Pixelantes Anonymous

"3. How much money are they losing because of piracy?"

I can answer that.

Nobody has a clue.

RIAA/MPAA/ESA are using completely bogus numbers (ArsTechnica had an excellent article on debunking their figures). Other groups involved with piracy issues either depend on RIAA/MPAA/ESA published numbers or don't do any research on it.

So, yea, there isn't one number you can trust on this, and all the numbers you see quoted in public are wrong.

"Why in all hell is it okay for these people to play the game?"

Did I say anything about it being ok or justified? I didn't. My post had nothing to do with the ethical or legal issues surrounding piracy. Why are you responding like it did?

All I said is that a group of people who behave in that manner exist and how their pirating has no impact whatsoever on the bottom line of the developer.

The issue I was raising in the context of World of Goo was that there were 100,000 people who play the game, 10,000 of them bought the game. 90,000 pirated the game. The implication is that World of Goo developer just lost 90,000 sales.

That's not true. They wouldn't ever have had sold 100,000 copies of the game even if there wasn't a single pirated copy out there on the torrent trackers.

Whether or not piracy is wrong is a completely separate issue and has nothing to do with the economics of piracy, which is what my comment was about.

90% of the people who played World of Goo might've pirated it, but this article, as usual, totally misses the mark when it comes to the impact of that.

There are three types of people who pirate games.

1. The ones who would otherwise buy the game, but don't, because they get the game for free

2. The ones who wouldn't buy the game even if there wasn't a pirated copy available

3. The ones who bought the game specifically because there liked the pirated copy


Game developers only lose money on the first type and gain money from the third type. The second type has no impact whatsoever in terms of sales. There's a positive impact in terms of getting the word out about your game, however, provided that the game is good, that is.

Nobody knows the relative size of each group, but if I were to guess, I'd probably say 2nd group is the largest, closely followed by the 1st group. And the 3rd group is probably much smaller.

But the point is that whenever you hear content producers talking about how many people pirate their warez, that's not the whole story.

Bayonet

EA is purposely muddling the waters, again.

Of course most people wouldn't notice within the first month or two into the product's lifecycle.

99% of people wouldn't have upgraded their/bought new PCs three times in two months. Nor would any copies of the game have been resold three times.

EA is spinning this issue so hard they must be dizzy in the head by now.

GT5 is out already? Man, how'd you get your hands on it already when the rest of us will have to wait for another year or so?

Please do tell us more.

"U.S.-based Laguna Seca and Road America, are exclusive to RACE Pro"

Both tracks have been included in Forza Motorsport games before, so I don't think how they're RACE Pro exclusives.

Ah, the old "delete your cache and everything will be ok" placebo.

Remember folks, whenever someone tells you to do this it's a sign that they have no idea what the hell is wrong, but they want you to think that they do.

Frankly I find it a little bit surprising EA still tries this crap on anyone. XB3F, do us a favor...next time some clueless game company lies to you like this, call them on it rather than just report their lies as some sort of miracle cure.

I'm sure the Ensemble guys really are appreciating the Microsoft bigwig, who canceled the Halo MMO project they were working.

That one showed some real long-term strategic vision.

Man that 10x multiplier was a bitch to get. I just did it last night. The time it takes from 9x to 10x is insane.

Didn't manage to break into top 1000 in the leaderboard on that run quite though. That's my next goal.