[OT]Talking to Pirates

[Robert Fraser]

Mike Parker wrote:
> Additionally, earlier this year one of the most successful indie game 
> companies out there discovered that 92% of the full version copies of 
> one of their games were pirated. There is a writeup about it, with some 
> details on how they tried to reduce that number, over at Gamasutra:
> 
> http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350
> 
> I thought some of the parties on both sides of the discussions here 
> might find these links interesting.

 From the Gamasutra article: "...[W]e find 1 additional sale for every 
1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated 
copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale."

That sounds about right for the casual games space. The space is filled 
with a lot of products and besides one or two "must-plays", they 
generally feel like perfect substitutes for me (the only "must-play" PC 
casual game I've encountered is Peggle, though I bought Aquaria - big 
letdown IMO - and will definitely buy World of Goo).

I'd expect to see much different numbers for something like Microsoft 
Windows Client, probably closer to 1 in 10. Sure there are (arguably 
better) substitutes -- but most people don't want them. The 9 people who 
can't pirate the newest version of Windows would stick with the older 
version; I'd assume VERY few businesses or home users choose Linux 
because they can't afford/don't want to pay for Windows (obviously this 
case is different for Linux vs Windows Server).