dredgon said:
- What is your main reason to pirate a game(price, poor gameplay etc.)?
- When you pirate games do you then consider buying them afterwards depending on if they were a worthwhile experience?
-If you were to make a ration of 1-10 of how many times you pirate compared to how many times you buy a game what would the ratio then be?
- How much does advertisement, hype and history with the game/company influence your choice of getting a game?
- If you were to choose would you rather pirate a game or wait and buy it when it gets cheaper?
Firstly, story and gameplay are by far the most important aspects to me. Great gameplay can make up for a crappy story, a great story can make up for crappy gameplay. Get both and you've struck gold.
Now, hypothetically, if I WERE to pirate (ahem)
The primary concern would be price. When cash is available buying games is a lot easier. Often times keeping up with hardware demands, getting the next killer ap... all of it becomes prohibitively expensive. To use a personal example, I used to watch hulu all the time. Then I started making more money, so I got cable and watched that. Then I started making less money so I went back to hulu.
I knew this dude once who had an obsession with minotaur related mythological screennames who pirated a copy of starcraft and loved it so much that he immediately went out and bought a legit copy. And then did the same with black and white. And the witcher. And dozens of others. In fact, he considered it something of a vetting period. Sort of an extended playable demo. The awesome stuff got purchased, and the crappy stuff didn't. He was a bit of a selfish prick though.
Again, hypothetically, if I WERE to pirate, the ratio would probably be about 50/50 again totally contingent on finances. And I would probably pay for it (if it were good) the second finances picked up.
Advertisement, hype, all of that definitely influence my decisions concerning games. More than that though, good reviews, recommendations from people I trust, that doesn't happen in a vacuum. There are a myriad of ways to get information on good games, one of my personal most trusted sources is ZP.
And again, hypothetically, if I WERE to pirate a game, I would have no compunction in doing so immediately as I know that I am more than willing to pay for something that's good.
The entire concept of piracy as a whole is a fallacious notion. It's based on the extremely flawed premise that every single person who pirates a game would have bought it, and then won't because they pirated it. Now the reality of the situation is that there are going to be people who will and won't buy a game. I for one am not overly fond of the madden franchise. Being fair though, I've never played any of them. Ever. So I will never buy a madden game. But I might pirate one, someday, if I were that type of nefarious individual. This would open me up to genres I had never considered, expose me to games that I would have never otherwise even looked at. But I digress. The point is, not everyone is going to buy every game. So given that premise, let's assume for a moment that all the people who wouldn't have bought it anyway, pirate it. Now again, the company would have made X dollars before from this game and is making X dollars now. The only difference is the number of people playing. In fact, if anything, it exposes their game to audiences that would have never played it otherwise.
Now, are there people who pirate everything and never pay for it? Of course. These are the same people who used to borrow games from friends and beat them, or rent them at a video store. They're selfish, but they always were. They weren't buying games before piracy either.
So at the end of the day, piracy or no, the company makes roughly the same amount. The problem is when they look at the numbers of people playing these games and say, "Now wait a second, if all these people were PAYING us we'd have made a trillion bazillion dollars!!" When in truth they just wouldn't have played it at all.
To use my "friend" as an example again, a few years back he pirated a copy of Fahrenheit, and of course thought it was the most awesome game ever made (right up until the moment when it wasn't). He never bought this, because the unedited version was never released stateside. It was released here as Indigo Prophecy. Now because of this, when Heavy Rain came out, he got really excited and dropped 70 bucks immediately on the console special edition. A game he never would have otherwise played.
Now, in the defense of the developers, to my knowledge the open sourced games that have been released haven't gone over huge. But the first developers to find a way to draw in an audience, yet find a way to make money off piracy rather than attempting to stop it will make a bloody fortune. Look at something like minecraft which is heavily pirated, yet still made notch enough money to build a palace on the moon. The effective business model is there.
I remember when I first heard of mp3s back in the 90s. Everyone was saying "Quick! Get em while you can! It's going to be shut down ANY SECOND!"
That was 17 years ago. They can't put the genie back in the bottle, yet somehow the game, movie and music industries are still there. The only thing they've lost is their fictional billions that they feel they should have been making. Meanwhile the ipod embraces piracy and makes a mint, for themselves AND the music industry.
There is no measure they can take which will stop piracy, because the pirates are smarter and more agile than the corps. The harder they try, the more they alienate a group of customers they could be making money off of instead.
(the preceding was a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)
