Crysis’ Crisis: Game Piracy
I’ve often heard the argument that people pirate games not for the game itself, but as a demo, to help determine if they want to shell out their hard-earned cash or hard-begged allowance on a new title. PC developer Crytek doesn’t care why people do it, they’re just not going to put up with it anymore. Though in Crysis’ case, this pirate reasoning makes perfect sense: who would want to purchase a game that they will likely not be able to run on their system, even if it has mostly top-of-the-line components?
The specs for Crysis were unrealistic at the time, and pretty much slapped the majority of homemade rigs in the faceplate. Players that pirated the game likely wouldn’t have bought it anyway, without knowing it would actually run as intended on their system. Of course, that sort of argument doesn’t really stand with a game like Call of Duty 4, which managed less-than-stellar sales last year, largely due to piracy, and could practically be played on a cardboard box.
And PC games are by no means alone in being looted by pirates. It seems anyone who’s even heard of an R4 or M3 owns one, and the DS is the highest selling ‘console’ of this generation. Excuses for stealing games which never top $40? There’s so much crap on Nintendo’s systems these days, I want to know what I’m getting. Or, even if I downloaded a legit demo, I’d have to keep my DS open to prevent losing it. The PC just happens to be the gateway to all other piracy. It’s where you download games to your R4, or emulators and ROMs of all the retro titles you never had as a child. It doesn’t have the protective wall of the Wii or 360, which bans modified systems from playing on Xbox Live.
It seems easy to shrug off and say no one’s getting hurt, new games are still being produced and everyone’s happy. That the $3 billion in annual loss doesn’t really affect the $18 billion a year gaming industry. But obviously, if everyone pirated, the industry would die. The question is, are Crysis and COD4’s experiences indicative of a dismal gaming future?
It may be fun to sing You are a Pirate while dancing on the myriad copies of free games in your treasure trove, but it seems we are walking the plank of lowered development budgets, fewer games produced, and non-exclusive titles in the long run.
Tags: CoD4, Crysis, CryTek, Nintendo
Stardock’s Sins of a Solar empire sold essentially the same number of copies as Call of Duty in its first month and has no copy protection, no brand recognition, and no hype.
http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/14383
Crysis has sold more than a million copies despite unrealistic graphics requirements and worn-out gameplay ideas. Perhaps if Crytek spent more time on gameplay and narrative instead of dumping it all into pushing technical boundaries, they would’ve come close to recouping their initial costs.
The core mechanic of Call of Duty 4 (leveling/customization) is surprisingly refreshing on a console, but exists in some form in a mods and add-ons for other PC shooters (i.e. the Warcraft 3 mod for Counter-Strike).
I don’t think piracy is justified, I’m just saying that unrealistic sales expectations and the “me too” ideology of the FPS market is to blame more than the tiny number of pirates that know enough about the world of ISOs and emulated CD-ROM drives to actually pirate a game.
GAME PIRACY DOES NOT HURT SALES AND GAME COMPANIES KNOW IT!
This is closely related to the DRM issue.
I look at the piracy issue this way and I believe companies do too but they won’t admit this to you:
Piracy doesn’t hurt companies one bit and they know it. If they make 1 million copies of a game at a set price and they send to market all 1 million, they figure how much cash they stand to make on those games. If they reach their target number of sales, the company considers that game a success for them.
Now lets say another 1 million copies were pirated. This is great for the game company because they get more exposure and chances are better than not that sometime in the future some of those folks will purchase a game from that company. It’s free advertisement. None of those pirated games will cause the game company to lose one penny of those targeted 1 million sales because for every kid who has a pirated game there will always be one willing to buy the game off the shelf. This is because most consumers have no idea where to get a pirated game and would not want to, in the first place. Thus they get all the money they were after. The game companies know this.
The marketing divisions also know the psychological factor involved. If you tell a person he can’t do something he’s more likely to try to do it anyway. I am not saying they want pirated games but they know if a million people refuse to purchase the game and decide to download it free instead, they will have this much more free advertisment.
Some people try to make the claim that the game companies deserve to get paid for the copies of pirated games and are thus losing money. This is totally silly. As an example, people download songs off the radio all day long and pass copies to their friends. The music companies don’t figure on getting paid for this, so they don’t worry about it. They worry about the sales of CD’s they send to market. The game industry is no different. The argument goes like this:
If we (the game company) can stop people from pirating our games (by DRM or anti-piracy technology or what have you then we can put out more game copies and get paid for them. Again this is silly. If the game company wanted to make 2 million sales why didn’t they just produce another 1 million copies for market in the first place? They want to make free money on your work. Your computer makes or downloads the copy and gets the copy to a consumer (you). They don’t have to spend money on making the copy and shipping it to the store and advertising for you to buy the game. You have done all that work for them and they are just mad they can’t make EXTRA money off of you they never accounted for in their targeted sales, in the first place!
It can be said for that very reason, the company does not deserve the extra money because they haven’t done the work and spent the money to provide the person with THAT COPY.
Yes, this may be illegal, it may be against the games EULA, but it does not hurt the games sales. Because of this I heavily dispute the decision to make this a crime as there is no real basis for it. It would be like the music industry saying O.K. folks now we are going to charge you for all the songs you downloaded off of the radio, and oh by the way, if we catch you with a CD of radio recorded songs you’re going to jail! You never hear the music industry claim they lose money because people record songs off of the radio because they know this does not hurt their intended targeted CD sales.
Only if a semi truck with 50,000 copies ran off a cliff and the games were destroyed on the way to market, would they lose any money.
This to me is very logical. Even in America we are surrounded by media propaganda every day and we just fail to see it. The game industry has yelled for so long now that piracy hurts their sales that we have come to believe it like sheep. They are then able to use this and other means to justify things like a heavy DRM.
You show me any study that proves 100% beyond any doubt that because a game is so heavily pirated it kept people from walking into a store and buying a game off the shelf and for that reason alone a company could not reach their targeted sales, I will kiss your feet in public on National TV. Come on, that’s laughable. It can’t be done. For a company to expect me to swallow that bull, means they haven’t really thought it through.
Bottom line, the Piracy issue is a fallacy made up to force us to accept a companies right to control the use of their product anyway they see fit. Of course they have the right to do that anyway with their product, but this way they will have the mainstream popular consensus on their side, and that means less hassle for the company, which would cost them money. They always feel they have to justify their changes in the product because consumers don’t like it. They are only hurting themselves more than the pirates ever could.
Remember, Don’t use pirated material as it IS as of now against the law. I just felt the need to share these thoughts as I don’t think the issue has been examined enough by the general population.