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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 guess it still had to be said for the clue-impaired.
How do you think Microsoft got so big? People used to copy DOS and Windows, and when their companies were getting computers, guess what software their employees were familiar with, and which was thus bought?
Same thing with Photoshop. It's really expensive, and gets pirated a lot. Instead, people could have bought Paint Shop Pro or downloaded The Gimp.
Software piracy makes you serve as free advertising for the "victim" company, and when it feels like it, it can sue you for megabucks. Do the math, people (preferably not using a pirated copy of Mathematica. Get GNU Octave instead)!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
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?
DRM ... Is supposed change this,making piracy so difficult though, but will this have the opposite effect? I doubt it, The fat cats are just going to get fatter and the skinny kittens are just going to get skinnier.
The article seems to be an anti-piracy article in some sort of disguise.
In the end the consumer will decide and with the advent the choice will be a lot clearer. Let the Fat-Cats extort your money because you wont be able to use illegal software you obtained for free; or Take up on Open Source and discover that quality software is available free, and best of all its legal.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
The main person piracy helps is me. It's effect on the developers was never really a factor for me - if anything, their insistance on the validity of intellectual property made me actively unsympathetic to their desires in the whole process.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
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
Although this does make a lot of sense when it comes to business software, and it's very true. Copied software creates more educated users of that product, making business take-up that much easier.
But when it comes to games? Frankly, it's barking up the wrong tree. I don't see how piracy would help the big guy over the small guy. I mean, it's not like there's not millions of keygens floating around for all those small download games..right?
In any case, I don't think it's piracy that hurts creative industries at all. I really don't. People who tend to do that obsessivly (meaning they don't buy anything..there are quite a few like that), wouldn't have a preference over one thing or the other. You're not going to get them to buy anyway.
Not so much for the PC market, but especially for the console market, what is really hurting them is the presence of the used/pre-owned game. The same thing that is really hurting the movie industry. This creates a new sub-market for such goods that the producers don't see a penny out of. Every person that buys, for example, Metroid Prime for $20..
#1. Doesn't have that $20 to spend on another shrinkwrapped budget game..you know, one someone actually gets paid for?
#2. Considering that the shrinkwrapped price is near 20, it actually denies the producers rewards for their production. This is exactly the argument they make against piracy. But they can't do anything about this because it's above the law.
So I think complaining about piracy frankly, is half-assed until they start cracking down on used/pre-owned copies. Of course, legally, they're not on firm ground here. However, a widespread advertising campaign and pickiting campaign may convince people that going into that used-media shop is ethically wrong.
How do you think Microsoft got so big? People used to copy DOS and Windows, and when their companies were getting computers, guess what software their employees were familiar with, and which was thus bought?
This seems more anecdotal than anything else; CP/M and DR-DOS were pirated, but that didn't do much for them in the long run. You could argue that MS-DOS was pirated more, and therefore became more popular. I think the more "obvious" explanation is that MS-DOS was popular, and therefore more widely pirated.
As a profitable third-party games developer, I don't think that piracy has hurt us in terms of pricing versus first-party developers; people assign some value to software based on price, and if anything, The big-name, $50-$60 games are pushing our prices higher rather than lower. Most people, upon seeing a $9.95 game, think, "crappy puzzle game."
Software piracy makes you serve as free advertising for the "victim" company
Dollar-for-dollar, I'd prefer to have the money, and put it towards development or media.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
So I guess it was just as ethically wrong the last time I bought books at the local Salvation Aarmy? That kind of used-goods market just takes money out of the hands of the publishers who made the books to start with? By holding a yard sale, would I be subverting the capitalist system as we know it? ...my god, what about all the pawn shops? Gun and jewelry manufactures could be bringing in thousands of additional dollars if we just forced everyone to buy their products retail.
The fact is that, while game makers can choose to whine and complain about used game sales, that's where their action will end. They can't do anything about used game sales, and quite frankly, I think it's silly to consider something like second-hand marketing ethically wrong. Whenever a game ends up in the used bin, that mean's that someone else paid retail for the same. At some point, the company got their money for that unit. People spending $20 or less on two-year-old used games are people who most likely would never have paid for the game if it weren't sitting in the cheap bin.
"Infants flesh will be in season throughout the year." -Swift
I agree, the author is barking up the wrong tree in terms of the pirates' motivation. Most people will naturally try to justify their decisions with some sort of argument, and in the case of piracy it's do deflect the blame onto something else. In this case, the obvious target is the big, bad publishers who are already raking in more money than they know what to do with (until they go bust, of course).
I doubt anyone REALLY pirates applications for any other reason than to avoid paying. Anything else is just a self-satisfying cover story.
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.
That is an amazingly ignorant statement. Piracy has had a huge effect on the industry. It raises the barrier to entry quite high. The "big" developers can survive it, but the small companies and the startups who already have enough problems can easily be taken down by piracy. Piracy helps keep the big guys big, and helps force the small to give up their independence and become a "studio" of the big in an attempt to survive. This sort of crap has been going on for decades. And pirates have been making the same lame excuses and denying their negative contribution for decades.
You don't sound like you're trying to take a position for or against piracy. It sounds like to me that you're attacking Linux and claim that Linux users are pirates.
We also know that warez trading is prevalent among Linux-run IRC servers
I know several people who warez trade using Kazaa runnining on Windows.
Quit stealing source code: SCO, Windows 2000.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know there is not one line of SCO or Windows (9x, NT, 2000, or XP) code in Linux.
Quit trading in illegal MP3s and Divx movies.
Mp3 and Divx trading happens on almost every OS. I've seen users from Windows, Linux, and MacOS all trade mp3s and movies.
I do agree with your last statement though. And definitely start paying money for your games! People should get paid for their product. But I can admit that there has been a few times that I downloaded a warez copy of software to try it out or because I was strapped for cash at the time. But I did buy a valid copy if I liked it and saved the money for it.
Windows is as solid as quicksand.
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.
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.
People have to understand how voting from the wallet works (and you should after reading this article).
The problem with the "I only pirate good games" argument is that you're missing the core point of the article. If you didn't pirate anything you would have to weigh the merits of software in terms of their real cost.
Most small dev shops may not be capable of the quality of the big ones, but their stuff usually doesn't cost as much either. So Paint Shop Pro might not be as powerful as PhotoShop, but it also costs 1/10.
When pirate software, that fact just becomes irrelevant. Worse, you aggravate the situation by widening the gap between the developers - in effect degrading the quality of small software devs by siphening their revenue.
This is doubly painful for games - where smaller shops might need to try something innovative or different, which is harder to market when people are more like to try and pirate UT2004.
You can justify it any way you want - but the reality is: piracy sticks it to nobody but the little guy. So when every year games become more and more mainstream, less innovative and EA buys another license - just look to you hard drive and you might know why.
Do you reach for the classic tried-and-true Hershey chocolate bar at $1, or do you go for the no-name store made brand which no one seems to buy at $0.25? In cases like these, most people are willing to reach for the tried and true brand names of things rather than try things new in some cases.
And on top of that, there are advertising factors, appearance of box art, and the popularity of the type of game genre you're talking about. (We all expected Quake 2 to blow away Half-Life since it was id Software. Boy, were we wrong!)
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.