World of Goo Experiences 90 Percent Piracy Rate

[Aardvark Soup]

I think they could have decreased this percentage if they offered more options to pay for the PC version of the game. Especially outside of the US, there are a lot of people without PayPal or credit cards who would be unable to play the game if they would not own a Wii. I luckily do have a Wii but I find it incredibly annoying that I can't play a lot of other PC exclusive indies because I simply cannot pay for it.

 

[fnph]

Hey remember when Metallica came out against Napster because P2P would make everyone in the music business poor and living on cardboard boxes on the street?
Shut up about piracy already. Everyone knows how to avoid it. Build consumer loyalty by continuously pumping out good titles and treating your costumers decently and people will give you money.

There's one problem with your strategy for avoiding piracy. A new company with their first major commercial release. Also, they treat the customers fine. So, how do you avoid piracy then, genius?
Also, don't tell people to hust up about an obviously at least slightly important issue that's cheating honest, hard-working people out of well-earned money. It's not nice.

 

[TheEggplant]

"actually most cable isp's are mostly static, they say they are dynamic but they rarely change their ip address. dsl is mostly dynamic"


I wasn't aware of that concerning cable, but my point still stands as I have 1.5Mbs phone line xDSL.
I also stand by my turning off the upload option statement. They do not have a real method of calculating actual piracy rates. This is guess work based on assumptions. Going after a problem with false information is more useless then no information. These sort of numbers reinforce the continued restrictions the large corporations are getting passed into law. These laws make your backup copies illegal. It isn't fair and it isn't right that developers are getting ripped-off. I also isn't fair that I could be fined and/or go to jail simply because I like to play my disc based games with out a disc and watch my disc based movies on my computer.

 

[Jaccident]

Ready for the truth boys and girls? If you like being able to play games offline, buy the games now! Because otherwise 3-5 years down the line EVERY game will require you to authenticate online prior to play. You think piracy will be stamped out by DRM? Not alone it won't and while the games industry teeters on the edge or the same economic recession as every other industry, high speed broadband access is getting faster and more widespread each day. So when it comes to it we'll look at the broadband penetration statistics and say "now it the right time"
Fact is the only way to prevent that from happening is to stop pirating so much.

In addition who ever said the Dynamic IP issue makes those statistics defunct is a fool. While it's true Dynamic IP assignment will skew those statistics heavily what difference does that make. These people have still devoted their lives to this game for 3 years now, and they've discovered that over half the copies in circulation are fake. Can you imagine if you'd spent 3 years making the perfect paper hats and you put them up on the street with a pay box next to them and a sign that says "Stealing is Illegal" and found that despite your time, efforts and personal capital poured into these hats over 50% of people just took them.
[/rant]

 

[Doug]

Updates for people: At the 2dboy blog (http://2dboy.com/ ) they updated the figure based on more accurate information (profiles per user and installs per user). Based on the updated figure, the piracy rate is still 82%.

Honestly, I've lost that tiny remaining shred of faith in the human race.

 

[Rankao]

His explanation is a little off, if there is a debt to be paid by someone, and that someone dies somehow, the debt is transferred to anyone who has claim to estate, which almost always includes next of kin.

I might be different from state to state, and country to country but it really depends on the issue of the debt. (after some research) You can't transfer direct debt to a family member upon death, it can however be taken out of your estates before it is transferred, retirement, savings, past paychecks, life insurance, and housing. The only debt I truly known to be transfer would be a mortgage on a house when a person transfers the house.

So if you aren't worth anything, legally there isn't much a organization can do to collect the debts.

Your family will bare cost, such as funeral and possibly medical, but other debts can not be transferred to the benifators because of this.

At least that how it is in the United States.

On the Topic, yes please don't pirate games,and I know you feel like you are sticking it to the man. You aren't whenever it a Indie game. Instead, you are just going up to the guy who mows your lawn and punching him really hard.

EDIT: I also like to note that the link on the blog is actually interesting insight. The Indie companies look at the download rates at 1000:1 meaning, for every 1,000 downloads they see a lost of potential one sale. On a Bigger company this might actually scale down to 500:1 - 100:1 in lost.

 

[AlphaWolf13]

This game doesn't have any protection at all.
There was nothing to "crack" to try and give the game to torrent masses.
So it was kind of expected.

 

[fyrh56]

This game doesn't have any protection at all.
There was nothing to "crack" to try and give the game to torrent masses.
So it was kind of expected.

No it was not. Sins of a Solar Empire didn't have any kind of copy-protection, yet Stardock was selling the game like hotcakes.
Thing is, besides being a bit too expensive in my opinion, there is no way to get this game outside of the US. There is no way whatsoever to get this game in South America, Europe, Asia, Africa or Australia.

Well, unless you torrent it. Which considering how much hype this game is receiving, 80% of the world is going to do if they ever plan on playing the game this year.

 

[Doug]

This game doesn't have any protection at all.
There was nothing to "crack" to try and give the game to torrent masses.
So it was kind of expected.

No it was not. Sins of a Solar Empire didn't have any kind of copy-protection, yet Stardock was selling the game like hotcakes.
Thing is, besides being a bit too expensive in my opinion, there is no way to get this game outside of the US. There is no way whatsoever to get this game in South America, Europe, Asia, Africa or Australia.

Well, unless you torrent it. Which considering how much hype this game is receiving, 80% of the world is going to do if they ever plan on playing the game this year.

All Stardock games are DRM free - the downloader is only necessary to download the game, but can also update it.

 

[Zombie_King]

Never even heard of this game, but honestly, how can they tell how much it's pirated. Oh, it's been seen on Limewire and Bittorrent, guess we'll call that 90 percent?

Ffff, by the time it's on Limewire, even your granny has an illegal copy.

 

[shadowbird]

Purchasing my copy as soon as I get home. $20 is, in my opinion, a nice middle-low for a game (considering that the cheap ones are $5-$10 and the hyped ones around $60) and every indie developer deserves support if their prices are reasonable and you enjoy the game at all. That said, I will then probably download the game from the BitTorrent anyway, just to avoid the slowness and hassle of Steam. So I guess I will not affect the balance either way.

But, unfortunately, unless they reveal exactly how they're measuring the ratio, the 90% is just empty words with no weight. I wish we lived in a world where you could believe what developers and publishers say about piracy, unfortunately thanks to a lot of companies pulling huge and supposed-to-be-shocking numbers out of thin air blowing the problem out of proportion, we don't. So I don't see any reason to believe this is anything more than an overreaction to seeing a lot of people sharing on BitTorrent.

EDIT: Never mind, found their blog post. Technique seems reasonable. Though it begs the question, without leaking to the torrents, how many of those 90% only found out about the game from torrents, and how many would have purchased it without free download option. Because unless they would have (discovered and purchased), they are not lost sales, they're free advertising.