The Trouble with Torrents
Piracy. Lots of game developers suffer from it. Some people think it’s killing the industry, driving games to closed platforms. Obviously I don’t agree (at least not completely), starting a game studio and all that. But it’s worth paying attention to. I did a search on WPP and Torrent. Found a nice page that listed five different sites where you could download War Plan Pacific. I hope you, dear reader, didn’t download any of those.
Because who knows what they contain.
Or put it another way, don’t put that zip file in your computer, you don’t know where it’s been.
The smallest of the five torrent downloads was 416 Meg. One was over 900 Mb. The bits that ship on the retail disk from Shrapnel? 110Mb . Throw in a pdf of the manual for another 8 Mb to make it 118 Mb. Throw in the 1.0.1 patch and it’s still under 150 mb. So if you sample one of those torrent copies, you’re getting between 266 and 760 Megabytes of, ahem, extra stuff. Wonder what that extra stuff does?
Because who knows what they contain.
Or put it another way, don’t put that zip file in your computer, you don’t know where it’s been.
The smallest of the five torrent downloads was 416 Meg. One was over 900 Mb. The bits that ship on the retail disk from Shrapnel? 110Mb . Throw in a pdf of the manual for another 8 Mb to make it 118 Mb. Throw in the 1.0.1 patch and it’s still under 150 mb. So if you sample one of those torrent copies, you’re getting between 266 and 760 Megabytes of, ahem, extra stuff. Wonder what that extra stuff does?
posted by JohnH at
9:08 PM
5 Comments:
I came on here just to raise a similiar issue. I found the War Plan Pacific demo on a magazine cover disk and really enjoyed it. I clicked on the link to buy it and found that it cost $40. I'm sorry, but in my opinion that's insane.
I realise that you're market is pretty small as an independant, but I can't believe many people would consider $40 good value for a game like WPP. Its great fun whilst it lasts, but I can buy Hearts of Iron II for less than $20 now, and thats a game ten times bigger.
Again this is just my personal opinion, but I think that by asking $40 you're just playing into the hands of pirates. I haven't pirated the game, but I wont be buying it either. If it was $10 or $20 I'd be happy to, but what you are asking simply doesn't add up when you compare it to other options in the market. And given that piracy is so easy, I think your pricing policy is shooting yourself in the foot.
While I certainly respect your decision about how much money you want to spend (especially in this economy), ultimately I don’t think price has much impact on piracy. Someone who is willing to pirate a $40 game because they say it’s only worth $20 would also be willing to pirate a $20 game, saying it’s only worth $10. And then they’d pirate the $10 game because it’s only worth $5, and when the game was $5 they’d justify pirating it because it’s only $5 and who’s going to miss that. Honest folks like you who decide that if a game costs too much they just won’t play it are using a different thought process than pirates.
Our goal is a game that will provide at least 60 to 70 hours of total enjoyment for the average customer. While pricing is the publisher’s decision, we’re looking at well under $1 per hour of fun as our target. And we provide demos so you can get an idea if the game appeals to you before you have to shell out any money. Now, that 60-70 hours is a goal, and it won’t apply equally to every potential customer. Some people will look at the game and see themselves playing for a few hours then moving on to something else and other people think WPP will be on their hard drives for months or even years to come. Plus everyone has to make a decision about how much they’re willing to pay per hour of fun. One guy may only imagine getting 10 or so hours of fun out of WPP but still be willing to pay $40 because it’s still cheaper than going to a movie and there’s nothing good playing anyway. Another guy may think he’ll get hundreds of hours of fun but money’s tight and the car needs a new brake job so maybe he better not buy.
But getting back to the piracy angle, what I really wanted to point out about the torrents is that I suspect they are packed full of viruses. The smallest torrent download I saw for War Plan Pacific was more than twice the size of the legit full install.
-John
I don't even like using cracked executable for games that I do own. Had to use them in the past to get some games that I paid for to work properly, but don't like the idea of what might be "in" them besides the .exe
I bought WPP specifically because it wasn't an unwieldy monster game. I have no desire to play a game that is more work than going to work. ;)
It's ironic that I stumbled across this while looking for a torrent of WPP. I'm not looking for a torrent because I'm some sort of hard-core pirate, but because the Gamer's Front download policy is so absurdly restrictive.
I purchase a digital download of WPP, and I didn't think twice about the cost. But I was foolish enough not to hold on to the installer executable, not realizing that my download link would expire. A few months ago, after a clean install, I had to request another copy of the installer from Gamer's Front. Now, I have a new computer, and I can't find my executable again, so I've requested a new download link, only to be told that the policy is that they only allow one re-download.
I buy a lot of games online, from Steam, Impulse, Gamer's Gate and others, and this is the first time I've found myself limited like this. I understand concerns about piracy, but I am a legitimate customer who has been driven toward piracy by overly restrictive use policies. I can't imagine how not providing customers with new download links can possibly prevent piracy. In fact, I can't think of ANY reason why they can't provide me with a new link. It's not as if providing a digital download costs money.
I promise I'll never buy another game from Shrapnel until they allow me unlimited use of something I've already purchased.
And now I'm off to risk a virus so that I can play a game I paid good money for.
Jeff,
I'm sorry you're unhappy. One thing I think it's important to point out is that neither Shrapnel nor KE Studios use any DRM for the WPP digital download. A trade-off involved there is that downloads are not unlimited, like they can be on something like Steam.
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