happy to help  

And nobody believes me when I say that piracy is an over exaggerated myth.

people complain so much about piracy because they compare pc sales to console ones but they get there sales figures from an organization that doesnt count purchases of direct download copys.


did you know iron lore entertainment closed its doors recently? youve probably never heard of them but there the people who did titan quest and they were doing soulstorm the warcraft3 expansion.

one of there devlopers had this to say on there forums


i cant help but laugh when i read such idiotic rants, 90% piracy rates? there pulling this from there behinds , off the charts in asia? what does this mean over 100% piracy rates meaning people who dont even have computers are pirating pc games in asia so they can use the cds as coasters for there drinks?

Well i must say i have had downloaded this game @ first, tried it, love it, bought it. The price of 45$ is really nice, also cause the Euro is much more worth atm so it wasnt a decision i need to think about for too long.

Gratz with the sales tho, i hope some expansion news or patch news is comming soon

This Game made my pants tight when I first heard about it. I love this game.

StarDock\IC, Bioware, Epic and use to be Origin ( God Rest their souls and DAMN EA )is my fav companies.

90% piracy? Give me a break. The reason Bioshock sold so well on the consoles over the PC is simply because right now the console stuff is more popular than the PC. It has little to do with piracy. And as someone mentioned, the on-line sales don't count, so the numbers aren't including electronic distribution of Bioshock through outlets like Valve's Steam.

Sure there are people that may have bought the game who pirate instead, but a good number of pirates are people who just want another notch in their belt. They wouldn't buy the game anyway, and won't bother to play it even though they have it sitting on their drive or a DVD-R.

I can't tell you how happy it makes me that Stardock is still anti-copy protection. As time goes on they still seem to be convinced that their way is valid, and I'm beyond happy about that. As long as they continue this stand, I'll probably keep buying their games, even though strategy games are not my personal favorite genre. Money well spent!

-HM

is it bad that i brought 50.000 units

I have to agree, empirical knowledge within this community would seem to fly smack in the face of the argument presented. I did however do another informal and unscientific review of about two dozen of the top public & private sites and the threads related to Sins are telling to be sure. In total I calculated about 12k downloads. So that would put piracy at about the 12% area for Sins. A big huge difference to be sure.

Moreover and this is the interesting part, in nearly all of the comments attached to the torrent threads the vast majority of posters outright told the others in the community to just buy the game while they were preaching the gospel of SD/IC. This is as I stated before when this issue came up in the beta phase. Well contrary to popular opinion in such places many responses, instead of being the typical "go fuck yourself" or "this title is shit" -etc.. where "already got it", "going legit on payday", "picking it up tomorrow" or "I'll get it when it is in my local store" as well as a whole host of other similar comments.

I find it shocking that stuff like that has not really resonated with developers. Hell on these very forums IC has given support to self proclaimed pirates. What happens to such people on other forums??

You win customers with love not backhands and certainty not with BDSM. It is real difficult for even the most hardened pirate to talk smack about SD/IC given it history. In the end many of those same people become some of the best word-of-mouth promoters as well as legitimate consumers for the company. Food for thought...

Not having copy protection was a huge deal for me. When I found out the IC/SD opted out of pirate protection, it almost made me want to go out and buy two copies of the game.

This is all entirely anecdotal, but I have weekly LAN parties with my friends each weekend. Even though the complete lack of copy protection would make it extremely easy for them to just install off of my discs and never purchase the game, every single one of them has gone out and bought the game themselves. Even when I told them the developer was cool with 2 people per key, their response was "I don't care, this game is awesome!". These are not wealthy people who have lots of disposable income to throw around, yet they didn't hesitate for a second on dropping $45 on Sins, even though they already had the game.

Contrast that to games with stringent copy protection mechanisms. It's getting so over the top these days, half the time *I* can't play the bloody game, and I own a legit copy! Add in over-the-top CDkey checking for local area network play, and it becomes impossible for me to demo my purchased games to my friends, to see if they'd want to buy it.

Lately in the PC industry, I feel more like I'm punished for being a legit customer by wading through piles of copy protection garbage just to get the game started. I also can't stand swapping CD/DVDs, so the first thing I do upon patching my new game is to go download a NO-CD crack - sometimes I need to get the NO-CD crack just so I can play my legally purchased game!

Anyway, enough ranting on my part Point being is that most games with obnoxious copy protection measures, my friends have never bought. Contrast this with Sins, with no copy protection, my DVD readily available for my friends to copy off of, and 100% of them all bought copies of their own.

I gotta give a huge shoutout to Ironclad and Stardock on this. Hopefully the rest of the PC game industry wakes up.

Reason I blindly bough GalCiv2, and now 2 copies of Sins (for me and my friend) is lack of copy protection. Stardock trust us that we do not pirate their game, so I return favor and trust them that game is quality product.

This may sound silly, but if they want to sell any copies of their game, it must be quality product and must have even better quality support after release (meaning patches, free assets etc.) to keep up sales. There must be quality instead of hype and marketing like in next example.

And reason I did not bought Bioshock is their copy protection, I really do not want to pay my hard earned monies for something that basically installs rootkit on my computer.
Also I am buying games to play them and not to call their support because i typed serial number wrongly or did small mistake during installation. I may even get pirated version of that game someday, but only If i can bother myself and download it.

After Bioshock, i refuse to buy ANY game that has any DRM issues. I can tolerate DRM if it doesn't spy on me or have a whole host of issues not allowing legit people to play.

I do not care how great the game is, i will not buy it if it has DRM issues and if the company goes under i won't be shedding any tears for them.

As a consumer you speak with your wallet, what i say is no more crummy console to PC ports and no more crappy DRM.