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dinsdale -> RE: StarForce - The Other Side of CP Story - Thoughts ?? (9/11/2004 6:12:05 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Hertston
Solid or not, there are, as they say, lies, damned lies and statistics. What that one conveniently misses is any account of how many of those playing the pirated game would actually ever have bought it ?. In a very few cases (say Doom 3), the answer is without doubt "a great many". In most cases though, the answer is very few. There are millions of kids (of all ages) out there who have huge "libraries" of downloaded games software, music, and movies. Most is forgotten immediately after downloading, and only a tiny fraction would ever have been purchased if the piracy option was not available. Piracy is bad news for publishers - but nowhere near as bad as those figures suggest.
:thup: I agree completely. Software is the only industry where not only do they guess the pirated figures, but they also assume that every one of those mythical copies is a lost sale.
Back in the day, there used to be a newsgroup where people would post pirate copies of software they could never use, would never use, but wanted to have. Larger sized application, the greater the kudos from others. It always struck me as bizzare: people wanting to choke their harddrives with Fortran development suites or the latest Borland product. I'd say a lot of that is still going on: people download Doom, play for 5 minutes then move on.
Of course I might be wrong, but then I have as much chance of being accurate as the bull beign spewed from the CP industry. 70 out of 100 ROFL, did someone pick the number out of a hat [:'(]
quote:
I think a far bigger factor is profit margin - console games are, and always have been more expensive than their PC counterparts, with no associated increase in production and distribution costs.
Great point. No one seems to notice that with PCs, the scope of games keeps increasing. More complex, more graphics/art etc, but selling for the same price. A console is a fixed piece of hardware with a limited expectation of complexity, it's fixed dev costs are very appealing to publishers.
I would also add that PC games are becomming such a problem that people are buying consoles. *anecdotal evidence alert: * a friend of mine just bought an X-Box, he's a wargame guy from the earliest days of PC games, but he's done what he always swore he wouldn't. Instead of waiting for the next game which doesn't work, he's playing games which go into the CD and work immediately. Now I can't see myself ever doing the same, but the number of calls I get from friends who ask me to fix their PC after some disaster has struck convinces me that PC games are going to be niche products soon. Maybe it will be better that way. It was wargames and adventures which pioneered PC gaming in the 80's, maybe companies won't keep blaming pirates when all the pirates have switched to the next generation of consoles to play on.
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