Piracy and World of Goo
November 15th, 2008
I forgot to post this yesterday as I got busy and well…forgot.
Joystiq had an interesting (and scary) article on the World of Goo piracy rate on PC:
- World of Goo has 90% Piracy Rate (www.joystiq.com)
I bought World of Goo for the Wii (it was available as WiiWare) and I thought it was one of the best games I played this year. It’s fun, innovative, challenging when it needs to be, but easy to grasp and pick up. It’s beautifully designed and has abosutely fantastic artwork and music. It’s a great game. And it was made by two programmers and an artist! Three people!
What really pisses me off about all this is that people often justify piracy as “sticking it to The Man”. They say things like, “well, I wanted to try the game, but I didn’t want to support Giant Corporation X”. In this case they’re ripping off a tiny company of three people.
With a piracy rate somewhere around 90% now expected with PC sales, it’s no wonder that a lot of companies are getting out of the PC games business altogether. Let’s say you’re lucky enough to have 100,000 people playing your game. That means 10,000 actually bought it, and 90,000 pirated it. If your game cost $15, like World of Goo, that’s $150,000 made off sales. That’s nothing to sneeze at. However, three people working for a couple of years on a game, and all of a sudden, it’s not a fantastic living. It’s not poverty, but it ain’t great.
I have no idea what World of Goo’s sales are like on PC, they might be better or they might be worse. It’s just a shame. It makes me nervous about releasing my game on PC. It will take me a lot of time, effort, and money to get the game running on Windows/Mac, but if I only sell 100 copies, is it worth it? Who knows how many copies of my first game I expect to sell? It’s so hard to find (cheap/free) data on this sort of thing.
This is all the more reason for me to develop for the iPhone first. I’ll still probably end up building this first game for Windows/Mac too, just to see how much it sells. If it doesn’t make enough money to support itself, I’ll have to think whether or not it works as a long-term strategy. I know a fair number of indie developers do make a living off PC games, but I also know that they almost all struggle with the issue of piracy.
Owen