90% Piracy rate for indie game "World of Goo"

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World of Goo designer Ron Carmel mentioned the game had a staggering 90% piracy rate. We contacted Carmel directly, who confirmed the figure was "about right."

Carmel informs us that he's seen torrent sites with "500 seeders and 300 leechers" and has received emails from people who initially stole the game but ended up buying the full product; unsurprisingly, they make up a "very small percentage." He concludes, "We're doing ok, though. We're getting good sales through WiiWare, Steam, and our website. Not going bankrupt just yet!"
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http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-has-90-piracy-rate/

That sucks. WoG might seem a tad on the expensive side but it's a really fun game and you can really see the amount of work that's gone into it. It might not be that surprising but it still saddens me, 2D Boy deserved better.
 
consider that alot of people wouldn't have bought it anyway if it was unavailable, so that kind of figure doesnt prove much.
 
I feel bad for the developer. When I have money, I'll purchase the games I want to buy and support. It's sad no one wanted to support this brilliantly made game.

This is the first time I can honestly say I bought the game instead of pirated it.
 
As far as i see it the problem with world of goo is that it looked like its a really simple game being charged for twice what it should be. I'd buy it in a shot if it was somewhere around the ?5 region, but atm it seems like i'd spend the money, play a few hours and then get bored...

That said I've not played it at all, and I haven't even been interested enough to pirate it. :p (I do get a number of indie games too eg audiosurf, defcon, castle crashers... )
 
Meh, i don't think the people who pirate games necessarily reduce sales, esp. an indie game like World of Goo. Most people are probably pirating it because they're curious, if the torrents weren't there chances are they wouldn't fork out $20 for it. At least people are playing it to look on the bright side, and some people who pirate it will eventually end up buying the full game.
 
Agreed@people saying these figures don't mean much. Also, if I were a game developer I'd be surprised and pleased to get any emails from people saying they felt compelled to pay for the game after having pirated it, so mentioning how few they got seems to be missing the point a bit. I don't even know how you calculate the 'percentage' of something like that anyway; that assumes that people who pirate and then buy a game will always send an email of thanks to the developer, and it's still buying into the wrongheaded notion that all of the other instances of piracy can be converted directly into figures for lost sales. Clearly piracy occasionally even creates sales, so I don't know why developers find it so hard to accept that a great deal of piracy, being simple opportunism, doesn't have much to do with sales at all. In any case, it's simply the way the internet and the world works now, so devs - even indie devs - have a very simple, very limited choice: cope or don't.

Not taking anything away from Carmel though, World of Goo looked like a great game.
 
Laivasse said:
I don't even know how you calculate the 'percentage' of something like that anyway; that assumes that people who pirate and then buy a game will always send an email of thanks to the developer.
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Lol they aren't using the famed emails-to-developer statistical method.

2Dboy said:
first, and most importantly, how we came up with this number: the game allows players to have their high scores reported to our server (it?s an optional checkbox). we record each score and the IP from which it came. we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources by the total number of unique IPs in our database, and came up with about 0.1. that?s how we came up with 90%.

it?s just an estimate though? there are factors that we couldn?t account for that would make the actual piracy rate lower than our estimate:

* some people install the game on more than one machine
* most people have dynamic IP addresses that change from time to time

there are also factors that would make the actual piracy rate higher than our estimate:

* more than one installation behind the same router/firewall (would be common in an office environment)
* not everyone opts to have their scores submitted

for simplicity?s sake, we just assumed those would balance out. so take take the 90% as a rough estimate.
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Laivasse said:
it's still buying into the wrongheaded notion that all of the other instances of piracy can be converted directly into figures for lost sales.
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Nobody here or 2Dboy have said that in fact they've said the opposite

2Dboy said:
one thing that really jumped out at me was his estimate that preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale. this supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game aren?t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying
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I wasn't talking about the piracy rate. I was talking specifically about the comment about the emails they got from pirates who later bought the game and how they make up a "very small percentage" - that seems like a pointless and irrelevant thing to say, since obviously you're not going to get a million emails from pirates saying 'I stole it but then I bought it, thanks!' I know I didn't really make a distinction, but when I talked about the attitude of devs towards piracy I was speaking more generally, and naturally assuming that the reason 2D Boy were talking about piracy rates was because they shared the common view that lots of illegal downloads = lots of lost sales.

I remember the article you took the last quote from btw. It was pretty insightful, but I didn't realise that it was 2D Boy who said that. Interesting.
 
Then I'm thinking of a different article entirely...
 
This makes me so sad :(

I seriously love 2D Boy and WoG and this kind of shit pisses me off :(
 
* most people have dynamic IP addresses that change from time to time
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They kind of brush over this, but I would have thought that this would throw the statistics completely onto the crud pile. While I don't doubt that Piracy is undermining the sales a little, 90% is clearly a shock tactic to say 'buy this game NAO'. I was going to anyway :P
 
Well I can see their game on the two largest torrent sites on earth, and they both have copyright removal policies, so clearly the devs haven't contacted them to remove it. The only major site they might have an issue with is The Pirate Bay, but they could get it removed as long as they don't sound like an idiot in their email.

It's their own fault.
 
Well $20 does seem a bit much for the game when you know nothing about it.
 
I wasn't going to buy it anyway, since it doesn't look like my type of game.

Hell, I'm not even gonna dl it.
 
CyberPitz said:
I wasn't going to buy it anyway, since it doesn't look like my type of game.

Hell, I'm not even gonna dl it.
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This. And what does that 90% mean? That 90% of the people playing the game didn't pay for it? How can you even get that statistic? You cant just check the seeds and then just make up a number on how many people downloaded it based on how many seeds there are.

Still, even knowing that most of these people wouldnt have bought the game anyways, as a game developer I would feel offended that so many people would play it without supporting it.
 
No, they didn't pluck the number out of thin air, check out Ron's blog post here.
 
After all the 'figures are wrong!!!' whining by the 'honestly Piracy isn't killing the PC market, DRM is evil!!!' crowd, 2DBoy redid their calculations and the 90% dropped to a staggeringly much lower figure of 82%. Yep that's right all the talk of dynamic IPS etc distorting the true figures accounted for a mere 8% of piracy numbers.

So instead of 9/10 people playing the game and not giving them a cent, in reality it's 8/10 people not giving them a cent. Seems like a lot of people are just going to **** you over whether you have DRM or not, even if you're the little guy. I suspect right now 2Dboy are probably thinking they'd of been best off going with a Steam solution from the off.
 
Kadayi said:
After all the 'figures are wrong!!!' whining by the 'honestly Piracy isn't killing the PC market, DRM is evil!!!' crowd...
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Why put it so condescendingly when 2D Boy appear to share the viewpoint of this whining 'crowd'? While I haven't read their stance on DRM, they have said:
one thing that really jumped out at me was his estimate that preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale. this supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game aren’t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying.

in our case, we might have even converted more than 1 in a 1000 pirates into legit purchases.
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...which I'll admit surprised me, since I assumed the entire reason they would bring this up would be concern over sales.

(Incidentally when I said:
Laivasse said:
Then I'm thinking of a different article entirely...
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...turns out I was thinking of the same article. 2D Boy were referring to comments made by Reflexive's Russell Carroll, which is where I remembered the '1000% piracy reduction = 1% sale increase' stat from.)
 
I am pretty sure they brought this back up as they wanted to see what, if any, impact the lack of DRM would have on the sales of WoG.
 
Shit. I finished it yesterday (on my Wii). Really enjoyed it. Deserves better than this.
 
Kadayi said:
So instead of 9/10 people playing the game and not giving them a cent, in reality it's 8/10 people not giving them a cent. Seems like a lot of people are just going to **** you over whether you have DRM or not, even if you're the little guy. I suspect right now 2Dboy are probably thinking they'd of been best off going with a Steam solution from the off.
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1. If they thought no DRM would mean more sales they are idiots. Why support no DRM when even the most hard arse DRM can be beaten within 15 minutes?
2. It's awfully easily to crack a steam release.

Oh and this

To those who think piracy will ruin PC gaming by making profitability impossible, I offer the following analysis of the sales of another DRM-free game: Sins of a Solar Empire.

In September, Stardock reported that Sins sold over 500,000 units: 400,000 at retail and 100,000 online. For the sake of these back-of-the-envelope calculations, I'll assume that the average retail price is $40. The online price is $40. I'll round down total sales to 500,000.

So 500,000 * $40 = $20 million. We know that Stardock took in at least $4 million by virtue of online sales. I don't know enough about retail sales to estimate how much retailers take in per sale.

Sins cost less than $1 million to make. After the retailers get their cut, and Stardock pays for Impulse's bandwidth, I'll estimate that they pocketed at least $10 million, probably more. (I'm being conservative.)

That's at least a 10:1 return on their investment. That sounds like a killing! And Stardock/Ironclad plans several micro expansions in the coming months.

Even with piracy, Stardock did quite well. Hell, even if piracy is 90% (which I think is a buncha crap), they still made plenty of dough. Why? As explained by Brad and others:

1) Ironclad/Stardock kept costs low. I hate how the industry creates these multimillion dollar games that necessitate a huge number of sales to recoup development costs. Piracy or not, the PC gaming market is simply too small to fully recoup the dev costs of today's AAA games (not enough high-end PCs etc. etc.). That's why big-budget games need multiplatform sales.

2) Relatively low system reqs.

3) Sins is a PC game. At the moment, you simply can't have a Sins-like experience on a console. Stardock's offering a game that takes advantage of the PC's strengths. Imagine that, appealing to your target audience. AFAIK, the game doesn't suffer from "consolitis."

4) Excellent customer support and relations. Patches, active forums, listening to customers. The other day, Brad left a post on a somewhat obscure topic at CivFanatics. He wanted to to clear up any misconceptions about Stardock's upcoming fantasy 4X game to an audience that's clearly interested in 4X stuff.

5) Lots of positive press. Slashdot and other PC/geek sites responded positively to the company's anti-DRM messages, the PC gamer bill of rights, etc. This probably attracted customers and overall goodwill.

Now if Sins isn't your kind of game, you probably don't care either way. What I'm arguing is that it's possible to profit handsomely in the non-MMO PC game market, provided you know your audience and release a game worth playing. Having good marketing and PR certainly helps, too.

Source: http://news.bigdownload.com/2008/09/04/over-500-000-total-sins-of-a-solar-empire-units-sold/ [bigdownload.com]
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Kadayi said:
After all the 'figures are wrong!!!' whining by the 'honestly Piracy isn't killing the PC market, DRM is evil!!!' crowd, 2DBoy redid their calculations and the 90% dropped to a staggeringly much lower figure of 82%. Yep that's right all the talk of dynamic IPS etc distorting the true figures accounted for a mere 8% of piracy numbers.

So instead of 9/10 people playing the game and not giving them a cent, in reality it's 8/10 people not giving them a cent. Seems like a lot of people are just going to **** you over whether you have DRM or not, even if you're the little guy. I suspect right now 2Dboy are probably thinking they'd of been best off going with a Steam solution from the off.
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But then what % of that 82% would've actually bought the game if illegal downloading didn't exist?

There's no way to know, but I'm guessing under 5%.
 
Give me a break. This may be good but it's not exactly a mainstream game. Psychonauts is another highly rated game but it barely made any sales because it only appealed to a certain crowd of gamers.
Whining about it and blaming it on piracy is not going to convince anybody to buy your game nor improve your sales in any shape or form.
 
TwwIX said:
Give me a break. This may be good but it's not exactly a mainstream game. Psychonauts is another highly rated game but it barely made any sales because it only appealed to a certain crowd of gamers.
Whining about it and blaming it on piracy is not going to convince anybody to buy your game nor improve your sales in any shape or form.
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They weren't whining nor complaining about it.
 
There a question you have to ask yourself.

What was Ron Carmel doing on a torrent site...

Tehhehehehe....
 
Krynn72 said:
They weren't whining nor complaining about it.
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This.

I wouldn't say that hardly anyone played Psychonaughts because it only appealed to a certain type of person, its just one of those games that's awesome but no one plays.
 
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