Software Pirates

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In which the middle-aged Peacenik mouths off about War Drones--and all the other things that make him cranky. Pnorny!

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Software Pirates
03.22.05 (8:15 am)   [edit]
I was snooping out a warez site for research purposes and noticed that this one site tracked the number of times a particular game was downloaded. In this case a game was downloaded over 97,000 times. Wow! Doing some quick math at $40 / game, that could theoretically mean the game publisher lost nearly four million dollars in sales because of this one site alone. Double wow!! Call the police, the FBI, the NSA - this is a travesty. Those software pirates must die, die, DIE!!!


Wait a second. According to the site the game had been up one day. That means it would have to be downloaded about 300 times concurrently every moment for a day. That's a lot of expensive bandwidth and makes the 97,000 suspicious. Maybe it's the number of attempts to download.


But that got me thinking about WHY a game might get downloaded that much. This game wasn't a major name like a Halo or a Half-Life 2. It was a war game which usually appeal to a niche market. But why the tremendous downloads?


Two thoughts why.


  • It's "free" - plain and simple. Not that the person downloading will ever play it seriously. They'll likely download it, install it, try it for a minute, realize that it's not their type of game and then delete it. In this case, the game acts as sort of a demo. If the downloader likes the game hopefully they'll buy it. But the real thrill is downloading for free.
  • To "own" it. I call this the Collector Mentality. The downloader will likely never install it or if they do won't play it for very long. The thrill comes from having it, being able to add it to their collection. It's the software version of a packrat - they got to have it.


    In either case the software company is, yes, theoretically losing money but not in reality necessarily losing sales. The freeloader and collector would likely not buy this game - period - but because it's free and it's there they download it.


    Does that justify piracy? Hell, no. But there are different types of downloaders. Sure, some downloaders will be people who enjoy the war game genre and will download the game, will play it, and won't ever buy it but I sincerely doubt they make up the bulk of 97,000 downloads.

    •  

    posted by: winnipeg (reply)
    post date: 04.14.05 (1:37 am)

    Yes. It is horrible for the companies and I think that people should pay for games to play. But in the case of dowloading commercial free tv, I am all for it. Although I haven't done it, I get so sick of commercials and advertisements. Nice Blog. Keep Blogging.

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