Good old gamers, always looking after the little man. Indie game World of Goo, a title made by just two people, is suffering from an amazing 90% piracy rate. Designer Ron Carmel has confirmed reports on this issue, stating the figures are "about right."
World of Goo's creator has stated that he's seen torrent sites with 500 seeders and 300 leechers. On the plus side, he also has a few emails from people who said they pirated the game, but then went ahead and bought it. These emails are not exactly frequent, however.
"We're doing ok, though. We're getting good sales through WiiWare, Steam, and our website," Carmel assures. "Not going bankrupt just yet!"
This is very sad news indeed. While some may call me critical of the indie gaming scene, I think it's very wrong indeed to be ripping off a two-man team, especially if you love the work. 2D Boy has created a game that a lot of people really dig, and if 90% of those people are stealing it, they might not get another one in the future.
In this era of market saturation and mass produced crap, indie developers who are capable of making good games need to be nurtured, not crippled.
Contest:
8:09 PM on 11.13.2008
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Let me take a stab: less!
Your really gonna try telling Blizzard to not put SecuROM on games that people actually want to play?
Stop. Fucking. Stealing!
I'm not defending piracy or attempting to cover up how disappointing this is, but we shouldn't go jumping on the train to SecuROM town just yet.
It's great to support indie developers, and I bought WoG on Steam, but I don't think that WoG's sales numbers would suddenly shoot through the roof if the game were somehow pirate-proof. World of Goo is like Peggle, Bejeweled, and all those other games, and just like them, is pirated up the wazoo. And yet PopCap, Reflexive and the other "casual" publishers are rolling in money.
The biggest problem with this: it justifies in the minds of publishers the need for things like Securom. The game is cheap and awesome. Everyone who torrented it is a fucking prick.
If a cheap awesome game gets pirated like this, why would a meh expensive game fare any better? People like this are the cause of this fucking fiasco with Securom.
Even one pirated copy is too many though, a fantastic game if ever I saw one!
If I was a game maker, all my shit would be on consoles only. At least then there's at least a bit more security. Well except for PSP...and DS...and Wii and Xbox 360....shit and everyone knows ps3's got no gaems
However ripping off an indie game is the whole action of an asshole "gamer".
But anyone who pirated this game I just don't know what to say... Such a dick move.
I'm not gonna lie, I've tried the whole download game thing and most games I like I buy later, some games you just have to own a hard copy of. This is one of those games if you like it, I saw it in Wal-Mart the other day and had i been able to afford it at the time I would've snatched it in a second. Can't believe people would pirate such a small, cheap, amazingly cool game...
The true figure won't be anywhere near 90%.
Yeah, buddy, your arguement has just been flattened.
Can we now officially throw out all the BS justifications for piracy? All the "oh, I did it because of DRM", "I did it because (insert huge publisher) is evil", blah blah blah? Let's just admit that the VAST majority of the time pirates just want a free game and are either too cheap or broke to buy the damn thing.
I mean, good god, download something if you really want to, but save us the long-winded justifications, the bullshit Amazon/Metacritic reviews, and all the bitching and moaning. People will take anything that's not nailed down if they know they won't be caught, plain and simple.
damn right, pirates suck
Hearing this news makes me wanna help them out.
I'll buy it one day hopefully.
That said, unique IP's is TOTALLY wrong way to estimate piracy. I bought the game, I play from my work computer, I play at home. There you have a legitimate users creating two unique IP's. No wait, at home, everytime I reconnect the ADSL, I have a different IP. That screw things up more. To best estimate piracy levels, you have to have some sort of DRM, along with this data. It could have been a non-invasive DRM.
...
Ive watched my friend play it; it looked like an amusing, interesting idea, yet left me with no compulsion to buy it or even pirate it. I doubt im alone with those thoughts.
I also have to totally disagree that every single downloader 'digged' the game enough to buy it. Its what, 50mb? Thats the kind of thing you download on a whim, these days.
Im sure theyve lost sales, which is sad, but listen to the guy; theyre not doing that badly. Hes managed to get the game on the important distribution platforms, and its selling well enough on them. Thats the really important thing.
1. people don't use steam to buy unknown software. they buy software they know about or would buy elsewhere.
reasons: there's no refunds or exchanges on steam, it's a cautious market. don't tell me you haven't second-guessed a steam preorder purchase when you could have bought the game cheaper in a store and have the supreme ability to refund/exchange it if it didn't work for you.
2. steam doesn't support games, it patches them, it really doesn't do much else.
case in point - i couldn't get bioshock to work for 3 weeks after i bought it from steam, so i don't have the best feeling with valve's douchery when it comes to supporting games after purchase,
3. the pricing is usually made more akward on steam than less difficult or less distinctive than the retail market.
i.e. $4.99 is great, but its not $4.50 or $4. it's also more expensive than the store copy, it doesnt add value to use steam, unless you value intangible achievements.
it is also in USD, which can be a nice shock to those 20 million other steam users around the world being ass-paddled by the economic collapse.
e.g. purchases that i thought would be painless i.e. call of duty 4, were fucked up by steam's foreign support being filled by miserable asshats with no balls to stand up to distributors and publishers, so a game that was US$49.95 is now US$88.50, making it 3x more expensive than the store-purchased copy of the same game. asshats.
in short, steam is a walled garden, and it's not the be-all software distribution platform for unknown and unpublished titles, it still requires a decent 3rd party review from someone who has played the demo or played the full game and can objectively justify the non-refundable purchase.
so, unless you are using torrents to distribute your game in the first place or using torrents to push your demo, reviews, or any game materials, it's a totally separate sphere of influence and communication. steam is a tiny walled-garden on the internet, so don't compare your steam sales to torrent figures, because you'll lose every time, steam's just not that popular.
And to all people who are shouting at pirates, have you NEVER, EVER downloaded songs? Do you really think iPods sell because of people actually paying for music? Give me a break! Sometimes I feel that some developers (mostly console producers) allow easy piracy on their systems on purpose. Here in Greece PS2s especially have been hugely popular (and X360s as of recently) because of the ease of installing a mod chip. These console sales would never have occured if the consoles were impossible to pirate (see: GameCube and it's flopping in many piracy-ridden countries).
Also, I'd like to point out that good games always get sales even if they're susceptible to piracy. Stardock anyone? I admit I do download a lot of games but the ones I can really feel that the developers struck a special chord with me I do buy.