Mac Gaming News - Piracy Eats Into Already-Slim Mac Game Sales Margins
by , 1:15 PM EDT, June 19th, 2006
Given the fact that the industry is much smaller than its Windows counterpart, Mac gaming has suffered from the ill effects of piracy in recent years, according to a recent article by MacCentral's Peter Cohen. "In many cases, [piracy is] the difference between being in the black and winding up in the red," he noted.
Mr. Cohen took a look at MacGameFiles.com and, using sales numbers confidentially revealed to him by Mac game publishers, compared the number of times a game update was downloaded versus its actual sales. "The difference was nothing short of staggering," he explained. "It wasn't at all unusual to see three or four times the number of downloads than retail sales.
"In one case, it was an order of magnitude -- that's right, to the power of 10--higher than the manufacturer's sell through."
He acknowledged that some gamers may download updates multiple times because they've deleted and reinstalled games, but he believes they're "in the minority. What's more, not everyone in the Mac game market goes to Macgamefiles.com to download updates -- that only represents a portion of the total game playing public. Common sense indicates that a significant portion of that difference must be related to piracy."
So what's to be done? Ultimately, according to the Mac game publishers Mr. Cohen spoke with, copy protection schemes will become more rigid. For example, Half-Life 2 developer Valve Software created digital rights management that requires an online connection each time the player loads the game, in order to verify that they have a legitimate copy of the title.
Peter Tamte, founder and president of MacSoft parent company Destineer, told Mr. Cohen that another solution is to simply move to videogame consoles, where piracy is much less rampant and easier to control. He wrote: "It's not impossible [to pirate console games] -- people have been able to 'chip' game consoles to run pirated games -- but because of the barrier to entry, most people don't do it."
Observer Comments
A good way to fight Mac games piracy would be to release demos (and if possible less than a year after the full game hits the shelves). It's better if your (potential) customers are disappointed of having spent a significant amount of bandwidth dowloading a demo for a game that sucks than if they're disappointed of having spent a significant amount of money buying that same game. Because they'll probably fear less repeating the former mistake than the latter.
And please, could someone explain to me why it is so hard to make a demo when you already have the full game written or ported? Game publishers always make such a fuss about it.
Maybe you just don't understand how their business works. If making, releasing, distributing (download bandwidth is not free), and supporting a demo reliably increased sales beyond the additional investment required, games publishers would do it. If you're saying that game piracy is significantly "try before you buy" behavior, you're wrong. The only pirates who try before they buy are self-righteous posters to public message boards.
Welcome more intrusive DRM, because the games publishers will figure out that if they include it and don't cross the magical line of "too creepy", more people will buy their games and they'll make more money. It will be as if the market will be telling them "we like that DRM feature and will reward you more for including it -- THANKS!!".
Tue Jun 20, 2006 12:12 am Subject: Try Before Buy
Not everyone who downloads a game, then doesn't buy it, has pirated it. Many games do have a trial period. I buy maybe 1/8 of the games that I try--the rest go into the trash basket. Sometimes, it takes a week to decide to buy a game, other times it's obvious within a few minutes that a game is (or is not) worth buying.
QuoteBosco wrote:
If making, releasing, distributing (download bandwidth is not free), and supporting a demo reliably increased sales beyond the additional investment required, games publishers would do it.
So, game publisher X doesn't think a demo for game Y will increase sales significantely, therefore it doesn't make one. That's quite a vote of confidence from the publisher on the quality of the game. It really motivates me for shelling out the cash to buy it, because I know it's so great, the publisher says so on its web site.
And after I do and discover that the game actually sucks, I will continue buying all games from publisher X because the web site still says they're great. Sure.
I agree that a bad demo hurts sales, whether the full game is good or not. For example, I'm not planning to buy 'Cars: The Videogame' because the demo sucks so much. I can't change video settings so I don't know if the full game is less ugly than the demo and if it would run correctly on my hardware at these hypothetical non-ugly settings. But a publisher that releases a bad demo for a good game is just begging for trouble.
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