{"id":134,"date":"2009-05-07T09:11:30","date_gmt":"2009-05-07T16:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/?p=134"},"modified":"2009-05-07T09:11:30","modified_gmt":"2009-05-07T16:11:30","slug":"the-case-for-piracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/the-case-for-piracy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Case for Piracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ha-ha, just kidding. I’m not going to be arguing for piracy, but I do want to make one observation about how our industry is dealing with this issue. Some commentators<\/a> have been talking recently about the massive piracy afflicting the launch of Demigod<\/em>. According to Stardock’s Brad Wardell, of the 140,000 connections to the main server during the game’s first week, only 18,000<\/a> were by legitimate customers. This ratio compares favorably (or is that unfavorably?) with the 90% piracy rate<\/a> reported by the developers of World of Goo<\/em>. I don’t want to comment on the viability of various DRM schemes, but – needless to say – unless a game is server-based (WoW<\/em>, EVE<\/em>, EverQuest<\/em>)<\/em>, piracy is a bracing reality for game developers. However, I have an unscientific theory about the root of the problem:<\/p>\n

For any given game, only around 10% of players are ever willing to purchase an original retail product.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Obviously, this proposition holds up for PC gaming, but I believe the same is true for console gaming (housemates sharing a copy, renting from Blockbuster over a weekend, friends loaning each other games, grabbing a cheap used copy from Gamestop) and even board games (one gamer buying a copy for a group of friends). This reality is immutable – if DRM was perfect, the percentage would go up somewhat, but it would never come anywhere near 100%. Too many games exist for consumers to afford even a small percentage of them, and – more importantly – players’ individual interests in a specific game are always on a continuum. People on one extreme found a website<\/a> about their favorite game while gamers on the other end might play it only once on a random Tuesday night at a friend’s house.<\/p>\n

The interesting thing about this percentage is that it mirrors another important percentage – the number of players willing to pay money on so-called free-to-play game usually hovers near 5-10%. (RuneScape<\/em>, a F2P example on the higher-end, has reported figures around 12%<\/a>.) The important thing about the free-to-play movement is that the business model turns the theory I posited above into a founding principle. In fact, the smartest F2P games use a dual-currency system so that the 5-10% cash-rich players can subsidize the time-rich ones<\/a>. Ultimately, this model works because a place exists for everyone on the continuum, from gamers who just want to dip a toe to ones willing to drop thousands on microtransactions<\/a>. Launching a traditional retail game and hoping to change your “piracy conversion” rate is fighting the current; launching a free-to-play game built from the start with multiple levels of player commitment is sailing with the current.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ha-ha, just kidding. I’m not going to be arguing for piracy, but I do want to make one observation about how our industry is dealing with this issue. Some commentators have been talking recently about the massive piracy afflicting the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3EGlq-2a","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}