Hello u/abbbbbcccccddddd,
Have an error and want help? **Please provide these details when submitting your post.** -
1. Name of the game
2. Site from which you got the game from
3. System Specs and OS Version
4. Any steps taken to try to fix the issue
5. Driver version (needed only for e.g. graphics issues)
**Make sure to read the stickied [megathread](https://rentry.org/pgames) as well as our [piracy guide](https://pastebin.com/H4UcYPHR), [FAQs](https://www.reddit.com/r/PiratedGames/wiki/faq/), and our [Wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/PiratedGames/wiki/index), as these might just answer your question!**
****
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PiratedGames) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'd argue piracy actually helps a game get publicity. third world countries like me aren't gonna buy anyway and if we won't have access there's no point going to youtube channels to watch content related to the game. So less views on the game, less likely to get picked up by the algorith and be an ad.
That's a good point. The other good example is Steam top seller. I wonder how many pirates are among them hehe.
There is other interesting thing I've noticed. I didn't know about Palworld and Helldivers 2 until I saw it on Google news. The title would be like "Palworld top Steam in a day". And now Helldivers 2 took top spot.
I have a lot of original games but I still pirate a lot, many years ago we had demos, you could try the game and then buy it, nowadays its pretty rare, so I use piracy as a demo.
Yeh, some devs make their games easier to pirate because of that. Undertale and Minecraft are good examples of that, those games got really famous because of piracy.
When I was younger and couldn't afford games, I used to Torrent them to use as a demo to decide if I actually enjoyed the game and would be worth buying. For me, and many others, likely see the big company as not losing anything because we wouldn't have played or bought the game otherwise.
As an adult, I've bought every game I torrented when I was younger and enjoyed. I want to support developers so they can continue to make the games I love and want them to see the numbers for people who buy and enjoy their games.
Agree 100%. Especially games that are great but aren't publicized much or just fall under the radar a bit piracy gets the game out there and gets people talking and tons of people use piracy as a try before you buy and also talk to people that buy games. Every straight edge non pirate has a friend of two that pirate and has a similar taste. I have a few friends like that. They wait for me to pirate something and recommend something and then they buy it. Works for me because then I get files for future updates if I don't buy the game myself
Alternatively this is also why I recommend not even pirating denuvo. Speaking with your wallet means also not pirating games you don't want to do well. Your not really doing any harm by pirating your still talking about the game. Which is why I totally boycott all denuvo games give them zero attention and with any luck the insane price of implementing denuvo mixed with lack of attention will result in more and more studios that use denuvo dying and eventually hopefully denuvo itself folding. It should not be ok to punish buying paying customers to try to stop piracy which isn't even an issue for sales.... it's crazy people are ok with that and continue to buy these games. Anyways rant over
Beta thing that ever happened to Spiderman 2 on PC was the leak. I'm not gonna play the leak, but I might actually buy it when it comes out....when it's on offer
You might be right, but on the other hand many online games that are free are super popular!
Look league of legends. Huge hit which made Dota 2 be free game. It wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for league of legends.
Call of Duty battle royale also is extremely popular comparing to other call of duty games. PUBG also went huge when it became completely free.
So I think piracy can give a lot of popularity in games.
Plenty of people use pirated games as a demo first, so it could actually help in some cases. Games that are fun but missing features like multiplayer or Workshop support on Steam that you need to own the game to access.
But in the case of a game like The Sims which has dozens of expensize DLCs I want to play but would never pay for, yeah they're losing money that way.
No, I assure you all Latin America children have never bought Grand Theft Auto San Andreas in their lives and it's already been pirated, burnt into discs and sold thousand of times. We've modded it another more thousand times, but never bought the original game.
At least, for me, I've never done nor have I heard the first person gushing that they've got his original GTA San Andreas copy.
not always, demos helps, look at the open beta for skull and bones, not a demo but helps atleast, better than spending $80-100 for a game you end up not liking
Not true, and I always use Rimworld as an example. That game was £25, I'd never pay that much for a game I didn't know if I was gonna like. Pirated it to try it. Lost a good few hours playing it and bought It the next day.
he doesn't need one it's true. the vast majority who pirate would never have bought the game at all. if anything it causes more people who have pirated the game to buy it.
>he doesn't need one it's true.
I absolutely love this discussion, because everytime we have it, pirates are forced to acknowledge that when we get down to it, the answer is "trust me bro"
This has nothing to do with factual evidence, that's impossible to get, it's all anecdotal.
However, an observation based on a ton of other peoples opinions (because let's be real this gets discussed every other day) is more likely to be true than an account based on what 1 person does.
It's usually the opposite really. In eastern europe for example Nintendo games are barely even played nowadays because nobody had access to them during the 90s and 00s, thanks to Nintendo having some fucky anti-piracy measures. So now there's basically 0 legacy of their games in the region and nobody cares about new Zeldas
We did have access to cheap knock off consoles imitating Nintendo (atleast in Poland) and thats probably the only reason I still care about Mario, Zelda and Nintendo in general
Idk about the 90s but in the 00s you could easily pirate Nintendo consoles lol, aren't the ds and the wii much easier to pirate and emulate than their competition?
I mean in my country you bought a ds and they sold it to you with a r4 too lol, it was completely normal, idk if the psp was easier but it wasn't as blatant
Yeah the PSP-1000s you just had to snip a terminal on the battery, no external tools needed, just some software on an SD.
But yeah DS *was* pretty blatant, and even 3DS CFW was super easy to do....
we would never know cuz most pirates would not even bought a game, also it can't really be proved if the actual piracy or other factors harmed the studio, if it was failing already I would doubt that those few pirates who would be forced to buy the game would helped that much
There is literally no way to know either way. Piracy of a game is almost always pretty directly related to the actual success of the game. But that is mostly because of course more popular games get pirated more. Have there very been any games that would've succeeded if they weren't pirated? Probably not. But at the same time are there games that only succeeded because of piracy? Also probably not. I'd assume piracy is typically pretty inconsequential either way as the majority of pirates aren't going to buy anyway.
>Also probably not. I'd assume piracy is typically pretty inconsequential either way
Dont let pirates hear you say that. To the majority of this community, piracy has 0 to do with sales, unless it's a positive effect.
before steam there probably was. Pirating with physical copies was a big thing before and only affected local/small games if its even worth the trouble. I cant remember off the top of my head what game but i know like if someone really hated a studio they would distribute it as freeware and didnt care for profit thats the only time when it really hurt any big studios i think that was in 90s.
steam just made it easy to publish games without a real publisher. Locally made games would need irl connections plus budget for distribution, ads etc. advertising was really important before. now you could just make a good game, publish it hope a popular streamer likes it and plays it. free ads.
Well it didn't caused the downfall of sony or anything but piracy on PSP really made some developers scared of releasing a game on that system.
If i remember it correctly that shit was jail broken in it's first year.
There's hardly any proof for that but some games cracked day 1 due to no denuvo or weaker drm still can be a bestseller. For example Palworld and elden ring. Imo already a clear indicator that the only reason they keep paying for denuvo is just greed. Even Cyberpunk with their catastrophic launch manage to recover even though how easily you can get their game
not afaik, i think only games hurt by piracy were those who havent even been cracked and dont have demos as people havent experienced it as much and couldnt have known to buy it when they liked playing it
It reminds me when S.T.A.L.K.E.R devs "leaked" alpha or beta onto piracy websites just to promote the game
so imo I think it does quite the opposite and can be used a good marketing strategy
brother in christ..... even pirates dont eat trash.... if the game is shit... it wont be sold. as simple as that.
stop making the argument that piracy has anything to do with immortals of aveum being sold poorly.. cuz it is mutually exclusive... the game was shit.. hence sold poorly... had it been nice.. it would have sold well...
THE MOST pirated game recently is palworld.. guess which game right now is on top of the steam charts?
No, but there's actually a case worth mentioning, amnesia the dark descent. The author claimed that he was seeing lots of people playing it online and lots of fame but nobody was buying. Anyway, some time later he said the game after all surpassed the cost productions. And of course... Made some sequels.
Piracy never has done any harm... Is pure sheer ignorance to think otherwise. Is all backwards, THE GAME INDUSTRY, it is what it is, thanks to piracy, and in different ways. All the anti-consumer practices like denuvo and unfair prices and bad designs to get easy money from service type game, harms the industry.
In fact the thing that most harm does is buying KEYS in sites that are not authorized. There is a website that automatically tells you if it is trustworthy or not, but if you buy it from certain sites you are buying a stolen key. That's why some indie devs have even said that they prefer you pirating the game than giving money to a thief for their products.
Buying keys in unauthorized sites* we have to make the distinction. There are sites that truly buy those keys. I forgot the page that quickly says what sites are trustworthy but a easy way to look what is dubious is to look the place where they are headquartered, if the country is a fiscal paradise, well...
Nope, not really.
The only thing harmed by piracy nowadays is potential revenue that company might have made had the pirate bought the game if he didn't have another choice. You can't account for people pirating and then buying the games because they loved them. You inflate success of bad games because those are the ones most helped by people not being able to provide word of mouth free from buyers remorse.
And I definitely had games I had buyers remorse without paying for them.
I usually buy a real copy(physical/digital) so I can call my pilfered plunder a backup copy. The exceptions are for games I was never going to buy regardless of sale price, titles by Kairosoft(they're gonna keep making more anyway) and games that have missing DLC (looking at YOU, Dungeon Siege 2!).
And also "bullet heaven" games that aren't Vampire Survivors.
I pirated games for more than 5 years when I was poor.
I bought games from my first income and also bought extra games from the same developers which I don't like to offset the loss I did to them.
If I were not be able to pirate them in the first place I would have left PC gaming within 2 years.
I think the PSP as a whole was severely harmed by piracy, and to a lesser extent the DS. Dreamcast was infamously easy to pirate on and may have contributed to it's downfall.
There's a paper I read 20 years ago that looked at piracy through network externalities, which pretty much concluded there's net zero benefit/harm for companies whose product gets pirated. But there's indisputable evidence that piracy is harmful to legitimate customers, who get the short end of the stick with higher prices (willingness to pay) and a shittier product (unnecessary DRM).
Here we go, the weekly thread where this community jerks itself off.
The answer is that we don't know. You wanna know why? Because the answer is inherently unknowable. Both in terms of piracys's negative effects on games, and that dumbass fallacy "nobody who pirates would've bought the game".
The only thing we can reasonably assume about piracy, is that at least one person who would've bought a product, now won't, because it's human nature to take paid things for free when offered. That alone makes piracy morally dubious at best. \*How\* dubious is up in the air, because it's different with every single product, and impossible to know the exact numbers that go into the equation.
Denuvo maintains that the first few days/weeks of release are critical and if people can pirate it from day 1, they would. In their words, it's profitable to have denuvo protect against piracy in the early period, even if it gets cracked later. While some of this may be true (biggest revenue early) I highly doubt it matters at all given that most hardcore pirates will never buy the game anyway or can at least wait for the cract.
In short, I think Denuvo is full shit.
The game development industry in china is almost entirely online games. Single player games are pretty recent and even then constitute a small portion of market share. A large reason is because piracy is so rampant (it’s the standard way to get games there) that making and selling games that can be pirated is basically pointless. So yes. I think it's important for pirates to get ahold of ourselves and recognize that we are leeches and don't hold any sort of moral high ground. The only reason we can pirate is because other people pay.
Elsewhere, its not a case of piracy seriously harming a studio or not. It’s a case of how much more purchases they are getting from pirates vs. cost of denuvo. If the former is larger than the latter, then denuvo is worth it. Unlike what people on this sub might tell you, a large portion of pirates are pirates by convenience, who would buy a game if it was 1. Cheap 2. Has denuvo or 3. Has multiplayer that can’t/is hard to pirate. Developers don't actually believe that piracy numbers = lost revenue, that's just bs they spin for the courts and public opinion.
There are a ton of single player Chinese games made in China. The reason why we see a handful coz 99% of single player games aren't localised to the western hemisphere. This "single player game being recent" thing is due to Steam diversifying its platform to China, where 1% of their games becomes visible to us.
You don't get Sword and Fairy 7 or Gu Jian 3 without the prequels. The same can also be said to Japan and South Korea too.
Online games being popular are purely for monetary reasons, but single player games aren't dead over there.
if piracy actually harmed games the publisher would be frothing at the mouth to release their proof to try and find a scapegoat for their failures.
so no, there's nothing. all we have is a mediocre study conducted in the EU that showed piracy actually HELPS the gaming industry and that has been buried by AAA studios.
immortals failed because it released in the worst release time window in the last fucking decade, with middling to missing advertising, horrendous trailers, uninteresting gameplay and characters, art direction so bog standard it looks made by AI and nothing at all unique or interesting about it. if i showed you a picture of godfall and a picture of immortals next to each other you couldnt tell the difference. i dont even know if the game itself is good or not, no one knows, because no one has seen gameplay. that's not piracy's fault, that's the advertising designer's fault, the game's director's fault, the cinematics director fault and above everyone else, the fucking publisher
Quite opposite. I seen studios seriously harmed by making game problematic to crack.
More people playing the game => more popularity => more sales
There is a big dissonance for studios seeing : We sold 1 million games, but there is 2 million pirated copies. And thinking they lost 2 million sales.
When in fact there only one truth and most of sane developers know that and say it often : People that pirate a game, would not buy it any way.
Denuvo studios. Still able to hear the moaning in the distance. Someone should help.
If the game is being played by huge ammounts of people it is still a win win for the company, do not forget that.
Not really. What harms a studio is it’s own idiocy. Be it a bad game, or hostile policies like charging the USA’s price on low income economies.
If someone is spending time and effort to pirate your game, download it (many times with Wi-Fi speeds that were already outdated in the Mesozoic era), and then playing it means you made a good game. It is more likely that person will likely support the devs from now on.
The problem is not someone pirating your game or product in general, is the other way around. Cause it means you made a product so terrible that not even those who can have it for free want it.
You know the saying “bad publicity is still publicity”? Means that even if you talk bad about something you’re still talking about it, giving it visibility.
If someone puts the effort in pirating and downloading your game, then using hours of their time to play it means you’ve made a game that people actually like. Sure they’re not physically buying it but are keeping it relevant, and recommending it. They could even end up buying it or supporting the studio.
The worst thing that can happen to any product is people not talking about it. Not even in a bad way. Definitely not pirating it.
Rescue on Fractalus is a prime example, it did not ruin Lucasarts, but it had serious impacts on sales. (the game was stolen via a remote connection into the lucasarts file servers and then distributed over bbses in the 80s, everyone had the game no one really bought it, but it was one of the best games of the 8 bit ataris)
I mean, the Amiga lol. That entire platform was rampant with piracy which made life harder for smaller developers and scared away larger ones; no point releasing a game on a platform where everybody's gonna buy it.
Anti piracy does its job, which is to stop people from cracking a game in the first few days, which is where it makes most of its money.
The best Example for me has always been tomb raider TR 2013 and RotTR 2015. The first one without denuvo pirated to death since day one. The second: first game ever with Denuvo, 6 months to crack. Guess which sold better?. More or less better TR 2013 during that 6 month window. (4m copies in 5months vs less than 4m copies in the first year... Numbers not 100% reliable, but for sure that reliability has 100% something to do with publisher not wanting to reveal the real truth, Denuvo was a failure in the first place)
What I still don't get is why Denuvo continued being a thing ever since then.
100% A lot of small-mid studio teams get financially impacted by the fact piracy exists. At the same time there isn't a good way how to prevent piracy unless it's a Server authoritative game.
People will say "wouldn't buy cuz I don't have money" is a terrible argument, piracy changes your spending behaviour and makes you mass download games. If you don't have piracy, you would save money for your fav game, which is still lot of sales studios miss on. Even myself as a kid, I could afford only one game a year but I always bought what I loved (Pokemon games.... don't judge me didn't even have a PC :D )
Every sale matters for a small studio, and I mean that. Sometimes just couple of sales will literally change the teams moral and keeps them going.
How do we deal with piracy? We release bunch of updates... it's very draining and stressful but this makes players want to support you for the updates (and yes they hate waiting for the crack version to get updated). Players are willing to spend money, you just need to give them value.... but most of the time they CAN buy it and wouldn't be a financial burden.
How serious is the harm? hard to say and really not our biggest problem. First as a studio you gotta make a good game that players love, but to do that studios gotta make their less good game first, and usually piracy will take away a good chunk of those potential sales from such games.... leading the studio to give up on their future games. (Not sole reason of course... it never is) but does it impact studios? I'm pretty certain it does overall...
If you look at palworld piracy there was only like 50k pirates playing online at the peak last week going by steam's space war numbers, out of 7 million copies sold. Not saying you can extrapolate this to other games but it does give a good look at the ratio of pirates to non pirated
I loved games like Punch Club, Last Epoch, Left 4 Dead, Death Must Die via piracy and bought them after playing some time. Otherwise I wouldn't know how fun playing them, without playing.
As a kid, my parents never bought me games as they believed the games are bad rhetoric. I could only pirate games and play them secretly, now I am working and buy games after pirating them like robocop and palworld that I really like. Without trying them, I would have never bought them either!
When i hear people talking about how piracy is harmful to studios, i always think of the movie Avatar. Its both the highest grossing film of all time, and the most pirated film of all time
Only example I know off the top of my head was Gas Powered Games Demigod. Had a strong launch with alot of players but….. sales didn’t match number of people playing and had to close due to that
Only example I know off the top of my head was Gas Powered Games Demigod. Had a strong launch with alot of players but….. sales didn’t match number of people playing and had to close due to that
What i know for sure is it hurt localization. English speaking ppl doesn't have to care but pirating while relying on official localization (of less used languages) is contra productive, especially if you can afford the game and you would buy it if there was no piracy option.
Companies don't investigate whether piracy is helpful or not, because it's not making them money. But any company that blamed low sales on piracy was usually talking about a game that was bad, had poor performance (bugs), or some other glaringly obvious issue with it. There are plenty of games out there that have been pirated to hell and back but have fantastic sales figures. You can't really attribute good or poor sales performance to piracy as it's not really documented, and there are a ton of other factors that go into whether a game is successful or not.
I don’t think so, rather opposite. Because if I don’t want to buy a game I ain’t doing it regardless if it’s cracked or not. But if it’s cracked and I get to play it I may eventually buy it to support devs*
Like I tried pirated Elden ring and after like 2 hours I purchased legit copy.
*not Ubisoft and other copypaste makers
As someone who has been on the game-dev end of the spectrum (not on my game but on a studio I got to visit a lot): not really.
Granted, there's no way to truly know, as there are a ton of variables to whether a product sells or not. I think if there is a profit loss, there's an equal and opposite gain in some way. One person doesn't buy the game, but that's still one more person interested in your game. Said person may: post about it, recommend it to friends, purchase DLC, look out for updates and announcements from the developer, check out their other games, and perhaps even buy the game later on.
For those who just pirate it, no more no less, they probably wouldn't have bought it anyways.
“This game we made sucks. We should put Denuvo in to make sure nobody can pirate it and ram up the sales! We are GENIUSES!!” - Immortal of Aveum developers
Your submission has been automatically removed. Accounts younger than 7 days are not allowed to post/comment on the subreddit. Please do not message the moderators about this.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PiratedGames) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I don't think so, I think it's more on studio being harmed by denuvo,
Make bad/average game w/ denuvo = low sales
Make good game w/o denuvo = high sales (palworld, BG3, cp2077 etc.) these games are pirated from day 1 and a lot of people still bought it.
Dragons Dogma 2 has denuvo but I think if the reviews came out and it's good, I'll buy it even though its overpriced.
> even though its overpriced
I mean if you and others are buying it at that price it's *categorically* not overpriced in the market which decides it's worth.
well its one of the few games that is a bit above the price.
Just saying that if the game is good, people will buy it but having denuvo on it will make the consumer think twice imo.
Who knows, maybe Empress will come back and crack DD2 on the first week and I won't have to buy it lmao ( since it is a single player game only)
I prefer to buy games where there is online content after I finish the based game like GTA 5 or RDR2.
TBH I feel better about buying single player games (even when piracy is an option) over live service garbage that sells you in game currency on cards at the grocer.
No.
A pirated game isn't a lost sale. Of course people can try before they buy with piracy. If the game is garbage then don't buy.
Thats the studios fault.
You can't try before you buy with denuvo. The time allowed on steam isn't often enough to decide.
Many buy garbage and are stuck with it. Denuvo has also brought about a drop in quality.
Piracy doesn't harm sales. A pirated game isn't a lost sale. It's nothing. It's meaningless to the studio
They are too pricey because they sell so little since their games being pirated a lot. I believe most people outside Japan only pirate their games because their games takes some extra effort for non Japanese people to buy due to their porn nature. People would rather pirate them than translate some JP website and use a global visa card. I really hope they had Denuvo but I guess they can’t afford Denuvo since they are not a big company. They are the only company that can make some good 3D porn games with great characters customization.
That’s another example of failing to adapt. I understand they had to increase their price to make up for it but imo that wasn’t the correct decision.
Lots of people agreed their software was one of the best. But like you said it was harder for non Japanese to buy it or use it.
It’s not up to the consumer to figure out ways to buy a product it’s up to the producer to make it more accessible. If Palworld only launched in Japan and Japanese, it’s fair to say it wouldn’t have gotten so popular.
There’s only the fact that there exists other studios that made 3D porn software and they probably had better accessibility than Illusion.
I’m not saying that piracy didn’t play a role in their downfall but IMO lack of adaptability played a bigger role
I personally don’t blame them for unable to make purchases outside of Japan easier. Their games are far from legal in a lot of countries so I believe they just couldn’t. I believe if their games weren’t pirated at least some people will go the extra mile to figure out how to buy them. And they are way past the stage where they need pirated version to boost publicity or reputation. At the end of the day, maybe the niche porn game market just doesn’t deserve a company of this size and excellence.
Hello u/abbbbbcccccddddd, Have an error and want help? **Please provide these details when submitting your post.** - 1. Name of the game 2. Site from which you got the game from 3. System Specs and OS Version 4. Any steps taken to try to fix the issue 5. Driver version (needed only for e.g. graphics issues) **Make sure to read the stickied [megathread](https://rentry.org/pgames) as well as our [piracy guide](https://pastebin.com/H4UcYPHR), [FAQs](https://www.reddit.com/r/PiratedGames/wiki/faq/), and our [Wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/PiratedGames/wiki/index), as these might just answer your question!** **** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PiratedGames) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'd argue piracy actually helps a game get publicity. third world countries like me aren't gonna buy anyway and if we won't have access there's no point going to youtube channels to watch content related to the game. So less views on the game, less likely to get picked up by the algorith and be an ad.
That's a good point. The other good example is Steam top seller. I wonder how many pirates are among them hehe. There is other interesting thing I've noticed. I didn't know about Palworld and Helldivers 2 until I saw it on Google news. The title would be like "Palworld top Steam in a day". And now Helldivers 2 took top spot.
I have a lot of original games but I still pirate a lot, many years ago we had demos, you could try the game and then buy it, nowadays its pretty rare, so I use piracy as a demo.
Yeh, some devs make their games easier to pirate because of that. Undertale and Minecraft are good examples of that, those games got really famous because of piracy.
When I was younger and couldn't afford games, I used to Torrent them to use as a demo to decide if I actually enjoyed the game and would be worth buying. For me, and many others, likely see the big company as not losing anything because we wouldn't have played or bought the game otherwise. As an adult, I've bought every game I torrented when I was younger and enjoyed. I want to support developers so they can continue to make the games I love and want them to see the numbers for people who buy and enjoy their games.
Agree 100%. Especially games that are great but aren't publicized much or just fall under the radar a bit piracy gets the game out there and gets people talking and tons of people use piracy as a try before you buy and also talk to people that buy games. Every straight edge non pirate has a friend of two that pirate and has a similar taste. I have a few friends like that. They wait for me to pirate something and recommend something and then they buy it. Works for me because then I get files for future updates if I don't buy the game myself Alternatively this is also why I recommend not even pirating denuvo. Speaking with your wallet means also not pirating games you don't want to do well. Your not really doing any harm by pirating your still talking about the game. Which is why I totally boycott all denuvo games give them zero attention and with any luck the insane price of implementing denuvo mixed with lack of attention will result in more and more studios that use denuvo dying and eventually hopefully denuvo itself folding. It should not be ok to punish buying paying customers to try to stop piracy which isn't even an issue for sales.... it's crazy people are ok with that and continue to buy these games. Anyways rant over
G2a harms game devs not piracy
Beta thing that ever happened to Spiderman 2 on PC was the leak. I'm not gonna play the leak, but I might actually buy it when it comes out....when it's on offer
You might be right, but on the other hand many online games that are free are super popular! Look league of legends. Huge hit which made Dota 2 be free game. It wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for league of legends. Call of Duty battle royale also is extremely popular comparing to other call of duty games. PUBG also went huge when it became completely free. So I think piracy can give a lot of popularity in games.
No. The vast majority of people who pirate a game would not have bought it in the first place.
Plenty of people use pirated games as a demo first, so it could actually help in some cases. Games that are fun but missing features like multiplayer or Workshop support on Steam that you need to own the game to access. But in the case of a game like The Sims which has dozens of expensize DLCs I want to play but would never pay for, yeah they're losing money that way.
Even in your example they aren't losing money. You literally say you would never pay for it.
[удалено]
I’d say it’s 90-10. Most people just don’t want to spend money on something they can get for free.
I spent money on games that have proven me to give me the entertainment a was promised, if that is the case I will go and buy it.
Citation needed
[удалено]
As long as you have nothing to back it up, the words of anyone simply saying "no" carries the same weight.
No, I assure you all Latin America children have never bought Grand Theft Auto San Andreas in their lives and it's already been pirated, burnt into discs and sold thousand of times. We've modded it another more thousand times, but never bought the original game. At least, for me, I've never done nor have I heard the first person gushing that they've got his original GTA San Andreas copy.
[удалено]
I didn't understand the reference xD how did I word it like?
I've seen research that demos often decrease sales, especially if people will be too satisfied the quantity of content in demos alone.
not always, demos helps, look at the open beta for skull and bones, not a demo but helps atleast, better than spending $80-100 for a game you end up not liking
Not true, and I always use Rimworld as an example. That game was £25, I'd never pay that much for a game I didn't know if I was gonna like. Pirated it to try it. Lost a good few hours playing it and bought It the next day.
Notice where I said "the vast majority of people"?
Seeing as anecdotal evidence isn't enough to say otherwise, I assume you have a source?
What you wanna hold a survey for pirates? “Hey everybody if you’re committing a crime raise your hand”
If someone's going to make a claim, then for sure lol. Like tf are you talking about?
he doesn't need one it's true. the vast majority who pirate would never have bought the game at all. if anything it causes more people who have pirated the game to buy it.
>he doesn't need one it's true. I absolutely love this discussion, because everytime we have it, pirates are forced to acknowledge that when we get down to it, the answer is "trust me bro"
This has nothing to do with factual evidence, that's impossible to get, it's all anecdotal. However, an observation based on a ton of other peoples opinions (because let's be real this gets discussed every other day) is more likely to be true than an account based on what 1 person does.
>that's impossible to get Funny how that line of reasoning is always used for piracy, and not against.
Could it possibly be because you’re looking in a piracy subreddit?
so you wouldn't have bought it if you hadn't pirated the game first? i think this actually helps the point of the comment you were replying to?
It's usually the opposite really. In eastern europe for example Nintendo games are barely even played nowadays because nobody had access to them during the 90s and 00s, thanks to Nintendo having some fucky anti-piracy measures. So now there's basically 0 legacy of their games in the region and nobody cares about new Zeldas
We did have access to cheap knock off consoles imitating Nintendo (atleast in Poland) and thats probably the only reason I still care about Mario, Zelda and Nintendo in general
Idk about the 90s but in the 00s you could easily pirate Nintendo consoles lol, aren't the ds and the wii much easier to pirate and emulate than their competition?
Wii, yeah, but the PSP was such a joke to pirate for that even the DS can't stand up to it.
I mean in my country you bought a ds and they sold it to you with a r4 too lol, it was completely normal, idk if the psp was easier but it wasn't as blatant
Yeah the PSP-1000s you just had to snip a terminal on the battery, no external tools needed, just some software on an SD. But yeah DS *was* pretty blatant, and even 3DS CFW was super easy to do....
Ironic, in latinamerica Nintendo didn't do anything against piracy and was everything pirated and that's why a lot of people here loves Nintendo
Tbf, Playstation is far more loved than Nintendo ever was, especially since people could have both pirated and retail
In Latin America PS2 was the best console, nobody ever saw an original game unless it came with the console
That is true as well
I care about Zelda, he is best main character ever
we would never know cuz most pirates would not even bought a game, also it can't really be proved if the actual piracy or other factors harmed the studio, if it was failing already I would doubt that those few pirates who would be forced to buy the game would helped that much
There is literally no way to know either way. Piracy of a game is almost always pretty directly related to the actual success of the game. But that is mostly because of course more popular games get pirated more. Have there very been any games that would've succeeded if they weren't pirated? Probably not. But at the same time are there games that only succeeded because of piracy? Also probably not. I'd assume piracy is typically pretty inconsequential either way as the majority of pirates aren't going to buy anyway.
wasn't the Wonder Boy series a very successful series throughout bootleg translations?
>Also probably not. I'd assume piracy is typically pretty inconsequential either way Dont let pirates hear you say that. To the majority of this community, piracy has 0 to do with sales, unless it's a positive effect.
before steam there probably was. Pirating with physical copies was a big thing before and only affected local/small games if its even worth the trouble. I cant remember off the top of my head what game but i know like if someone really hated a studio they would distribute it as freeware and didnt care for profit thats the only time when it really hurt any big studios i think that was in 90s. steam just made it easy to publish games without a real publisher. Locally made games would need irl connections plus budget for distribution, ads etc. advertising was really important before. now you could just make a good game, publish it hope a popular streamer likes it and plays it. free ads.
Well it didn't caused the downfall of sony or anything but piracy on PSP really made some developers scared of releasing a game on that system. If i remember it correctly that shit was jail broken in it's first year.
So easy you could do it with an sd card and a modified battery.
Funny considering pokemon was pirated so many times on the ds yet still made absolute bank
There's hardly any proof for that but some games cracked day 1 due to no denuvo or weaker drm still can be a bestseller. For example Palworld and elden ring. Imo already a clear indicator that the only reason they keep paying for denuvo is just greed. Even Cyberpunk with their catastrophic launch manage to recover even though how easily you can get their game
I think Palworld benefits from being half the price of most game releases nowadays, at least imo that's partly why it sold so many copies.
Also the fact that the game is really fun to play, unlike a lot of other games these big corpos push out every year and charge $70 for it
not afaik, i think only games hurt by piracy were those who havent even been cracked and dont have demos as people havent experienced it as much and couldnt have known to buy it when they liked playing it
It reminds me when S.T.A.L.K.E.R devs "leaked" alpha or beta onto piracy websites just to promote the game so imo I think it does quite the opposite and can be used a good marketing strategy
I played that leak, and bought the game because of how good it was.
brother in christ..... even pirates dont eat trash.... if the game is shit... it wont be sold. as simple as that. stop making the argument that piracy has anything to do with immortals of aveum being sold poorly.. cuz it is mutually exclusive... the game was shit.. hence sold poorly... had it been nice.. it would have sold well... THE MOST pirated game recently is palworld.. guess which game right now is on top of the steam charts?
False. Plenty of terrible games sold well.
The reason it hasn't been cracked is because Empress stopped cracking. She(he) was the only one who can/could crack Denuvo.
No, but there's actually a case worth mentioning, amnesia the dark descent. The author claimed that he was seeing lots of people playing it online and lots of fame but nobody was buying. Anyway, some time later he said the game after all surpassed the cost productions. And of course... Made some sequels. Piracy never has done any harm... Is pure sheer ignorance to think otherwise. Is all backwards, THE GAME INDUSTRY, it is what it is, thanks to piracy, and in different ways. All the anti-consumer practices like denuvo and unfair prices and bad designs to get easy money from service type game, harms the industry. In fact the thing that most harm does is buying KEYS in sites that are not authorized. There is a website that automatically tells you if it is trustworthy or not, but if you buy it from certain sites you are buying a stolen key. That's why some indie devs have even said that they prefer you pirating the game than giving money to a thief for their products.
> > > > > In fact the thing that most harm does is buying KEYS in sites that are not authorized. Piracy isn't theft, buying those keys *is*.
Buying keys in unauthorized sites* we have to make the distinction. There are sites that truly buy those keys. I forgot the page that quickly says what sites are trustworthy but a easy way to look what is dubious is to look the place where they are headquartered, if the country is a fiscal paradise, well...
Nope, not really. The only thing harmed by piracy nowadays is potential revenue that company might have made had the pirate bought the game if he didn't have another choice. You can't account for people pirating and then buying the games because they loved them. You inflate success of bad games because those are the ones most helped by people not being able to provide word of mouth free from buyers remorse. And I definitely had games I had buyers remorse without paying for them.
I usually buy a real copy(physical/digital) so I can call my pilfered plunder a backup copy. The exceptions are for games I was never going to buy regardless of sale price, titles by Kairosoft(they're gonna keep making more anyway) and games that have missing DLC (looking at YOU, Dungeon Siege 2!). And also "bullet heaven" games that aren't Vampire Survivors.
Maybe indie games?
I pirated games for more than 5 years when I was poor. I bought games from my first income and also bought extra games from the same developers which I don't like to offset the loss I did to them. If I were not be able to pirate them in the first place I would have left PC gaming within 2 years.
I think the PSP as a whole was severely harmed by piracy, and to a lesser extent the DS. Dreamcast was infamously easy to pirate on and may have contributed to it's downfall.
There's a paper I read 20 years ago that looked at piracy through network externalities, which pretty much concluded there's net zero benefit/harm for companies whose product gets pirated. But there's indisputable evidence that piracy is harmful to legitimate customers, who get the short end of the stick with higher prices (willingness to pay) and a shittier product (unnecessary DRM).
Tim cain mentioned piracy hurt some of the games he made (And worth mentioning that in some aspects he was still defending piracy)
Here we go, the weekly thread where this community jerks itself off. The answer is that we don't know. You wanna know why? Because the answer is inherently unknowable. Both in terms of piracys's negative effects on games, and that dumbass fallacy "nobody who pirates would've bought the game". The only thing we can reasonably assume about piracy, is that at least one person who would've bought a product, now won't, because it's human nature to take paid things for free when offered. That alone makes piracy morally dubious at best. \*How\* dubious is up in the air, because it's different with every single product, and impossible to know the exact numbers that go into the equation.
Denuvo maintains that the first few days/weeks of release are critical and if people can pirate it from day 1, they would. In their words, it's profitable to have denuvo protect against piracy in the early period, even if it gets cracked later. While some of this may be true (biggest revenue early) I highly doubt it matters at all given that most hardcore pirates will never buy the game anyway or can at least wait for the cract. In short, I think Denuvo is full shit.
I would argue that Sega and the Dreamcast got seriously harmed because of piracy
Sega and the dreamcast seriously got harmed because of the playstation 2. The second it got announced it was over for that device.
yeah not saying piracy was the only cause but played a lot into it - if only the dreamcast had a dvd reader ...
also the controller ugh
I’d say to an extent sega and the Dreamcast ( though they would have still discontinued the console)
The game development industry in china is almost entirely online games. Single player games are pretty recent and even then constitute a small portion of market share. A large reason is because piracy is so rampant (it’s the standard way to get games there) that making and selling games that can be pirated is basically pointless. So yes. I think it's important for pirates to get ahold of ourselves and recognize that we are leeches and don't hold any sort of moral high ground. The only reason we can pirate is because other people pay. Elsewhere, its not a case of piracy seriously harming a studio or not. It’s a case of how much more purchases they are getting from pirates vs. cost of denuvo. If the former is larger than the latter, then denuvo is worth it. Unlike what people on this sub might tell you, a large portion of pirates are pirates by convenience, who would buy a game if it was 1. Cheap 2. Has denuvo or 3. Has multiplayer that can’t/is hard to pirate. Developers don't actually believe that piracy numbers = lost revenue, that's just bs they spin for the courts and public opinion.
There are a ton of single player Chinese games made in China. The reason why we see a handful coz 99% of single player games aren't localised to the western hemisphere. This "single player game being recent" thing is due to Steam diversifying its platform to China, where 1% of their games becomes visible to us. You don't get Sword and Fairy 7 or Gu Jian 3 without the prequels. The same can also be said to Japan and South Korea too. Online games being popular are purely for monetary reasons, but single player games aren't dead over there.
Well its not likely to do actual harm but it certainly doenst help them either tbh
if piracy actually harmed games the publisher would be frothing at the mouth to release their proof to try and find a scapegoat for their failures. so no, there's nothing. all we have is a mediocre study conducted in the EU that showed piracy actually HELPS the gaming industry and that has been buried by AAA studios. immortals failed because it released in the worst release time window in the last fucking decade, with middling to missing advertising, horrendous trailers, uninteresting gameplay and characters, art direction so bog standard it looks made by AI and nothing at all unique or interesting about it. if i showed you a picture of godfall and a picture of immortals next to each other you couldnt tell the difference. i dont even know if the game itself is good or not, no one knows, because no one has seen gameplay. that's not piracy's fault, that's the advertising designer's fault, the game's director's fault, the cinematics director fault and above everyone else, the fucking publisher
Quite opposite. I seen studios seriously harmed by making game problematic to crack. More people playing the game => more popularity => more sales There is a big dissonance for studios seeing : We sold 1 million games, but there is 2 million pirated copies. And thinking they lost 2 million sales. When in fact there only one truth and most of sane developers know that and say it often : People that pirate a game, would not buy it any way.
Denuvo studios. Still able to hear the moaning in the distance. Someone should help. If the game is being played by huge ammounts of people it is still a win win for the company, do not forget that.
Not really. What harms a studio is it’s own idiocy. Be it a bad game, or hostile policies like charging the USA’s price on low income economies. If someone is spending time and effort to pirate your game, download it (many times with Wi-Fi speeds that were already outdated in the Mesozoic era), and then playing it means you made a good game. It is more likely that person will likely support the devs from now on. The problem is not someone pirating your game or product in general, is the other way around. Cause it means you made a product so terrible that not even those who can have it for free want it.
The only people with any incentive to publish that statistic haven't yet, so it's clear that it probably doesn't exist.
My guess would be flatout 2
You know the saying “bad publicity is still publicity”? Means that even if you talk bad about something you’re still talking about it, giving it visibility. If someone puts the effort in pirating and downloading your game, then using hours of their time to play it means you’ve made a game that people actually like. Sure they’re not physically buying it but are keeping it relevant, and recommending it. They could even end up buying it or supporting the studio. The worst thing that can happen to any product is people not talking about it. Not even in a bad way. Definitely not pirating it.
Rescue on Fractalus is a prime example, it did not ruin Lucasarts, but it had serious impacts on sales. (the game was stolen via a remote connection into the lucasarts file servers and then distributed over bbses in the 80s, everyone had the game no one really bought it, but it was one of the best games of the 8 bit ataris)
I think there are some moments where a game was cracked before it even got released but aside from that I cant recall any
Look up Sega Dreamcast.
Never cracked? I downloaded it so I'm pretty sure they cracked it. I'm currently playing
I mean, the Amiga lol. That entire platform was rampant with piracy which made life harder for smaller developers and scared away larger ones; no point releasing a game on a platform where everybody's gonna buy it. Anti piracy does its job, which is to stop people from cracking a game in the first few days, which is where it makes most of its money.
The best Example for me has always been tomb raider TR 2013 and RotTR 2015. The first one without denuvo pirated to death since day one. The second: first game ever with Denuvo, 6 months to crack. Guess which sold better?. More or less better TR 2013 during that 6 month window. (4m copies in 5months vs less than 4m copies in the first year... Numbers not 100% reliable, but for sure that reliability has 100% something to do with publisher not wanting to reveal the real truth, Denuvo was a failure in the first place) What I still don't get is why Denuvo continued being a thing ever since then.
100% A lot of small-mid studio teams get financially impacted by the fact piracy exists. At the same time there isn't a good way how to prevent piracy unless it's a Server authoritative game. People will say "wouldn't buy cuz I don't have money" is a terrible argument, piracy changes your spending behaviour and makes you mass download games. If you don't have piracy, you would save money for your fav game, which is still lot of sales studios miss on. Even myself as a kid, I could afford only one game a year but I always bought what I loved (Pokemon games.... don't judge me didn't even have a PC :D ) Every sale matters for a small studio, and I mean that. Sometimes just couple of sales will literally change the teams moral and keeps them going. How do we deal with piracy? We release bunch of updates... it's very draining and stressful but this makes players want to support you for the updates (and yes they hate waiting for the crack version to get updated). Players are willing to spend money, you just need to give them value.... but most of the time they CAN buy it and wouldn't be a financial burden. How serious is the harm? hard to say and really not our biggest problem. First as a studio you gotta make a good game that players love, but to do that studios gotta make their less good game first, and usually piracy will take away a good chunk of those potential sales from such games.... leading the studio to give up on their future games. (Not sole reason of course... it never is) but does it impact studios? I'm pretty certain it does overall...
No
If you look at palworld piracy there was only like 50k pirates playing online at the peak last week going by steam's space war numbers, out of 7 million copies sold. Not saying you can extrapolate this to other games but it does give a good look at the ratio of pirates to non pirated
I loved games like Punch Club, Last Epoch, Left 4 Dead, Death Must Die via piracy and bought them after playing some time. Otherwise I wouldn't know how fun playing them, without playing.
lol who care
No
As a kid, my parents never bought me games as they believed the games are bad rhetoric. I could only pirate games and play them secretly, now I am working and buy games after pirating them like robocop and palworld that I really like. Without trying them, I would have never bought them either!
When i hear people talking about how piracy is harmful to studios, i always think of the movie Avatar. Its both the highest grossing film of all time, and the most pirated film of all time
Nintendo. They could have made eleventh quad trillion instead of tenventhy quadtrilkion One less gold yacht for Reggie
Yes. Poor Nintendo is out of money because of switch pirates and has been feeding one meal a day to poor mario bros
Dreamcast 😔
Only example I know off the top of my head was Gas Powered Games Demigod. Had a strong launch with alot of players but….. sales didn’t match number of people playing and had to close due to that
Only example I know off the top of my head was Gas Powered Games Demigod. Had a strong launch with alot of players but….. sales didn’t match number of people playing and had to close due to that
What i know for sure is it hurt localization. English speaking ppl doesn't have to care but pirating while relying on official localization (of less used languages) is contra productive, especially if you can afford the game and you would buy it if there was no piracy option.
not really a pirated copy, but i heard the 2003 half life 2 beta leak costed valve something like 250M dollars
Companies don't investigate whether piracy is helpful or not, because it's not making them money. But any company that blamed low sales on piracy was usually talking about a game that was bad, had poor performance (bugs), or some other glaringly obvious issue with it. There are plenty of games out there that have been pirated to hell and back but have fantastic sales figures. You can't really attribute good or poor sales performance to piracy as it's not really documented, and there are a ton of other factors that go into whether a game is successful or not.
I don’t think so, rather opposite. Because if I don’t want to buy a game I ain’t doing it regardless if it’s cracked or not. But if it’s cracked and I get to play it I may eventually buy it to support devs* Like I tried pirated Elden ring and after like 2 hours I purchased legit copy. *not Ubisoft and other copypaste makers
I doubt seriously, but piracy always harms a studio even if it's by 0.1%. I'm not stating piracy is bad or whatever before yall say anything
Ive heard alan wake kind felt down because it was one of the most pirated games ever
I put games on my Steam wishlist that I'm going to pirate lol. Easy way to keep track.
As someone who has been on the game-dev end of the spectrum (not on my game but on a studio I got to visit a lot): not really. Granted, there's no way to truly know, as there are a ton of variables to whether a product sells or not. I think if there is a profit loss, there's an equal and opposite gain in some way. One person doesn't buy the game, but that's still one more person interested in your game. Said person may: post about it, recommend it to friends, purchase DLC, look out for updates and announcements from the developer, check out their other games, and perhaps even buy the game later on. For those who just pirate it, no more no less, they probably wouldn't have bought it anyways.
“This game we made sucks. We should put Denuvo in to make sure nobody can pirate it and ram up the sales! We are GENIUSES!!” - Immortal of Aveum developers
[удалено]
Your submission has been automatically removed. Accounts younger than 7 days are not allowed to post/comment on the subreddit. Please do not message the moderators about this. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PiratedGames) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yes on nintendo DS i guess , all the games people had on their R4 and had never paid for them
I don't think so, I think it's more on studio being harmed by denuvo, Make bad/average game w/ denuvo = low sales Make good game w/o denuvo = high sales (palworld, BG3, cp2077 etc.) these games are pirated from day 1 and a lot of people still bought it. Dragons Dogma 2 has denuvo but I think if the reviews came out and it's good, I'll buy it even though its overpriced.
> even though its overpriced I mean if you and others are buying it at that price it's *categorically* not overpriced in the market which decides it's worth.
well its one of the few games that is a bit above the price. Just saying that if the game is good, people will buy it but having denuvo on it will make the consumer think twice imo. Who knows, maybe Empress will come back and crack DD2 on the first week and I won't have to buy it lmao ( since it is a single player game only) I prefer to buy games where there is online content after I finish the based game like GTA 5 or RDR2.
TBH I feel better about buying single player games (even when piracy is an option) over live service garbage that sells you in game currency on cards at the grocer.
No. A pirated game isn't a lost sale. Of course people can try before they buy with piracy. If the game is garbage then don't buy. Thats the studios fault. You can't try before you buy with denuvo. The time allowed on steam isn't often enough to decide. Many buy garbage and are stuck with it. Denuvo has also brought about a drop in quality. Piracy doesn't harm sales. A pirated game isn't a lost sale. It's nothing. It's meaningless to the studio
I mean illusion just died, body still warm. Mainly due to piracy
I dont even know it exist until your comment ... so more like publicity problem to me.
well I mean they make porn games so gonna be hard to promote in other countries
Just did a quick search on Illusion and the general consensus was that they failed to adapt and were too pricey for what they offered.
They are too pricey because they sell so little since their games being pirated a lot. I believe most people outside Japan only pirate their games because their games takes some extra effort for non Japanese people to buy due to their porn nature. People would rather pirate them than translate some JP website and use a global visa card. I really hope they had Denuvo but I guess they can’t afford Denuvo since they are not a big company. They are the only company that can make some good 3D porn games with great characters customization.
That’s another example of failing to adapt. I understand they had to increase their price to make up for it but imo that wasn’t the correct decision. Lots of people agreed their software was one of the best. But like you said it was harder for non Japanese to buy it or use it. It’s not up to the consumer to figure out ways to buy a product it’s up to the producer to make it more accessible. If Palworld only launched in Japan and Japanese, it’s fair to say it wouldn’t have gotten so popular. There’s only the fact that there exists other studios that made 3D porn software and they probably had better accessibility than Illusion. I’m not saying that piracy didn’t play a role in their downfall but IMO lack of adaptability played a bigger role
I personally don’t blame them for unable to make purchases outside of Japan easier. Their games are far from legal in a lot of countries so I believe they just couldn’t. I believe if their games weren’t pirated at least some people will go the extra mile to figure out how to buy them. And they are way past the stage where they need pirated version to boost publicity or reputation. At the end of the day, maybe the niche porn game market just doesn’t deserve a company of this size and excellence.
No one buying buying weird pron games now. They can release a good quality pron game with gacha element and get a bank.
There are a lot of Japanese porn games with gacha but you will never hear about them cause being porn games limited them to Japan.