This is very old news by now but I will bring it up because it helps me to frame my point. Remember that delightful little indie game called World of Goo which I reviewed not so long ago? It turns out that over 90% of the people who activated the games online score sharing feature did not in fact purchase the game. You can of course question the methods they used to come up with this number, but all things considered I believe their findings are quite accurate and completely unsurprising. Or rather, they are not particularly surprising to me. I was expecting the number to be somewhere in the 60-70 range. 90 sounds a bit high, but again – the trend is not surprising.
Some people however were shocked by these news. That shock stems from common misconceptions about what piracy is and what are the reasons that make people download software and media illegally. There are multitude of theories floating out there, and everyone has their favorites. Most of them are wrong. The fact is that even the notorious pirates have trouble truthfully explaining why they do what they do. And that’s the problem.
So let me put down few of my observations here, to try to dispel these common misconceptions first. Once we have that out of the way, lets try to answer the real question: why do people pirate. Cliff Harris – an indie game developper actually tried to talk to pirates and asked them this question directly. Unfortunately what he got was the same list that gets throw around on every forum and mailing list. Pirates themselves don’t really think about this stuff – and when you put them on the spot and ask them, they will try to find good justifications that make themselves look better.
So let me go over most of the items on Cliff’s list in no particular order, and use Word of Goo as a counter example.
Piracy is not about unreasonable pricing
A lot of pirates will tell you that they download games because they don’t want to pay the outrageous prices major development studios are asking for their mainstream titles. Here in US, you will usually pay $60 for a brand new PC game on a release day. I hear that in Australia the prices are even worse. So it is a worldwide problem – games are expensive. But, this is not why people pirate.
Case in point: World of Goo. The game costs $19.99 which is actually quite reasonable. This is actually the price range that most people mention when asked what would they be willing to pay for a brand new game on a release day. And yet, World of Goo had a 90% piracy rate. While some people may be put of by high game prices this is clearly not the driving factor that makes most of the people fire up their torrent clients.
Piracy is not about avoiding DRM
Many new PC releases are riddled with DRM and people are fed up. With every new iteration, the technology becomes more obtrusive, complicated and restrictive. At first we were only required to keep the CD in the drive while playing. Nowadays you are forced to activate the game online each time you play, uninstall emulation tools such as Daemon Tools, you get phantom drivers and rootkits installed on your system and etc. The situation is becoming ridiculous, and even people who never cared about privacy protection are starting to get annoyed. This is why Spore has a 1 star rating on Amazon.com due to poor customer reviews. Many people claim that they download games primarily to avoid DRM or to “boycott” products that ship with it.
That is bullshit though. World of Goo had no DRM and 90% of it’s players still pirated it.
Piracy is not about sticking it to the man
A lot of pirates claim that they are simply sticking it to the big, bad game studios like EA games. These are the folks who set the high prices for games, push the draconian DRM measures, treat their employees like shit, can cool games and make crappy sequels. Some pirates don’t want to give these people any money, but they don’t want to miss out on some of the rare good games they release. So they obtain them illegally.
But World of Goo was an indie game. It was made by two guys who worked on it on their spare time. It is not connected in any way to the big and evil game studios. And yet it has a 90% piracy rate.
Piracy is not about poor quality of playable demos
I used to play a lot of free demos when I was younger. I would get them from gaming magazines, install them and check out all the new games that were coming out. Most of the demos were functional enough to actually keep me occupied for an hour of two. I don’t do it anymore these days, because a lot of games provide no playable demos. Those which do, make them very short and they are often not representative of the full game will run on your machine. So you download a 600 MB demo, install it only to find out you only get 5 minutes of actual play. Not only that, but when you buy the full game, you find out that between the time the Demo and the release the AwesomeShader technology used by the games engine was upgraded from version 7.0 to version 8.5 that won’t run on your machine.
Furthermore, the minimum requirements that get put on the box these days are a lie. If you meet these requirements but not exceed them, the game will launch on your machine – but it will probably run at 1 FPS and will take 30 seconds to process each key-stroke. And that’s with the graphics and effects turned all the way down.
These days the only reliable way to make sure that the game will run on your computer in an acceptable manner, and that it is not a major waste of money is to download it. Of course once you get the full game for free, few people bother to actually pay for the product. But the idea is, that if we had good Demos, it would help reduce piracy.
World of Goo had a really good demo though. It had the whole first world (one of 5 if I remember correctly) unlocked and available. It actually offered more than few hours of play, and showcased the gameplay quite extensively. And yet, 90% of people chose to pirate it. So I think we can write this one off as well.
Cliff Harris confirms this. Prompted by his discussions with pirates he actually released a longer, and more playable demo for his game and saw no change in his piracy rate.
Piracy is not about lack of digital distribution
People pirate because it is easy. If you want a new game, you have a choice. If you are a honest customer you can do the following:
- Step away from the computer
- Pull up your pants
- Leave your house
- Drive to the nearest store that sells PC games
- Locate the game you want (hoping they have copies left)
- Go wait in line at the cash register
- Wait while the super-slow minimum wage, “I don’t care if you are in a hurry, I’m gonna take my time” cashier rings you up
- Drive home
- Unpack the game
- Install it
- Type in the CD key
- Activate it
- Wait while it downloads patches
- Play it
If you are pirate, your list becomes astonishingly shorter:
- Go to your favorite torrent site
- Search for the game you want and hit “download”
- Continue your online activities for an hour or two
- Unrar the game
- Mount the CD/DVD images using Daemon Tools or Alcohol
- Install the game
- Apply the Crack
- Play it
Major advantage of this method? No need to pull up your pants! Then again, World of Goo was available via Steam which actually makes this process even easier:
- Open Steam
- Search for your game and hit buy
- Continue your online activities as the game downloads
- Play the game
It can be done pantsless, AND it does not require the usual headache of mounting and cracking. It would seem like the more convenient option if you asked me. Not to mention you could also buy it from Direct2Drive, Beanstalk, Greenhouse, Impulse and directly from the developer website. That looks like plenty of choices! You could have bought the game from every single of these services without any pants on, and in most cases without the need to actually locate your credit card as long as you had an existing account on one of these services.
And yet, 90% of people who got World of Goo did not pay for it.
So what is piracy all about then?
Here is my theory… Before I tell you, let me just say that I may be wrong. I do not have any statistical data to back it up. But neither do the people who were talking to Cliff Harris. So in the worst case my idea is no better than the ones I shown above. So let me break this down to you:
People pirate because they like to get stuff for free and the chances they get caught are close to zero.
Yup, that’s my theory. All this other bullshit people bring up when you ask them about piracy is just stuff they make up to make themselves look better. No one wants to say “I download games because I don’t feel like spending money” when talking to a game developer or someone from the media. That makes you look like a douche-bag. But the truth is that not spending money is better than spending it. That’s just how it is.
Of course some people who live out of touch with reality will argue with this point, and say that if it was true and everyone was like that people would be stealing all the time. They would be taking stuff from the stores, from their neighbors and wherever and think nothing of it. Or would they?
But there is a difference. If you steal your neighbors lawnmower, then the neighbor doesn’t have it anymore. It feels wrong because someone gets hurt in the process. But if you could copy his lawnmower atom, by atom for free do you think he would get upset? I don’t think so. I think he would happily lend it to you for the day just so that you can make yourself a copy – just like neighbors and friends exchange CD’s and DVD’s for that very same purpose. No one is hurt, and your conscience is clear.
Theft also carries much higher risks and social stigma. If you are caught shoplifting, you might get arrested. That means public humiliation, embarrassment and possible long term repercussions such as criminal record. You will be the talk of the town, and people will look at you differently. Thieving is frowned upon even in the most anarchistic societies. It’s just something you don’t do. But copying? Copying is like sharing. Nothing wrong with that.
If you get caught downloading software you might get a nasty letter from your ISP telling you to stop. If you are really, really unlucky, you may be one of those few people who gets slapped with a lawsuit in which case you will probably end up settling out of court for a hefty fee. It may hurt you financially, but not socially.
You are not a thief, or a criminal. It doesn’t go on your record. You were just caught up in a copyright dispute. And if you tell people the details they will roll their eyes, and admit that shake their heads in disbelief making comments about frivolous lawsuits and broken legal system. “They made you pay how much for just downloading a video game? That’s preposterous!”
But how many people actually do go to court for downloading stuff? RIAA and MPAA have quite a legal team cracking down on file sharers and yet they still only manage to sue few thousand of people each year. That’s out of millions of people sharing data online. You are actually more likely to die in a car accident than get sued by RIAA. I imagine this is actually lower for software, because we don’t hear about major crackdowns on video game sharers in the media that much. Most people consider this a fair gamble.
As a result of all these factors, most people don’t really care about copyright law. Some do – especially people who are content creators, and who earn living by selling their IP. Most however don’t have strong feelings about it one way or the other. They might actually buy stuff every once in a while. For example they may make a point of actually owning every installment of their favorite game series. However, they would never consider buying 80% of the stuff they download. Downloading is like a long term rental – only you don’t have to pay. Many pirates simply discard the downloaded game once they beat it get bored with it.
That’s my theory. People pirate because they don’t want to spend money. There is nothing you can do about this as a game developer. DRM does not work. Longer demos are nice, but do nothing to convert pirates into paying customers. Digital distribution won’t make your game disappear from torrent sites. Pirates are not your customers. They never were, and they never will be. If you just can’t convert them into paying customers. If they were unable to pirate, most of them would simply go without your product. Even if you make piracy an offense punishable by death, and had the ISP’s do deep packet inspection, dispatching kill teams to deal with file sharers, it would still not increase your sales by any significant amount.
If you look at things this way, you will clearly see that combating piracy and increasing sales are two different goals which have very little overlap. If you commit yourself to the former, you are bound to neglect the latter. And anti-piracy measures will hurt your bottom line in the long run.
So concentrate on selling stuff. Listen to your customers – the people who are paying for your games. Drop the DRM – it’s not doing anything but alienating the folks who want to give you their money. Instead, try to focus on Kevin Kelly’s 8 generatives – intangible features that reward customers and which pirates loose out on when they download a cracked product.
Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps my analysis is flawed. But that’s what I believe in. People pirate because it is easy, relatively risk free, guilt free, it carries no social stigma and it seems perfectly victimless. Yes, yes – I know it is not, but then again it is actually very hard to even prove how it is hurting the developers. The concept of “lost sale” is flaky, and as I said above – most people who pirate, wouldn’t buy your product anyway.
I’m making no excuses. Piracy is not ideological, it is not a protest or a boycott of any kind. It is all about human selfishness, greed, laziness and lack of regard for a fairly abstract law regarding exclusive distribution rights for intellectual property.
Does that mean that all the answers Cliff Harris got when he talked to pirates are null and void? Does this give content creators an excuse to ignore any and all of these points? No. The things we discussed above are still valid. Customers want less DRM, longer demos, digital distribution and lower prices. But, as I said – pirates are not your customers. When you ask them what would influence them to buy your product, they for a brief moment put themselves in the shoes of a paying customer. When they say they want these things they are not lying to you. They genuinely wish that the games were cheaper, had no draconian piracy protection and etc. In that aspect their wishes are very similar to the wishes of people who are perfectly willing to buy your games.
So while fulfilling these wishes won’t bring your piracy rate down, it may actually increase sales. Look at World of Goo – they have hit all of these major points and I believe they are quite successful. The succeeded in generating a buzz, got raving reviews everywhere online and created a huge user base. But the more popular you are the more pirates you get. Games which have very low piracy rate, are simply not in high demand and their sales numbers probably reflect that. Popular games have high piracy rates and high sales.
So I say – ignore pirates. Treat them as an inevitability – a side effect of living in a digital age, and producing digital goods. You can still pursue notorious file sharers in courts – that’s your prerogative. But don’t try to convert pirates into customers using technology. It wont’ work, and it is annoying to the people who genuinely want to support you.
I agree with you 100%.
For me, buying a game isn’t something I do to play it – First, I pirate the game and play it for a while, maybe all of it. Then, when I get some money (I still don’t have a job, so that is manly on holidays and birthdays) I choose one or two I really liked and played for countless hours and buy those to support the company.
For me, buying games is more like a donation than paying a price: I buy what I can if I think they deserve. I bought Call of Duty, for example, because I thought they deserved it. Now I’m planning to buy CoD4 and Defcon.
Other thing is the ease – My local stores don’t have World of Goo and never will, and I don’t have a credit card, so Steam is hard to use here in Portugal.
Hear hear! :D
Just to strengthen your point with a real-life experience of mine. When I bought my Wii, a colleague of mine was talking to me about my purchase as he also had one. So he popped up the question, “Which modchip did you use?” I told him for my Wii, I did not want to use one as I wanted to “go legit”. Also, I had heard about WiiWare and VC, and I wanted to get stuff from there. If I had modded my console, there was a chance that I may not be able to buy stuff. He was very surprised at the remark. He asked why I would pass up the chance to download games for free. Somehow, he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to mod my console, as everyone he knew was doing it.
Yup, I also had since concluded piracy is about getting stuff for free.
Funny thing was I am a tester, and my colleague, who was badgering me to mod my Wii, is a software developer!
Also, this brings up the point that piracy is certainly not confined to the PC alone. But that’s another story for another day.
I agree with you. And I would add that part of the problem could be that people pirate because they got used to it. I think most people started because of some of the “reasons” and then just went on. And on, and on.
I think also that its somehow like IceBrain says. It’s like music in the pre-Internet times, you listened to it on the radio, you borrowed tapes from friends, and what you REALLY liked, you bought it (when the money came). Though I have this feeling that lots of people forget this last step :-).
Talking about myself I did pirate because of the money. Really. I mean when I had the chance I started downloading music and games, but kept on spending more or less the same amount of money (more in general, because my income increased), simply I had more music and games. A LOT more.
And I say “did” because I do not pirate anymore. Not for any good reason. I just don’t have the time. I almost don’t game, nor listen to as much music as I did. I am sure parents out there will understand me. And for once or twice I year I can play a game or relax and listen to a new album, I can afford buying it.
One more thing. Here in Spain we pay what they call a “canon on digital copy”. That means that for every CD, DVD, Memory Stick of any kind, even hard drives, that I buy I am paying some money that suppossedly goes to the people that makes songs and games. Even if I am using the f*g media to copy code that **I** develope. Nowadays I do not pirate, but pirates do have all my support, eventhough I don’t believe the bad excuses they might use to justify themselves.
@Mart: of course it’s not confined to the PC, most people I know have their PSOne and PS2 modchipped, years before the internet was common around here.
@Hector: I never understood those who don’t have time to listen to music. I never “waste” time listening to music, I do it while I program, while I’m commuting from home to college, etc. I very rarely “spend time” listening to music alone.
But you’re right about the cannon. I bought many spanish magazines here in Portugal (portuguese magazines are bad and expensive) and I thought that it gives you the right to pirate what you want: You’re effectively paying for that right, whether you want to do it or not!
Btw, Paul McCartney just released a DRM free album with FLAC digital songs for just 9 bucks. I’m buying that as a stand, even if I don’t really like the musics.
@ IceBrain: Yup. But the focus seems to be specifically on PC piracy these days. So much so that when a game is mentioned to be pirated, it must be a PC game.
@IceBrain: I mostly listen to music the same way, while doing something different… it’s just that now I do have a lot less opportunities: I used to go to work by car, listening to music, but a few months ago I bought a motorbike, I listened to the radio while traveling by car, now I have to play things that help to keep the kids entertained, I listened to music at home, while reading or programming as a hobby, I don’t have much time to do that things anymore… :-)
But from time to time I do like to take some music and just listen to it, maybe while half asleep, or just wandering arround.
I think you’re mostly right. I think the habit of piracy has been driven by some of the other issues though. I typically assume most games have some nasty DRM unless it is specifically trumpeted as not having DRM (e.g. sins of a solar empire). I think the “bad things” the gaming industry does are so universal (or thought as so universal) no one looks into what a game costs. They know it costs $50, it is full of DRM, disc checks, CD keys, and that unless it is on steam they have to go to the store. Even if none of that is factually true about a partiuclar title, people established habits of piracy by assuming it is true.
I agree with you in general, but for me in specific, I’m part that, and part price/DRM. I’ve crapped on about DRM before and how I’m less likely to buy a game because of it. But I have just got back from lunch where I went into a shop to check out the price of a game – Left 4 Dead. I played a pirated version a couple of days ago and it was a lot of fun. All I need to do is go to my mate’s place with a USB and I could have it as well. Instead I went to the shop to see how much it was – seeing that it wasn’t really a full game, just a fun aside, I was expecting ~$60 aus. Instead it was $100 aus. Boggling.
I had dragged a workmate with me from lunch who wasn’t keen on the delay to check it out. It’s not something I didn in passing, I went specifically there.
So while I think you’re right in general, I personally pirate *more* (not *only*, but *more*) because of DRM and exhorbitant pricing. On the World of Goo thing, *part* of that is simply the culture of getting stuff for free extending into this other game – most of the people who pirated it would have been completely unaware of the price, I bet. They’re just used to getting things through piracy channels.
I use to pirate almost everything. I said that I did it because I had no money, and wouldn’t have otherwise purchased it. Now I’m making money, so I try to buy everything (at least after I play/listen to it more then twice). So I hope that there’s at least a percent of these pirates that will later become customers. I do agree with your point about “pirates are not customers”, and I’d like to believe that following that will result in more people becoming customers.
What I really don’t like though, is that you can no longer buy ‘stuff’. It use to be that if you went out and purchased a tape, or CD, or the latest game, you owned it. You could use it for however long you wanted, and when you no longer wanted it, you could give it away, or maybe even sell it.
Now it’s getting harder and harder to buy ‘stuff’. Everyone just wants to sell you a ‘non-transferable license’. For example everything on Steam. I refuse to purchase another game from Steam until there is a way for me to give it to a friend when I’m done playing.
I’m sure most of us remember the clauses from the old license agreements stating that as long as you removed the copy from your own machine, you were welcome to give it to whomever you wanted. I want them back!
I agree.
Also, ask yourself, why do people buy?
Because the product they are getting is meaningful and valuable to them.
AiR released Ableton is not something I find valuable, it’s just something to mess around with.
Original mint condition album covers are not downloadable;
buying music albums is probably more worth it in comparison.
More to your point of the relationship between pirates and increase sales:
” I’m more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who’s in the tent bought a ticket to be there.” Cory Doctorow.
The rest of the post is also worth reading.
I decided to move from Windows to Linux. Since then I have had no reason for piracy :)
@vacri: Very good point. People pirated the World of Goo because they saw favorable reviews online. They didn’t really care that the game was an indie production and that it was cheap. They got it the way they get most of their games. Which just reinforces the point about pirates rarely being legitimate customers.
@Kenny: I never tried it but wasn’t there a way to gift your purchased game to someone on Steam these days? I know there is a way to purchase a game for someone else (it gets associated with their Steam account). I’m not sure if you can bind it to your account and then re-gift it. I’ll have to look into this.
@Ajzimm3rman: Good question. The way I see it, people buy because:
1. They love the product and want to support it
2. They miss out on some of the features if they pirate (album cover, online play etc..)
3. They are buying the game as a gift
4. They can’t find a crack, or can’t patch their cracked game
5. They refuse to pirate on moral ground
6. Because they want to
For example, I often buy games I like because I actually want to own a legal copy. Piracy is like a rental – you install the game, play until you are bored and then toss it out to make space for something else. When you own it, you always have the original media so you can install it back at any time with no hassle.
Of course DRM and the limited activation thing is quickly changing that, making the pirated copies more lasting and permanent instead.
@Mikko: Heh, good point! Same here. I usually prefer the open source alternatives to a lot of commercial applications. Games are a different story though.
Heh, ironically the same guy who showed me left4dead in it’s pirated state told me to go online to Impulse (Stardock’s ‘steam’) and buy a space game on sale for $4, which was a crazy little game and worth the $4 just to check out. While there I bought a full-price game (well… US$20, but not on sale) plus expansion and spent the weekend playing that (Children of the Nile, an alright game if you like city-builders). While there I saw the listing for World of Goo which reminded me of this post.
There is DRM in the game – it being a ‘digital download’ thing – but it was convenient, cheapish, and it was right there…
Just as a postscript, world of goo outsold Spore, Fallout 3, and Left 4 Dead for a while on Amazon.
http://2dboy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/amazonnumber2.gif
Discussion.
Oh and one more thing – the 90% figure is an overstatement, but it is close.
.
One might suspect pirates would be less willing to contact a game-maker’s central server. On the other hand, pirates may play more games (due to the zero cost) and may be better at games thus would have more incentive to get on the leader board. Who knows, but these numbers are about as good as we’re likely to get I suppose.
Just wanted to put up an excerpt from an article by Chris Crawford in the 1981 issue of Computer Gaming World. The article was titled ‘The Future of Computer Wargaming.’ He predicted the problems of computer piracy quite accurately –
“The effect is not black and white. One pirate will not bring the industry crashing down. Even widespread piracy will not kill the industry. Widespread piracy will have four effects:
First, software will be more expensive because software sellers will try to recover their costs on fewer sales with higher prices.
Second, software will be more expensive because software sellers will burden it with a variety of anti-piracy devices. You the consumer will pay for these protection schemes.
Third, software will be less usable and enjoyable because the protection schemes used will probably interfere with the operation and use of the game.
Fourth, fewer games will be available because fewer authors will be motivated to write programs when they cannot earn a good return for their
efforts.”
Note- The 1st 100 issues of the magazines are archived at “http://pdf.textfiles.com/zines/CGW/”
Worth checking out if u really love gaming :-)
Excellent post :-) You have pointed out all the standard excuses.
Its too easy to pirate and so we have lost the will to save up money and fulfill our desires… its the ease which lowers all boundaries.. I should confess that all my mp3s & games are pirated too but I do plan to buy most of them once I start earning, at least the reasonably priced ones :-)
Keep up the excellent posts, I got you on my Firefox bookmarks toolbar :-)
In my next interview, I’m going to cite reading your blog daily as a technical activity ^___^
I totally agree with what you say. I admit that I pirate over 95% of the media I consume. I don’t do this for any idealogical reasons, it’s merely that it’s easy. I could say it’s because I don’t have the money (which is actually true in my case) but when I get a job (I’m still a student) I suspect I won’t change my pirating ways. Although I do feel guilty about it sometimes. When it’s an indie artist or developer I feel like I really should be supporting them. I guess I do what I can to tell my friends about artists that I like but that’s just making excuses.
On the other hand I did switch to free software for idealogical reasons for some of the reasons you listed. I’m also a big supporter of Creative Commons for the same reasons. Me getting into piracy may have been one of the reasons that I got into free software.
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its doesnt matter if i agree or disagree coz no matter what they will continue
Lol. They should have asked me why I pirate games. My answer would have always been, “Because I’m cheap and lazy.” And I’m glad you put in the part about people buying the games they respect. Even though I’ve basically pirated every game in the C&C series, I still go out and buy the games because this series is legit. Also, I really like the ‘band’ Roadrunner United, so even though I already pirated all their songs, I’m still gonna buy the album when I have more money.