World of Goo

[Dale]

Awesome puzzle game, that craps all over TIM.

Website: World of Goo

In fact, I'd go as far to say that it's the most fun game I've played this year. It's so simple, yet the solutions can be as complex as you wish.

The design is just brilliant, with that ultimate challenge of building your own massive tower at the end.

At $20 US it is an extremely affordable game, and provides at least $50 worth of entertainment. Very much a "great buy". Plus, the developers are two new up-and-comers. It's always very beneficial for the industry to support Indie Devs, so I say go for it.

Well done 2D-Boys!

World of Goo Trailer 2 Director's Cut
by 2dboy

[Asher]

It has a 90% pirate rate on the PC.

PC GAMING RULES/././

[Dale]

True! They say they can trace this as the game logs in to upload scores.

But the devs do state as a disclaimer on their 90% pirate rating that a large percent is probably due to dynamic IP's of legit buyers.

[DrSpike]

Hmm, I'm no expert but that seems a fishy argument to me.

[snoopy369]

From their blog, the post Asher/Dale are referring to:
[q="2dboy"] 90%
Thursday, November 13th, 2008 from Ron Carmel

pirate.pngyes, that’s the approximate piracy rate for the pc version of world of goo. we casually mentioned that number recently and the news seemed to propagate far and wide, so we’d like to follow up with some more details, for those interested.

first, and most importantly, how we came up with this number: the game allows players to have their high scores reported to our server (it’s an optional checkbox). we record each score and the IP from which it came. we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources by the total number of unique IPs in our database, and came up with about 0.1. that’s how we came up with 90%.

it’s just an estimate though… there are factors that we couldn’t account for that would make the actual piracy rate lower than our estimate:

* some people install the game on more than one machine
* most people have dynamic IP addresses that change from time to time

there are also factors that would make the actual piracy rate higher than our estimate:

* more than one installation behind the same router/firewall (would be common in an office environment)
* not everyone opts to have their scores submitted

for simplicity’s sake, we just assumed those would balance out. so take take the 90% as a rough estimate.

this is in line with a previous estimate by russell carroll (director of marketing at reflexive) for the game ricochet infinity. russell estimated a 92% piracy rate and i found his analysis quite interesting (check it out here if you’re curious). one thing that really jumped out at me was his estimate that preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale. this supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game aren’t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying.

in our case, we might have even converted more than 1 in a 1000 pirates into legit purchases. either way, ricochet shipped with DRM, world of goo shipped without it, and there seems to be no difference in the outcomes. we can’t draw any conclusions based on two data points, but i’m hoping that others will release information about piracy rates so that everyone could see if DRM is the waste of time and money that we think it is.

————————
nerd.jpgUPDATE (and nerd alert): a lot of smart people have been questioning the accuracy of our 90% estimate, and with good reason, it’s a very rough estimate and the measurements are flawed. so we did some more digging to see if we might have missed the mark by a significant amount. here’s what we found:

1. based on the number of unique IPs and unique player IDs, we found that on average, there are 1.3 unique IP addresses per player (there is 1 player id for each profile created on any installation that submits scores to our server)
76% of players have contacted the server from 1 IP
13% from 2 IPs
5% from 3 IPs
3% from 4 IPs
1% from 5 IPs
1% from 6 IPs
1% from more than 6
this tells us that the dynamic IP issue is a relatively small factor in this calculation
2. we also looked at how many players IDs were created (rather than used) from each IP address. given that the vast majority of player IDs are associated with only a single IP, this is a fairly accurate measure of how many profiles the average user created. on average, a player has 1.15 profiles per installation.

when we take the total number of player IDs (which is smaller than the number of unique IPs from which leaderboard entries came) and divide it by 1.15 (the average number of profiles per installation) the number of estimated unique installations drops by about 35% as compared to the estimate based on unique IPs. let us further say that the average user installs the game on 1.25 computers with different IPs (i.e. not behind the same router), which i think is a high estimate. that lowers the estimated unique installations by another 20%. after factoring both of these in, the piracy rate would still be 82%, and we should keep in mind that this number doesn’t include those who never opted to submit scores to the leaderboard (it’s an option that’s off by default). so while it’s possible that the actual piracy rate is lower than 90%, it’s unlikely that it’s significantly lower. 2d boy hopes this satisfies the more rigorous number crunchers out there

oh, and yes, these numbers are exclusive of the demo… those scores are submitted to a different server entirely.
[/q]

So it's in the 80% to 90% range, probably. Either way, I think the counterargument to Asher is quite simple: Treat the 80%-90% as demo users, and treat the 10-20% (actual sales) as the interesting number. Are the actual sales numbers high/good/whatever? I think the answer for that is yes...

[Dale]

The demo is no argument either, as apparently the demo uploads to a different server database so they keep demo and full leaderboards seperate.

[Asher]

This is why PC gaming is dying. People still play PC games in North America, but they only regularly chart in Europe because Europeans -- being dumber than North Americans, by virtue of not being bright enough to leave Europe -- keep spending money on free merchandise.

[snoopy369]

You're not even reading my argument, are you ... Piracy numbers are literally irrelevant. If a game sold 50m copies, it wouldn't matter if 2bn copies were pirated - 50m sales is the relevant number. As the above article references, piracy->sales conversion ratio is about 1000:1, meaning only 0.1% of those pirates are potential customers anyway - so, if you have 1000 sales and 9000 pirated copies, you're only losing 9 sales (total) to piracy, which is the only relevant factor (it doesn't cost the producer a penny for their game to be pirated, in direct costs).

Heck, piracy in Europe is just as bad, or worse, than in the US (I used to play . I think it's just a cultural difference, not regarding piracy but regarding console vs PC. In the US you're more likely to own a console, and therefore buy console games; in Europe, people like PC's more, and are less likely to own a console, so more PC games are sold.

[Asher]

Originally posted by snoopy369
You're not even reading my argument, are you ...

Heck, piracy in Europe is just as bad, or worse, than in the US. I think it's just a cultural difference, not regarding piracy but regarding console vs PC. In the US you're more likely to own a console, and therefore buy console games; in Europe, people like PC's more, and are less likely to own a console, so more PC games are sold.

Cite this, because I know for a fact Playstation sells by the ****load in Europe...

[snoopy369]

Oh, that's just personal experience, hence 'I think'. But the fact that "Playstation sells well in Europe" should be evidence enough that Europeans don't know **** about consoles... heck, it's probably evidence that they're buying it for the BR drive and nothing else. Why else would more people buy a PS3 than a X360?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Asher
This is why PC gaming is dying. People still play PC games in North America, but they only regularly chart in Europe because Europeans -- being dumber than North Americans, by virtue of not being bright enough to leave Europe -- keep spending money on free merchandise.

You pirate PC games don't you? And then have the chutzpah to come and shout that the PC is dying and how great the environment for developers on the 360 is?

[Asher]

Originally posted by lord of the mark



You pirate PC games don't you? And then have the chutzpah to come and shout that the PC is dying and how great the environment for developers on the 360 is?

If I pirated PC games, how come I'm getting achievements in Fallout 3?

You presume too much for someone who knows so little.

[Asher]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Oh, that's just personal experience, hence 'I think'. But the fact that "Playstation sells well in Europe" should be evidence enough that Europeans don't know **** about consoles... heck, it's probably evidence that they're buying it for the BR drive and nothing else. Why else would more people buy a PS3 than a X360?

It goes back to the PSX/PS2, not just PS3.

[Wiglaf]

Originally posted by lord of the mark



You pirate PC games don't you? And then have the chutzpah to come and shout that the PC is dying and how great the environment for developers on the 360 is?

[Dale]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Oh, that's just personal experience, hence 'I think'. But the fact that "Playstation sells well in Europe" should be evidence enough that Europeans don't know **** about consoles... heck, it's probably evidence that they're buying it for the BR drive and nothing else. Why else would more people buy a PS3 than a X360?

I know a few families that chose PS3 over 360 purely because of SingStar. Why do you think Lips has come out for, to combat that market.

Personally, I would prefer 360 games, but when buying a console for the whole family you can't overlook Sony's whole "family game" orientation.