News - Spore leads top 10 list of most pirated games

[HEXUS]

Studies show that three PC games available via BitTorrent have now surpassed 1,000,000 downloads. Ouch.

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[Betty_Swallocks]

Yes, all that DRM was ever so effective, wasn't it?

[finlay666]

I think a lot of the problem is the perception that its an ok thing to do drm or not, look at world of goo, 90+% piracy rate they reckon, a similar amount for the other game the company released that did have drm so it doesn't make a huge difference.

[kalniel]

I thought it'd be way more than that actually - for such a popular game. It's fairly obvious that the more popular a game is the more people will download it, so I guess DRM is doing something if it's keeping the numbers down.

[Bleak]

DRM (newer versions of Securom) is also to keep down the number of 2nd hand sales of games as much as anything.

Rather than total number of downloads it would be more interesting to know the ratio between purchases:downloads on games. Also how many people who downloaded the game went out to buy it afterwards.

Without those sorts of figures the total downloads doesn't really mean anything other than the game was popular, which we already knew.

[Barrichello]

The site reported 1.7m illegal downloads of Spore since the game was released in September 2008.

Electronic Arts (EA) said it sold nearly 2m copies of the game.

TorrentFreak said that Spore's Digital Rights Management (DRM) software - which came in for considerable criticism when the game was released - was one of the reasons the game was so prolifically pirated.

Sounds about right.

[Andy3536]

And if they hadn't used DRM and passed the saving on to the customer the number buying the game would be up and the number pirating down, yet the're still using it.

[kalniel]

And if they hadn't used DRM and passed the saving on to the customer the number buying the game would be up and the number pirating down

You're just making that up. Might as well say if they didn't use DRM then the number pirating would be 10x higher and the number buying the game would be lower. There's no DRM of note on Fallout 3 and yet it's been pirated far worse than Spore in terms of downloads to sales ratio.

[Andy3536]

You're just making that up. Might as well say if they didn't use DRM then the number pirating would be 10x higher and the number buying the game would be lower. There's no DRM of note on Fallout 3 and yet it's been pirated far worse than Spore in terms of downloads to sales ratio.

Your just making that up
So if they sold them cheaper they wouldn't sell more ?

There's been links posted on here in threads where people from the gaming industry have said DRM does more harm than good.

[choongsta]

anyone else feel spore was a bit of a let down?

[kalniel]

So if they sold them cheaper they wouldn't sell more ?

Not significantly.

[Andy3536]

In my opinion, not significantly.

Some problems with your post, corrected for you

[kalniel]

Some problems with your post, corrected for you

I don't see any change

[educatedfool]

You're just making that up.

The same can be said for every single argument against DRM and for DRM. Every 'fact' that is stated is horribly inaccurate and should never, ever be used to create official statements.

My opinion on the matter is that spore was not pirated as much as you thought was because it was such a bad game even the pirates couldn't be bothered to get it. And saying DRM affects the number of downloads is just wrong. If I have ever thought of downloading a game, the fact that it has DRM makes no difference because within 1 or 2 days it'll be fully cracked.

[magneticman]

fallout 3 does have drm

[kalniel]

The same can be said for every single argument against DRM and for DRM. Every 'fact' that is stated is horribly inaccurate and should never, ever be used to create official statements.

That was my point

fallout 3 does have drm

The game itself doesn't, only the launcher.