Interesting theory on internet piracy(article)
 

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...e-pirates.html

It's concerning the video game market, but do you think that this also applies to the adult video industry?

That's a very interesting take on piracy, though, I think it will be quite hard to convince content producers to adopt a similar stance.

One minor difference is that using pirated games takes at least some level of knowledge... it's not just click a link, download, install... with tube sites, there is zero knowledge needed, any idiot can go to a tube site and watch free porn...

Even in regards to sophisticated computer users, people are a lot less likely to install an executable on their system than they are to play a media file... especially in an environment where the player's embedded in the page for you.

As installing a stolen game requires use of a peer-handled executable, I'm sure that the gaming market is, on a proportionate scale, less impacted by content theft than most other markets affected by torrents and the like.

It's still an interesting take, but their situation isn't quite analogous to ours, imho.

Well my 2 cents would be:

If a game costs 20 bucks in US it's fairly cheap, plus the demography of users is different, many of them don't even pay with their own money for that, as far as it's also kids or teenagers

The average Joe can't even find and crack the game, I always had to do it for my stepfather

They would not preach this if they wouldn't be making busloads of revenue, which is apparently their case and which apparently doesn't happen in adult

It's fans of one particular game, you won't be satisfied with something else for free as in adult

Who is buying games? US and western Europe, of course the rest of the world can't afford it - massive piracy going on, just for illustration a new game here costs around 100 - 110 USD while the income is about five times lower than in the States.

Just give the games for free, let people download them and charge them a monthly fee like World of Warcraft, theres private servers but nowhere near as good as the real ones and the real ones have tons of players.

Yeah, but I'm wondering if he's correct about people who pirate probably wouldn't buy the product anyway.

Yes because most of them wouldn't be able to afford it - the market east from Germany is 95 - 99 pct. piracy because a new legal game costs 100 USD and it's almost one tenth of an average income.

The other thing is that game is not such an impulsive thing like sex, you don't need the game such essentially and you don't need it while having certain tension.

If you have a boner, you just need something to satisfy you, no matter if you will pay for it or not - so that's the moment where you need to grab the surfer for your product - it's a different product and different motivation.

You can spend hundred of hours on a game...not so on a porn flick...
The incentive to buy is not the same.

another good point - the value for your buck is, well say more sophisticated and variable ...

"The reason why we don't put copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count," Wardell argues. "When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue."

Pointing out: "Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count," Wardell argues."

A million lost and they don't count, maybe some lessons to learn at least?

Well, I would dare to say there has been many points raised as for what a totally different product it is to simply ignore them.

Porn - something different, you have a boner, you need an immediate satisfaction, no matter if you pay for it or not, you grab your DVD that you bought, you go to the site that you already paid for OR you load up the illegal tube site- in a couple of minutes, you are done.

You won't be watching adverts and previews for months picking your game that will cost you your pocket money and that will amuse you for months.

We are in a bit of an opposite position now - the pirates make the rules, not our customers.

Interesting article.

Aye, very different.. I'm not sure if the article stated it, but game companies also don't produce games for every language/country or send it to them. So that makes it much harder for piracy to happen.

I also have found most games have online key regs that contact the servers to verify, pretty much a piracy catch for pc games/software at least.


I think pirates rule as little as the rule games, it's how we look at it. We can block all asia/east euro from our sites/members area. We can offer seamless drm protected movies too. We can slow piracy down, to almost none.

It still happens, just like it does in the millions with games.

They say they don't protect the games, but they do when they don't send them to china, a market that won't buy and is more likely to pirate. Which is a major source of our piracy.

The difference is, we set ZERO limits and expect people not to pirate.

interesting........

You can download pretty much any game and if the Chinese guy is a little bit sane and it's not exactly Fallout that he plays, he will put together how to work with the game.

China or eastern Europe can't pay for porn so let them burn their bandwith, the problem is different - it's a different product demanding an immediate satisfaction its purpose is fullfilled in a couple of minutes, for free and with pirated content, no matter if that's a Chinese or an US guy, they both have the same boner.

Once you can get 10 - 15 minutes for free every two days - you have no need to purchase a membership.

DRM is expensive and wasn't used before, because it was contraproductive and the phenomenon of immediate satisfaction with stolen content on tube sites was not there.

Now, when the time has come when it WOULD be useful it's already thousands of scenes flowing around, the tube sites can actually feed each other if they would want to.

So, it's not what to do with the content, that can be stolen tomorrow, but what to do with the busloads of content that was stolen already.

I gotta run, I suppose I broke my record in rhetorics today already anyway.

The big difference is budget; exactly as Carlos points out. Most of the "pirates" are either broke students or consume far too much volume to be able to pay for it all. Then you have the international markets, and realistically they just can not pay for the product be it games, movies, or porn.

With a high disposable income it is far, far more expensive for me to spend time trying to locate and downloaded a pirated product verse just pull out the credit card and buy it.

Additionally I prefer higher quality products verse low quality. Would you rather watch a movie for free that was recorded with a crappy hand camera in a movie theater, or shell out $30 for the Blu Ray? I'll spend the $30.

In a world of piracy what your customers are paying for is quality & immediate availability. And that doesn't matter if your potential customer can't afford to pay anyways.

Great article, thanx for the link!

Another thing is that games use to summon almost a cult following and a new game of popular series such as Warcraft or something is going out probably once in a few years, why wouldn't you pay 25 bucks for something you wait for three years already..

Dealing with totally different products here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good

Like Carlos said games have much more of a cult following then porn. For games, there are a lot less perfect substitutes than for porn. How many substitues do you have for Call of Duty compared to say creampie movies?

In porn, if people want a creampie movie, it doesn't matter if it's a hot 10 minute creampie for free from Youporn or a movie from Allinternal. That goes for the majority, of course there's still a smaller % which insists on specific producers, models etc. That % gets smaller as more is available as more free perfect substitutes become available.

Actually that is a good idea, not just in video games, but if you could adapt it to a pay site model. Where you download the video, and it will not play unless verified by the pay site owner server. Kinda like Micro$oft uses to verify you have a un-pirated OS before giving you upgrades.

Interesting..

That's right. Porn and games are very different animals and surfers treat them very differently.

Interesting article :)