Piracy Is Good!

[fubz]

I'm not promoting piracy at all. But this article is very interesting.

Piracy is good

Sometimes the link doesn't want to work right.... so copy and paste!

Galactic Civilzations 2 has no copy protection

Wednesday March 08th 2006, 2:52 pm

“We just got our report on the first week of sales of Galactic Civilizations II. Despite some availability problems, we’re told that we’re presently the best selling software title at Walmart. Let me be clear: Not just #1 PC game, but overall software.

Best Buy, EB, and Gamestop have put in additional orders that actually exceed their initial sell-in orders (which you may recall were 3X what GalCiv I’s initial retail presence was).

How is this possible? No one is ever going to accuse us of being a marketing juggernaut. It’s not like there was a 6 month build up of “hype†or whatever. Few reviews are up yet.

It’s word of mouth. You guys. Individual people from around the world simply getting the game and telling their friends that they liked it.

And here’s another thing to consider — Galactic Civilizations II has no copy protection whatsoever. Not even a CD check. Heck, you can install the game and toss out the CD and use the included serial # (which you don’t even have to use to install) to redownload the entire game from us even years in the future.

So what about piracy? Remember? That’s the argument why games need all kinds of DRM and CD protection — piracy. Yet retail sales are very high. Very high despite the fact that any one of the 50,000+ people who have already purchased could zip up the CDs and put them on-line because there’s no copy protection.

One might argue that not having copy protection decreases the piracy on the game because there’s no copy protection to crack and distribute. And perhpas some people who might have been on the fence decided to buy the game because they didn’t have to worry about losing their CD or worrying that some copy protection scheme was going to create headaches.

It will be interesting to see what the overall monthly sales stats will be when they’re published next month (i.e. the ones publicly available).

Thanks to the Internet and the ease of communication, it is looking very possible that the balance of power in PC entertainment software has shifted decidedly to the players and away from the traditional avenues.

As soon as the generally available sales stats are out, we’ll link to them.†- Galciv2

Whoops. Don’t let EA or Ubi Soft see! Piracy works? Works for who? The game! Noway! This is so… out there, someone’s head might explode!

Don’t you love it when you’ve been saying something for years, but now finally the evidence is starting to back it up?

“Today something unprecedented happened — for us anyway. Several retail chains re-ordered more units in a single go than their initial order. EB Canada, for instance re-ordered a very large number. Yay Canada!

See, typically what happens at retail is that you get your initial “sell-inâ€. Re-orders are only designed to bring stocking levels back to that initial sell-in level. So over time, the game fades away. It’s very unusual for a game to actually increase its retail stocking after the release.

So now we’re in unknown territory. We no longer have any idea how many units the game will sell. The first one sold roughly 75,000 units in North America and roughly that many overseas / electronic. We’ve shipped around 50,000 so far and we’re starting to run into a back order so availability is going to get tight in the coming days as we’re now rush manufacturing another batch to handle.

This all happened before the reviews even started to come out. The reviews should certainly help. But it goes to show how powerful word of mouth is. And if there’s other small developers out there, bear in mind, Galactic Civilizations II had only a handful of full time developers and roughly that many artists on it. If you’re at home, open up one of your game manuals and look at the credits to see what’s the norm.

You can be a small development house and still make a game people like. Word of mouth is absolutely crucial. I also am convinced that having the developers themselves interact in the forums directly is important as well. It lets us hear issues people run into. We’ve also learned a lot in the process. I also think that putting out timely regular updates is key as well. In fact, we’re planning to put up the final version of 1.0X tonight. Lots of new video options, AI tweaks, glitch fixes, that nasty hard drive formatting bug if you’re using an ATI or nVidia card (just kidding) should help spice things up.â€

Edited March 11, 2006 by fubz

[Bubba Bob]

So, that article is saying the game sold well because of the lack of protection features? Did I read that right?

"One might argue that not having copy protection decreases the piracy on the game because there’s no copy protection to crack and distribute"

What kind of logic is that?

Sounds like someone is just trying to justify piracy, and doing a crappy job at it.

EDIT:

It took me less than 60 seconds to find an illegal copy of the game using Bit Torrent....

Edited March 11, 2006 by Bubba Bob

[fubz]

Actually the game company themselves state that they can't do anything about game piracy, so they dont do anything to protect the game, and through all the pirates that get a hold of it, they then tell their friends how good it is, so then those people end up buying it.

http://galciv2.com/

[Naming is hard]

So, that article is saying the game sold well because of the lack of protection features? Did I read that right?

"One might argue that not having copy protection decreases the piracy on the game because there’s no copy protection to crack and distribute"

What kind of logic is that?

Sounds like someone is just trying to justify piracy, and doing a crappy job at it.

EDIT:

It took me less than 60 seconds to find an illegal copy of the game using Bit Torrent....

Sorry, i hate to be the one that burst your bubble but...

Galactic Civillzation II does NOT want there game pirated

[fubz]

Oh man! Thats new news. Now i look like a retard even more!

WOOT!

but its still interesting....

[Naming is hard]

Heh, i read the first story on Digg and believed it aswell, and i ALMOST whent to bittorrent the game,

AND i googled it, looked up the price and exactly what type of game it was,

Now, THATS interesting =P,

[JDoors]

I didn't get the impression they were promoting piracy, just sayin', in a sense, that piracy is as good as marketing for spreading the word about a good product.

IMO, this is a the more likely reason people are buying:

"... perhpas some people who might have been on the fence decided to buy the game because they didn’t have to worry about losing their CD or worrying that some copy protection scheme was going to create headaches."

I know there are many programs I did not upgrade and many I no longer use because I couldn't be bothered to work with the copy protection schemes on them. Screw 'em, I'll use consumer-friendly or free products instead (I still haven't upgraded to XP due to the "phone home" scheme, I regressed to clicking the splash screen in WinZip because my registration somehow got disabled).

I didn't see the price of the game but if that's reasonble that'd be another more likely reason for good sales.

[TheTerrorist_75]

I didn't get the impression they were promoting piracy, just sayin', in a sense, that piracy is as good as marketing for spreading the word about a good product.

IMO, this is a the more likely reason people are buying:

"... perhpas some people who might have been on the fence decided to buy the game because they didn’t have to worry about losing their CD or worrying that some copy protection scheme was going to create headaches."

I know there are many programs I did not upgrade and many I no longer use because I couldn't be bothered to work with the copy protection schemes on them. Screw 'em, I'll use consumer-friendly or free products instead (I still haven't upgraded to XP due to the "phone home" scheme, I regressed to clicking the splash screen in WinZip because my registration somehow got disabled).

I didn't see the price of the game but if that's reasonble that'd be another more likely reason for good sales.

After WinZip 9 you need to repurchase. WinZip 10 didn't really add much that couldn't be handled by a free program. My registration still works for 9 and it does what I need. I think it's been five years since I paid for WinZip.