If you're a British game pirate, take note -- the industry is out on the prowl, and its prey is your hairy, quivering arse. Several videogame companies in the UK are mounting an offensive against people obtaining their games illegally via the Internet with an eye to netting some nice, fat, out-of-court payments.
[British developers] will serve notice on 25,000 people across the UK, requiring each one to pay £300 immediately to settle out of court. Those who refuse risk being taken to court. The companies will target their initial legal actions on 500 people who ignore the letters.
The companies behind this assault are Atari, Codemasters, Topware Interactive, Techland and Reality Pump. Just yesterday,
we posted a story about Topware and its lawyers netting over £16,000 from one woman who was illegally sharing a pinball game. If all these companies can continue reaping such rewards, then videogame piracy may be the best thing to happen to the UK games industry in years. How ironic.
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Contest:
5:53 AM on 08.20.2008
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But if you're stupid enough not to take "special measures", you deserve to get caught.
Myth: Pirates download games and don't go buy them because they already downloaded it so it is a lost to sales.
Fact: Pirates download games and if they are good go buy them (look at valve games you never hear them bitching) and if the game sucks they don't buy it nor play the pirated copy. So it is not a lost of sales to blame but your game sucked so nobody wanted to buy it.
Fix: Make better games.
that is because those that make good games tend to sell them regardless if people pirate them as well. Don't get me wrong, I like a game from one of those producers- I pirated overlord (codemasters), and then bought it later.
That's a load of bull and you know it. Good games sell REGARDLESS of people that pirate because 2+ million people want the game and only 500,000+ steal it. That means the game still sold 1.5 million and they're "ok" with that.
However, a lost sell due to theft is a lost sell due to theft. 25% is still 25%.
It's the little companies that need a break that get completely boned by piracy. They needed that extra 50,000 sales to stay afloat...and now, everyone that worked for said company needs to find another job and fast.
And if the games suck so much, why are people spending the time to download it, crack it, install it and then play it. If the show sucks, change the channel. If you have no interest in the game, and it sucks, why the heck are you playing it?
And sure, there's a small small minority that do exactly as you say and buy the game after spending days downloading it, playing it, beating it...but that number is shrinking since now-a-days every game has a FREE download demo to play to see if it's for you or not. You can legitimately try before you buy.
@ZagZagovich
You do realize that Oblivion was downloaded 300,000 times in one week, right? You need to check out the downloads the day of or week or two of its release. Not only do piraters want their games for free but they also want it immediately...
Just because someone downloaded the game does not make it a lost of sale. I would give you potential lost of sale. Not everybody that downloads the game plays it and beats it. Hell most people dont even get around to installing it. I did the same thing for Overload I downloaded it and tried it then went and bought it because I liked it. Crysis I downloaded played it maybe 15 mins then uninstalled it and deleted it never picked it up again. So you might say why didnt I get the demo? Well most bandwith for downloading demos cap out at 100k and take a 3-6 hours to download. When I can pirate a game in less than 2 hours. Sometimes it take more than one level to figure out if I like the game (it didnt in this case). Should I be counted as a lost of sales? NO wouldnt have bought the game either way even if I couldnt pirate it I would not get it EVER. I would only buy valve, id and blizzard games which I know are good. If this was a perfect world. The numbers for piracy is soo skewed that you can never really tell how much was lost because there are poeple who will pirate the game play and beat it and never buy it but I will tell you that number is not 25% or every person that downloads it. But the fact is if you design a good game people will buy it regaurdless. Look at valve, id, blizzard, epic etc. Also piracy will never be stop EVER so you might as well focus on making a better game or do multiplayer with auth servers (for people who are going to want to buy the game to play it online).
One thing is it weeds out the good games from the crap ones, where the only way you'd usually find out is after a non-refundable purchase which = you losing money.
It must be a good feeling that you can sue people £16,000 for a game (using the term loosely).
Pro-Tip: If your game only sells 800 copies, piracy really isn't the problem.
Atari and Codemasters have done dick-all that's worth buying in a long while, since UT2k4 and Operation: Flashpoint (both developers have since changed publishers). So really this may be their only potential source of income.
It just startles me that the game (s)industry can see what happened to the music industry, and think "Hey, that's a good idea... after all, record companies haven't had any repercussions, have they?"
I wonder how many of these 25k people recieving a letter, will ever buy another game from these publishers?