"Starcraft 2 pirated 2.3 million times" -GI - Page 7

On November 16 2010 15:15 oogles wrote:
I hate statistics like these, because it's like saying "Blizzard is missing out on the sales of 2.3 million copies of Starcraft," which is totally bogus. In all likelihood, most of the people who pirated it just downloaded it, opened it up, played it for 15 minutes and then never touched it again. I have friends who pirate dozens of games a week and that's kind of how they play. You can speak ethically about whether these people should be doing this; I for one don't pirate because I want to support developers that make great games. However, in the grand scheme of things, these people are not as significant of a factor in how gaming companies make money than these statistics would lead many to think.

The worst part is that misinterpretation of statistics like these become a justification for gaming companies to take drastic anti-piracy measures that in my estimation hurt the entire industry by hurting the consumers that PAY for the product. Blizzard is certainly not the worst offender in this area, but the missing LAN functionality in Starcraft II is a direct result of this kind of thinking. With Starcraft II growing, these kind of problems don't just affect the consumer, but even large events like MLG.

The concept behind preventing piracy is to make those who pirate have a more difficult time experiencing the game than those who purchased it. But if you are negatively affecting those who purchased the game, you are diminishing the margin by which the "purchased" experience is better. In some extreme cases, pirated games actually work better than purchased games.

I am optimistic about the anti-piracy models that focus on making the "purchased" experience better, rather than working on making the pirated experience worse. If it is easy and convenient to buy, download, and update the game, and you get other features that you simply could not get through pirating, people are going to be more likely to just pay the cost of the game and get it going right away, instead of tinkering with cracks and stuff. Steam is a great example of this: you can re-download the games you purchased at any time, cross platform, it is insanely easy to update the software, and you get all of your user data on any computer through the steam cloud.

All that being said, Blizzard actually does a pretty good job of doing it right in my opinion. Yeah, the blizzard downloader isn't perfect but you can redownload SCII through your Battle.net account any time you want which I think is great. I just feel like Blizzard not allowing LAN is kind of showing that they don't trust the value of Battle.net 2.0 and they feel like consumers would opt to get pirated hacked versions rather than play on the ladder.

On November 16 2010 12:09 seaofsaturn wrote:
Well, a lot of people who actually bought the game probably used a torrent to download the client because the blizzard downloader is slow as balls.

On November 16 2010 12:07 mufin wrote:
you could also flip the coin and argue why did blizzard try to fight pirating in the first place and simply give its community what they wanted (lan, cross-region etc...)