About 4%" of people playing have purchased the game

NO stealing is never ok and being poor is no excuse for that. If you don't have the money than save it up or wait for a sale but stealing? NO.

Piracy =/= stealing. These are different actions with different direct effects, different moral implications and different legal consequences.

And I would go so far as to condone theft in certain situations. Never say never :(

wait do you seriously believe that piracy is no theft? And no theft is never ok even if its for some food. You need morals to keep law actual meaningful and if you excuse one thing but not the other our society would be done for.

I already explained that they are. You are welcome to try and argue otherwise.

The second part is on your conscience. I know mine.

Welcome to the PC, a sad reality. However I'm sure some will probably buy it later on (granted, for less) if they liked it.

I've yet to see anyone make an actual argument for how piracy = theft. Most people seem to think that using something you haven't paid for = theft. If that's the case, we're all thieves, seeing as I'm pretty sure just about everyone in Western society has borrowed a book, movie or game from someone.

Of course, only a lunatic would think that.

There already are a whole lot of arbitrary laws in society. We're still standing.

It's nothing. It's a headline-grabber that was never meant to be anything other than a throwaway tweet. Here, listen to the developers themselves:

Originally Posted by Rubikant

Taron here, the other half of Crazy Viking Studios.

A 90%+ piracy rate estimate is expected and normal for any game that has a DRM-free version available, which we do, and since tracking the number is haphazard at best (I'm not sure why Kris even tried), the margin of error for estimates is really high, so we are well within the norm for estimated piracy rates. I'm not sure why its suddenly newsworthy. I don't think Kris expected this much reaction when he made that tweet (and I personally wish he hadn't said anything).

There's no way to say if piracy actually negatively affects sales, in fact there's every possibility that it increases sales. Anyone claiming to have converted piracy rate into actual lost sales is lying to you. Just because tons of people download a game, doesn't mean they were going to buy it anyway, and there's no way to definitively say if they would have or not. Chances are they wouldn't have bought it anyway, or are just using the pirated version as a "demo", so I personally doubt it has any significant impact on sales.

That's why we aren't actually stressed or even particularly surprised by the estimate. It will have no affect on how we do things in the future. It was just an observation (that in hindsight Kris should have kept to himself), an interesting statistic to look at but it doesn't really MEAN anything, and we don't and won't support the practice of using intrusive DRM to combat piracy, as it does much more harm than good.

I just want to make cool games. Piracy is going to happen and any attempt to stop it is just going to upset legitimate customers, so its not worth spending time on. I'm not even sure why Kris started tracking it or tweeted about it, he certainly never told me he was doing that.

Originally Posted by Rubikant

Also, for those that wondered, no the game does not use any kind of metrics or tracking. I'm staunchly opposed to that kind of thing (I'm big into privacy rights) and I refuse to include it in any game where I have any say in the matter (which for CVS as half owner of the company I obviously have say).

I left my industry job and went indie when my company was bought out by a freemium mobile games company, and I did so largely because I hated the player manipulation used in freemium games and I hated the idea of adding systems in the game that track what users do and send it to some server somewhere.

I want to make games to entertain people, things like pay walls and metrics tracking are not in the pursuit increasing the fun to be had from the game so I see no reason to use them. Maybe its not the best way to do things financially, but I believe that the method for making money from a game should never, ever be a consideration for the actual design of the game itself. Game designers having to consider profitability in their game design decisions (both for freemium and stuff like dumbing down the game to appeal to a wider market) is exactly what I find to be the biggest detriment to gaming as a whole right now.

The only thing Volgarr does with online is connect with Steam for authentication, leaderboards, and achievements, and of course it doesn't do any online stuff at all for the non-Steam version.

Originally Posted by Rubikant

I think the term "releasing" in your first sentence is pertinent here. The problem, as I see it, is that it wasn't meant to be a "released" figure at all. There was no press release involved, nor was it part of an article or interview. This wasn't an official company statement intended to make the rounds in gaming news.

Rather it was a twitter tweet from a small-time developer who was a bit surprised by his own estimation (made purely out of academic interest and curiosity) and got a bit ahead of himself, not expecting it to get any real attention anyway, and expressed in a manner of being thankful to everyone that resisted the urge to pirate a game that was very very easy to pirate (being DRM-free and all) and bought it anyway. And we do appreciate it, that thank you was meant sincerely!

So, yeah, I agree, it was pretty stupid and even a bit irresponsible, and a valuable lesson has been learned about how once you actually have a released game your tweets can spread far and wide and get way more attention and scrutiny than you may be used to. In hindsight, he should have either not said anything at all, or had a full pdf prepared outlining the statistical data and its sources and methods and such and properly "released" the info rather than randomly tweeting it. Live and learn.

So our apologies for stirring up controversy, and if there is continued interest and time available perhaps Kris can put together an article showing his full data, but in the meantime, as I said before, we expected piracy anyway (its inevitable, DRM or not) and there's no solid evidence that it affected sales one way or the other, so this really isn't news-worthy.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=702205

Found that with about a 10-second google search. Next time you see a sensationalist title, do a little research before reacting.

Port it to Mac or PSN and i'm in!

I'd needa know more information about where that number came from to even guess how accurate it is. Are they just looking at number of torrent downloads vs number of sales? Because a lot of people pirate games and then purchase them after.

Either way, I just really don't want to believe that 96% of the players stole it. That's heartbreaking.

what? it is like you are going into a store and take something without paying. How is this not theft? You do not borrow anything you pirate it. Seriously people...

@darji: Theft: material loss for someone. If you steal a car the owner of the car will no longer have that car. Piracy: an unauthorised copy. The person who made the software still has it and the pirate have a copy of it. Both are bad but they are not the same thing.

Theft = taking something someone else spent money/work on producing.

Piracy = reproducing something someone else holds the rights to reproduce.

They are very different things, as one is a practical offence while the other one is a theoretical one.

A lot of high level hair splitting going down in this thread.

That's true. It's not an excuse to pirate a game in general even if you wanted to play it. There we're a lot of games I wanted to play when I was younger but then the only option I had would be to get a boot-legged version and also mod the console to play those bootlegged games. I knew of classmate growing up who owned boot-legged PS1/PS2 games. Heck, I've done it too in terms of PC games back in the day but also was way too caught up with education anyways, so I only played a few, select games even on my free time.

WOW just wow.... You know what. I am done you guys deserve no games at all so yeah go pirate your games until no one wants to actually make games anymore and you are left with stuff like COD and tons of free to play games with microtransactions that will get every little penny out of you because this is what you guys deserve.....

It would be depressing if that number were 50%, but 4%? To HAVE TO dream of getting 8% or 16% of people to buy your game instead of stealing it is just a wretched thought.

And, I think we have to stop saying, "Oh it poor college kids or poor high school kids..." Its not.

I work in a place where people pay on the honor system for photocopies and printout from computers. Do you know who pays and who doesn't? Do you know who pays without whining or bitching about a copy being 25 cents? WORKING PEOPLE! The people who know the value of a dollar, the people who scrape by on minimum wage are always the people who pay for all their printouts and never complain. The people who typically cheat, steal, and bitch are always the affluent people who could afford it at ten times the price.

The people stealing games are not the people who cannot afford games, they are the fucking pricks with a $2,000 computers.. Its not that having nice things or being affluent makes you bad, but I assure you its not the person with a used computer working hard to feed his family that is stealing games...s/he is at work not on the internet stealing.

Let's not fool ourselves into thinking most of these thieves cannot afford games, that is an excuse that is mostly a lie.

@monkeyking1969: I'm on more or less the same side as you, though I don't think your personal anecdote holds up at all. I pirated games when I was poor, I know it was wrong, and I feel bad about it. Now that I'm not poor, I don't pirate games anymore. My brother whose on disability pirates all his games, because if he didn't, he wouldn't be able to play anything. Plenty of the people pirating games are doing it because they can't afford it. I'm not saying that justifies it, but it's true.

My own stance on piracy has and will always be, if the developer still reasonably stands to make money off it then don't pirate. If it's a game from back in the day goes for hundreds on eBay and it's not available through any digital download service, then that's another story. The people who're pirating this game don't have this excuse. I hate to put it bluntly, but if you don't want to pay for something, or even if you're not able to (sorry) you shouldn't have access to the product.

In the end, I understand what it's like to be in less than desirable financial circumstances and don't judge anyone else for making certain decisions. I would go on, but I think I'm getting into some really dicey territory here. I think the important thing to take away here is that we should go buy "Volgarr the Viking", because it's a pretty cool game. I know I will.

Pirates are bad people. That's my story and I'm stickin to it.

Seems like a weird definition, since a pirate does take something someone else spent money/work on producing (without consent).

Don't steal folks, it is NOT an 'everyone does it' situation. Have some self esteem for at least that in your life.

I have spent 12 years watching who pays and who doesn't. It is beyond an anecdotal, its about 100K people passing my desk and paying or not paying for printouts or copies at machines less than 3 ft from my desk. I have more than enough 'data form observation' and 'data from interaction' that shows the people with the least money pay more often, pay fully, and complain less.

But, Hunter that just sounds like you and you brother are thieves regardless of means. You blame poverty, but it could be you.

@monkeyking1969: Your data is based on your assumptions about how "affluent" someone you've never met before is. Also you're assuming that there is a 1:1 translation between a photocopy honor system and purchasing or pirating a game. It's not exactly scientific data dude. Say what you will about me and my brother just being awful awful thieves, the fact remains that I haven't pirated a game since I was capable of purchasing them, suggesting a direct relation between means and rate of piracy. I highly doubt there are a bunch of rich jerks out there pirating stuff just because they can. That doesn't make any sense and comes across as an attempt to make pirates seem worse than they actually are. Which is not to say I support pirates or that being poor justifies their actions, I already stated earlier in this thread that I think the whole situation is disgusting. However claiming "They do it for no reason simply because they can!" is just silly.

If Adult Swim wants to employ me to help them figure out this issue than by all means. Otherwise I don't care.

How about they, like everybody else, use their resources to solve their problem? This whole boo-hoo charity campaign ain't working on me.

But if it's any consolation I'll totally buy Volgarr when it goes on sale on Steam for 75% off.

Steam sales are like legal stealing! But more expensive.