As well as our love of Arsenal, Captain420 and I share an insatiable desire for statistics. Google Analytics is always in our web histories and we frequently discuss changes in "the numbers."
This weekend the numbers went absolutely mental.
Our daily hit count has been steadily increasing for months now as interest in Football Superstars has broadened, and more often than not each day shows an increase over the one that preceded it. Saturday continued this trend and unremarkably became our biggest day for hits so far. Sunday however was quite the opposite and blew us away by doubling this figure in one shot!!!
Yesterday (Monday) site activity reached unprecedented levels and looked sure to even surpass Super Sunday! I went Sherlock on this development's backside.
I gave thanks to our benevolent internet overlords before embarking on a Google search, focusing in on pages that had made reference to Football Superstars within the timeframe of our dramatic increase in hits and registrations. I was expecting to find that one of the major gaming news sites had been talking about us and sending a lot of traffic our way, but instead I found that almost every search result took me to the dark, dank corner of the internet that's home to warez sites and other assorted dodginess.
Apparently one of our trusted Closed Beta testers (pre-Transfer Window) had leaked the Football Superstars client to various torrent and file-sharing sites. Typically this spells disaster for a game, and publishers have invested millions in preventing this sort of thing, but it seems that this act has proved to be the single most effective marketing stunt Football Superstars has had!
While most games require cash purchase up front or a paid subscription, Football Superstars is freely distributable and in fact once we're out of the Transfer Window we'll be actively encouraging you all to share the game with your friends! We don't even have the worry of warez users gaining access to the game ahead of release as they are completely unable to access anything beyond the login screen without us manually activating their accounts!
Strangely there are several positives in all of this for Football Superstars, but even so as a keen gamer and card-carrying member of the games industry this stuff really concerns me!
How is it that Football Superstars has been promoted in the typical channels for over a year now and seen pleasing though modest increases in awareness, and yet the minute the warez sites catch wind of FS our numbers double? What does this say about how the gamers of the world choose to find out about new games, and ultimately get hold of them?
I'm far from naive on the subject and know all too well just how drastically piracy has hurt PC gaming in recent years, but I still held the belief that there was a majority of us reading magazines and websites and talking with friends to find out about the latest games. Now I see that a staggering amount of people pay attention only to these illegal websites and must completely disregard the usual sources for news. Surely if these people had such an interest in Football Superstars they would have found out about us by now one way or another, but instead they all flood in only when news reaches the torrents.
We now live in a world where publishers very deliberately delay the shipping of PC versions in multi-format releases because they know that a universal launch is tantamount to giving away free copies of the product they've slaved over for years. Some major players in the industry are now completely abandoning the PC as a platform because of this (see Epic Games and Gears Of War 2)!
I'm under no illusions that one man or even one community can do anything to turn back the tide, but I wanted to put this in writing and express my own thoughts on the situation. I'm not the PR suit spewing canned warnings; I'm just a gamer who's extremely concerned for the future of PC games, if indeed there is one.
N.B. Clearly warez versions of the Football Superstars client are out there, but we strongly discourage you from downloading them. The only official link to the download is the one at footballsuperstars.com that you are given access to when we activate your account. The people posting these third-party downloads can very easily add malicious programs to the files that could damage your computer and infringe on your security. Besides, you can't get any further than the login screen without an activated account :)
