Free Games As a Solution To Game Piracy

christ, jesus H writes "PC gaming may not be dying, but it is in a state of flux. We're seeing developers and publishers blaming piracy for all the ills of PC gaming, but attempts to rein in pirates with the help of DRM only annoys and mobilizes the legitimate customers of your games. The solution? According to David Perry of Shiny Games, PC games are going to be free." (And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below.)

Comments

ooh, ooh, I've got one!

[BlackCobra43]

Electronic copyright violation.

Yarr, I be a clever pirate.

make good games that run on reasonable hardware

[WillAdams]

Instead of mediocre games that require incredibly expensive stuff few people have.

Re:Problems...

[VoyagerRadio]

On point A)Windows: Exactly. Halo 2 running only on Vista? What the...? That's plain wrong, considering most of us are still running XP.

Piracy is not an excuse

[Austerity Empowers]

People have been pirating games for almost 30 years, but companies have been profitable. Pirating games is a giant pain in the butt, so if you can purchase a game online and legally download it, you're probably going to do it. You can purchase almost any game via digital downloads these days.

Compare to consoles, I own an xbox 360 but do not own a single game. I don't pirate, but I have gamefly. I get 3-4 games per month, which I play beat and return in mere days. The amount of money being made there per game is miniscule, if I had more free time I would probably do the trade-in thing which I understand is all the rage.

I'm not convinced "free" (as in crack) games are a solution to a real problem. Windows is just not turnkey enough for the simple games that consoles do best. For the complicated games, lately people don't buy very many. Who has time for WoW AND Lotro AND MMOG++? PC games tend to be involved, for this reason we won't acquire every game that hits the shelves and will be selective. If a game sucks, we won't buy it, no time, forget money.

Console games...well gamefly will send me anything on my queue, and I'll keep the queue full even if the games on it suck and I just send it back barely touched. If you're EA, this is just fine, that means they're getting more share of my entertainment budget ($14.99/mo or whatever it is). From the standpoint of running a business based on increasing profits, they like it, no risk.

Inappropriately conflated "Illegal" w/ "Steal"

[Woundweavr]

You make a reasonable argument on why its wrong to violate copyright. That does not mean its "stealing."

When you pirate a work, you must by definition make a new copy. That copy can only be legally produced by the copyright holder. It would make no sense to simply destroy it, and so ownership of it reverts to the one legally able to produce it in the first place. Most of the time illegally-produced copies get destroyed anyway, but that need not be the case.

In any case, you now have a copy of the software that belongs to the copyright holder. By not returning the copy to them or buying it outright, you are in fact depriving them of something: a copy to sell or otherwise do with as they will.

And so, piracy equals theft.

Possession of something that should lawfully belong to someone is not theft on its face. The means by which one takes unlawful possession indicate different crimes.

• If one physically takes possession of something belonging to another person through force or stealth, this is called theft.
  
• If one obtains property of another through a transaction that used an excess of deceit to the point that the transaction is considered invalid, this is called fraud.
  
• If one makes a copy of media that is copyrighted without the consent of the copyright holder to an extent that is considered unlawful (one has the right to make backup copies under the fair use doctrine and until the 90s one could make copies if one did not receive financial gain from the copies), this is called copyright violation
  
• If one purchases or otherwise obtains property in a transaction that would normally be legal, but the goods are stolen, this is called purchasing stolen goods (and is only a crime if done knowingly).
  
• If there is a civil dispute over property ownership and the possessor of the goods is found to not be the proper owner, this is not considered theft or even a criminal matter (generally).
  

There are a number of other variations on the above. Simple possession of another person's rightful property does not necessarily constitute theft.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[Waffle Iron]

It's stealing: you're depriving the intellectual property owner of one of their property rights, i.e. exclusivity. The same way I may choose who gets to stay in my realty (i.e. I control the exclusivity of the property)

You seem doubly confused. If someone violates the "exlusivity" of your property, that's called trespassing, not theft.

Re:I prefer this idea:

[billcopc]

+50, Nailed it!

The no-refund policy leads to horrible products with fantastic marketing budgets. What's a scorned gamer to do, sue the company ? On what grounds ? You can't prove "lack of fun" in court.

I'm of the opinion that piracy / software theft / whatever you wanna call it, helps the good game houses and hurts the bad ones. The whole try-before-you-buy excuse is a very valid one IMHO. There's a crapload of software out there, that I would have never heard of, were it not for some illiterate little shit in Norway posting it on Usenet. Not just games but apps too... prime example: O&O Defrag. I saw it on some FTP eons ago, gave it a whirl, and have been a paying user for over eight years now. Why the *&@^ am I paying for a defrag tool ? Because I like the damned thing, that's why. Had it not been pirated, I would still be cursing at MS Defrag / Diskeeper on a daily basis.

Same thing applies to games. You mentioned Blizzard, well a long long time ago, when I was just a teenager with lots of BBS accounts, I stumbled upon the original Warcraft. I had no clue what this game was, nor did any of my friends, but it was an addictive little thing. Chop wood, mine gold, kill stuff - FUN! Warcraft 2 came out, I trotted down to EB and picked up the War2 battlechest. Then Starcraft, War3, and WoW.

Had it not been for that pirated copy of the original Warcraft, I would never have bought the 2nd and 3rd installments.

The same is true for a bunch of Lucasarts games... Day of the Tentacle, anyone ? If it weren't for those massively distributed copies of Monkey Island, I would not have been hooked, and they would have sold $250 less games to this one guy alone.

Meanwhile, when companies release shitty games, the kind that's not even worth pirating, you can be damned sure I'll never buy their stuff, and I won't bother downloading it either.

If games didn't cost $60-70 to "try", maybe they would sell more. There are very few shops that release demos anymore, and the ones that do, often pull a Hollywood on us, where the full product only adds filler with no substance. The business model needs to be redesigned from the ground up - new distribution, new (smaller) budgets, greater emphasis on gameplay... it's not so hard, just look at all the runaway hits of recent years like Portal or Sam & Max - inexpensive to make and tons of fun.

Sure, blockbusters can be good too, but so many of them flop because the money takes over, release dates get bumped up and salaries get chopped. What, you actually believe those no-experience foreign sweat shops with mile-long resumés are going to cut development costs while delivering a superior product ? Ever heard of EA and Activision ? Ever seen them release a top-quality product ?

The game industry is fucked, much like the music industry. Pointing fingers will not change that.

Re:I prefer this idea:

[PitaBred]

The no return with open package isn't just because of piracy... it's because people would use big-box stores as rental stores. Get a game, play through it, return it and get another one, all "free". What I'd be most impressed with is if they did a return policy like Gamestop does. 7 days, no questions asked, after that, you're SOL. 7 days is long enough that you can return it if it sucks, but short enough that you can't play through most games worth money, assuming you're a normal person. There may be a few people who abuse it, but I think that would be a solution that would appease the greatest number of people, and get more people buying games again.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[hey!]

This is a quite (unintentionally) interesting post. The words "stealing" and "piracy" are criticized here because they are inaccurate metaphors for the thing being described, chosen to sway the debate by their emotional impact. Here we have an AC troll who is trying to veer the conversation back into emotionalism by yet another inaccurate metaphor.

You can see that the words "stealing" and "piracy" obscure the issue, without necessarily thinking that copyright infringement is acceptable.

Some cases of piracy are reasonably close to theft: unauthorized commercial duplication for example. In this case, the copyright holders aren't deprived of the material, they are deprived of the revenue, which the infringer enjoys. Other cases are not very much like theft, but are still not very admirable. They are more like freeloading.

Still other forms of copyright infringement represent the user trying to exercise a right he believes he has but which the copyright holder does not believe he has. In some cases that may be a legal right (such as archival copying), in other cases it may be a moral right, like replacing a CD lost in a fire. Such infringements have to be viewed on a case by case basis. Some are be reasonable and others are not, some are legal and others are not, but none are precisely "stealing" nor are any "piracy", which technically means robbery on the ocean without a valid legally recognized license from a sovereign nation.

Re:I prefer this idea:

[Denial93]

When I worked in a games company, I was told matter-of-factly that 80% of games sold are played for less than 30 minutes, and 80% customer satisfaction was alright. By that logic, a lot more effort was put in the first level compared to the last. Playtesters made sure the game was finishable, but everyone involved knew it started to get tedious after the first few hours. I scripted a couple of cutscenes very late in the game that I was told less than a percent of players would ever see. I still did them as best I could, but I wouldn't be surprised if others were less motivated...

Re:I prefer this idea:

[Danse]

Here's a hint, if you truly can't return the game, you can't reject the EULA, and as such aren't bound by the terms.

Which means that you'd be able to distribute as you like.

What are you smoking? The EULA doesn't take away the right to distribute, copyright law does. That is in effect whether you agree to the EULA or not, so no, you could not distribute the game if you refuse the EULA. You're stuck with a box of discs that are essentially worthless unless you can sell them to someone else. Of course if it was an online game or application, then that person would be stupid to buy the opened box b/c you could have already gotten the CD Key from it and they would not be able to use it online. Of course sites like Ebay will probably shoot down your auction of it too. Sucks to be a software consumer these days.