Championship Manager Dev Reports 90% Piracy Rate
"That's not just a number in the air, we can measure it and we know that there are a huge amount of pirated copies," said Beautiful GM Roy Meredith in an interview with CVG.
World of Goo co-creator Ron Carmel recently stated that his game was suffering from a 90% piracy rate--though Carmel later lowered the estimated figure to a still-staggering 82%.
Despite Meredith's obvious concern regarding piracy, he recognizes that adding DRM copy protection to the upcoming Championship Manager 2009 could create even more problems.
"There's a real issue around DRM... I'd love to defeat pirates, but actually, with all this mess on Spore and Football Manager, which I haven't been able to play this year... I spent about three hours trying to go through this registration process and I really want to play it, but I've got other things to do with my life."
Added Meredith: "There are actually other ways of dealing with piracy too. One is to compete price-wise. We haven't got to pay royalties to Sony or Microsoft, so we can go into territories and price compete."
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Rice-Rocketeer
replyThat's fucking harsh. :(
Man, I feel bad for a lot of Devs.
Granted, I know nothing about this Championship Manager 2009 game, and I'm betting that these lesser known titles suffer from a WAY higher ratio of pirated copies than triple A titles or titles that are very well known.
Now I know this dev isn't doing the whole DRM thing, but maybe they need to spend more money on marketing?-
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I used to pirate virtually all of my games. I've been on Steam for a couple of years now. With this last holiday sale, I spent well over 200 bucks on games and now have over 70 titles in my Steam account. I bought several games I already had on my hard drive along with some titles that I had never heard of, solely because of the ease of using Steam. I repurchased all the Unreal titles and some of the Doom series. I now have all of the Valve titles and countless other games. Valve made it easier to buy the games than deal pirating. It feels so much better as well. I look forward to blowing even more cash on games the year, so long as they are available on Steam. The weekend deal is almost a certain purchase anytime it's put up and I hope that other publishers will throw up their back catalogs as soon as possible.
As a side note, I've also purchased the Fallout games from GOG as a show of my support for what these guys are doing. If you feel the same, throw these guys some cash, they deserve it for the wonderful service they offer the gaming community. -
I don't think that marketing can solve everything. Football manager games fill a pretty small niche. Imagine seeing a TV commercial ála GTA4 or Mirrors Edge for a football manager game. That's just not doing any good.
That said, I do also feel pretty bad for those guys, or small companies in general.
Piracy IS a pretty damn big problem. And it isn't so much a problem for the big companies with lots of funding and 10 AAA titles a year. The small startup companies get the rug pulled from under their feet before they even got a foot in the business.
Pirating games is so easy it's ridiculous. Some companies try to circumvent this by focusing more on the console market. But as soon as mod-chips get more popular (and they will, if the console trend continues), that won't solve anything.
As said by this guy, the other way is using DRM software, which is a hassle for most players, a game breaker for others, and in the end it just postpones the inevitable. -
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Yeah? You really think that? People are going to rush out to buy this game now because of this "free marketing"? Suddenly, the sales are going to shoot through the roof? I think that, since developers are human beings (contrary to the beliefs of some people in this thread, who seem to think they're devious money-hungry beasts out to pry every last red cent from the poor PC gamers, with a niche soccer simulation), the guy simply has gotten frustrated with people playing his team's work without actually compensating the people who created it, and aired that frustration while being interviewed.
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Remo, you're right, but relax a little dude. I know some people are being retards with the usual bullshit arguments but you're borderline flaming in response.
And soccer simulations are not niche, they're utterly ginormous in Europe, Football Manager consistently tops the PC charts by a country mile on release. Others like FIFA Manager and Champ Man don't do so well simply because they're nowhere near as good on many levels.-
It is utterly infuriating to me. In my job, just about every week I have to research or write stories about more independent developers closing down, and I have absolutely no patience for the kind of stupid shit that's going on in this thread. The degree of entitlement people feel they have to get other people's creative work for free is truly astonishing. It's a topic that is treated with such an amazing level of hypocrisy and idiocy that I feel would be hard to match even if I'm being as tactless as I am clearly being.
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The biggest reason why everyone is having trouble wrapping their puny little human heads around the issue of piracy is because the variables are different. Piracy is like stealing but it isn't. To steal something you need to take something that someone else can no longer buy.
Software is digital and can be copied without taking away from the original copy. That is the main issue. Software is digital and can be copied without taking away from the original copy. NO IT IS NOT STEALING. Dubbing songs off the radio is only considered stealing to RIAA/MPAA who in turn is stealing the money they are taking from the "stealers" away from the artists they say they represent. EVERYONE dubbed songs, how do u think blank cassettes got popular in their heyday?
So... piracy is like jaywalking, it doesn't harm anything but potential profits. It doesn't take away from anything physically tangible. Instead of concentrating on the pirates, concentrate on the people who will buy your game. COD4, HL2, CS, etc etc were mega hits and also was pirated to all hell.
The issue itself is hypocritical not the people arguing on either side. Yea you get some bad arguments and some good arguments, like any complex issue. But Piracy is a problem because people don't know their history and because they care too much about a useless market. Don't cater to thieves, cater to consumers.
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