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[Alex Vostrov]

Another article from the nimble fingers   of me.  

Piracy is quite a controversial topic in the gaming community.  People tend to have strong feelings about it - to the point of incomprehension on the opposite side.  There are some developers who take "piracy is the devil" stance, while others simply shrug their shoulders.  Added to the discussion is the issue of anti-piracy measures, like DRM.  Having underdeveloped self-preservation instincts, I'm going to splash some oil into the fire.

95%

That's what surveys by several indie game developers have shown the piracy rate to be.  I don't know about you, but this is shocking to me.  Only 1 in 20 people cares enough to support the person who works to entertain them.  Do you know what the 2nd and 3rd top search strings for "world of goo" are?  It's "world of goo torrent" and "world of goo download".  This is a game which is made by 2 people, has no DRM and costs as much as a dinner out - the standard excuses that pirates spew just don't apply here.

Frankly, the people who pirate games make me sick.  It's not that they copy the games and shaft the game creator - I can deal with that.  What really gets me are the sickly explanations that people bring up when called out on it.

My Nautical Voyages

Let's get a couple of things straight, first.  I come from a country where copyright law doesn't exist, in practice.  Western Europe and America have several centuries of entrenched intellectual property tradition.  The former Soviet sphere, by contrast, doesn't.  Because the government controlled all media for the last 100 years, copyright as you know it didn't form in the Soviet Union.  Sharing bootleg music and books was a way to get around the communist system.  Instead of screwing over the creator, you were doing them and your friends a favour by sharing their stuff.

It's not a surprise then that I grew up blissfully unaware of all this copyright stuff.  Nobody got rich being an author in the Soviet Union anyway.  Since my dad was a programmer, we always had tons of pirated software around the house.  It never occurred to me to ask why somebody would spend all that time and energy making this stuff.  It was just there - poorly translated into Russian by enterprising pirate groups.

When I moved to Canada, it dawned on me that people were actually selling software for a living - what a novel concept!  As I got a job and started to earn money, I stopped copying programs and started buying them.  There were two reasons for this.  Firstly, I wanted to support people who create awesome games, books and music.  If we don't pay these artists money, they'll have to go get a job, and the flow of goodies will stop.  The second reason is that most of everything is crap.  I can't even be bothered to pirate it.  I just don't have the time nowdays to play most games or read most books.  I can afford the 1% that's relevant, so why not buy it, just for convenience's sake?

Excuses and Justifications

As you can see, I'm not some sort of frothing-at-the-mouth RIAA crusader.  Heck, I don't even sell any games!  I've pirated stuff in the past, so this is not a case of "holier than thou".

No, what really drives me up the wall are the cowardly justifications that are offered by pirates on the Internet.  If you're too cheap to pay $20 or you think the game sucks or you don't give a damn about supporting creators, just say so!  But no; instead we get a chorus of whines blaming everything else in the world.  Here's a sampler:

• "The game is too expensive."  People pirate $0.99 games on the iPhone; how much lower do you want to go?  False excuse.
• "Evil publisher...blah...blah...DRM...blah."  DRM sucks, but games without DRM by small indies get hit just as hard.  False excuse.
• "I just want to try the game."  Games with demos get hit as badly as games with no demos.  False excuse.
• "Game's not very good."  If the game's not very good, why are you playing it - is it some sort of masochism?  False excuse.
• "Easier to pirate the game than going to the store."  Most games are available online now and they still get pirated to death.  False excuse.

All of these excuses are just people trying to justify their behaviour to themselves and their peers.  It's not social activism, politics or anything else.  Here's the real reason:

"I can get the the thing that I want for free without getting caught."

If people would admit this, maybe I wouldn't get the urge to punch them through the Internet every time I read a thread on piracy.

What Then?

Now that we've established the real reason for piracy, let's talk about it from a small developer's perspective.  Before we plunge into that, however, let's recognise something.

If you're a small software developer, you have no right to complain about piracy.
Ho! What's this?  Haven't I been doing this for the last 10 paragraphs?  Well, no; read it again.

It helps to view piracy as a natural phenomenon.  If your garden gets eaten by a swarm of locusts, it doesn't help very much to get angry at the bugs.  The locusts aren't out to get you (it could be your neighbours cursing you though; might want to gather a mob).  In this case, piracy is a side effect of the Internet destroying social norms.

Humans aren't adapted to living in societies of millions, communicating across the globe.  Our intuitive morality can deal with tribesman Thunk breaking your best spear, but not patent law.  Pirates are being jerks, but it's only because they don't realise it.  In a way, they are comparable to sociopaths.  Sociopaths lack the ability is assess the moral dimension of their actions in normal situations.  Pirates can't assess the moral dimension of their actions because they are placed in an abnormal situation.

Hug a Pirate Day

You should be happy about piracy.  Why?  As I've mentioned, piracy is a side-effect of the Internet.  It's just one of the consequences of opening the information tap.  What other effects are there?

Well, one is me being able to type this from my bedroom and you reading it.  If I make a game and sell it, I can only do so because of the 'net.  If you're an indie developer, chances are that you would not be able to exist without the Internet (or its grand-daddy, the BBS).  The truth is that the creative destruction wrought by electronic communication has benefited the small guys the most.

Of course, if you're working for a large publisher right now, you have my permission to stay mad.  Sucks to be you.  This is why the large publishers are thrashing left and right in the PC.  Well, that and used sales.

How to Defeat Piracy

Drumroll!  You don't.  Piracy is a feature of the landscape.  It's the new reality of the world that we live in.  The sooner that you can accept it, the faster you'll be able to work around it.  See it as a river that floods once a year and washes away your crops.

I know that it sucks to see your stuff be copied, but it's not something worth worrying about.  Even if you could force every single pirate to buy a copy of your game, you'd barely feel it.  Conversion rates for pirates are miserable.  These people are not your customers - they're background noise.  Focus on the guys and gals who are paying you the big (or small) bucks.

The most important thing for a small developer is to recognise that the normal rules don't apply in their case.  Piracy doesn't kill you - obscurity kills you.  That's why your first concern should be to promote your game and to build your audience.

This is why we see these strange effects in the indie space.  Asking people to choose their own price drives up sales.  Games that become free for a week sell more than they did the months before.  Tarn Adams makes $1500 per month from donations while working on a game that most people can't play.  The normal rules don't apply.  If you want, you can even make some $$$ off of the pirates.  Just sell them premium stuff that's a pain to find for free.

Summary

What can you offer with your product that makes it more valuable than FREE?  Is it a great community?  Faster support?  Bonus items?  Fuzzy feelings?  What would you do if someone cloned your game and made it open-source?  Stop thinking of this as a moral issue and start seeing it as a business reality.  The sooner your recognise this, the faster you can get to solving the real problems.

P.S. You should also write an article on piracy to promote your game.  Hey, it worked for World of Goo and Cliff Harris!

[Melly]

An interesting read. I often see that developers believe pirates are all anti-social teenagers or simply massive douchebags. The reality is not so black'n'white. Most pirates, if you meet them on the street, will be polite people that could very well be the type of person you'd have a long lasting friendship with. Like the OP mentioned, they don't pirate to break the law or rip people off. They do it because it's easy, and that's how the human mind works.

As far as I know (please correct me if I'm mistaken), the human mind works heavily in a effort/reward ratio when judging its actions. If you remove most other factors (social, moral, etc), which is one of the effects of the internet, what you get is two choices:

1- Spend money to get the game. Money has a high value in society, so it's seen as the use of effort to get a reward, in this case the game.

2- Pirate the game, get it anyway, spending no money, without consequence, without effort.

For the mind, number 2 is a massively attractive deal. We often have to put conscious effort into not doing this because we don't see who we're ripping off, whoever it is has infinite copies of the game they can sell through downloads, so the things that would normally stop us from stealing (guilt from screwing someone over for your own benefit) are heavily subdued, and are easy to ignore. Hell, for all the average gamer knows, all they're ripping off is a huge faceless corporation, so who gives a shit?

When it comes to indies, it's no longer a huge corporation of people they never met they're ripping off, but actual people that tend to make themselves known to the community. Even so, it's not many that put the effort into knowing that person and caring about her success. It still has the impersonal internet barrier there, and the lack of consequence, so pirating is still a great deal.

So, in the end, to not pirate a game that has no DRM, being made by people not at all likely to sue your ass for a million dollars, requires either conscious effort in order to see the big picture (something humans are notoriously bad at), or to actually care on a personal level with the developers (which requires more effort than the average gamer would care to put in).

[Hempuli‽]

My only problem with the article is how you bring out the common excuses of piraters, and then show examples to deny them. Isn't it very much possible, that even though it doesn't show in the overall piracy rates, the people who excused their piracy that way were actually following the principle they mentioned? Like, if you ask a person why he pirates and he says "I try this first and buy if I like", he may actually do it that way even though he was the only one, thus his actions not showing in the piracy rates.

[Valter]

Instead of selling the game online, you could use some kind of platform that has all the delicious sharing opportunities of the internet while still being regulated to prevent theft.

The XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare networks all come to mind.

[Alex Vostrov]

Instead of selling the game online, you could use some kind of platform that has all the delicious sharing opportunities of the internet while still being regulated to prevent theft.

The XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare networks all come to mind.

XBox still has piracy.  It's just slightly harder to do, but not too hard for people who really want to do it.

Besides, most indies will not be able to get onto XBLA.

[Hideous]

"Easier to pirate the game than going to the store."

This is why I used to pirate games. That, and money problems. It just wasn't as convenient to buy the game as it was to pirate it.

Then Steam came along and swept me away.

[Valter]

Besides, most indies will not be able to get onto XBLA.

To the best of my knowledge, the Community Games section (or is it Indie Games? Whatever) costs 60 dollars for a premium XNA membership, and that's it.

Steam does provide a better reason for not-pirating, considering that it organizes all your shit for you. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the best way to combat piracy is through a unified platform, rather than scattered efforts.

[bento_smile]

• "Easier to pirate the game than going to the store."  Most games are available online now and they still get pirated to death.  False excuse.

Heheh, you know, I buy things because it's easier than pirating them. Say I want a DS game, two clicks on amazon and it's mine! If I wanted to pirate it, I'd have to get an R4 cart or some rubbish like that. I can get an interesting DS game for under £10, so why not?

Same with films... £3-5 or gimping my internet for a day or so trying to get a torrent (our router doesn't cope so well). Even CDs, I used to pirate as a way of trying them out, but now I can preview the tracks before buying, there's no need to. All this stuff is cheaper than when I was a teenager... and nowadays I have more money too! XD

(This is also why my house is full of junk XD )

[Radix]

Excellent post, dude.

No, what really drives me up the wall are the cowardly justifications that are offered by pirates on the Internet.

The thing about this is they aren't making these comments spontaneously, it's pretty much always in answer to someone challenging the pirates. If you don't treat people--and the 95% figure if true means these are the great majority of your audience--like they're evil slimy monsters then they won't be compelled to justify themselves. They may even respect you, realise you're a human being too, and fork out for your next game just as they probably do for a lot of other stuff.

The evil monster attitude has been imprinted on us by years of expensive music/film/software publisher campaigns, and look how effective it's been so far. I don't think it's a productive attitude.

I just wanted to highlight this. Even if you accept that it's simply a fact of our online ecosystem, having a (public) chip on your shoulder about it might make it sting even more.

[Alex Vostrov]

Excellent post, dude.

No, what really drives me up the wall are the cowardly justifications that are offered by pirates on the Internet.

The thing about this is they aren't making these comments spontaneously, it's pretty much always in answer to someone challenging the pirates. If you don't treat people--and the 95% figure if true means these are the great majority of your audience--like they're evil slimy monsters then they won't be compelled to justify themselves. They may even respect you, realise you're a human being too, and fork out for your next game just as they probably do for a lot of other stuff.

The evil monster attitude has been imprinted on us by years of expensive music/film/software publisher campaigns, and look how effective it's been so far. I don't think it's a productive attitude.

I just wanted to highlight this. Even if you accept that it's simply a fact of our online ecosystem, having a (public) chip on your shoulder about it might make it sting even more.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if you put a screen with the following when you launch your game:

"Hi, I'm Alex Vostrov, the guy who made this game.  It cost me 2 years of my life to make.  Please don't pirate this game.  Without your support, I can't make any more games like this."

[gimymblert]

The real issue is to have enough 5% to life from what you do

[s0]

You forgot the, in my opinion, most "tolerable" excuse for piracy, even though it probably doesn't apply to indie games as much.

I have no problem with pirating old, rare games or games that never came out in my country where the only way to get them legitimately is via Ebay for hundreds of   . I refuse to pay ridiculous collectors prices.

[Ben_Hurr]

The evil monster attitude has been imprinted on us by years of expensive music/film/software publisher campaigns, and look how effective it's been so far. I don't think it's a productive attitude.

I just wanted to highlight this. Even if you accept that it's simply a fact of our online ecosystem, having a (public) chip on your shoulder about it might make it sting even more.

The whole "You wouldn't steal a car, why would you steal a movie?" type business.
It's mainly the only reason we have these piracy = stuffing-CDs-in-your-pants-and-leaving-without-paying arguments in the first place.

Unfortunately, the fact is that those baggy-pants backwards hat wearing software stealing thieves are also your dear customers part of the time.

Driving off people that like your product isn't a good idea.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Besides, most indies will not be able to get onto XBLA.

To the best of my knowledge, the Community Games section (or is it Indie Games? Whatever) costs 60 dollars for a premium XNA membership, and that's it.

Steam does provide a better reason for not-pirating, considering that it organizes all your shit for you. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the best way to combat piracy is through a unified platform, rather than scattered efforts.

xbla games are not xblig games -- those are completely different. xbla games are marketed my microsoft, whereas people have to dig and search on a site in order to find an xblig game. you also aren't allowed to use high score lists etc. in xblig games, and they are limited to 5$ maximum (1, 3, and 5 dollars are the price points) whereas xbla games range from 5$ to 15$. they also have to be very small, under 100mb or so.

[Alex Vostrov]

That's great.

[gunmaggot]

Excellent post, dude.

No, what really drives me up the wall are the cowardly justifications that are offered by pirates on the Internet.

The thing about this is they aren't making these comments spontaneously, it's pretty much always in answer to someone challenging the pirates. If you don't treat people--and the 95% figure if true means these are the great majority of your audience--like they're evil slimy monsters then they won't be compelled to justify themselves. They may even respect you, realise you're a human being too, and fork out for your next game just as they probably do for a lot of other stuff.

The evil monster attitude has been imprinted on us by years of expensive music/film/software publisher campaigns, and look how effective it's been so far. I don't think it's a productive attitude.

I just wanted to highlight this. Even if you accept that it's simply a fact of our online ecosystem, having a (public) chip on your shoulder about it might make it sting even more.

I understand why people get pissed off when people pirate their games, though.  It might not be tactically the best option, because pirates often don't understand why what they're doing is wrong - being attacked just makes them feel like they're being victimised for no reason.

Best way to convince people is to explain just exactly what is wrong with piracy using a good metaphor (ie. not theft).  Most convincing one I've come up with is that piracy is essentially equivalent to stiffing an employee of a paycheck for work they've already done.  It's effective because ideological pirates find it massively uncomfortable to find out that they're the ones in the 'boss' role, and that they're simply depriving someone of payment for work they've done for them.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

another metaphor is counterfeiting -- money has a certain value because there's a certain amount of it. when you print more of it (either when the government does it or when a counterfeiter does it), its value goes down, and all the other copies of that money are slightly less in value. piracy is much like counterfeiting money: you have a number of otherwise worthless things (paper dollars) which are worth something due to limited availability. creating more of them without being the person in charge of the system (the one entity which is allowed to print more money) devalues the worth of all the other copies.

it doesn't hurt anyone to print $100 bills and use them to buy stuff, not directly anyway, but it does hurt them indirectly, because if everyone did it it'd be a big issue; it's gaming the system that's in place. same thing with piracy, it lowers the worth of all the other copies of a game to make more of them. setting up a torrent or a file download is analogous to giving away free money that you're printing to anyone who asks.

one argument for piracy is often that information has no worth because it can be infinitely copied. but if you apply that argument to money, you can see that it's a bit strange: money itself has no worth, it's just paper. you could print as much of it as you wanted to, and give it to everyone. but then it'd be worth nothing, defeating the point.

[Melly]

Steam does provide a better reason for not-pirating, considering that it organizes all your shit for you. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the best way to combat piracy is through a unified platform, rather than scattered efforts.

I think it's not so much the unified platform part, but to try and make buying the game take less effort than pirating it, and Steam does that pretty well, in most cases.

At Steam, getting a game is a matter of a search, going through a few links, if you use PayPal just a few more links, and then the game's being downloaded at high speeds, you not having to worry anymore about it, since it'll handle updates automatically for you.

On the other hand, pirating requires that you first search a torrent. Then you download the torrent and pray that there will be enough seeders (unless you're part of one of those private torrenting site it's a gamble), then you often also need to find a crack, then you need to have luck that the crack isn't actually a virus that destroys your computer, and after all that's installed you often block yourself completely out of software updates and most, if not all, online features, unless you wanna put in extra work every time there's a patch. And then there are cases like the Arkham Asylum one where a seemingly cracked version of the game is only superficially so, and the game blocks you from progressing, or simply doesn't work properly after a certain point.

Of course, that's a worst-case-scenario thing, and pirating a game, especially a DRM free one, can be a breeze, but what I'm saying is that Steam is probably one of the better efforts at working around piracy. Instead of fighting over it for your customers, give them something better, and only use mild DRM just to give pirates a little more of a headache getting it to work if you're so inclined.

@ Paul

I'm not sure I feel you analogy fits. I don't think having several more copies of a game out there than would normally be causes the other copies to lose their value. I'm really not sure what do you mean with value, is it that they're worth less money, or some other more subjective thing?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i mean value neither in the subjective nor monetary sense, just in the sense of something which one acts to gain or keep. something beneficial. most things are valuable only because they're limited. land is valuable because there's a limited amount of it. if there's an unlimited amount of something, it has less value than otherwise.

i'm not sure why you believe the value of something doesn't go down if you can get it for free. let's use another example besides money. let's say someone invented a way to turn lead into gold. wouldn't the value of gold go down, and the value of lead go up, if you could turn lead into gold? you see why that'd happen, right?

the same thing happens with games. if 19 out of 20 copies of world of goo out there were created for free, that decreases the value of that 1 out of 20 copies of world of goo that people bought. i.e. if you can convert 'empty hard drive space' into 'world of goo' then you reduce the value of 'world of goo', just as if you can convert 'lead' into 'gold' you reduce the value of 'gold'.

[Melly]

I think the reason I have difficulty grasping your analogy in this case is because, if I buy a game full price, the value I take from that game does not change no matter how many pirated copies are there out there. The value I take from it (entertainment, inspiration, skill-building, etc) does not change.

But I guess you might be somewhat right if I think about the fact that people forging money doesn't affect what value I get from the money I use directly, but may affect it in the long term as the economy is hurt by all the fake money circulating. I guess this could be analogous to how piracy doesn't affect me directly, but it has been affecting the game companies, causing them to become more agressive in their anti-piracy measures to the point of hurting the customers.

Is that what you meant?