Item — HN Reader

To give you an idea of the scale of the problem:

Greenheart Games famously released a "cracked" version of their own game (Game Dev Tycoon) onto torrent sites on launch day. In this version, the player's in-game studio eventually goes bankrupt because "pirates" steal their games.

The Data: Within 24 hours, 93.6% of players were playing the pirated version.

The Consequence: The developer's blog post highlighted the irony of pirates posting on forums complaining that the "in-game piracy" was unfair and "ruining" their fun. The experiment proved that even at a low price point ($8), a massive majority of the PC audience will choose "free" regardless of the developer's size or struggle.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161118042043/http://arstechnic...

https://web.archive.org/web/20131214165241/http://aussie-gam...

P.S.: It bears repeating that the game cost only 8 dollars.

4 comments

The number of pirated copies doesn't translate to missed sales.

Someone playing/watching/listening to something for free doesn't mean they would still do it if they had to pay for it.

It’s certainly not a 1:1 loss, but it’s also not zero

Sure it can be zero. It can even be negative. As larger player numbers, including piracy, are a natural form of marketing. That means it's not hard to see this additional marketing could lead to larger sales figures compared to if piracy was not possible.

One reason anti piracy companies make a living is because companies that buy it see concrete increases in revenue as a result. It may not be every pirate who converts to a customer but DRM solutions are priced to be below the expected additional revenue. And it's not always cheap.

Do you have any data to support that? I'd actually be really interested to see. There are a lot of weird ass games with Denuvo (like Handball 17, Bus Simulator 18) I think at least sometimes paying a big DRM subscriptions is part of a money laundering scheme.

Don't have public data, but industry contacts confirmed to me in private on multiple occasions that DRM increased sales. One really old example was a copy protected expansion pack selling much better than the unprotected base game that is required.

There's data against it. The EU conducted a study then suppressed it until an MP eventually made a FOIA request to get the results, because the results weren't what they wanted it to say. https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...

That report wasn't suppressed. It wasn't published because the methodology had a 44% margin of error, and subsequently it was totally useless.

(https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...)

It doesn't provide data suggesting that piracy doesn't hurt sales. It literally doesn't provide any data at all.

Only anecdata which I'm not allowed to publicize. All I'll say is that places that use this stuff are often operating at low margins and if they didn't see benefits they wouldn't pay for it.

> The experiment proved that even at a low price point ($8), a massive majority of the PC audience will choose "free" regardless of the developer's size or struggle.

Several points:

* A pirate can pirate infinity +1 games for free, that will skew any statistic compared to legitimiate buyers that have to manage a finite budget. It also means that you aren't looking at 93% lost sales.

* It wasn't a new indy game, but a port of an existing mobile game, so I wouldn't be surprised if legitimate buyers weren't in a rush to get their hands on it on day one. The steam statistics from the first month mention a peak concurrent player count of over 7000 so it certainly didn't stay at 200 copies.

I basically just Hoover up every new game on the pirate sites once a week. I spend thousands a year on video games. I own a 5090. I’m kind of obsessed.

Unhinged take I checked that was 2013 and the game cost almost as much as you you would pay in a month's rent in India in small towns.

Most pirates aren't people who could pay for this stuff. This is utterly meaningless.

So much in fact I don't even want to link counter examples to it.

No/very few paying user pirates even single player games these days if they can afford it as a luxury please understand that.

I would likemy regular updates bug fixes patches and new feaures ASAP. And on sale at 8$ for a game is less than 0.01% of my income so sure.

But if it costs 800 USD I will get it for free because I am literally too poor for it.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is beyond deluded.

Instead of denuvo you can use simple steam drm, non trivial to pirate for small games cracks will take days or weeks to appear and updates won't be available instantly.

It's safe simple and easy. And doesn't hurt any one.

Denuvo is just invasive bullcrap that deluded people think helps anyone.

"simple steam drm, non trivial to pirate"

Steam DRM is trivial to the point where you may as well not use it and just release on GOG. Until the one actual cracker in combination with the hypervisor guys showed up a few months ago Denuvo had been unassailable for years.

Alright I will like to ask you for the exact steps for every language other than steam DLL swtichroo which can easily proofed against.

It's not as trivial to crack for a relatively non invasive and easy to enable feature.

Denuvo is hardly uncrackable there's a big reason Rockstar went to their own anti piracy tools.

Seeing unhinged takes about Denuvo shilling on HN is nutz. Honestly well what I would expect from folks here.

Thats playing with statistics and you know it. Why such game?

If they would release only the paid game, there wouldn't be 93% + 7% of the gamers playing, far from it.

Cost is almost irrelevant to pirates, either its free or its not, like it or not. There is mix of folks who do it for the lulz, some do it to have higher performance gaming without denuvo taking resources and computing power, and some are outright poor. Even 8-usd-is-too-much poor.

I've lived like that. Don't judge too easily. Don't do stupid mistakes and count those as otherwise-paying-gamers. Thats PR for denuvo and similar, not a fair discussion.