Aug 14 2008
Why do people pirate games?
A small game developer (Cliff Harris of Positech Games) recently made a serious effort to talk to pirates and find out why they steal games (and specifically, why they steal his games). A full recounting of his findings can be read right here.
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I am really glad to see another developer actually trying to look at piracy in a calm, rational manner. I am getting pretty fed up with PC developers and PC Media (I’m lookin’ at you, PC Gamer) crying over and over that piracy is killing PC Gaming.
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First, I think they seriously exaggerate how “easy” it is to pirate games. As an experiment a few months ago I actually decided to see how hard it was to pirate a game (I chose a game I actually owned, so I felt I was not doing anything unethical or harmful to my own industry). I went to one of the main bittorrent sites (arrrrr, you know which one, ye mateys), searched, downloaded, the whole deal. Most downloads failed. The ones that didn’t, either weren’t the actual game, were flawed, or had some kind of data corruption or other problems. If I was really patient, I am sure I could have successfully pirated the game. But a couple hours of time was not sufficient. So the whole “its easy to pirate games” thing is a crock. Yes, experienced pirates know how to do it rapidly, but “experienced pirates” are going to steal your game even if you sell it for $1.
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Second, it is a lot easier to blame pirates for an industry’s failures than to figure out what you’re doing wrong. Buggy games. The “release it now, patch it later” phenomenon. Games that lie about their features. Games that suck. The lack of recourse when you buy a bad game (you can’t return it, and you can rarely sell back used PC games). The lack of options for BUYING the games (you can’t rent PC games and you can’t buy them used).
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Third, the PC industry treats its paying customers like thieves, and people are fed up. Oppressive DRMs are an affront. Even having to keep the CD/DVD in the drive is a lame, pointless annoyance. But now internet verifications are becoming more common. This sort of thing turns honest customers into pirates, and sends them online looking for cracks just to play their own games without having to disc swap. Chris touches on this, with one of my favorite sections of his article:
DRM
This was expected, but whereas many pirates who debate the issue online are often abusive and aggressive on the topic, most of the DRM complaints were reasonable and well put. People don’t like DRM, we knew that, but the extent to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly misunderstood. If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it. These gamers are the low hanging fruit of this whole debate.
I don’t expect a whole lot of disagreement here, but I’d still like to hear what you think about PC gaming piracy. What causes it? What are its real effects? How common is it really?
I used to live at a dorm of an Engineering University and surely the piracy there was extensive.
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Back about 10 years ago when Internet piracy wasn’t that normal a thing because of the average Internet speed we had several dorms sharing a network. On this network several people had bought servers with all the pirated games, programs, movies and music you could want. This all ended when the Anti Piracy organization (APG /IFPI) got some information and sued some of the owners.
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This brought the servers down and people started downloading on the Internet instead, but it was less organized and more bothersome.
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A few years later things had gotten relaxed again and one in particular had a very open server once again. Well he got busted and he had so extensive logs that everyone got a bill for the stuff they had downloaded within the last 6 months. I had a friend who got a $2000 bill.
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I do believe that making it more bothersome to get a good cracked game is making allot of people choose to buy because the time is more valuable to them. By making it harder you raise the bar and by hunting pirates you make people scared of sharing with people they don’t know that well. So even though I hate the way they run their scare campaign, I still believe they are worth their money until the game developers, musicians and so on figure out some other way to make money than making people pay for the box.
Game patching is not really that much of an issue for me. From my experiences, a lot more good comes out of patching than not. There is a world of difference to patch to fix minor to moderate issues than to have a game which has moderate to major issues from day one. Those games generally stand out and fail fairly quickly.
My biggest gripe about what the majority of the gaming industry does is game pricing. Sure, it doesn’t change often, but the price of games makes it so that you generally can’t afford to take a risk on a game. If it sucks, you are out 40-60 dollars. If game pricing was say, 10-30 dollars, I would be more willing to give more games a shot.
A great example of this was the Penny Arcade Game, On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkenss. I think I paid 20-30 dollars on a game that was decent. I hadn’t heard a great deal about it but thought, “20 somethin’ bucks.. sure.. I’ll go for it.” I do believe they were able to offer it for lower because all the distribution was on-line. Perhaps this is something which more gaming companies should look to as a model for doing business in the future.
I don’t mind the patching but broken games truely make it a horrible experience. I think the last three titles I have bought was…
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- Hellgate London
- Gothic III
- Age of Conan
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Gothic III was bought cheap late after release but the game still don’t have a patch that makes it playable. The two other crashed often and had several unfinished and unbalanced aspects. I am sure I would gain nothing from complaining to the stores I bought them from or to the gaming companies but it leaves me feeling cheated.
WitchKiller:
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I can see your point even though it is very black and white.
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I do not think that getting caught is the main reason for a larger part feeling it’s ok. I believe that the fact that you don’t take something away from someone is an important factor. They lost a possible sale but it surely has a different feel than taking a box with a game from some store, even though you were 100% sure you would never get cought.
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But as with most things like this… I guess most of it is just culture and just one more thing that has become slightly accepted.
Along these lines, A couple of issues ago Game Informer ran an article about “somebody” starting “some-name” that would act as a huge dowload site for PC games. The quotations denote me forgetting the names and I dont have the issue anymore to look it up but, im guessing this would be like Gamestop’s downloadable games. Only, it would be a mass market place for them where even the newest games would be available.
If copyright protection would allow you to make say 1-3 DVD’s of your own to store the download safely on “real” instead of virtual means I can see this cutting costs of production for retail enormously, ie. No packaging, no discs, no shipping. Hell, the reign that producers have over developers could be evened out enough to see a day where faulty/bad games are not released and then patched, but instead given the time and money to release a quality and finished product the first time around.
This format also allows for easy previews of games…just like movies. Download the introduction, test out the gameplay, story, buy or move on.
One thing that instigates piracy is lack of innovation, lack of delivery, or overpriced delivery. With xbox live, console owners have seen revolutionary strides in delivering new content and games. Yet the PC market still hasnt been able to capitalize on providing online service aside from massive MMO’s. Games are expensive. Thats the price for hard work and creativity. A downloadable format might not drop the price so much that games would be “cheap” but it would deliver options to a gamer that are previously non-existent.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and if you think it would, in fact, move the focus away from piracy and to legitimate sales.
I’ve got to go along with a statement made by WitchKiller. Neither cost nor dissatisfaction in a product line make me resort to stealing. I believe that people who use these excuses for piracy are going to continue their thieving ways no matter what changes are made.
Anyone who knows me has heard my anti-piracy rants before. I don’t care what excuses people give, stealing is stealing whether you do it by downloading a stream over the Internet or by sticking a CD in your purse at the store. Whereas I might have some sympathy for a starving man stealing a piece of fruit, I’m never going to feel an ounce of pity for a software thief.
I’m sure I’ve deviated a far ways from the point of the original topic here, but it really burns me up to hear any of these so-called justifications that are made by those who commit piracy acts.
Back in my younger days, I probably pirated games because it allowed me to get access to a lot more games than I could have possibly afforded. Way back when it was easy to d/l the games I probably grabbed a ton of what was available. I also had a lot of free time. In the simplest of terms, cost and availability made me pirate. Now, it’s just too inconvenient to bother figuring out how to do it. And I don’t have a lot of free time, so I pick a well reviewed game, buy it, and play it for awhile. But kids or young people probably still have the time and will to do it. Subscription based games and ones with codes for online play typically can’t be pirated, that seems like a good solution. But for offline games, I own 2 of Stardock’s games. I think the lower price, higher quality, no DRM really works. I think their games cost at least $10 less than the “normal” price.
There is also a large cultural piece with pirating. For one, the name isn’t stealing, so it isn’t lumped in with that. It’s easy to start down the slope when it has a catchy title like that. I think making it uneccesary, as with rentals, if the right way to combat it. When mp3’s were available from that Russian website I imagine they sold a ton of music. The price was like 35 cents per song or something. It becomes easier to be legit and so mainly that’s what people will do.
I also would strongly caution those with their soapbox in hand. The black and white view is not only unpopular, it’s usually hypocritical. Is pirating wrong? Yes. No arguments there. But do you follow the posted speed limit to the number? Stop completely at every stop sign? Fill out your tax return to the letter of the law? et al. Our culture is one that lends itself to breaking the law, and a little or a lot DOES matter. I wouldn’t even try to compare murder to theft. This shouldn’t be confused for justification, it’s not. In many peoples mind, mine included, to physically take something from someone is different than making a copy of something they have. So we have a different kind of stealing. You can’t honestly believe that someone who makes an anonymous copy of a group of 1s and 0s is akin to someone walking into a store and grabbing a physical item and walking out. It’s simply not the same crime, or type of stealing. Most people wouldn’t loot a store, most people would copy software. It’s a victimless crime (that’s what they would believe). If I don’t buy a piece of software, but instead copy it. But I never would have purchased it, technically nothing is lost. That’s the justification that a pirate would make. But if you walk into a store and take a box then the store suffers a loss of money. Again, copying the software is stealing from the creators/owners of the software, and it’s wrong. But, if you don’t understand why they do it, that is partially why. Unscrupulous people would steal anything, but even an honorable person can pirate software because culturally it’s “okay.” If you could sit everyone down and calmly and rationally explain why it’s wrong, then you’d probably see a dip in piracy. But I think most people just don’t think about it. Just like you drive 4 or 5 miles over the posted limit. Well hopefully you get the point I’m trying to make. Not that piracy is, in any way, okay; just the mentality of it.
Reply to Cambion:
You mention some reasons for piracy of console games to go down. I don’t have a console myself but from what I have read it doesn’t seem like all the new consoles can be chipped and as far as I know that means no pirated games.
If I end up buying a console I would not chip it either. Like to do the honest thing and honestly I really feel the hardware is too expensive to mess around with like that.
From a quick search I couldn’t find any chipping for PS3 though so that was why I posted what I did. Being unable to play pirated games is a rather save way to stop piracy on your games =)
I’ve know a number of people who pirated software (no, this is not a “oh, it was my FRIENDS doing it” statement), and to a one they had the following rationale for pirating.
Too many games suck, and charge you just as much as the games that rock. In fact, they often charge more.
To them, pirating the game was to get around the fact that often demos were more polished than the actual game itself, and would go ahead a little bit to see if it was actually worth playing through further, and then go buy the game. I know for a couple of games multiple of them loved the game so much they played it all the way through and then went out and bought it, and proceeded to never play it again, but recommend it to other and pull out the disk just to prove what a good game it was.
Not legal, but definitely a great way to get your game marketed.
Actually, nearly forgot. I knew one guy that had his binder of disks stolen. He “Pirated” the games he had already paid for. Kind of goes to some of the issues of fair use and DRM; if you’ve paid to have a copy of the game you can play, you should be able to make a back up of it in case something happens to your disk or computer. Yeah, it “deprives” the developer of you buying another copy, but what you bought was the license to use one copy of their intellectual property. The one that’s stealing is the one that stole your disk, or if there was a disaster, you should have a back up of what you’ve already paid for - the data, not the hard copy disk.
Well if you live in a country like mine (lebanon) you will be obliged to buy pirated games for these reasons !
- Pirted games is legal here , they are sold at shops for 2$ the game.
- you cannot find original games , you need to ordeer them online
- and for me the main reason to buy originals is for the multilayer, so if i have an shitty connection multiplayer is not playable and i don’t wanna waist my money over a 5 hours single player campaign ! most of the noew games are short !
and for me i really hate piracy cause it is just not the right thing to to . but sometimes you are obliged to get it (originals are not available and no money )
and if you think that piracy is ruing pc gaming you are wrong ! cause consoles are hacked too ! hacking a 360 game is easier than a pc game !!!
i mean when the pirated pure got released first it came to the 360 than after a week to the pc cause of its protection software !
the only unpirated console is the ps3 and they are cracking it now ! all you need is a massive HDD
well, im a student and a big mmo fan. i really enjoyed your blog and this article really touches something that im familiar with.
“First, I think they seriously exaggerate how “easy” it is to pirate games.”
believe me… it is easy, you just have to know a good warez site and you find the game you want in 15 seconds! then, you, the “pirate” give the game to your friends.. its like pot, its everywhere but if you ask on the street you cant find it!
“Second, it is a lot easier to blame pirates for an industry’s failures”
the actual gaming industry is a general FAIL. Companies value more the income than the quality and forget that quality generates income. i like to mention some companies, blizzard and electronic arts.
Blizzard
i have all original blizzard games. All those games received “love” from the devs. brilliant story lines, stunning graphics in sintony with the storyline, balanced and simple learn yet complex to master online modes that extend the game durability (games like the old starcraft are still played at lans), good customer and community support, humor, everything!!! they have been developing starcraft in the last 4 years (if im not wrong) and it still doesnt have a launch date.
Electronic Arts
meanwhile, other companies use a quantity approach. Electronic arts launches a FAIL game for every hollywood blockbuster and for every sport. if it happens that a game has some success, they keep launching sequels every year. some sell, some dont.. but they still have profit, lots of it..
good games allways sell!!
now the question: is piracy ruining video games companies???
no, its selecting them… piracy is good, its like darwin’s natural selection. truth be told, demos are overrated and few people read forum comments.. pirates provide the real test drives!
but we must keep fighting piracy. we need to mantain some balance. Piracy cant be erradicated and cant become too popular. both things are bad!