Nyarlathotep wrote:az_bont wrote:
Why would piracy affect sales of their game in particular, when just about every single game released is available on the internet, very often before the release date?
Euro Gamer wrote:SI opted for digital distribution instead of a boxed release, but the expected sales didn't pick up.
Ah, that would be the reason then. They used a distribution method that only a fraction of the population would care to take advantage of, and which in particular alienates mainstream gamers, which form a higher-than-average proportion of the audience for sports games.
Read the commenst to that article, a few of the programmers explain it in detail, but in summary:
1) PC games generally have 6:1 ratios of warezers:purchasers - this particular title was seeing rations of 10:1
2) Its a particularly niche game aimed at a particular niche audience (in much the same way Sam & Max Episodes are) and distributed electronically, so it cant rely on 'mainstream' sales to support piracy (as many PC titles actually do)
1) Where are they getting these numbers from? BitTorrent is uncentralised, and so there's no central source for figures. There is no way of keeping track of the number of downloads on Usenet, either.
Besides that, if actual game sales were as disappointingly low as they stated, and the game was only expected to sell to a small market of gamers, then surely the much smaller sample size can account for that discrepancy?
A figure of 10:1 for pirated copies to actual sales means nothing. Aside from that, the difference between sales of 10:1 and 6:1 is only 40%, and the various posts by the developers seem to indicate that sales were a lot worse than that - a fraction of what they expected.
2) Using a novel digital distribution method is fine if your particular niche audience is one likely to be receptive to the idea of paying money for digital content. Very few games have gone with this sort of method, and the only two big success stories I know of are the Sam and Max episodes, and Half-Life 2, which are squarely aimed at a segment of the market that are, for lack of a better word, geeky. And in the case of the latter, it only sold 25% of its copies via Steam, the remaining 75% coming from the boxed release.
But an ice hockey management game has much more mainstream appeal, by which I mean it does not especially appeal to that segment of gamers who would be particularly receptive to the idea of digital content distribution. You only have to look at the percentage of iPod users who bother with iTunes to see that whilst people will happily pay for their CDs (sometimes), they are not keen to pay money for a product that doesn't have a physical prescense.
Aside from that even, there are posts in that comments page complaining that the game wasn't any good, and that their previous copy protection methods had rendered games unusable, which seems to be becoming more and more common with PC games, further increasing the attractiveness of pirated copies to gamers.
The game was a German language hockey simulator, with it's potential audience being hockey fans in Germany, of which there aren't many. The game recieved no marketing, had a small potential customer base, yet the developers decided to go with a distribution method which has so far only been used with a handful of other titles which were so immensely popular they were guaranteed a large number of sales even if the majority rejected the notion - which in the case of HL2, they certainly did.
The developers fucked up -
immensely - and they're trying to pass the buck.