Minecraft Creator Says 'No Such Thing As A Lost Sale'

from the give-people-a-reason-to-buy dept

Thu, Mar 3rd 2011 11:20am — Mike Masnick

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.

There is no such thing as a 'lost sale'... Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?

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:

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

56 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:27am

I met a guy living on the streets the other day that said space ships are coming. Because he said it, it must be true.
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freak (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:29am

Notch & Mojang Specifications are also good examples for your CwF+RtB model.

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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The eejit (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:31am

YARR!
I be stormin' the seven seas o'Media and be stealing yer rum! Then I be on me way to the X in Sex to steal yer pornography! Then I be stealin' all yer developers and makin'em walk the plank!

YARR!
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:32am

Re:
I met a guy the other day that said they'd rather be selling than suing. That really is true.
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I'll Bite, 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:34am

Re:
If the dude was wearing a space suit, and beamed down as he said it it would be. Notch isn't just some guy.
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The eejit (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:35am

Re:
Well, they are coming! Didn't you get the memo? It said that all the idiots were going to Hollywood for experimental probing.
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freak (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:36am

Re:
If that guy on the street made over 20 million euros from the space ships, I might take a little him a little more seriously.
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:37am

Anti-pirates are dealing with the same entitlement issues the so-called pirates are accused of.

The scary part is how anti-piracy arguments are being used against the used items markets.
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:39am

Re: Re:
He claimed he was rich, but Charlie Sheen took it all, or it might have been Bin ladin. I don't remember exactly. He was rambling a bit, concentrating on the sky.
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Mike Masnick (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:41am

Re:
I met a guy living on the streets the other day that said space ships are coming. Because he said it, it must be true

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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crade (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:42am

"But it's impossible to make money because of "piracy" right?"
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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Anonymous Coward, 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:43am

Re: Re: Re:
You were that crazy person, weren't you.
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cjstg, 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:47am

Re:
and the product is still in beta. go figure.
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SJ, 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:53am

Re: YARR!
His next one: http://www.scrolls.com/

Damn Minecraft, I spend too much time digging and building :)
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Jay (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 11:54am

Re: Re:
Space may be the final frontier
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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Justin Olbrantz (Quantam), 3 Mar 2011 @ 12:01pm

Typical
While slightly more optimistic, this guy is very average in my experience with professional software and hardware engineers: they (usually) simply don't worry much about piracy (and, may I add, they tend to dislike DRM).

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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:Lobo Santo (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 12:01pm

Re: The space ships are coming!
Statistically speaking, given the nigh infinite nature of space and the nigh infinite number of planets, the odds of there NOT being any space ships moving in a direction which could be considered "towards" our planet is staggeringly low.
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Chris Rhodes (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 12:03pm

Thanks For Posting This
I saw him mention that he had talked about illegal copying, but he didn't elaborate on the subject and I was waiting to see what he had said, so 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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nuffin, 3 Mar 2011 @ 12:58pm

Thinking of the 'lost sale' reminds me of selling tactics that would raise the price of something just to offer 'half off'...shady marketing
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Overcast (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 12:59pm

I met a guy living on the streets the other day that said space ships are coming. Because he said it, it must be true.

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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Joe Vogon, 3 Mar 2011 @ 1:01pm

Re: Re: The space ships are coming!
Statistically speaking...

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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Anonymous Coward, 3 Mar 2011 @ 1:11pm

Re: Re:
I don't know: the guy selling the product that cannot be pirated speaking about piracy, or the guy waiting for his space ship talking about space ships. Both of them seem on par to me.
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Josh in CharlotteNC (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 1:17pm

Re:
I met a guy living on the streets the other day that said space ships are coming. Because he said it, it must be true.

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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Justin Olbrantz (Quantam), 3 Mar 2011 @ 1:17pm

Re: Re: Re:
"the product that cannot be pirated"

Can you restate that in a way that makes sense?
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drewmo (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 1:24pm

Re: Re: Re:
Yeah wait what? Minecraft can't be pirated?
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Marcus Carab (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 1:34pm

Re: Re: Re:
Umm, this whole story started because a tonne of people were pirating Minecraft.
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Mar 2011 @ 1:41pm

I am glad notch thinks this way. I pirated his game and I am not ashamed. I never cared for it that much, i tried the free version and it was meh. Then I pirated the full version and it amazed me. I ended up buying a copy for myself and 2 more gift copies for friends. I say piracy was actually the reverse of a lost sale.
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Stever (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 1:45pm

Notch's comments on Piracy
Notch is firmly part of the PC/IT community. His ideas must be framed that way. What he is saying is pretty clear. Make your product easy to use, fun to keep using, cheap enough for everyone to buy and you do not have to concern yourself with any loss of revenue because you will just keep selling enough stuff to make continuing development worthwhile.
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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fogbugzd (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 1:53pm

Re: Thanks For Posting This
>>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.

Every pirated copy is a test drive.
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Chargone (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 2:11pm

Re: Re:
given the way it's selling and being developed, i'd lay odds that it'll stay that way until such time as Notch gets bored with it and moves onto the next project instead.

perpetual development... small budget projects can do this.
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Chargone (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 2:13pm

Re: Typical
i'd argue it's only a lost sale when you actually, yourself, drive off a customer who would have bought from you otherwise.

DRM causes a lot more of those than piracy, really.
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RadialSkid (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 2:29pm

Re: Re: Re:
THAT'S COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT, MISTER!
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senshikaze (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 3:00pm

Re: Re:
see: all Google products. And they are zillionaires.
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Mike42 (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 3:14pm

Re: Re: Re: Re:
Awww, you guys just crushed the troll! Look at the little troll tears running down his troll face as he runs home to his troll mommy!

You should be ashamed of yourselves! Living in reality like that!
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Marcus Carab (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 3:28pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Yup. And now he will just ignore it and make the exact same arguments later without anyone being able to call him on it.

Anonymous Coward is a very accurate label.
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Greevar (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 3:47pm

Re: Re: The space ships are coming!
You're also forgetting that the space ships are coming because we're building them! It's being assumed that they're coming from space, but they could be coming just like the newest Ford is coming.
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Ryan Diederich, 3 Mar 2011 @ 4:05pm

Oh I See What Happened....
What really happened was, Minecraft became so popular, so fast, that there wasn't even enough time for an old and technologically impaired CEO to take hold of the place.

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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Jay (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 4:29pm

Re: Re: Re: Re:
But they're right there to use!

It's not a loss to the original work!
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Anonymous Coward, 3 Mar 2011 @ 5:03pm

I also like the way another game makers do.

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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Pontifex (profile), 3 Mar 2011 @ 9:26pm

Re: Re: Re: The space ships are coming!
As long as they don't try to build a nearby bypass...
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RD, 3 Mar 2011 @ 9:45pm

Wrong quote
"But it's impossible to make money because of "piracy" right? "

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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Mike Masnick (profile), 4 Mar 2011 @ 12:52am

Re: Re: Re:
I don't know: the guy selling the product that cannot be pirated speaking about piracy, or the guy waiting for his space ship talking about space ships. Both of them seem on par to me.

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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MadJo (profile), 4 Mar 2011 @ 4:39am

Re: Re: Re: Re: The space ships are coming!
But those hyperspace bypasses have got to be built!
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Mar 2011 @ 5:12am

Hell yeah I pirated the sh*t out of this game then bought it a month later, best purchase ever.
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The Groove Tiger (profile), 4 Mar 2011 @ 7:24am

Of course pirates can cause lost sails, especially if they use chain shot.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Mar 2011 @ 8:02am

I would be interested to read thoughtful comments that address various studies on this subject that appear in the recent article at Copyhype (http://www.copyhype.com/) entitled "How Much More Evidence".
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Mar 2011 @ 8:09am

Re: Re: Re: Re: The space ships are coming!
Goodbye and Thankyou for all the fish.
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Mar 2011 @ 8:13am

Re: Re: Re:
The m ain difference is that you can already play it, can already buy it, and is already a load of fun, and it's not completed yet.

Good projects SHOULD be like this, no matter the budget.
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That one guy, 4 Mar 2011 @ 11:20am

Re: Re: Re: Re:
of course you can pirate it, but Notch does try to stop it (you have to play online before you can play offline...)
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Mike Masnick (profile), 4 Mar 2011 @ 2:16pm

Re:
I would be interested to read thoughtful comments that address various studies on this subject that appear in the recent article at Copyhype (http://www.copyhype.com/) entitled "How Much More Evidence".

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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Anonymous Coward, 4 Mar 2011 @ 3:22pm

Re: Re:
Actually, he happens to name several that do not appear to be industry funded.

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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Anonymous Coward, 8 Mar 2011 @ 4:54pm

Have you tried downloading anything on Hotfile lately? Lots of "This file has been deleted" messages.
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mady, 10 May 2011 @ 4:24pm

minecraft
I like Minecraft and I think it is very cool. I have some ideas that mite make minecraft more fun for everyone that play 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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Bobby Samuel, 28 Apr 2013 @ 5:14pm

Free Minecraft Accounts
Have you tried FPOs? http://zeketiki.wix.com/fpos
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 :)
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Demetrius, 30 Jun 2013 @ 8:03am

Comment
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[ link to this | view in thread ]
Andariel, 28 Jan 2015 @ 8:24pm

Re: minecraft
I agree with Notch. There really is no such thing as a lost sale concerning Minecraft. People who play for free will usually wind up buying the game anyway.
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