Minecraft Creator Says 'No Such Thing As A Lost Sale'
from the give-people-a-reason-to-buy dept
Last year we wrote about how Minecraft developer Notch (Markus Persson) had been quite vocal in saying that worrying about piracy was a waste of time, and it was much more important to focus on giving people a reason to buy. And has he ever. The game keeps selling like crazy, and we detailed how he was raking in a ton of money, despite not caring if people were using his software for free.In a short presentation at the Independent Games Summit he elaborated on those positions and again told people to stop worrying about "piracy" and focus on giving people reasons to buy. He dismissed the standard party line on these issues:
Piracy is not theft. If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.The "lost sale" point is one we've raised a bunch in the past, but people have a lot of trouble grasping it. There is no such thing as a lost sale, because a lost sale just means a failure to get people to buy. And that's a marketing issue, not a legal one. If a "lost sale" is illegal, then anyone who gives you a coupon to buy their product instead of a competitors is "causing a lost sale." But that's ridiculous. And that's the point Notch is making. There are all sorts of reasons people might not buy from you -- and most of them may be your fault. So it's your job to convince people to pay for something -- which he's clearly done. As he notes:
There is no such thing as a 'lost sale'... Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?
If you just make your game and keep adding to it, the people who copyright infringed would buy it the next week.Another report of the talk showed he expanded on the "copying isn't theft" concept:
A lot of big companies try to make piracy like theft; I wouldn't steal a car, but I would 'steal' a good design. If I liked another person's apartment, I would try to make mine look like someone else's... but that's not stealing.And, of course, he's still making money like crazy. While it doesn't look like he posts historical data any more, he does show a running tally of the past 24 hours, and as of me writing this, he's sold 10,348 copies in the past 24 hours (out of 36,612 registered). At 15 euros a pop, that's over 150,000 euros in the last day -- for a small indie game. And these numbers have been going on for months. It's not even a situation where there was a big boom and then sales dropped off. It appears that the game just keeps on selling.
But it's impossible to make money because of "piracy" right?
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Filed Under: lost sales, markus persson, minecraft, notch, piracy, reasons to buy
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But it's made in a Hollywood basement
Cobain can you hear the Spears
Singing songs off station to station
And Alderaan's not far away
It's Californication
And if you want these kind of dreams, it's Californication...
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It's not a loss to the original work!
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If he's saying it from his spaceship, seems like you should take him a bit more seriously, no? Instead, your response seems to be to ignore the spaceship and pretend it doesn't exist.
In that situation, who's more believable?
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Can you restate that in a way that makes sense?
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You should be ashamed of yourselves! Living in reality like that!
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Anonymous Coward is a very accurate label.
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Heh. Why don't you just give up? The software can be pirated. That was the whole point.
You keep trying to wish away the actual spaceships while calling the guy in the spaceship a kook for claiming there's a spaceship. At some point, when everyone else can see and touch and feel the spaceship, the one who looks like the kook is you: the guy insisting it's not there.
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Re: The space ships are coming!
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You forgot something. You didn't take into account the quite remote possibility that there are any hyperspace express routes heading in this general direction.
I think we have nothing to worry about.
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Space ships are coming?
Dude, we've had space ships for so long that we're already retiring the designs! Discovery has spent a year actually in space since its first launch in 1984!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Discovery
I shouldn't be surprised. You support the recording industry, so being only 26 years behind the times is an improvement.
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I mean heck, he adds stuff to the game based on twitter convos with random people, and fixes bugs based on community voting.
He gets excited about ideas, and tweets/retweets really cool things he sees in the MC community, and often draws ideas on what to add or how to change something based on the cool things people have done in MC.
For some concrete examples, he added delaystone blocks because people were making logical circuits with redstone, and beds because people kept asking for a way to skip night.
So yeah, there's a good chance I'll buy into whatever games he makes in the future.
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perpetual development... small budget projects can do this.
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Good projects SHOULD be like this, no matter the budget.
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YARR!
YARR!
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Damn Minecraft, I spend too much time digging and building :)
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The scary part is how anti-piracy arguments are being used against the used items markets.
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It's not impossible, but every time it happens it's some miracle one off, the sky must be falling, it's amazing it can't possibly ever happen again event. :)
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Typical
Speaking personally, I can't say I agree with the statement that there's "no such thing" as a lost sale, but everything I've seen and heard leads me to believe that the number of lost sales is grossly overestimated by non-engineers.
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DRM causes a lot more of those than piracy, really.
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Thanks For Posting This
I've seen a lot of discussions on the Minecraft forums about copying, and it's amazing to me the number of people who come forward to say that they copied the game initially, but then bought a copy for both themselves and a friend. Or the number of people who didn't ever buy a copy, but had three friends who learned about it through them that went on to buy copies.
Treating ever copied game as a lost sale is ridiculously short-sighted.
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Re: Thanks For Posting This
Every pirated copy is a test drive.
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Are they advanced enough to replicate spaceships at will? Or do agendas, politics, and notions of 'control' keep them from doing that? :)
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Notch's comments on Piracy
He is very correct when he says Piracy is not a lost sale because chances are the non-paying user was not going to buy no matter what the price. At the same time they probably have amny other pirated copies of other software so that chances are they will not be taking much time with MineCraft anyway.
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Oh I See What Happened....
This is how everything digital should be. Companies that dont understand are foolish. People buy what they like. Make them something they like and they will buy it.
But if they dont have a way to find out that they like it, why would they ever?
Minecraft is the antithesis to the record labels. While they claim lost jobs from piracy, minecraft boasts 70% of users pirated the game. Hes making 100 grand a day. Thats crazy money.
Proof that pirace makes a product sell better, but only if you let it.
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They just allow the fully functional game to be downloaded and played with. The downloaded version of game contains only the first chapter. If you like the games machanics and/or want to know how the story goes on, you can buy the additional chapters.
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Wrong quote
Get it right Mike, its:
"Its impossible to make money on FREE."
At least, according to the industry shills, big media, hollywood, the music industry, the gaming industry, and anyone else who THINKS they are dependent on copyright to exist.
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Hart names two studies. Both paid for by the industry.
He ignores the vast number of independent studies that show otherwise. He's also incorrect in his claims about music sales in Sweden. He should look at the latest data.
But a bigger point, he still claims that there's such a thing as a "loss" without recognizing that a "loss" in this context is a *FAILURE* by the business. If you produce horse carriages and automobiles come on the market, it's your responsibility to give people a reason to buy what you have. That is, you adapt. The labels haven't done that. If there are any "losses" it's solely due to their own failure to adapt. And that's not disputable. We've seen repeatedly that artists who *embrace* new business models that involve free file sharing have DONE BETTER than they've done before.
This proves -- without any possible retort -- that "piracy" does not, in fact, create lost sales. A failure to put in place a smart business model creates fewer than expected sales. That's it. We should not -- as you and Mr. Hart appear to want -- legislate a business model.
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Your one line dismissal of what is cited seems to be a bit of the mark.
Life is much more nuanced than "copyright bad" and "piracy good" when viewed under the objective of an economic microscope.
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minecraft
I think you should add more kinds of weapons like spears or something like a gun, and you should add more mobs like a horse. That everyone could have 1-5 horse that one time and they could make a satble that they can make with leather. so they could ride the and feed it with wheat. You could find a horse in a group of 3-4 in a feld need some forest. You could have them catch a horse with a rope that they can make with leather to get the horse next to them and have a stable and put it on the horse. It make not work all the time to make it a little more hard to catch one.
These are some thing that I think would make Minecraft more fun for everyone.
Thanks
Mady
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Re: minecraft
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Free Minecraft Accounts
They have a working minecraft account generator and a Battlefield 4 beta code generator. You guys should really check it out. It helped me a ton, I'm now playing minecraft with all my friends :)
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Comment
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