TPG Cast Episode 23: PC Gaming Alliance

Well it’s about time! All these podcasts with game developers and reviewers and the whole time I’m asking myself “What about the PC side of PC Gaming? When are you guys going to talk to people from Intel or Nvidia?” I was most pleased, thanks.

I wanted to talk a bit to Matt’s points on piracy. He makes a good argument for why one pirated copy does not equal one lost sale, but there is one more factor to consider. Think about how crazy you get when your favorite digital distributor has a sale. How many games do you buy versus how many do you actually end up playing? If you think getting 20 games for $10 is too good a deal to pass up then imagine how big your backlog would be if you could get 100+ games absolutley free. If two games that you really want to play come out at the same time you have to put some thought into which one you will spend you limited funds on, where a pirate may just see that they are popular and new so they grab them both. Why not? I had a pirate friend ask me about a movie once, he wanted to know if it was any good. Appearantly it was one of the top downloads at his favorite pirate site but he had never heard of it, although he downloaded it anyway. A few months later I asked if he liked it and he confessed that he still hadn’t gotten around to wacthing it. I’ve known many pirate types and he was not unique in this. Another guy had every version of Adobe Photoshop ever released, but had no clue how to use it and only a vauge idea of what it was for.

Allow me to setup a thought experiment. Lets say there are 200 games released in a year and there are 1000 gamers in the market, just to make the math easy. I have read in several places that the average gamer buys 3-5 new games per year. (Note that I am focusing on new titles, all those great Steam sales you take advantage of are usually not first run games.) I’m going to assume a 5% piracy rate, which is 50 gamers who illegally download every game. This leave 950 gamers who buy 4 games each. Break this out equally and you end up with 19 legit sales and 50 illegal downloads per game, or a 72.5% piracy rate. From a population that is only 5% pirates. Yes I know that there are too many assumptions here to make these figures anywhere near accurate, thats not the point. When some company says their newest game has a piracy rate of 80%-90% this doesn’t mean 80%-90% of gamers are pirates. Although that is what they will try to imply.

I share Adam’s pain with the EULA. I think if there was a law that said the game box must include the EULA or Subscriber Agreement in full you would see a quick change in the market. If that would be a good or bad change is anyones guess. I have been able to take opened games back to Best Buy, it was not easy and required talking to the manager.