Business ramifications of piracy *spawn

[dobwal]

Its kind of hard to reply to this due to the way that you altered the context of my post(the word ALL was never used).

Your use of "definitely" implies "in all cases" to me.

Good games still sale well even if there is heavy piracy. The Wii has the worst piracy right now but third party support was never strong for it even before piracy. Well made third party games still sell well on the system despite the tremendous piracy.

The Wii may have the largest level of piracy but I wouldn't consider it heavy as the number of users who pirate pale in comparsion to the number of user who don't pirate. The Wii and the 360 have the most piracy because they are successful and until now the only targets. The Wii and 360 sell software well despite piracy not because of it. Good games sell well on the Wii and 360 because the majority of its userbase don't pirate titles. Pirating games on the Wii or the 360 isn't akin to pirating music online which is actually easier than actually purchasing music online. The average lay user doesn't know how to pirate games.

People were pirating 360 games before the Wii even came out but look at all of the million seller third party games on it. Piracy does make it hard for bad developer though because people get to sample there game and find out how horrible they are before playing them.

Again the level of piracy on console outside of maybe the PSP is relatively low on console compared to say the PC market where the userbase tends to have more in depth knowledge of the hardware, software and their utility and thus pirating becomes more feasible.

Most major studies(the ones not funded by the pirated industries themselves) show that piracy increases sells for companies. If nothing else it equals free advertising.

What studies? And how is piracy free advertising? What being adverstised when the target is actually obtaining ownership or rights to the actual product. Giving away demos is free advertising and the equivalent a giving a person a free small sample of soap. Pirating games is equivalent to advertising by giving a person a lifetime supply of soap. I never heard of a person seeing someone playing a pirated game, only to be told they have to legimately buy the game by the pirate.

Then there is the fact that most games in existence are out of print. People would never get to play a lot of old Sega Genesis games and SNES games if not for piracy. Then they get hooked on the old 2D version and go out and buy the 3D version and remakes of them.

That being facillated by services like Live, PSN or Itunes now. Today, I might go buy the same BMW that I stole from and returned to a old lady last month because I loved the experience of the ride, the former action doesn't indemnify the latter.

You are forgetting this one fundamental fact that has me wondering why it is called piracy. Pirate take from other and actually cause a loss. People who download games don't take anything from the company. Everything it had before it still has. You can not force people to buy a product and most of them only downloaded most of the games they downloaded because they were free.

People who download games do take from the company. They take ownership of rights they do not own. The consumer should ultimately determine a game' value by voting with their purchase not by claiming software rights illegally. You would still have everything you had before if I simply made a copy of your key and entered your house and slept in your bed while you were at work every morning. Im sure you would find my action of commandeering your house every day as a loss to you since Im partaking in rights that only you have to pay or paid for.

Software piracy is mostly a scapegoat for bad sales.

True and not true. The music industry always claims lost sales as if every illegal download would have truly equaled a sale if piracy was not possible. And thats bunk. But piracy can have a readily negative effect on sales on any product when it becomes rampant.

 

[lilbroK]

Your use of "definitely" implies "in all cases" to me.

def·i·nite/ˈdefənit/Adjective
1. Clearly stated or decided; not vague or doubtful: "we had no definite plans".
2. Clearly true or real; unambiguous

all(a): quantifier; used with either mass or count nouns to indicate the whole number or amount of or every one of a class; "we sat up all night ...

As for the rest, Believe what you want. I am not going to debate the semantics with you as it doesn't matter. Those were ruff estimates. They are not the point. They were only there to support the point.

The points is that people make a moutain out of a mole hill when it comes to piracy and that in a lot of cases, there is more money lost fighting it than there is lost by it.

Did piracy cause the bankruptcy of Factor 5 and Free Radical.

 

[dobwal]

def·i·nite/ˈdefənit/Adjective
1. Clearly stated or decided; not vague or doubtful: "we had no definite plans".
2. Clearly true or real; unambiguous

all(a): quantifier; used with either mass or count nouns to indicate the whole number or amount of or every one of a class; "we sat up all night ...

Why do you use definitions that only prove my point. The use of "definitely" doesn't leave room for ambiguity so using it with "piracy increases hardware sales" implies in all cases when you don't explicitly state otherwise.

The points is that people make a moutain out of a mole hill when it comes to piracy and that in a lot of cases, there is more money lost fighting it than there is lost by it.

Did piracy cause the bankruptcy of Factor 5 and Free Radical.

I can agree with your statement. Piracy tends to be overstated. However, I don't believe that a rosy picture should painted when it comes to piracy either.

I don't think piracy is all that harmful if you content protection system is good enough to keep it low and under a certain threshold it may have positive effects like your anedoctal evidence gives examples. However, rampant piracy can decrease sales by discouraging developers from contributing to your library and ultimately affect hardware sales.

You only have to look at the pc market where delayed release if at all happens regularly and efforts in superior graphics comes mostly from home brew mods. It just goes to show how much effort developers put into pc ports when a game visuals can be improved drastically by mods released within days of a game's release by a bunch of guys sitting at home working for free.

 

[deathindustrial]

What studies?

Not sure about software but for music there is this one:

The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis (with F. Oberholzer-Gee). Journal of Political Economy. 2007. 115(1):1-42.

http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/JPE 31618 FileSharing 2006-12-12.pdf

Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from
zero. Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the
decline in music sales during our study period.

Cheers

 

[Colourless]

What Sony are attempting to do is quite simple. Throw everything at them and hope something sticks.

 

[Gitaroo]

a little off topic, buy looks like someone leak the DSi key.....

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Awesome stuff! Where did you find the video? Was it 5 posts above your own?

.

Ooops Sorry ! Epic scrolling fail !

EDIT: Your ps3 died ? thats bad ! As for the slims, yes, I am also of the view that the new slims don't look like they fit in the ps3 design at all. The round corners and matte finish and strange looking buttons instead of touch-buttons ......... feels more like an Apple product than a Sony PS3.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

WoW ! I just searched ps3 games on torrentz and there are so many games torrents already ?!?!?! I wonder if they are just fake and people are just downloading thinking it will work someday.

 

[Rotmm]

I wonder if they are just fake and people are just downloading thinking it will work someday.

I'm guessing those torrents are more to do with the previous USB Jailbreak hack, where piracy is possible if one doesn't update the firmware to the latest one.

And yes, it's (my FAT) been dead for some months now, the 2nd time it's died. The first time I sent it to Sony to fix, paying the requisit £130. When it died again a few months later I expected Sony to repair it again for free, but discovered that they only offer a 3-month warranty on repairs (unlike, say, MS who offer a full 12 months).

So I'm still trying to get them to repair it for free, with letters and phonecalls. I'd probably have given up and bought a 2nd hand fat already if I wasn't so concerned that, if it breaks down, the PS3 service support is both overpriced and undervalue.

As for the Slim being like an Apple product? I'm no fan of Apple, but even I realise they have their finger on the pulse with regards to styling. No, the PS3 Slim looks more like one of those Chinese knock-off products that are designed to resemble a proper console.

 

[baten]

Not sure about software but for music there is this one:

The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis (with F. Oberholzer-Gee). Journal of Political Economy. 2007. 115(1):1-42.

http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/JPE 31618 FileSharing 2006-12-12.pdf



Cheers

I would like to add a great presentation at TED that questions the profitability of IP and copyright for the industries that make use of them. It's 15 minutes but it's worth it, especially the last part.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

 

[Nesh]

You know....at the end the best way to kill the competition is to pay a capable hacker to hack the competing console so that it plays pirated games


Regardless no matter what intentions are there from someone who manages to hack a product, by the time that it opens up piracy opportunities he must be prevented.

I am pretty sure that guy knows well that there are such opportunities with his hacking, but doesnt care. Hackers do what they do as a hobby and they will show their work if they believe there wont be consequences on them. They dont care much of the consequences on the product itself.

iPhone jailbraking made iPhones pretty much open to anything related to piracy. You can literally get ANYTHING on an iPhone for free by the time you jailbreak it.

A friend of mine tried ton of fully-featured applications on it just to see how they perform on his iPhone for free. Even games like Street Fighter 4. If he wanted he would have kept them and played them forever for free

 

[Shifty Geezer]

iPhone jailbraking made iPhones pretty much open to anything related to piracy. You can literally get ANYTHING on an iPhone for free by the time you jailbreak it.

Looking at the business side of this, Apple is doing very well with iPhone/iPod. Thus it stands as evidence that having your system blown wide open doesn't mean the end of the world, or at least not the end of your product. The question is what does it cost, if anything? Sadly this has never been proven AFAIK, an exact correlation between pirate copies and lost sales, so we'll never know. But as I said earlier, if PS3 sees commonplace piracy, we will actually get a measure.

 

[Nesh]

Looking at the business side of this, Apple is doing very well with iPhone/iPod. Thus it stands as evidence that having your system blown wide open doesn't mean the end of the world, or at least not the end of your product. The question is what does it cost, if anything? Sadly this has never been proven AFAIK, an exact correlation between pirate copies and lost sales, so we'll never know. But as I said earlier, if PS3 sees commonplace piracy, we will actually get a measure.

Yeah but where does Apple get the revenues from? What is pirated and what is not? Also how much should the user base be to ensure a healthy amount of non pirated sales?

Will the PS3 continue to do well if pirated? The PS3 relies on gaming software mostly and it is in an industry where a good game needs millions to produce. It needs to sell a considerable amount to break even so every unit counts more than say, small games tailored for a mobile phone. Sony also needs to get every single penny to make their division profitable enugh. In addition PS3's userbase isnt as healthy as it was with the PS2, so we cant say for sure if its enough to produce enough non pirated sales to compensate for the pirated units.

 

[RobertR1]

from geohot.com:
As of 2:00 PM EST, 1/14/2011, I am not subject to any TROs

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yeah but where does Apple get the revenues from? What is pirated and what is not? Also how much should the user base be to ensure a healthy amount of non pirated sales?

Will the PS3 continue to do well if pirated? The PS3 relies on gaming software mostly and it is in an industry where a good game needs millions to produce. It needs to sell a considerable amount to break even so every unit counts more than say, small games tailored for a mobile phone. Sony also needs to get every single penny to make their division profitable enugh. In addition PS3's userbase isnt as healthy as it was with the PS2, so we cant say for sure if its enough to produce enough non pirated sales to compensate for the pirated units.

As of approximately 1 or 2 years ago, I know Apple was claiming to make little to no money from the App store despite millions of titles selling. At the time virtually all profits from the iPhone were from sales of the phone itself. The app store was only a vehicle which was used at the time to make the iPhone itself more attractive so that more phones would sell.

Apple itself I think could care less whether the phone is jailbroken and whether or not pirated or non-pirated software is used as the majority of their profits are from the hardware sales. It's interesting that their efforts to lock out jailbreaking is due mostly to pressure from AT&T (tethering = bad) and app developers (pirating = bad). Without that, I'm quite sure they'd be more than happy to not bother. In the end jailbreaking doesn't affect them as they don't rely on the sale of software for their profits.

Regards,
SB

 

[ban25]

PS3 Trophy Exploit:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=283575?cid=OTC-RSS&attr=CVG-News-RSS

 

[RobertR1]

You know....at the end the best way to kill the competition is to pay a capable hacker to hack the competing console so that it plays pirated games


Regardless no matter what intentions are there from someone who manages to hack a product, by the time that it opens up piracy opportunities he must be prevented.

I am pretty sure that guy knows well that there are such opportunities with his hacking, but doesnt care. Hackers do what they do as a hobby and they will show their work if they believe there wont be consequences on them. They dont care much of the consequences on the product itself.

iPhone jailbraking made iPhones pretty much open to anything related to piracy. You can literally get ANYTHING on an iPhone for free by the time you jailbreak it.

A friend of mine tried ton of fully-featured applications on it just to see how they perform on his iPhone for free. Even games like Street Fighter 4. If he wanted he would have kept them and played them forever for free

Jailbreaking on the iphone is a great asset. Many people use it for productivity and better customization options with their hardware. By default, piracy on Cydia doesn't exist. You need to add sources and then wait for programs and updates to be cracked and so on. Some of the things Apple decided to add to their IOS revisions were already part of Cydia and heavily used. Were they motivators for Apple to include in their IOS updates? Possibly. Personally, I've spent more money on Cydia apps than App store apps. I can't imagine using the standard SMS app when BiteSMS is heads and shoulders better. Lockinfo turned my useless lock screen into something amazingly productive. SBSsettings are useful to anyone along with a host of other FREE (read: not pirated) apps available on Cydia. Jailbreak on the iphone is a great example of homebrew turned into a full blown platform that is also economically viable for developers.

Piracy exists in all diff media levels and yet new music/movies/games/books/devices continue to roll out. For every pirate there are plenty of legit users that continue to support the various industries. You'll always have "hackers" who simply want to poke where they theoretically aren't allowed. It's what drives them. From there you generally get two development arenas: homebrew and piracy. You choose the path you want to travel, if any.

 

[obonicus]

from geohot.com:
As of 2:00 PM EST, 1/14/2011, I am not subject to any TROs

Groklaw says geohot's lawyer tried to put a hold on the TRO, but there's no mention of it succeeding. Maybe they haven't updated it yet.

 

[obonicus]

PS3 Trophy Exploit:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=283575?cid=OTC-RSS&attr=CVG-News-RSS

I believe that's been there since PS3s were first jailbroken.

 

[RenegadeRocks]

Jailbreaking on the iphone is a great asset. Many people use it for productivity and better customization options with their hardware. By default, piracy on Cydia doesn't exist. You need to add sources and then wait for programs and updates to be cracked and so on. Some of the things Apple decided to add to their IOS revisions were already part of Cydia and heavily used. Were they motivators for Apple to include in their IOS updates? Possibly. Personally, I've spent more money on Cydia apps than App store apps. I can't imagine using the standard SMS app when BiteSMS is heads and shoulders better. Lockinfo turned my useless lock screen into something amazingly productive. SBSsettings are useful to anyone along with a host of other FREE (read: not pirated) apps available on Cydia. Jailbreak on the iphone is a great example of homebrew turned into a full blown platform that is also economically viable for developers.

Piracy exists in all diff media levels and yet new music/movies/games/books/devices continue to roll out. For every pirate there are plenty of legit users that continue to support the various industries. You'll always have "hackers" who simply want to poke where they theoretically aren't allowed. It's what drives them. From there you generally get two development arenas: homebrew and piracy. You choose the path you want to travel, if any.

I was thinking if the law suit gets decided against Sony, then like the Iphone jailbreak ruling, what if all consoles are thrown open to homebrew by a ruling? Wouldn't that be great to legally have homebrew apps for my PS3 !

Like a proper implementation of the Move controller as a mouse in the internet explorer. Complete Flash support for the browser. A screenshot tool for games(Like press L3 and R3 togethe to save a screenshot anytime in a game).If a parallel of PSN happens with great apps like video calling to PC and other stuff, I'll install CFW and stop online play on PSN. My family really doesn't like grouping together in front of the PC in my bedroom for skype calls. if that gets implemented on the PS3 , on the TV in my living room, I can see my family happily calling away and enjoying it too !

Are people banned from online play on the Iphone if they have jailbroken OS? I have an Officla OS on my Ipod touch, so don't know how it works.