.

For the sake of argument, some of those people that did pirate Super Meat Boy could have bought the game if piracy didn’t exist but there is no actual way to calculate that lost revenue. It is impossible to know with certainty the intentions of people. With the SimCity fiasco and several companies trying to find new ways to combat piracy and stating piracy has negatively affected their bottom line I wonder if they’ve taken the time to accurately try to determine what their losses are due to piracy.

My first job outside my parents cabinet shop was at KMart. KMart, like countless other retailers, calculates loss by counting purchased inventory and matching it to sales. Loss is always built into the budget because it is inevitable. Loss could come from items breaking, being stolen, or being defective. If someone broke a light bulb, that was a calculable loss. If someone returned a blender for being defective, it wasn’t a loss to KMart, but a calculable loss to the manufacturer. If someone steals a copy of BattleToads, it’s a loss to KMart. All loss in a retail setting is calculable because items to be sold are physical objects that come from manufacturers that have to be placed on shelves by employees. You have a chain of inventory numbers, money spent and labor spent that goes from the consumer all the way to the manufacturer. A stolen, broken, or lost item is an item that you cannot sell. In the retail world your stock is worth money.

In the digital world, you don’t have a set inventory. Your game is infinitely replicable at a negligible or zero cost (the cost bandwidth off your own site or nothing if you’re on a portal like Steam, eShop, etc). Digital inventory has no value. Your company isn’t worth an infinite amount because you have infinite copies of your game. As such, calculating worth and loss based on infinite inventory is impossible. If you have infinite stock, and someone steals one unit from that stock, you still have infinite stock. If you have infinite stock and someone steals 1 trillion units from that stock , you still have infinite stock. There is no loss of stock when you have an infinite amount.

Because of this, in the digital world, there is no loss when someone steals a game because it isn’t one less copy you can sell, it is potentially one less sale but that is irrelevant. Everyone in the world with an internet connection and a form of online payment is a potential buyer for your game but that doesn’t mean everyone in the world will buy your game.

...
Not sure if this ties in with rusty's thread but anyway... Follow the link for further reading...
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Re: Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.

Post by hamin_aus »

Old argument is old.

100% true but still old.

Some companies don't care that their piracy "losses" are completely thumb-sucked.
In their minds every pirated copy is a lost sale and they aim to make up these losses by passing the expense on to you - loyal customer.
But when companies go out of their way like EA did to screw loyal buyers by making games always on, even when they knew that wasn't necessary and was in fact spoiling the gaming experience - even lying about it...
Then I have to draw the line.

EA will have to make a really special game in order to make any money off me after SimCity.
But I might go and pick up SuperMeatBoy on steam :D

Also, don't we have a piracy thread where this has been rehashed several million times :P
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Re: Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.

Post by rustypup »

piracy thread was locked?

i think....
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Re: Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.

Post by hamin_aus »

:lol: You think I'd know that being a mod and all



Scintillating contribution, by the way
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Re: Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.

Post by rustypup »

behave or i'll sick adria richards on you...

his point has been made by many others... the corporates will never buy it because it would mean letting go of their security blankets...
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Re: Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.

Post by hamin_aus »

rustypup wrote:behave or i'll sick adria richards on you...
Please do.
I'll fork her repo.
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Anakha56
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Re: Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.

Post by Anakha56 »

Boys please... This is not the thread about dongles and repos... :P :lol: Although it did have Super Meat Boy...
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Re: Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.

Post by StarBound »

Piracy happens and those that pirate is better off than those who buy the product especially when there is dlc, always connectivity ect required.

DRM (I belive rusty said it) is access control. The ability to control when and which platform you play on, limiting the time until your ready to be milked again and providing you with non renewable content.

Quite frankly I've move past seeing piracy as any kind of threat to anyone when dealing with digital content. The bigger concern is how long is the lifetime of the product you bought.
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