Well, one of them at least =) Gotta say though, I was disappointed to hear about the piracy.
Chat with Echo

Good interview questions. I found the part about the effect of the demo on sales quite interesting (any devs reading about this, take note). I'm also quite surprised by the sharp drop in sales that followed the appearance of the pirated version; quite unfortunate that piracy hit their sales so hard. It would have also been nice to know if they ended up coming out in the red or the black for Defense Grid with some general idea of by how much- basically to see if even in the face of rampant piracy the development of independent PC games is a viable business model.
Anyway, thanks for posting that up, it was a good read.

Interesting article, but it leaves me with the same question I always have when I hear developers or publishers talking about "piracy rates": How the hell do they know how many copies of their game have been pirated on any given day? I can understand how they got the information on the sales drop Austin mentions (and one could debate piracy as the sole cause of a sales drop three weeks after a release) but he mentioned "pirated copies per day" as it related to sales produced by the demo. How could he possibly know how many copies of his game were pirated on a daily basis? If it is possible to actually track this kind of information, then shouldn't they have enough information to take to law enforcement to deal with it?

Yeah, it would have been interesting to know sales information like that; however, I don't think Echo would have been comfortable with making such information known -- he didn't want to talk numbers -- so I was actually surprised when he did bring up the those figures for piracy.
The good news in that though, is that Steam did do it's job. It prevented zero day piracy (the only form of piracy Valve have claimed it to stop). Without that, they really would have been in trouble right from the start.
Still annoys me though that such a cheap game (and now with a demo too) is being pirated in the first place. But then, seeing what happened to World of Goo, just goes to show that there are some real *******s out there.
Now if you read between the lines, I guess we can assume that sales are still fairly good, seeing that would use Valve's Steamworks in the future. And of course, if we do get to see some community tools, then we know they're doing ok!
I will also be interested to see how it fares on the xbox when it finally gets released there too. Sadly, no PS3 release due to how incredibly annoying Sony made it to program for the damn thing.
Interesting article, but it leaves with the same question I always have when I hear developers or publishers talking about "piracy rates": How the hell do they know how many copies of their game have been pirated on any given day?
Another good question. I figure they do the same thing anyone would. Pick most widely known source of pirated games and watch the figures. Although some companies can also track though the number of support requests they get. So... I guess I could try asking him later to see if he'd be prepared to give an answer. No promises though.

I know one method is to check all the major torrent trackers and count the number of leechers as the number of downloads. However, this method is fairly inaccurate as many of the torrent trackers overlap, leading to the numbers of pirated copies being grossly inflated. Unsurprisingly this method is fairly popular among those looking to make claims of there being lots and lots of piracy.

World of Goo still managed to climb to the top spot of Amazon's PC sales charts, above things like Spore or WoW. PC sales are on par with the game's Wii sales (if not better), so they don't seem to be doing that bad. And lots of other people playing the game I see as a good thing - if I were given the choice between a 1,000 sales and 10,000 players or 1,010 sales and 1,010 players, I'd go with the former.
As for Defense Grid, the game's nice, but overpriced. You could actually get a proper game for 20$ (hell, even three, if you're looking at GOG), instead of a simplistic tower defense game, of which already exist countless free variants. It's a whopping zero bucks they're going to see from me, unless they halve their price - whether I also pirate the game or not is a separate matter.

Finally finished downloading this game today (via Steam), spent about 8 hours straight playing the thing. I have to say, it's the most well presented of the Tower Defence genre games I've played.
$20 is abut right, but I picked it up at the $15 sale. Mainly due to the current exchange rate on AU/US:$
Good job on the interview!

I don't know if a lot of people know this, but Steam actually provides developers/publishers with extensive details on purchases. They can quickly find out how many units were sold in a single day and where those sales originated from.
Not sure, but I expect the details go right down to the exact time of purchase too. So at least Hidden Path have a very good idea of how much they are selling and when.
As for Defense Grid, the game's nice, but overpriced. You could actually get a proper game for 20$
Defense Grid is a proper game =) Have you at least played the demo?
I also can't agree with the notion that it's better to have more players and less sales. And if someone is not prepared to purchase a game, why should they then be playing it for free? What right do they have to decide to do that? I've read all the excuses that pirates use to justify their deeds, yet I have seen very very few that I would find acceptable. And those only pertain to availability. If the only problem is the asking price, then there is no real justifiable reason for taking a game for free.
Still, I'd be interested to see the results for a company that takes the brave move of setting a base price of say $5 for a game and then also offering higher prices for the same product and then giving the player the choice of how much they deem the game to be worth.
I'd be interested to see how many units they sell at each of their price ranges and the overal profit made on each of those ranges to see which is most acceptable to players and which is most profitable in the long run. Sure we could just say that players would find the $5 price best and developers the $50 price, but I bet in reality the results would differ to that.

Didn't a few bands try this a year or 2 back and actually got people paying more than CD price to get it straight from them?

Yes. I think Radiohead at least tried this. Probably others too. I would really love to see the same attempted for games.

Radiohead tried it with In Rainbows, with a name-your-own-price kind of deal (I just paid $0.00). Nine Inch Nails (best band EVER) gave their newest album, The Slip for free and Trent Reznor even told people who felt they were being shafted to just steal his music online.

yeah I got the new NIN as well, shame it wasn't that good really
It WAS radiohead! I seem to remember it one one of those faceless interchangeable pop bands but couldn't be sure it was them.

I liked The Slip, my favorite song was 1,000,000. And the thing you said about Radiohead being a "faceless interchangeable pop band"? OH SNAP!

I love Defense Grid, it's a great tower defense game, and well worth the money I paid for it. Though I bought it on Direct 2 Drive when it was on sale there, so it was cheaper than on Steam (not only because of the sale, but also because I could pay in dollars).
It's too bad to hear that the devs are feeling forced to do console development or focus on online games due to piracy. :(