PC Game Piracy (and I agree with this...)

Great Debates
21

“Caveat emptor” is an obnoxious concept when the seller’s side is making moralistic speeches about the moral duty the buyer has to behave a certain way. Why is it the consumers who have all the responsibility?

Basically, they are saying “unauthorized copying is wrong; always, under all circumstances! But if you don’t like the game sight unseen or our DRM breaks your machine or we steal your personal data, screw you! We don’t have any responsibility!” I find it difficult to find sympathy for the producers and sellers of software when their disdain for their customers is so obvious.

22

Lots of publishers out there don’t cop anything like that sort of attitude.

23

You mean like all those things that can be and also are pirated? And none of which do you have to worry about not working with your computer but being unable to be returned? No worries your computer is going to be compromised by bad code that allows hackers to get in (yip, it’s happened. See SecuROM or however it’s spelled.)

It’s really quite simple. To fight piracy, release a free demo so that anyone who wants to try something out can. Don’t make the DRM make it harder for legitimate users to use. Offer incentives that can only be gotten by using the software as intended.

The funny thing is, downloadable games usually have the perfect level of DRM for a lot of people, and yet they insist on going further.

Also, why do they think that zero-day crack hurts their sales more than later ones? If you know the game is going to be cracked, it’s pretty easy to wait.

And before someone tries to insult me, note that I’m a former pirate who will only download stuff he owns. The one thing I will do is cdcracks, because I don’t recognize the right to not let me use my hard drive as it was intended.

24

I have to agree. The situation is skewed incredibly against legitimate customers. If you attempt to install the game but it doesn’t work, or if the game doesn’t run properly or crashes, or even if it’s destructive – well, it’s open software, you can’t return it. Piracy, you know.

For the record, I don’t pirate games myself, but I’m also willing to wait a long period of time after release. If a game gets a reputation for faulty DRM or other technical problems, or for licensing issues, I don’t buy it at all. Ultimately it’d be better for such companies to have me pirate their games because I might actually buy it if it works, rather than just writing off the game until it’s bargain-binned at $5.

I sympathize with pirates even if I’m not one. Game companies have gone so far in treating their customers like criminals, and doing everything in their power to ruin used game sales and squeeze us as much as possible, while simultaneously making DRM penalize legitimate customers. Rather than making their products better and easier to use, they intentionally hassle people and blame nasty pirates for their poor sales. Antipathy is to be expected.

Yes, game companies can’t be blamed for taking steps to protect their games from easy, casual piracy. It should, however, be done in the spirit of preventing legitimate users from being adversely affected. I unfortunately don’t see that spirit in effect. As has been said, game companies want consumers to see their control and ownership of their software as inviolable… up to the point where it causes destruction, where of course they disavow responsibility. The CD isn’t owning the software, it’s just a license to use it – except if the CD stops working or is lost, no we won’t replace it even if you have your serial number, you’re boned and no you’re not allowed to copy it beforehand either, or download it from someone else who has the file…

Treat the software as a license, fine - but give customers a bone. Use the Steam model. Let us redownload games we’ve purchased onto a new PC without saving all the physical media. Give us an advantage. Treat us like valued customers,not like potential criminals. Otherwise, as it stands, buying the software means all too often an inferior experience compared to pirating, and people will ethically feel justified to pirate.

25

The only way to really beat piracy is to make buying the games more attractive than pirating them. iTunes did more to kill music sharing than any other attempt before it. Steam has done a lot for games, too. Yes, they do have DRM, but it’s generally non-intrusive.

You’ll never eradicate piracy. Can’t be done. There will always be people who pirate for piracy’s sake, who take cracking DRM as a challenge, or who have extremist views on the freedom of software. The effort needed to stop these people is far, far out of proportion to the potential revenue gained. The people you can win back are those who consider piracy to be more convenient than dealing with legitimate software.

26

I’m perfectly willing to put up with DRM that is not intrusive at all to the customer as long as i am being charged a decent price. My Steam library is huge, mostly from package deals but i still spend plenty of money with them. As far as piracy goes you just can’t make people feel bad about screwing companies that gladly screw them, it’s just never going to work.

27

:rolleyes:

28

Basically stand alone pc games are about to go the way of the dodo, while multi-player games will most likely gravitate to the world of warcraft or eve online subscription model. One of the things they are looking at to drive down the price of games is to make it episodic.

Piracy according to the numbers on the graph in the article show that rates of piracy are regionally biased, so North America seems to have the lowest amount of piracy, while Asia seems to have a high rate.

Most game developers are basing their next gen games on console and may not even do a port for the pc/mac/linux side. Case in point is that bungie has no intention of releasing halo 3 for computers.

Since I buy only console games(360), it’s not something that really affects me until the game dev’s start on their planned assault on the used game market. I have no use for pirates or their reasoning why, if game dev’s can’t put food on the table or pay the rent, they are gonna move on to another profession that will.

Having said that, it will affect my zero day purchasing if the price of games remains the same for all titles. Their right to set the price, mine to ignore and wait. For boutique pricing, it had better be an orgasmic game.

Declan

29

As I see it there is a spectrum of pirates. On one extreme is those who would never pirate anything for any reason. They will pay the price and put up with any inconvenience or do with out. On the other, there are those for whom piracy is an ends unto itself. They pirate just to beat the system or for the challenge. Most of us fall somewhere on the spectrum between. If the price/inconvenience of the legit product is high enough and the pirated copy is easy enough we can justify it to ourselves.

That said, I acknowledge that all piracy is a form parasitism on a creative industry and can kill developers. My first real computer system was an AtariST and it had what was probably the first multi-player FPS game called Midi-Maze. The game required you to hook up the computers in a midi-loop of up to 16 at a time and then you could run around a gray featureless maze and shoot pellets at happy face spheres. I played that game at parties for years and only saw one legal copy. All the others were pirated. That was a game that only really appealed to people who were the most likely to pirate at the time. The company went out of business and gave the rights to a German company that tried to do a shareware version before it finally ended up on the original Gameboy as FaceBall2000. The game itself was not that expensive, and no more inconvenient than the pirated copies (it actually crashed less). It just had a fan base that overlapped with the group that pirated for fun.

Contrast that story to Baen Books Websubscription model. Theyy allow DRM free, unlimited downloads of anything you buy, and they are making enough profit on it that other publishers are now starting to use their service to sell books online. But they have three things going for them:
[ol]
[li]They offer a price point that offers good value. Individual books are 4-6 dollars each (several dollars cheaper than the paperback), available the same time as bookstore.[/li][li]Adequate try-before-you-buy. There is a fairly large free library containing one or two books by an author or in a series and sample chapters for every book are available for online reading.[/li][li]Perhaps most importantly, they have no long standing issue with piracy. Pirating books does not have the same social assumptions that other forms of IP have.[/li][/ol]

I guess the moral of the story is to find a way to get the vast majority of the people who would only pirate if they think they are getting ripped off or if they have a problem with the producer (overly aggressive DRM or reduced quality/convenience) to get on board with your model and let the hard core go. Maybe something like Steam can do games what iTunes did music and pull it out of the morass. But unfortunately, game piracy has been endemic for decades, music piracy only became mainstream about 4-5 years before iTunes store opened. That is lot more time for it to become normalized.

30

As far as I can see, piracy only kills developers who struggle too hard against it. The more you bitch and moan and install gates and security and otherwise act like a complete tightass, the more people will want to pirate your stuff, either because the legal copies are a pain or a genuine threat to your computer, or just because they don’t like you as a company. Companies who relax their grip on their software (without being stupid about it, of course) tend to find a much more welcoming and loyal customer base.

For another non-game example, I point to Rifftrax. They sell audio commentaries on unencrypted MP3s for $3-5 a pop, and as far as I can tell they’re doing extremely well despite the ease of potential piracy. I know I certainly would never think once about pirating their stuff; I like them and want to support them.

31

[OT] Just want to mention that I went to a couple of LAN parties in the early 90’s where we played this game on our ST’s. The first multiplayer FPS I believe.[/OT]

32

Except that isn’t true. Stardock, just for example, has had some games very heavily pirated. They’re one of the most gamer-friendly anti-DRM developers out there.

33

I was about to ask what you meant by heavily, since that’s an entirely subjective assessment, but I decided to do a little digging myself.

It looks like the big story for Stardock in the past couple years was their release of Demigod, an online strategy game. This article tells the story: When Demigod was launched, they were overwhelmed with pirated copies. Only about 15% of the accounts were legit. Sounds pretty bad, right? But the game came in 3rd on the following week’s sales chart, which didn’t even count digital sales. The game only dropped to #5 the following week, and was #7 overall for the month of April; impressive for a small-name game, considering it released in the middle of the month.

The CEO appears to be pretty unconcerned in the article, although I take that with a grain of salt since I doubt he’d present himself any other way. Regardless, Stardock appears to have weathered the piracy storm and come out ahead.

Arguably, his approach is sensible. Rather than focus on all the potential lost revenue, wailing and stamping his feet over what “should” be his, he’s concentrating on the money he is making. Does it really matter if there’s a million copies of your program running around, as long as the revenue your company does make is sufficient to keep rolling and growing? I know, it’s heretical in the US to not want to squeeze every possible dollar out of the consumer, but it certainly seems to be a much less stressful approach.

Of course, I do want to highlight my previous post:

In that same article, the CEO admits they could have done a few things better with Demigod, including asking the user to set up a valid account. I don’t see that as anywhere near as intrusive or restrictive as most DRM methods, and it’s a pretty basic and reasonable thing to do for online games. It likely would have cut the number of pirates in half and increased the sales by a good amount. Lesson learned, anyway.

Ugh. I typed out that whole post before realizing it didn’t actually address what you were saying. :smack: You’re certainly correct; 85% piracy at launch is heavy by any measure, regardless of how well the company did despite that. Still, I remain optimistic that the laid-back approach pays more dividends in the end than flinging DRM feces in customers’ faces.

34

Yes, and it’s terrible how this vast, heavy piracy has completely killed them as a company. It’s truly one of the great casualties of software pirates.

…except for the part where they’ve been growing extremely quickly, posting some very impressive numbers for what began as a very small, unheard of development house, and diversifying into multiple fields including online content delivery.

That darn piracy, holding them back.

35

One of the posts in this thread is a thinly disguised insult against pirates, and probably one in particular.

As for my hard drive, the original purpose was to store a program on the disk so that one would not have to constantly use the external media. Requiring the CD circumvents this function for the hard drive, as I have to put the disk in any time I want to use the program. I see nothing immoral about removing that restriction. All I did was make my (legal) backup (that’s on the hard drive) completely functional, so I don’t risk damaging the original.

It’s pretty much the same thing as putting all your DVDs on your computer. You realize that the software that does this has to “crack” the encryption to do this, right?

36

I’m the biggest pirate I know. But I think the argument of “I use cracks because disks circumnavigate the purpose of my computer!” is nonsense. I don’t have a problem with you using a (illegal) crack for your (legal) backup. I just think the argument you use to justify it is silly.

37

Stardock? Are these the motherfuckers who send me the “WinCustomize” magazine, and have for years, even though I absolutely do not want it, have never read it, and have repeatedly clicked “unsubscribe”?

I have never been to stardock.com, nor have I ever knowingly given them permission to send me stuff.

38

This is the wrong way to look at it. Stardock games have sold incredibly well and the company has made plenty of money DESPITE being heavily pirated. Of course if you offer a product with no protection a lot of people will download it for free but plenty of people will happily pay for it. More than enough to have a successful company.

39

Exactly. Stardock gets an enormous amount of good press from gamers, and has made it despite being a small fish in an awfully big pond. I own one of their games myself and I nearly assuredly wouldn’t have bought it if it wasn’t for their reputation.

Too many people assume that piracy equals loss. I don’t agree. If for every person who pirates your game who might have actually paid for it is replaced by a sale to someone who wouldn’t have bought because of anti-piracy measures, plus the positive publicity – you win.

40

Doesn’t game rental fill the gap here?