Neil Gaiman on internet piracy

[Molyneux]

What about small developers like indie game companies though ? They can't afford losses if most of their users are pirating because their sales figures are tiny to begin with.

Most indie games that I've bought are cheap - too cheap for it to be worth the hassle of pirating in the first place. That said, there's also the open question of whether the increased sales brought by the increased availability of the game offset any losses from piracy.

[General Zod]

What about small developers like indie game companies though ? They can't afford losses if most of their users are pirating because their sales figures are tiny to begin with.

A pirated copy doesn't directly translate into a lost sale. If someone's going to pirate it they probably wouldn't have paid anyway.

[Xon]

What about small developers like indie game companies though ? They can't afford losses if most of their users are pirating because their sales figures are tiny to begin with.

The dynamics do change. Stuff like the Call of Duty series are hidiously popular, and since they are primarily a multiplayer service the more people the better. For tiny indy companies, the challange becomes getting people to even knowing they exists and enticing people to even notice them. Piracy just means someone knows about them, and potentially they will tell other people about the game if they like it. That has a chance to convert one act of copyright violation into an advert which brings in many sales.

The smaller the indy company is, the more expensive relative to thier income it is for them to advertise. Which means stuff like Steam's "under $5/$10 banner" starts to be come really bloody important to be on. Because it's effectively free advertising to a very large number of your target audience right next to a nice buy button. Steam is awesome of indy dev's. The effort for the end-user from seeing the advertising to actually buying is only a few clicks, compared to remembering a product even exists by the time you get to a store selling something you saw on TV briefly.


Business apps are a different kettle of fish, generally you have one company paying another to develop and support something exclusively tailored for thier needs. In such a case, piracy just means the app poientially has a market elsewhere!

[adam_grif]

Piracy is more likely to hurt the long term sales of bad games than quality ones, since someone who pirates a game to check it out and then thinks it totally sucks isn't going to buy it, whereas the reverse does happen in many cases. Totally unquantifiable of course. Percentage of people who would have bought it if not for pirating it and percentage of people who would not have bought it except for pirating it are both big fat unknowns.

[Xon]

You see that occur with movies in theaters. Big budget movies advertise the hell upto the opening, and then if it looks to have bombed they drop advertising within days and then the movie disappears from theaters really quickly. It's been occuring faster now that mobile phones are common compared to when they where rare.

One thing you can derive from this is word of mouth of a bad movie spreads quickly, nfi on how fast or how big an impact, beyond a general trend.

[Duckie]

oddly, the contracts tend to work against them: Movies generally have a deal with theatres that regardless of performance they cannot be removed until 2 weeks after the opening. Infrequently but regularly, a movie is so bad and widely avoided that the theatre actually earns money by paying the fine for removing it too early and replacing it with something else.

This has been, I would guess, happening more and more lately, though I have no proof of such a phenomenon.

[DPDarkPrimus]

What about small developers like indie game companies though ? They can't afford losses if most of their users are pirating because their sales figures are tiny to begin with.

From various indie publisher's comments I've seen about pirating their games, the common feeling is "it really sucks that people are pirating our games, but we don't want to have DRM on them so if people are going to be jerks then please don't be one of those jerks".

[Vendetta]

What about small developers like indie game companies though ? They can't afford losses if most of their users are pirating because their sales figures are tiny to begin with.

Although they're also the people who benefit most from the kind of word of mouth advertising that Neil Gaiman was talking about in that opening video.