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'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator

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Re: 'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator

#51
post #35
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it doesn't really make sense to add online or multiplayer support to the app/game? Then isn't it just the typical DRM anti-feature? I'd be pretty annoyed if I couldn't play my fun new game on a plane because it needs to constantly connect to the internet to prove I didn't steal it.

As somebody who makes a living selling software, I do not consider the author getting paid a minor feature. Apologies for the inconvenience, take it up with 80% of your generation.

I'm pro authors getting paid, but you can't expect users to like antifeatures. Such as an online mode that merely detracts from the game. If it adds more than it takes away, then users will be happy about it, even if the main reason you put it in was your own wallet.

Re: 'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator

#52
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be that as it may, can you see that it's legitimate for a musician to want to make, record, and sell music - not an associated industry of products? And there are fans who don't go to concerts or buy t-shirts, but really like listening to music? If you're a fan like that, and you don't give back to the artist at some point, you're making it less likely that the recordings you want will be made in the future. Notice t…

"Be that as it may, can you see that it's legitimate for a musician to want to make, record, and sell music - not an associated industry of products?" It's legitimate to want any sort of business model to work. But if it doesn't work, complaining that you wanted it to doesn't help.

The shame is, I can't think of anyone who wouldn't want it to work. I don't know about you, but I like the fact that I can listen to recorded music and not have to go to a live performance.

Re: 'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator

#53
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when my company was using our analytics to track piracy for iPhone applications, we found that 1 out of 243 people who stole an application later installed a legitimate copy. We stopped tracking piracy when we realized that we were getting into a cat-and-mouse game with application pirates and the feature wasn't worth the resources, but I can't imagine these stats have changed much since.

Thank you for bringing data into the discussion.

While I agree with you that data is nice, this data in particular doesn't say a whole lot. It's like saying "1mm pay Google for the enterprise version of Google apps, and 100mm don't. They're leaving so much revenue on the table!" When discussing freemium, nobody talks about those who choose the free plan as 'pirates', even though they are doing the exact same thing that 'pirates' do.

Re: 'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator

#54

Sadly, pirates don't actually convince their friends to buy it. They help them pirate it. He's right about doing what he can to provide features that pirates can't take advantage of, though. That's the only way to actually combat piracy.

I agree with you. However, truly outstanding apps will always do well. I downloaded Angry Birds Lite to my itouch, played the first few levels and promptly bought it. I also did the same with Tower Madness. There was an article on a flash games company that could detect when the app was running on illegal web servers. It would display an advert inside the game saying where it came from which resulted in a spike of traffic and revenue for the original owners. I believe a few developers are now treating the pirates as salesmen to reach a larger buying audience. It's not ideal, just goes with the territory

Re: 'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator

#55
post #37

Sadly, pirates don't actually convince their friends to buy it. They help them pirate it. He's right about doing what he can to provide features that pirates can't take advantage of, though. That's the only way to actually combat piracy.

I'm maybe 15 years behind the current trends but all games I've ever bought (when I was still buying games...) were carefully screened and test played using pirated sources. Piracy has always been the de facto news channel for new games: not magazines or demo disks. You had the game coming from your friends first and you saw it weeks or months later in a magazine. Investing actually money into something as brittle an…

I often find demos to be misleading of what the final product will be like. Games are expensive, at least for me, and demoing the final product is the only way I will know for sure that I am not going to waste $60 if I decide to buy something.

Re: 'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator

#56
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for bringing data into the discussion.

While I agree with you that data is nice, this data in particular doesn't say a whole lot. It's like saying "1mm pay Google for the enterprise version of Google apps, and 100mm don't. They're leaving so much revenue on the table!" When discussing freemium, nobody talks about those who choose the free plan as 'pirates', even though they are doing the exact same thing that 'pirates' do.

It brings more to the table than the hand-waving that I see all over piracy discussions. And I don't see how you connect the parent's post with your freemium discussion - he made no such conclusions from his data.

Re: 'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator

#57
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you that data is nice, this data in particular doesn't say a whole lot. It's like saying "1mm pay Google for the enterprise version of Google apps, and 100mm don't. They're leaving so much revenue on the table!" When discussing freemium, nobody talks about those who choose the free plan as 'pirates', even though they are doing the exact same thing that 'pirates' do.

It brings more to the table than the hand-waving that I see all over piracy discussions. And I don't see how you connect the parent's post with your freemium discussion - he made no such conclusions from his data.

It's true, he didn't. But I've seen others draw the same conclusion from similar data before, so just pointing out that fallacy ahead of time.

Re: 'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator

#58
post #41

Sadly, pirates don't actually convince their friends to buy it. They help them pirate it. He's right about doing what he can to provide features that pirates can't take advantage of, though. That's the only way to actually combat piracy.

I helped my friends pirate the first 10 audiobooks of a series I love, by handing them a flash drive with the MP3s on it, and the condition that if they liked the series they should buy the new ones as they come out. Now 6 of my friends (who never would have been hooked on the series otherwise) own legal versions of the two most recent novels starring our favorite wizard-detective. Those sales would not have been mad…

as a huge fan of audibooks myself: Can you tell me what series you are talking about?

(see? Another chance to hook somebody)

Re: 'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator

#59
Perhaps then the goal is to have a mutable pricing structure that responds to market pressure. If it really doesn't cost anything to produce 1 additional electronic copy, something like this might work.

At launch date / first to market, there is a high price tag for the digital good (whether it be music, game, movie, etc). This is so that the vendor/author can make sure that they can sell at a high price to those "first movers" that actually want to pay $1000 to be the first person on the planet to have that special ring tone, ahead of everyone else in the market, for example.

As time passes, and as more people buy the "product" (which is done via a download or a file transfer) - the price of the product goes down - because the as demand rises, the cost of production actually doesn't change - and the author already made some money, so there's no point being greedy, because then people would go and pirate it.

Once this price goes down, it goes down for EVERY SINGLE customer, including those who bought it during the high initial price. I mean, the vendor does have the customer's credit card numbers. Do a residual, scaled, periodic refund for every single customer, based on the differences between the current discounted price and the original price at which the customer bought the good.

As the # of units sold increases, the price of the product decreases - of course the relative rates can be tweaked so that the vendor is still making more money than they are discounting, because as an electronic/digital good, there are no factories or warehouses - it's easier to make money at mass scales when it comes to digital goods (vs physical goods like bicycles).

Existing customers feel validated - the more people they recommend to buy the product, the more money they get back.

New customers don't feel like they're getting ripped off - the prices are falling all the time, and you "buy into" a whole discounting structure.

The original vendor/producer can finely tune the ratio at which the prices fall in order to control profitability, popularity, and sales rate as a factor in promotion and marketing.

Again, if you take advantage of the fact that if you sell 10 copies, the cost for building the software/digital good is no different from when you sell 100,000 copies, then you can exploit that "efficiency gap" if you can call it that between the existing pricing structures and a variable pricing structure that I describe.

At some point, you will reach a "price floor" at which the producer is comfortable reaching their target cumulative total profit. Since altering the price changes the price for every single customer since the beginning of the lifetime of sales for the product, you can actually say - I want x million for this product in 3 years time - and actually be able to hit that target by planning out the way the price changes. OR if you believe in the long tail, go ahead and have a constantly decreasing price - as you reach the hundreds of millions of people in the long tail, you can charge 1 cent - and you would get hundreds of millions for a product you made - providing usefulness for all those people at a great price - AND being able to protect your livelihood during those critical first few sales.

Of course, this requires every single sale to every single customer to have its own merit, its own tracking system, its own values. BUT personalized sales is exactly what we are looking forward to in the future.

And I think technically, it's not super hard - I mean we have nonstop systems and mainframes and clusters of all kinds - that analyses the trillions of collisions in the LHC - what makes us think that we can't track six or seven billion consumers who are alive on this planet, who might be making 5 or 6 million transactions a year? It's not that bad when you consider the scale that google / national science foundation / CERN operates at.

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