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Interesting. So 90% of the people pirate the game (which has no serial number or protection). I thought the reason people pirated apps was because of draconian protection systems like DRM?!
Hardcore pirates will always find a new excuse. Most of them just don't want to pay. They can't be counted as lost sales if they never had any intent to buy.
If that 90% figure is accurate, that's really fucking depressing. That's a beautiful looking game. I sure hope they're getting enough sales to make some decent money.
On the flip side, I recall at least one set of statistics showing that most pirates don't run a game more than once. Presumably most pirates pirate huge numbers of games and simply don't have the time to play them all in depth -- which certainly supports the idea that they wouldn't pay for them if piracy weren't an option.
Interesting. So 90% of the people pirate the game (which has no serial number or protection). I thought the reason people pirated apps was because of draconian protection systems like DRM?!
Yeah - most of the people pirate because its easy and relatively risk free. They would never think of 'pirating' a car. Who came up with the term pirating anyway? It adds a glamor that 'stealing' just doesn't have.
It would be as if I had a device that could duplicate your car in 10 minutes, atom-for-atom.
Clearly this would spell big trouble for the auto industry. We might even introduce laws which make this act illegal, or otherwise induce artificial scarcity so that the price of a car doesn't fall to zero, because we decided, as a society, that the auto industry is something we want to encourage.
Maybe every car would require a special passphrase to start, and the car phones home via the cellular network so that no more than one passphrase can be active at a given time.
Hmm. That sounds familiar. On the other hand, I'm not stealing someone's car when I duplicate it, am I? Suddenly there's this third party (the car manufacturer or retailer) who cares a lot about what I do with me car. They'd say, "No, it's bad for you to copy other people's cars" and do what they could to stop me.
A very different situation from car theft today, which involves only two parties (me and the person I stole it from) and obviously and directly deprives said person of their car.
Copyright infringement isn't theft, not legally, not historically, and not morally.
A bought this game at the full price despite having the pirated version available. I really want to encourage them to make more! For what it's worth, I probably wouldn't have bought it if it had any sort of crazy DRM scheme.
There's a wallpaper sized version of the of the pirate robot image and a new song on the official blog post here: http://machinarium.net/blog/2010/08/05/machinarium-pirate-am...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I might have agreed with you once. These days, Google Analytics tracks 2/3 of pages on the Internet. I already know you downloaded it -- if you think you have a legitimate reason to not let me track that you turned it on once, send me an email and I'll be happy to discuss the many benefits of paying Big Freaking Enterprise pricing with you. I have no desire to do privacy-increasing mechanisms which only help the priv…
i'm not really trying to make an argument about privacy and your rights online type of stuff. i'm just trying to make note of the fact that if you do have something that phones home, can you really say that your product is totally free and clear of that drm/registration/etc type of software practices? more similar to false advertising. "our product will NEVER do this. except, it does, but just a little"
DRM is about controlling the right to run the software, and I don't think a simple ping back would count as that.
If that 90% figure is accurate, that's really fucking depressing. That's a beautiful looking game. I sure hope they're getting enough sales to make some decent money.
90% seems to the rate everyone comes up with when they actually measure it, judging from various independent games blogs and feedback from acquaintances in mobile gaming. I wouldn't be surprised if the rate holds for AAA titles as well. On the flip side, I recall at least one set of statistics showing that most pirates don't run a game more than once. Presumably most pirates pirate huge numbers of games and simply do…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah - most of the people pirate because its easy and relatively risk free. They would never think of 'pirating' a car. Who came up with the term pirating anyway? It adds a glamor that 'stealing' just doesn't have.
I have never considered pirate software to be "risk free". I'm not concerned about getting caught. I'm concerned about running arbitrary binaries downloaded from god-knows-where which were prepared by hackers with less-than-honorable intentions. After you've reformatted your hard drive for the 3rd or 4th time, you give up on pirate software.
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It's $5 for everyone. The piracy thing is a marketing gimmick because you don't get written up in gadget blogs just because you have a sale.
Is it $5 for those who already paid ?
Even if you don't wish to play the game (often), the soundtrack is pretty awesome to have as background coding music. $5 is a steal.
agreed; soundtrack alone is well worth the money
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm not really trying to make an argument about privacy and your rights online type of stuff. i'm just trying to make note of the fact that if you do have something that phones home, can you really say that your product is totally free and clear of that drm/registration/etc type of software practices? more similar to false advertising. "our product will NEVER do this. except, it does, but just a little"
It's also possible to put an online feature in the game like check the high scores or check for updates, and you'll be able to track usage while not having a DRM feature. DRM is about controlling the right to run the software, and I don't think a simple ping back would count as that.
>"We released the game DRM-free which means it doesn’t include any anti-piracy protection, therefore the game doesn’t bother players serial codes or online authentication, but it’s also very easy to copy it," Amanita's Jakub Dvorsky explained. "Our estimate from the feedback is that only 5-15 percent of Machinarium players actually paid for the game."
1) they claim to not have any DRM, registration, pingbacks, etc.. they're saying that the 90% (average) number is purely based on feedback. how reliable is this number? i know i ignore most feedback mechanisms by default.
2) if they said all of this, and it turns out that the product does have a pingback or some form of automated feedback, is that not dishonest?