- Details of the ten most pirated PC games of 2008 have been released by TorrentFreak, it gives some idea of the sheer volume and value of what is being stolen. No wonder the boxed standalone PC game is becoming extinct.
| 1 | Spore | (1,700,000) | (Sept. 2008) |
| 2 | The Sims 2 | (1,150,000) | (Sept. 2004) |
| 3 | Assassins Creed | (1,070,000) | (Nov. 2007) |
| 4 | Crysis | (940,000) | (Nov. 2007) |
| 5 | Command & Conquer 3 | (860,000) | (Mar. 2007) |
| 6 | Call of Duty 4 | (830,000) | (Nov. 2007) |
| 7 | GTA San Andreas | (740,000) | (Jun. 2005) |
| 8 | Fallout 3 | (645,000) | (Oct. 2008) |
| 9 | Far Cry 2 | (585,000) | (Oct. 2008) |
| 10 | Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 | (470,000) | (Oct. 2008 |
- Nintendo sell 800,000 Wiis in one week in USA. An amazing feat, just the logistics involved are impressive. At this rate Nintendo will have to launch a new machine because every American household will have a Wii.
- Analysts says that the Sony Playstation PS3 is vulnerable in an economic downturn as customers become more price sensitive. And the Nintendo Wii is vulnerable because its more casual gaming is a discretionary luxury. So it looks like 2009 will be Microsoft’s year.
- Konami launch teaser site that hints that Metal Gear Solid is coming to the Microsoft Xbox 360. This makes commercial sense if you look at the relative sales figures of the consoles. The industry will not exactly be surprised if/when this is officially announced.
- Sony to cut 8,000 jobs. And 8,000 contractors, so the total is 16,000. Sony just had a 90% fall in quarterly profits and warned of full-year earnings down 58%. What can you say? Difficult times call for difficult measures.
- Sony launches PS3 Home today and Trip Hawkins is not impressed:Â “What I can’t really tell yet about the various announcements made about online and what they’re doing so far, I can’t tell whether they’re going more towards this mass market idea – the way I’m describing this ‘omni-market’ – or if they’re being lured into essentially trying to compete with Warcraft or Second Life. My own personal opinion is: if Sony makes Home feel too much like a Warcraft environment, they’re just never going to create the kind of audience size that you’re going to see Nintendo and Microsoft create. Because clearly Nintendo is orientated towards the mass audience, and even Microsoft has learnt a lot of valuable lessons from things like Xbox Live Arcade.”
- Lots of Zune rumours. Mainly that it will feature in Steve Ballmer’s CES speech on 7 January. Some say that it will be the Zune phone, others that it will be a big gaming announcement. Already the Zune has features and benefits that the iPod doesn’t. But still Microsoft need to catch up in the perception of the market. As Zune is a cornerstone of their long term strategy they will stick at it till they win.
- The Nintendo DS has broken the all time UK one week console sales record. And that is without counting all the counterfeit machines. Yes, now they are stealing the consoles as well as the games!
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“Analysts says that the Sony Playstation PS3 is vulnerable in an economic downturn as customers become more price sensitive. And the Nintendo Wii is vulnerable because its more casual gaming is a discretionary luxury. So it looks like 2009 will be Microsoft’s year. ”
Or, the 360 will suffer too because it’s the middle ground. They’re hardly going to do well from the recession …just not as poorly as others if they’re lucky.
As for the piracy chart, Spore is so high up because it became a protest to DRM. Assassins Creed was leaked, and crap, so people wanted a quick look but not pay and suffer the whole thing. Crysis was probably pirated more to make sure the thing ran on peoples computers before buying it. Command & Conquer was pretty poor too, so there is more try before you buy.
The lower games are just traditional piracy. It’s an evil that exists, and for the most part can’t be avoided. They don’t all account for lost sales. The numbers actually make me think that the number of lost sales by piracy is lower than first thought.
But then you can prove anything by using stats, as we have seen here a few times.
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BC Stated
“The lower games are just traditional piracy. It’s an evil that exists, and for the most part can’t be avoided.”
Murder and rape are evils that exist but it makes them no more right than piracy, which everyone should be trying to stamp out for the good of the industry.
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I’m all for stamping out piracy (murder and rape is probably not an equal evil by any stretch of the imagination though).
If it isn’t fought in someway then it can get out of hand. The problem is that a lot of stamping out involves annoying the good people who buy it with ever more poor DRM that doesn’t work.
Piracy is not the sole reason for loss of sales. Technical requirements and price of hardware, DRM, complications in getting it to work, bad ports, unsuitable games for the known market, etc. The methods of stamping out the piracy are not making a dent in the numbers and are possibly artificially bumping them up.
Those numbers are not losses in sales because many of these people wouldn’t have bought the game in the first place. Some pirates are just collectors (which I always find weird), others just want to give the game a go, and some just don’t want to jump through hoops to play the game they bought.