Illegally downloaded games 'up 20% in five years'

[Djinni]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/15627247
The number of illegally downloaded video games has gone up nearly 20% in the last five years.
Figures from research firm Envisional also suggest the top five games from 2010 were pirated online almost a million times.
Industry executives are worried these figures mean a generation of people will expect to get games for free.
But some gamers dispute industry claims about how much of a problem online piracy is.
Illegal 'testing'
Newsbeat met Sam who illegally downloads around 100 titles a year and ends up buying around 50 of them.
"I buy games because I've pirated them, if I don't get to try them I never would have bothered picking them up."
Sam, who didn't want to give his surname, says he's not put off by the threat of being fined or sent to prison.
"I've never been fined. I've been doing this since I was 14 and I'm now 23.
"Games that I enjoy I purchase, ones that I don't enjoy I delete."
The video games industry says all piracy is theft and the answer lies in offering fairly-priced alternatives to illegal downloads.
Andy Payne, chairman of the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment (UKIE), believes it's something the industry is already doing.
"You can be playing that game every single day for a year.
"Look at Fifa, Modern Warfare, Black Ops, those games people are playing all the time. That's great value."
Earlier this year video game executives told Newsbeat online piracy cost the industry hundreds of jobs and millions of pounds.
However, UKIE is reluctant to give a similar estimate for either, saying it is nearly impossible to get an accurate figure.
It is keen though to emphasise that big blockbuster titles can cost millions of pounds to produce.
"Two hundred, 250 people sat in a studio for two years building the latest Modern Warfare 3," says Andy Payne.
"This costs real money."

Ok, I know its an old article, but I'm supposed to discuss this for some assignment due on Friday... and was wondering what your thoughts are on the Legal, Social, Ethical and Professional issues and implications are surrounding this.

[Deleted]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCk9Cheiqqg

Stephen Fry summed it up for me. You cant tl;dr Stephen Fry -_-

[Drunkenvalley]

DRMs are bunches of pisstakes at the customers, and a very large amount of them either force users to evade them (Fallout 3/NV has weird issues for Russians) through piracy, or the customers would rather drink their own piss than play the game on that particular platform (GFWL for example).

So to hear piracy has gone up is not the least bit surprising to me.

However, I doubt it is a real number. Piracy should imply that the user has not bought the product, but there's usually no way of knowing if they have or haven't, so if you ever spot those figures about "potential customers lost" then you can take a good swig of Jack Daniels and laugh really, really hard at them for me.

[Deleted]

The American comedian, Louie CK made an announcement regarding him selling a comedy routine (new material) for only $5. He's achieved this price by cutting out the middle man. He goes on to say its going to be free of DRM and all the usual advertisements, email harrasments etc that you normally get with ANY purchase of anything these days. Hes very aware of piracy and visited a popular site to view the comments on the torrent that directed to the show he very recently released.

He says that where as its a slight gamble whether this carefree way of distributing his material (without any hidden crap installed) will be viable, but, the end of the day it wont make or break him - its more of an experiment. Theres an AMA on reddit from him where he mentions it as well. I'm keen to see whether this honest, fair and laidback attitude actually turns out to be hugely successful, with him respecting customers instead of branding them. I really hope this model of fair price and "if you actually buy it, i`ll make more" attitude takes off. I hope it does.

[Keller]

I think it's good. All the games lately have been a long list of sequels. Also the industry is growing - ofcorse it means piracy will follow.

[Deleted]

Meh. Games sales. PC ownership and console ownership have gone up though. so yes piracy will go up to. Its taken out of the overall context too much.

[Adorada]

While piracy does, for the most part, produce lost sales (while other times it actually creates a sale), it comes down to the quality of the item. People lose their jobs, not over piracy, but because of the outcome of the item. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 recently broke the billion dollar mark and yet that game is and probably will be for quite some time, one of the most pirated games out there today. It sells well because, while others might disagree, is still a fairly solid game. If you produce a quality game/music/movie/etc, piracy will not have a huge impact on the sale (not saying it won't, but it won't cause any major shutdowns/losses). Kaos Studios (creator of Homefront), recently got shut down by THQ. Why? Because Homefront was a failure and couldn't compete with Call of Duty. Piracy obviously didn't help the game, but neither did the quality of it either.

[Deleted]

I'd like to see anyone play a pirated version of BO/MW every day for a year, considering you wouldn't get multiplayer.

The industry is still increasing profits, so pirating can't be making a huge deal.

[DeltrusDisc]

However, I doubt it is a real number. Piracy should imply that the user has not bought the product, but there's usually no way of knowing if they have or haven't, so if you ever spot those figures about "potential customers lost" then you can take a good swig of Jack Daniels and laugh really, really hard at them for me.

Going to have to agree with the drunken Norwegian here. Statistics have always been something to laugh about, especially when it comes to something illegal like this. The question comes to mind, how do they know illegally downloaded games are up 20%? The only way I could figure they could so easily get that sort of information is if in secret they hosted all the torrent sites and got their information that way, but that is such a ludicrous idea I can't believe I even just typed it.

The statistic is dumb and fake. Enjoy your booze.

I think if these companies are so worried about their profits, they can make it so the only way you can play is on one of their servers like with WoW and other MMORPGs, while some people have hosted WoW servers "illegally," Blizzard was still able to crack down hard on them.

I kind of like how Iron Maiden has always been about their music, they don't care that people record their concerts, they just ask that you buy their albums and support them, if you are able to, they just want people to enjoy themselves.

Like, I'd love to buy SW:TOR but at $60 for the game and then the $15 sub? Fairly steep, that's worse than WoW (WoW and its expansions have never been over $40 that I know of, unless you get the CE) and Rift. Honestly, when games are so damn ridiculously expensive, $60+ (they have been for a long time I know) people are less likely to buy them I think and if they can get the game free, they're more tempted to, but look at Portal... that was a killer game and could have easily been sold for more but at $10-20 they made a TON of sales.

I need more coffee, I'm losing my train of thought, if you could tell. o.<

[Arithin]

Pretty indifferent to a the publisher's plight. Theft is just another expense to doing business. You'll never see a brick and mortar store with no losses due to theft. You can't go wrong with fighting it, provided it never pisses off your paying customers. The dangers of DRM and customer alienation are pretty high and long lasting, but it works well if you're smart about it.

Not too worried about the increasing rate of piracy either. Its an expanding market, so the more popular your product is, the more thieves you have that are after it. Also look at the price and market saturation. Paying around 60 bucks for a game isn't that big of a deal when only a handful of decent products hit the market a year. Now you have high quality product being released even faster. But people are no richer.

[Drunkenvalley]

Actually, Blizzard very rarely crack down on private servers. There was often no need either.

The whole private server market had its neck snapped in the transition from BC to WLK content. Most of the big core server software that were popularly used were open source, but somewhere along the line of WLK development they just plain died off, so the open source projects were never maintained and suddenly everyone had to make their own stuff to get it to work.

How it works today I'm not sure of, but during large parts of WLK the core software that most servers used were custom-made and closed-source for WLK content. This didn't really help the market in any way, and massive instability issues were more than happy to further dropkick them out of function for long times.

TLDR is that Blizzard never really made any big punches against the playerbase for playing private servers, nor did they really make any big attempts to pursue the private server market either. If anything ever killed off the private servers it was the multitudes of problems in keeping the server running.

That's only loosely relevant to piracy though.

[Deleted]

I'm one of those try and-if-I-like-it buy persons. Not so much in games though. Not often I download games, only old games that does not sell anymore like Commander Keen 1-6 and such. I downloaded music that I wanted to listen to. If I enjoyed it I bought it. If it wasn't that good I ended up deleting. With Spotify I've downloaded less but still bought a lot.

[Deleted]

/care...

I pirate stuff because it's free, easy and fast. That's it. I can't rip the DVD's I've bought legally and I don't wanna carry 10 DVD boxes when I'm traveling.

I also pirate creative applications like photoshop and ableton live. I use it purely for myself and if i start make money out of it, I'll buy it.

Also; there's a reason this topic isn't allowed. Pirating stuff is illegal and will only leads to a flamewar

ps: I wonder what FBI might find in hongkong where my proxy is located...

[Deleted]

/care...

I pirate stuff because it's free, easy and fast. That's it. I can't rip the DVD's I've bought legally and I don't wanna carry 10 DVD boxes when I'm traveling.

I also pirate creative applications like photoshop and ableton live. I use it purely for myself and if i start make money out of it, I'll buy it.

Also; there's a reason this topic isn't allowed. Pirating stuff is illegal and will only leads to a flamewar

ps: I wonder what FBI might find in hongkong where my proxy is located...

I wonder how cool you feel talking about a proxy (YOURS?) in hongkong for downloading when you live in Denmark.

Don't talk bullshit. This topic is allowed. It's an article about piracy, not about what you pirate and how much you enjoy doing it.

[Cyanotical]

personally i think pretty much any and all statistics related to software/media piracy are fake, put forth by copyright holders to justify their concerns, if i run a store and there are 10 items missing from my shelf and only 8 show up in the register as being paid for, then i know i have a 20% loss, thats fairly easy

but if i make software and put it up on the internet, then 100% of downloads from me are sales, i have no way of knowing how many are downloaded from torrent sites, or even worse person to person ie "let me get a copy of that"

there is a huge discussion relating to piracy because of SOPA/PROTECT-IP right now, and companies are trying their hardest to make pirates out as job killing villans, when the truth is that the company itself is the problem, if you want your products pirated less, make a better product and deliver it better, Steam is good at this, take Audiosurf for example, a $10 game from Steam that most of us have, there is a pirated version out there for free, but why bother, it's $10, and has Steam support, so i can compete with my friends and they can see what i am doing, and there is a demo

this is another thing that has lead to a rise in piracy, the lack of demos, it used to be that every game had a demo, i think they are even more important now that games cost $60, personally i get rather upset when i buy a game and hate it, then im stuck trying to re-sell it for less then 50% of what i paid, the lack of a demo is not an accident, companies realized that a demo could kill a game before it's release, wasting tons of money, now they would rather you buy it first then find out it sucks, at least then they get some money back, this has lead to alot of the "try it and if i like it buy it"

piracy is a reaction to the actions of the software and entertainment industry, it is directly tied to them, the more they try to fight piracy the more they create, the way to stop piracy is not to try and lock up media with DRM, but to offer a better experience, when the experience of using the original media is better then the pirated version, the original wins out, every time

[Deleted]

I think piracy is moraly correct!It's not worse than what large companies do to the privateperson.
Like TV license,ridicolous extrafees for downloading more than X amount of GB,Electricity!
There are so much extra fees just from owning a computer or Tv that it would cover any expense any media company needs to create our media!
Take the money from the governmental companies and give it to the creators,They can afford it!

[Drunkenvalley]

Ironically, no matter how intensely the big companies try and tell us how bigass criminals we are, just about everyone who even remotely look their direction will disagree.

They will disagree for any number of reasons, but it's particularly hard to agree with them when the musicians are getting ripped off by the company, the company is frigging rolling in dough, employing big name lawyers and harassing common citizens who have done nothing but download a song from Lady Gaga or something.

Really, it's hard to take to heart their message when what the commoner sees is a big, fat dude with this pretty young thing of a lady, obviously paid for, and the dude is literally burning money to light up a fat cuban sigar as he tries to tell you that crime doesn't pay. It just doesn't cross over when you want to execute so much crime on him purely by his unnervingly bothering appearance.

[Cilraaz]

Also; there's a reason this topic isn't allowed.

Discussing piracy in this manner is fine. We don't allow piracy discussion in ways such as "just go to 'x' site and download it" or "why not just pirate Windows?" thrown into random discussions. Discussing piracy and its implications is much different than telling someone to pirate or where to pirate.

[Naididae]

I agree with what Cyanotical has said. The lack of demos really turns me to pirating and if I enjoy the game I will buy it. Another thing is definetly the prices. I live in a country where your average xbox game that sells for, let's say, 50/60 dollars, usually goes for 115 here, so hell yeah i'm going to pirate and if I really enjoy it I'll buy it.
Steam is a great example of something that works in my opinion, with it's daily/weekly offers and stuff. I had played Portal for example, a while ago, but then I saw it very cheap on Steam so I bought it and Portal 2, simply because I considered the price to be fair and I really enjoyed the first game.

It's really simple really: give us a fair price and a good product (and on top of that let us try a demo to see if it's worth the buy), and we'll buy it. If your product sucks, it's not the pirating fault.

[Zippoflames]

I would like to see how they work out the figures with regards to pirating because a few people i know sell xbox 360 games pirated and its like 3-5 games for £10ish, (dont hold me to the price been a long time since ive spoken to them about it) Now i know they used to be able to get most games 2-3 weeks before they were released and i dont think an East London fella has many friends who work high up in Microsoft/whoever to get the originals from to copy.

I do every now and then download a film tho, And believe it or not i still download films i already own just because its easier to watch on any of my devices, No warnings, No unskippable adds etc just move file and watch..

But i think the biggest factor is just purely the cost of the products, I downloaded and tested Crysis 2 and loved it so i bought it, but i also bought Deus Ex HR via steam and hated it within 10 mins so no way of getting any form of money back via reselling it... So for me now it will be download it do a level or 2 if i like it buy it if i dont i just delete it.