Pay What You Want and the Four Currencies

[larsiusprime]

Some of you guys might have heard of my blog series, Piracy and the Four Currencies.

I just posted part 3, Pay What You Want and the Four Currencies

Also cross-posted over here at Fortress of Doors

Discuss

[abc123]

Okay, so making great progress on the skill menu. I've got it mostly working and I like the new version a lot better - much faster to allocate points, easier to tell at a glance what everything does, and best of all - this will be much easier to localize as it doesn't depend on a big chunky algorithm designed to splice together English sentences.

Just a few more tweaks and then it's done.

Oh, I also wrote a new blog post - "Pay What You Want and the Four Currencies"

Interesting article.

The majority of game developers do not realize that DRM doesn't gain them anything. So many developers are presented with 2 choices like this:
- Sell 10000 copies, have 5000 copies pirated
- Sell 5000 copies, have 1000 copies pirated
And would go with the second one

Not to mention, DRM doesn't really stop piracy anyway. All the DRM gets cracked anyway, so what ends up happening is legit users get to play a shitty version of the game loaded with crap, and the pirates get a nice clean version with all that crap stripped out.

fwiw, i'm one of those people who pirates everything (including this game). If I can't find a copy then I just don't bother and find something else to play. So any developer who spends money to stop people like me from pirating is an idiot, because they're not gaining ANYTHING from doing so.

I think piracy to some extent actually helps developers (especially smaller ones who are relatively unknown)
- Larger community for a small game, regardless of whether those community members paid for the game or not keeps interest in the game alive for longer
- Some people DO eventually buy the game after pirating it (though the % of people who do so is small)
- More people following your work means more publicity for your next game

Of course, developers would prefer that piracy doesn't exist, but that's not going to happen. And the DRM required to effectively prevent piracy ends up driving away more paying customers then pirates. I will admit, there's been a couple game releases lately I was interested in but ended up just not bothering to play them because the DRM was such a pain in the ass to get the cracks to work. The thought of paying for that garbage never even crossed my mind.

Focusing on sales is the only sensible thing to do. The only "cost" of piracy to a developer is lost sales. Some devs treat it like every pirate copy out there is taking money straight out of their bank account.

[Yinan]

The thing that most companies doen't realize is that those who pirate the game wouldn't buy it in the first place. So no money lost for them (or only a little).

Personally i think the best approach is something in between. Making the game normally play with absolutely no protection (no DRM or the likes) but making it nearly impossible to, for example, mod a game without the real one.
Had that problem with Oblivion. Pirated it, played it, liked it. When i wanted to mod it i always got the problem that a lot of mods didn't work with my pirated version. So i ended up buying the game because i really wanted to play with mods! If i hadn't played the game beforehand with a pirated version, i wouldn't have bothered buying it, so actually the company GOT something out of pirating (at least in my case, and i wouldn't wonder if there are other people like me who ended up buying it to play mods... everyone likes mods ).

The Pay what you want approach is an interesting one and i can also see why it is pretty successfull. But i think there should be more then only the "low barrier" for a minimum cost of like 1$ or 2$ (or 1€ or 2€ for me ^^). There are other games that give you beneftis if you give them more like "basic prize 1$, if you pay 5$ you get an extra bonus to exp, if you pay 10$ you get one extra unlockable char" or something like that. Granted, a lot of people won't bother and still will only pay the 1$, but with this (and for a developer it is not much more work for some added benefit) the likelihood of people paying 5$ or even 10$ is much higher, so the average payment per copie increases.

I, for example, am a sucker for extra benefits or content if i like the basic game. See Gemcraft Labyrinth, after playing 3-4 maps i bought the Premium Content and I'm very happy with it.

Edit': plz some mod remove this post coz it's in the wrong thread -.-

[Yinan]

I just realized that my answer was in the wrong thread because the other one also anwered in the wrong thread So i', just gonna copy it here ^^

The thing that most companies doen't realize is that those who pirate the game wouldn't buy it in the first place. So no money lost for them (or only a little).

Personally i think the best approach is something in between. Making the game normally play with absolutely no protection (no DRM or the likes) but making it nearly impossible to, for example, mod a game without the real one.
Had that problem with Oblivion. Pirated it, played it, liked it. When i wanted to mod it i always got the problem that a lot of mods didn't work with my pirated version. So i ended up buying the game because i really wanted to play with mods! If i hadn't played the game beforehand with a pirated version, i wouldn't have bothered buying it, so actually the company GOT something out of pirating (at least in my case, and i wouldn't wonder if there are other people like me who ended up buying it to play mods... everyone likes mods ).

The Pay what you want approach is an interesting one and i can also see why it is pretty successfull. But i think there should be more then only the "low barrier" for a minimum cost of like 1$ or 2$ (or 1€ or 2€ for me ^^). There are other games that give you beneftis if you give them more like "basic prize 1$, if you pay 5$ you get an extra bonus to exp, if you pay 10$ you get one extra unlockable char" or something like that. Granted, a lot of people won't bother and still will only pay the 1$, but with this (and for a developer it is not much more work for some added benefit) the likelihood of people paying 5$ or even 10$ is much higher, so the average payment per copie increases.

I, for example, am a sucker for extra benefits or content if i like the basic game. See Gemcraft Labyrinth, after playing 3-4 maps i bought the Premium Content and I'm very happy with it.

[abc123]

The pay what you want approach doesn't work for games like oblivion though, which have a retail price of > $50.

It DOES work for smaller games (like this one).

Again, at the end of the day it's the sales #s that matter. Would you rather sell 5000 copies at $7 each, or 20000 copies at an average price of $2.50? With the latter sales, you get 15K in additional revenue for a few dollars in additional expense (the small amount of bandwidth it costs for people to download it). Again, the problem here is a lot of companies treat it like they're losing money on every copy they sell for less then a certain amount, when in reality all it's costing them is a fraction of a cent in bandwidth for every copy downloaded.

[larsiusprime]

Moved everybody's posts over here

Moderator powers, yay!

[beamyining]

something about game dollars ???