On 03.01.2006 22:26, Todd Wasson wrote:
> Asgeir Nesoen wrote:
>>I am very sceptical towards sales peoples assessment of lost revenue
>>when it comes to copy protection. For one, these guys often think in a
>>very different way. I.e. "Ah, he has installed this track 12 times
>>during the last 3 months, that is 11 x the price of this tracks worth of
>>lost revenue".
> No, they don't think that. Sales people are not any dumber than the
> rest of us.
Well, at least they are over here in Norway. I am partly referring to
the kind of dicussion about illegal DLing of music here in Norway, and
the amount of stupidity displayed by the industry here really is
staggering. Sales people often have a very different way of thinking, a
way which has nothing to do with reality (I have heard people heavily
into economy say "how can you afford having that valuable painting on
your wall" when I reply "it doesn't cost me a dime to have it hanging
there"... :-)).
<snip>
> When I said we were getting all these downloads, that means we very
> frequently had people trying to install John Doe's tracks on other
> computers. I.e., when you see an alarming amount of instances where
> one account owner is trying to install his purchased tracks on 5-15
> different computers, we have a serious problem on our hands.
> Does that mean lost sales? I understand your point about how you might
> try something that you wouldn't have bought anyway. That's not really
> an excuse, but I understand where you're coming from. And yes, a
> certain percentage of people probably did just that. I find it
> unlikely though because we give the sim away for free along with two
> free tracks. That's plenty for someone to fire it up for a couple of
> minutes and decide it's not their bag, so why are they going and
> installing someone else's tracks without paying for them if the sim
> sucks so much they'd never buy anything? That doesn't compute,
> although perhaps it's happened.
Well, I was not referring to your particular game, since the model of
marketing your game is not the usualy way of marketing a game, far from
it. In a way you published your game as a demo, where all the plugins
can be bought. In that case my argument is dead since there is no excuse
when you can freely DL a game and test it to your hearts content. With
other marketing methods, however, this can be a different ballgame
altogehter as you may well understand. The inability to test a game
before you buy it is an excuse, if not a good one. Your way of marketing
a game is a very good way of marketing a game, since you want to present
the quality and depth in all its splendor to anyone interested, and
trying to make money out of that interest, and not peoples inability to
try something before they buy.
> However, you must admit that in addition to that group of people, there
> is also another segment of folks that will simply do whatever they can
> to avoid paying. On top of that, there is another group of people that
> will simply boycott you and not bother because they hate copy
> protection and want to make a statement. Making any statement at all
> about whether, in purely the financial sense, a developer should put in
> copy protection, and if so, at what level of intrusiveness and
> inconvenience, really boils down to the percentages of people in those
> groups. There are competing forces here and really the only folks that
> have a good feel for the final equation are the developers/publishers.
> The ones with the investments at stake and the sales/downloads and
> other figures staring at them in the face when they proceed to make
> decisions to maximize profits as any business aims to do.
I agree completely. My point was that I believe figures of lost revenue
and market analysis can be vastly more complicated than they occur to
be. People fail to understand that they have to consider the two strong
marketing forces here: Heavy protection will limit availability,
availability will sell more. The actual numbers will vary from business
to business, model of marketing etc etc
>snip>
>(However, if you have a demo
> available, it's questionable whether or not you're really getting more
> exposure, and if you are, is it significant?)
If you have a truly superb product, outstanding and appealing, a demo
will help you no end. You may recall the impact of the GPL demo. Yes, I
know that GPL was a ground breaker in every single department and can
hardly be representative for most demos and games, but it still prooves
the power of letting people try before they pay.
> 2) If you have copy protection, then it goes without saying that you
> are losing sales among the folks that hate copy protection and boycott
> anything that uses it. However, you are gaining sales among a certain
> percentage of the group that wanted it and would pay for it, but would
> have taken it for free instead given the chance. Again, the decision
> is made based on which of these dollar values is bigger.
Musicians offering their music by way of download will also see that
their strategy will affect much more than just their sales figures of
just one record. They will sell a bit less at first, yes, but the fact
that they're present on the net, offering people legit downloads, will
create possible future sales numbers as well. This is extremely
difficult to assess in any way, though. And ditto out of focus for sales
people in the game biz.
Furthermore, I think that focusing on getting at the people who'll never
pay for a game is a bit of shooting birds with cannons, since they'll
always get around protection, it is just a matter of time. I think that
this is what makes people here react and disagree with protection
strategies to the extent that they'll vote with their dollars, since
protection can be very intrusive and possibly mess up existing systems
and create hassle for normal people, paying for games. Because they feel
that they are subject to heavy procedures of which they are not targets
at all.
> In our case, it's safe to say that we vastly underestimated the
> percentage of the population that would simply avoid paying if they
> could do it. We have placed in more stringent copy protection by only
> allowing one computer per account. The result of this policy change
> has definitively, unquestionably been an increase in overall sales.
> Your theory would be correct if the "avoid paying for it if I can get
> if for free" crowd was much smaller than it actually is.
I cannot disagree with this, and I never meant to either. We're talking
statistics here, statistics that I really think have been over
simplified over the years by people who do not understand the nature of
internet. You may note that I am talking generally, not specifically.
<snip>
>>Things don't work like that, as we all know. When I download a game off
>>some file sharing proggie, we're not talking lost revenue at all, since
>>I'll buy the game if it is *any* good at all. Most of the time I'll try
>>it, and ditch it 2 minutes after that, but you can't call that lost
>>revenue, since I would not dream of buying the game in the first place.
>>Same thing with movies. The movies I download from time to time are
>>movies I would not see in a theatre, or even less likely buy a DVD. Why?
>>Because I will not pay for crap! The movies I would get and see for free
>>are movies that I'd never pay for!
> If they're such crap, why bother getting them?
I am watching those movies because I can, not because I choose this
method of watching it rather than DVD or in a theatre. We all know that
a movie has a personal price; for some people it is worth 2 USD, and
they will never buy the DVD or go watch it. And these people will not
represent a revenue loss for anybody. For others it is worth 30 USD, so
they'll go buy it for 24.99 USD and feel good about making a bargain.
The problem is that it is very difficult to assess the personal value a
give movie, or game has. Again, this is something that has to do with
quality and taste, in the personal sense, and is very difficult to
quantify, especially by a sales person who has his own very weird (to
me) standard of what is revenue loss and not.
> Anyway, this is an idealistic view, really. It's easy for someone to
> claim that they would have paid for a bootleg game if they liked it,
> but it's much easier still to put it off indefinitely or find an excuse
> not to do it. Logically it really doesn't make sense anyway to do it
> so to me sounds like a sorry excuse. That's why we make demos. It
> gives you a chance to try before you buy.
And not every game house out there produce demos. A recent development
in games marketing is cranking up sales figures by launching massive PR
campaigns, using hype, what I call mass psychology effects, instead of
working relentlessly to produce a product that stands by itself. A game
programmer wants to sell his game because it is damn good, but his sales
person may want to sell a game on a very different basis. You can crank
up sales figures by making your product better, or by spending even more
money on PR campaigns, fooling people to think that this is something
they need. This of course coincide with the fact that game houses these
days target a huge portion of potential game buyers.
>>I wish game houses would rather spend their energy on making a game as
>>well as possible instead of protecting they property based on false lost
>>revenue assumptions made by people who have no clue whatsoever.
> Do you work in the industry? Ever written and sold your own software?
> Managed a company that did? Seen sales figures from two different
> policies on the same product? If not, it's a bit silly to simply
> assume that the folks that have are just collosally stupid for
> disagreeing with your view.
Of course I am generalizing. Naughty
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