[casual_games] Questions about Piracy

[Aaron Murray]

Hello fellow Casual Game Makers. We just launched our first big casual game
(Bumble Tales) on 9.9.09 and I have some questions about piracy.
I was not surprised that the game showed up on dozens of torrent and pirate
sites, though I was surprised to see it leaked the day before launch.
I was also surprised by how many pirate sites it has shown up on. Thousands
of downloads and hundreds of seeders in a day.

Worrying about lost sales is not my concern as I don't think that the
pirates would be buyers anyways, but I wonder if any of you have looked at
your torrent download to portal sales ratios.
Do any of you think there is a potentially decent metric to collect there?

And finally, more abstractly, what are your thoughts on the impact of Casual
game piracy? Is our "target" audience so much less likely to be involved in
piracy that it doesn't matter? Surely games like COD4 suffer greatly, but
would the latest hidden object or match-3 game feel the effects in any
tangible way?

-Aaron

-- 
Aaron Murray
Technical Director, Founder
Tandem Games
www.TandemGames.com
www.DomainOfHeroes.com
www.BumbleTales.com
"Fun for All. All for Fun."
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