When Video Game Sales Falter, Blame Piracy
from the more-proof-please? dept
James Parker writes in to let us know that Sports Interactive, a sports simulation video game company (recently purchased by Sega), is blaming "piracy" for the failure of their Eastside Hockey Manager game, on which they've now ceased development. I should say, first of all, that I'm a huge fan of Sports Interactive's games, and have given the company (and some of the companies that it bought) plenty of money in the past -- but am not at all convinced by their argument. Sports Interactive games tend to have very vibrant communities, where there is usually a lot of social pressure to buy the actual game if you want it. They've also done digital downloads for quite some time, and are pretty good at making the process seamless. It seems like the big hockey strike that decimated interest in hockey for a while probably had a lot more to do with the problem. While SI admits that the strike may have dampened interest in hockey, they still think that the issue is unauthorized downloads, as determined by watching various torrent sites offer the software up for free. Yet, just because someone is downloading the game, it doesn't mean they would have bought it otherwise. There may be many reasons why the game failed, and given the tremendous success of Sports Interactive's other games (many of which are vastly more popular and probably have a ton more unauthorized downloads), it seems hard to believe that EHM failed because of "piracy." Instead, it looks like the game just failed, and "piracy" is a convenient scapegoat.
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Plus, with many softwares being available on these "torrent sites", you would think that the thing SI is crying over, would affect every other company in the same way. Sometimes if you have a good program (or song), sharing is a good way to advertise it.
Here's to thinking that you are the only one!!!
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Line up now for the handouts
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Billy sounds 8
The *IAA (1) has nothing to do with software (2) Collects the money gained from laws, lawsuits, and fees and keeps it internally. It does not redistribute it to the content creators. It keeps it as a "policing fee" for keeping those big bad copyright violators at bay.
You'd get no larger a piece of the pie, but you WOULD help justify the new laws.
Just release under GPL and then don't worry about getting money for it.
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Sucky Game
How easy is it to get the games? Not that hard, once u have the emulator which can be a pain. The pain.. well if you're not that good with computers you aren't going to be setting up an emulator to play cutting edge games, i assure you. So, now it's basicly computer computer people that do it. And if they are geeks.. they usually want the actual game, for the case, for the "good game u deserve credit here is ur money," and lastly SO THEY CAN MAKE US MORE GAMES!
It makes no sense to steal all the games so companies get discouraged and stop making them. For the people that say that'll never happen, it just did in this article so please don't....
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Why does it seem like SI is surprised that their software is pirated? They make it seem like they had no idea that software gets pirated and when their product was failing somebody pointed out a torrent site and they had a revelation - "ahhh, so thats why our software isnt selling..." Thats a ridiculous concept. The software industry has always had to deal with piracy and if your software really is worth buying, people are going to buy it - especially since a lot more people buy software than pirate it. I mean, thousands of other software companies are perfectly successful despite piracy. It isn't an excuse for a failed product. All software developers are aware of it and if they really feel its going to be a problem for a particular product they can implement a nice licensing system that makes it hardly worth the hassle of pirating.
Maybe its as simple as nobody wants your Eastside Hockey Manager. Maybe its as simple as your software just isn't that good. Maybe its neither and you just didn't do a very good job marketing. Maybe its all of the above - but any way you slice it, blaming software piracy for your product not covering development costs after the fact is like a retail store blaming shoplifters for not covering their bottom line at the end of the year.
People are cheap. People steal. Nothing new here.
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Face the facts, and KISS.
Most moviegoers would cite that its because a majority of recent movies simply suck.
The same could be possibly said about the quality of this video game title...
If it wasn't going to sell anyway, why would piracy make a dent?
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Piracy has stats to prove this false
here's a suggestion to all software companies to make their items unattractive to pirates:
MAKE IT GOOD, OFFER ONLINE CONTENT
games like World of Warcraft are so successful because of this, because they are good and do offer an online service and updated content. this is why WoW works where other software fails. other software companies just want to be lazy. if you want to be lazy and offer crap, no one will buy it.
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Demand?
That being said, the biggest hockey market in the world is North America, and there's a lot of competition for hockey games over there, all of which have far bigger budgets (namely EA). Perhaps it's just a case of the reason noone bought ECHM is because they were buying the other games?
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Re: (eeyore)
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WinZip
For software developers, if the RIAA tries to get damages for your software, sue them for not giving you your money, same with Indie labels. If they say they need it for the purposes of combting piracy, all you have to do is say "It's my money. I never joined the RIAA." THey would not have a leg to stand on.
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It's called what?
They've never sold a copy of anything to me. I guess that means I'm out stealing? Hell of a leap in logic to go from one to the other.
I, like many people, haven't bought it because it's a niche product of interest to only a few. If that's not what the company intended, then the answer is to redo their product pipeline, not blame the lack of customers on piracy.
Plus, wasn't this an UNreleased game? If an unreleased game was being pirated, that speaks to flaws inside the company for losing control of their product.
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video game piracy and falling sales, blame insane
Why does it always use cheat codes? Some of us think someone should get real.
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