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Piracy Helping Larger Game Developers?
Carlos Camacho writes "Piracy has been in the news recently within the game developer, and game player communities. You've seen all arguments against piracy in the past... Or have you? GBA and Mac game developer Aaron Fothergill of Strange Flavour Software wrote iDevGames a guest-editorial that will hopefully lead more users who copy games to re-think exactly it is that they are hurting. 'One of tenets of the software thief, is that "software is too expensive." They will then usually go on to bemoan how the 'giants' of the industry treat users unfairly and how stealing their software is their way of getting at 'the man.' Unfortunately, little do they realise, that the opposite is happening! Instead, rampant software theft benefits the 100 stone gorillas at the expense of new products that would otherwise be able to compete on price and features, resulting in only the big monopolistic companies keeping their products in the market and being able to control it'."
I've never thought of it that way before.
Personally the reason I don't have any pirated software is I've found everything I need on packages.gentoo.org, and freshmeat.net. (With the exception of a few games, which I was glad to pay for).
I do understand why people pirate some software, like Photoshop, Autocad, etc... They're industry standard and too damn expensive. And, I can see how this could potentially block out smaller competitors.
However, due to the continuing growth in popluarity of OSS, the software industry is destined to change. Piracy isn't any concern for OSS.
Have you tried Linux yet?
Of course DRM will entrench the fat cats, possibly to a greater degree than they are entrenched now.
However, ending piracy voluntarily would end the advantage that the fat cats get over the skinny kittens from piracy.
DRM will not be that draconian. Everybody but the mental midgets at the RIAA realizes that pissing off the customers enough for them to decide to go elsewhere. As long as the DRM allows a certain amount of leeway, consumers will continue to lap it up.
It was mentioned earlier about applications like Photoshop, or the Windows OS, have drastically increased in price due to piracy. That's probably true. However, how has the gaming arena changed? Not very much.
As a matter of fact, it's more easy to argue the relatively small price increase of games reflects inflation and the steady increase of standard pay for programmers in the 90's. Quite frankly piracy doesn't do jack to the gaming industry, other than to cause game developers to whine and moan. Had the concept/practice not come about, we'd still be in the same situation. The only possible benefit that would come from the lack of piracy is the possible improvement in game quality since companies spend a lot of time and money on trying to keep their games from being pirated (which always fails, I've yet to see a game that hasn't been cracked except for the online aspect of Neverwinter Nights).
I think the article is a bit wrong: You do not pirate the big games, you pirate the good games! And most good games are big. Also, most good games are from big companies, that's true most of the time, and even if you are a small company that makes a good game, you will get a crapload of money off the sales and eventually become a big company, just look at Valve.
:D
Valve doesn't even sell games anymore, they sell CD-keys
The entire software industry is based on theft, if only of ideas.
Piracy is a problem for smaller companies and that sucks, but when you get scumbags like Electronic Arts releasing games like the recent MVP Baseball that only works with "approved" gamepads, leading you to spend two hours hacking around in your system registry to bypass it, I don't care if I get modded as a troll, but those fuckers deserve it.
There is no excuse for pulling this shit, and a lot of people have been screwed over by EA on this, as playing the game with the keyboard is virtually impossible, and after shelling out $50 for a new game, you shouldn't then have to go out and buy a new controller just because EA are money grabbing bastards. (For the record, my "not approved" Gravis Xterminator from about 5 years ago works just fine in the game once I hacked the registry to make the system believe it's a Logitech Dual Action Gamepad.)
I hate to advocate piracy, but companies that mislead and deceive, like Electronic Arts, really do deserve to be punished. Whether that be through pirating rather than buying, or just flat out not bothering at all, whatever the case, making it so they lose a sale is no more than they deserve.
Piracy can help smaller companies though. For a great example of how piracy helps the smaller companies, Id Software would never be as prominent as they are now without Doom and Quake being widely pirated. I also remember a few years ago there was a rather persistent rumour that Lucasarts were deliberately leaking their games onto the net to build buzz for them. Seemed to work too.
I'm glad to support the smaller developers. My pre-order for Out of the Park Baseball 6 is already in:) This is an unpopular opinion, but piracy is not without it's benefits. One pirated game does not equal one lost sale. Piracy has also driven computer sales. The Commodore Amiga, by Commodore's own admission, was as popular as it was due to the rampant software piracy.
I've pirated stuff in the past, and ultimately wound up buying a game I pirated because I liked it. I would never have bought it had I not pirated it.
For all these doomsayers about piracy, the fact is, while there are many negatives, the positives are largely ignored.
I fully expect to -1, troll now, but ah well. Someone has to post the unpopular opinion:)
Sorry, I apologize. Ethically wrong was the wrong term to use. I shouldn't presume to judge, especially since I personally don't think there's a clear answer one way or the other.
The real term to use is ethically equivilant.
And yeah. When you buy used books it's akin to piracy, at least from the perspective of the producer. The producer receives no additional benefit for your enjoyment of the work. Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, but there's absolutly no difference from the perspective of the producer between downloading a PDF or a book and getting it at the library.
Absolutly no difference.
Maybe you somehow feel justified in doing one but not the other, but you have to realize, they are the same.
Yes. I have rather extreme views of this. It's just that any other way of thought to me is hypocritical. They are either both right or both wrong, at least from the view that the reason you buy something is to reward the producer. (if you're against piracy because you're an elitest prick, then you have some other problems.)
What can the game companies do? They can refuse to give stock to the EBs of the world that have pre-owned stock next to new. As well, like I said, they could get well known game designer companies to have information pickits to get the word out to buy new or don't buy at all.
Myself? I think that anti-piracy laws should be strictly focused on commercial avoidance of producer renumeration. In other words, any company or group who makes a profit out of facilitating people avoiding rewarding the producers should be strictly illegal. Non-commercial file-sharing? Harmless in the wide scheme of things.
Why did I pay big money for games that often are broken and were never repaired? If they were normal physical products each and every game company would be in court getting its ass chewed out by consumer watchdog agencies.
And it just doesn't look like it is getting any better. Hell with "copy-protection" schemes it even gotten worse. Buy the legal product and you end up with something you can't copy to preserve the orginal CD, wich is a legal right in holland, and no way to get new cd's (only often send to american residents).
Where as if you download the game you can archive it as much as you want, you have no bloody keys to keep, and because they rip out the cd checking code the game frequently even runs faster. I lost 1 cd to my legally own "the longest journey", got the box if you don't believe me, I downloaded the game and notice how playing it from virtual cd's is a lot faster. No waiting for the CD to spin up to play a movie.
So game companies should get their act together. I was a paying customer who bought all his games except doom, no credit card. I now got even more money then when I was a kid and you lost me. Spend some time figuring that out. I tended to buy at least 1 game every single month and frequently more.
Have I just become a thief or am I rebelling against being ripped off by selling me broken products?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If they pull stunts like that, it's best to not bother with the game at all, and not pirate it either. Tell all your friends about it, so everyone knows not to bother. Pirating the game doesn't equal punishing the company: they still get the exposure, and other people you invite in, who try the game, might actually buy it. If you don't have it, you can't promote it that way.
Weren't early iD games released as shareware? That seems like a good distribution method, which combines legality with low distribution costs with try-before-you-buy.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I think you're missing the point. Right now, the situation is:
BigAwesomeSuperGame2004 costs $49.95. Joe wants to play a game and knows BASG2k4 is hot right now, but doesn't want to pay $49.95 for it, so he pirates it. Joe completely ignores PrettyCoolAlternativeGame from Small Software Co for $24.95.
If there were no option to pirate the game, it might work like so:
Joe doesn't want to pay $49.95, but knows that's the only way to play BASG2k4. Instead, he wanders up and down the software rack and finds PCAG for $24.95 and buys that instead.
Piracy is hurting the small game developers, not just because their software is getting pirated, but because people won't even consider it if they can pirate the big name games instead. Maybe if the big companies actually felt some pressure from sales lost to smaller companies with less expensive games, they might change their pricing.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The only possible benefit that would come from the lack of piracy is the possible improvement in game quality since companies spend a lot of time and money on trying to keep their games from being pirated (which always fails, I've yet to see a game that hasn't been cracked except for the online aspect of Neverwinter Nights).
Developers do not spend much time or money on anti-priacy. It is a pretty small amount of time overall and does not really take away from real development efforts.
Even when developers are not interested in copy protection or other anti-piracy efforts they often are forced into it by publishers or distributors.
Copy protection and other anti-piracy efforts do work. No one expects them to be 100%. The fact that a handful of more sophisticated users, and that phrase is used lightly, are able to get around anti-piracy is irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that more casual users are stopped. More often than not someone tries a burned copy of a game, can't get it to work, and then goes out and buys the cd.
The only problem with this line of argument is that after development, games only cost maybe $5 per unit to make. It's possible that if prices were lowered, the lower profit per unit would be made up in volume. Of course, it's really hard to tell if game prices are on the wrong side of the cost-sales curve or not, especially since different games can have different curves.
Rob
Why isn't this a main page topic? This is most certainly an important topic for anyone involved in the business side of software.
But the real point of my comment is to introduce a name for this side-effect of piracy, and it is monopoly-sharing. I chose this name since piracy usually occurs on file-sharing networks, but the sharers are actually perpetuating monpolies. The link is to my blog post about the topic.
True story.
Inserting the word "magically" into an assertion doesn't automatically make it dumb.
You're right, it's pretty fucking retarded all by itself with no insertion of words necessary.
Software sales generally come from people who meet both of the following criteria: "want the software," and "don't already have the software." If you pirated a game, you obviously met the first criterion, but you've removed yourself from the second one. That's one potential sale down the drain. The company has lost value. Not $20, but some percentage of it.
So if I remove myself from the second criteria, then it's like I never existed at all. See? If some strange holocaust killed all software pirates, it wouldn't change the revenue of software companies at all.
You need to add one more criteria: "willing to pirate software". There are people who are willing to pirate, there are people who will only use software they have acquired legally. There are probably a whole lot MORE legitimate users than pirates, not because users are particularly scrupulous, but because pirating executable code is more inconvenient and dangerous than pirating music or movies.
And looking at the sales figures, there are fantastically more legitimate users today than there ever were at any time in the past.
Not if production costs are increasing faster.
Right, something other than piracy is the source of independent developer's woe. You could blame the increasing costs of production--though I'm not sure that's really true. It costs a whole lot more to make the state of art 3d shooter than it cost to make a 2d platform game back in the day, but it's way the heck easier/cheaper to make a 2d platform game today then it has ever been in the past. I suspect that as time goes on, making 3d games is going to be easier and cheaper. 3D models will always be more expensive to build than 2D sprites, but the diminishing marginal returns of 3D graphics are starting to kick in, as games displayed on televisions and computer monitors aren't going to be able to look too much better than they do now. Which means that games using cheap, easy to use pre-packaged 3d engines will become visually indistinguishable from games developed with expensive 3d programmers.
You could blame users for growing sick of the desktop computer as a gaming platform--consoles are a much larger percentage of the marketplace than they used to be, but are vastly less friendly to independent developers. (The web is more friendly to indies, but users aren't as willing to pay.)
You could blame the thousands and thousands of available classic titles, usually available at low cost somewhere or another. Whether I choose to pirate Warcraft III or keep playing my old copy of Command and Conquer Red Alert, I'm definitely not going to buy your new independent strategy game.
You could blame the power law. As the number of users and developers increases, it's just plain natural for a small set of powerful developers to make most of the sales.
Or you could blame users again for wanting big, complicated games, instead of small innovative games.
You could realize that computer software is what microeconomics textbooks call "a natural monopoly"--the marginal costs of producing new copies is near zero, so the market gravitates toward a few dominant players.
That's not to say that a pirate shouldn't think twice about stealing an indy game they like if they'd like to see more of that sort of game in the future. But that's no more true today than it was in the past, and piracy is definitely not the reason large game developers are winning.
Look, I steal a lot of software, so while I may be mistaken in this specific case (although since you haven't named the program, there really isn't a specific case to be mistaken about) I'm not mistaken about the general case. Even if the crack available, it's still vastly easier to exchange software by trading cds around IN A CLASSROOM--i.e. your example still is not generally applicable.
One pirate kiddie turning another pirate kiddie onto a game doesn't really help anyone.
Doesn't really hurt anyone either. A non-sale is a non-sale. If we're talking about obscure software, then the probability of a pirate turning a legit customer to the dark side is low, because the number of intersections between your legit and pirate set of people are smaller. This rationalization has been TRUE for decades. That even in the post-linux era people still don't understand this is mind-boggling fucking stupidity. IBM doesn't see all these desktop running linux with no IBM hardware and start bemoaning "geezus, those stupid hackers are STEALING all of our Linux research and development costs!" It sure seems like major corporations aren't buying into your "debunking".
On the other hand, encouraging legit users to be pirates by forcing them to download cracks to make their product work at all, as has happened to me with several games, definitely decreases the number of legit users in the future, by getting people in the habit of piracy--or driving them away from the PC onto the consoles, where games just freaking work. Surely consoles are vastly more small-developer hostile than PC, piracy or no piracy.
It seems to me people selling information need to remember that prayer about "the courage to change what I can, the serenity to accept what I cannot." By trying to get every last possible sale from the last few holdouts, sellers of games are alienating those who DO purchase their products. I've got no sympathy for them.