An In-Depth Look At Game Piracy

TweakGuides is running a detailed examination of PC game piracy. The author begins with a look at the legal, moral, and monetary issues behind copyright infringement, and goes on to measure the scale of game piracy and how it affects developers and publishers. He also discusses some of the intended solutions to piracy. He provides examples of copy protection and DRM schemes that have perhaps done more harm than good, as well as less intrusive measures which are enjoying more success. The author criticizes the "culture of piracy" that has developed, saying. "Fast forward to the 21st century, and piracy has apparently somehow become a political struggle, a fight against greedy corporations and evil copy protection, and in some cases, I've even seen some people refer to the rise of piracy as a 'revolution.' What an absolute farce. ... Piracy is the result of human nature: when faced with the option of getting something for free or paying for it, and in the absence of any significant risks, you don't need complex economic studies to show you that most people will opt for the free route."

Comments

Re:Piracy is the result of human nature

[cpghost]

Piracy is what happens near Somalia right now. Oh, you meant copyright infringement? Nevermind...

They still don't get it

[ccguy]

when faced with the option of getting something for free or paying for it, and in the absence of any significant risks, you don't need complex economic studies to show you that most people will opt for the free route."

Well, there's always a third route: Not getting that something, meaning that having these three options:

- 1. Play for free
- 2. Play at a cost
- 3. Don't play at all

Many people will sort it 1,3,2.

Also, some people will happily do 2,1,3 as long the price is reasonable and so it what they get.

So... stop trying to get money from people who just don't value your product if it isn't free, because it can't be done. You can piss them off though, and that can hurt your business.

Re:They still don't get it

[g_adams27]

> So... stop trying to get money from people who just don't value your product
> if it isn't free, because it can't be done.

Your premise is flawed. Pirates obviously do value the product even if it's not free, which they show by taking the time and effort to get it.

You seem to be quite confident that huge companies with highly-skilled marketing, accounting, and product research divisions "just don't get it", as if the ideas you present have never crossed their minds. But in fact the article spends a whole section or two discussing the issues that you refer to. For example:

The argument [of economic loss] is straightforward and both intuitively and logically sound: for every pirated copy of a product, there is some potential loss of income to the producer of that product. This is not the same as saying that every pirated copy is a lost sale. What it actually means is that firstly some proportion of the people who are pirating a game would have bought it in the absence of piracy. Equally as important however is the fact that even those who would never have paid the full purchase price for one reason or another may still have paid some lower amount to purchase and play the game which they pirated. This is because by the very act of obtaining and playing a game, they've clearly demonstrated that they place some value on that game. After all, if something is truly 'worthless', consumers won't bother to obtain or use it in the first place, regardless of whether it's free or not. Even if a game only gives the pirate a few hours of enjoyment, that's still worth something. In the absence of piracy they may have purchased the game at a discount several months after its release, or bought it second-hand for example. So the existence of piracy results in some loss of income to PC game developers, publishers, retailers and even other consumers.

BULLSHIT.

[Anonymous Coward]

If i buy the game. They treat me like a thief. Install things that may or may not fuckup my computer or game. Require the disk to be in the drive. Require activation and other bullshit. Limit the number of installs i can do. Tell me what programs i'm not allowed to use like daemon tools. And costs a shitload for a semi-beta game.

If i pirate the game. I don't have any of that. AND it's free.

Piracy. Better product, lower price.

You're kinda foolish not to pirate anymore...

DRM

[Kranerian]

The article goes on an extensive analogy about DRM equaling Door Locks, and it completely misses the point. Yes, DRm prevents the majority of hackers from being able to do anything to the actual, hard copy of the game. This is worthless, though. All it take is for one person to break through the protection and upload it to a torrent site, and then everybody with internet access can have the game for free. It does not matter that most people couldn't break the encryption themselves. They don't need to, because somebody else already has.

Re:saying. "Fast forward to the 21st century"

[collinstocks]

That's what calculus is for. It's so that the people selling the software/music/media/stuff/whatever can graph the people willing to pay against the price. Then they plot their expected profits for each price against that in order to find the optimal price.

People like you and me and anyone else who thinks the products are overpriced are not going to buy them. Either the companies making the products will be forced to lower the price to a more optimal one, or they will be able to keep it at the same price.

The problem is that they are claiming loss of sales for piracy done by people who never would have bought the game in the first place since the price is not right.

Granted, I am not a gamer and don't even bother to download these things since I don't have the time to play them, so take my gaming specific claims with a grain of salt.

Re:saying. "Fast forward to the 21st century"

[nEoN nOoDlE]

After seeing indie games on bittorrent that cost 5 bucks if purchased I don't think your reasoning holds through. Some people will not purchase at any price, and will pirate it. Price is completely subjective and rarely dictates the quality of the product,, but the perception of quality. The iPhone App Store is a great representation of this. There are a lot of programs that are free, so people start to get the impression that all apps should be free. There are useful apps for $1 that some reviewers consider overpriced. You can't find an app on the app store, no matter the price, that some people will say is overpriced, when these are the same people who will go and buy a $60 game for their XBox, play it for less time than the iPhone app's usefulness, and not think anything of it. If games drop in price to, say, $20. People will find any higher variation of that price "overpriced" as their perception of the price of games now will be worth $20 instead of the $60 they're paying now.

Re:Piracy is the result of human nature

[prestomation]

http://www.filesavr.com/i/piracy.png

Re:saying. "Fast forward to the 21st century"

[decoy256]

I would actually tend to agree that video games should not be pirated, but other products I do not have so much of a problem with. For instance, music and movies... Have you seen the commercial they put at the beginning of some movies where it has the stunt coordinator or some such schmuck talking about how piracy could cost him his job and make his kids go hungry. I don't buy it. Movie studios still own the copyrights on movies made 50, 60, 80 years ago. That is FAR too long for anyone to hold a copyright.

The Constitution gives Congress the power...

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

But when people can "renew" these copyrights indefinitely, progress is not being promoted, but stifled.

Re:saying. "Fast forward to the 21st century"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's where the second hand market comes in. Need a cheap car? Buy a used junker. Don't want to pay $50 or $60 for a new game that you'll only play for a couple hours? Buy it used. Oh wait, they want to use DRM and activations to shut down that market too.
Fuckers.

Bullshit

[Jane Q. Public]

I call bullshit on this article, from a number of different angles!

One of the biggest reasons is lack of logical coherence. The author cites lots of numbers, but then does not actually put them together in an objective way to actually support his conclusions. In fact, his conclusions appear to be foregone. He seems to have ignored a good body of evidence that would lead to different conclusions.

For one example, he cites an article about game piracy on Macs. The article mentions the "pirate's argument" that it is okay to pirate because that person would not have bought the product anyway, therefore there is no lost sale. However, the article only discusses this topic from the point of view of whether it makes a valid moral or ethical argument.

The cited article (and main article too) ignore that several university studies have in fact shown that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of piracy occurs when there would not have been a sale anyway. (In most cases because there was insufficient money to purchase the product, but there are several other reasons this occurs.) That may not be a sound ethical argument in favor of piracy, but that is irrelevant. More to the point: it is an economic reality. Economic realities are; they exist. Simply putting them down as unethical is to ignore the actual causes, and possible solutions, for the situation. Further, trying to prosecute -- and especially fine -- people for not buying a product they probably could not afford to buy anyway is completely counterproductive. It offers no societal solutions to the actual problem; it simply fosters fear and antagonism. And backlash, as the RIAA and MPAA are finding out, probably too late to do them much good. They were warned by the society of their customers, but they did not listen.

In another example of faulty logic, the author indulges in the classic logical Post Hoc fallacy argument to conclude that piracy causes DRM, not the other way around. (For those not familiar, this is the argument that because one thing happened after another, the earlier event must have caused the later event. This does not follow: in fact it is just as likely that some third event caused them both.) In particular, he states that a game that was released with no DRM resulted in lots of downloads, then claims that "The evidence is overwhelmingly clear: DRM does not cause piracy, piracy results in DRM." When in fact his "evidence" shows nothing of the sort.

As a systems manager and tech (and now Software Engineer) with many years experience, I can testify that there are a great many cases where, in fact, DRM causes piracy. One example is when I worked for an engineering company, which used quite a few proprietary programs for certain involved, specialized calculations. Many of those programs came with various forms of DRM. And I can tell you this in complete honesty: every one of the programs that used DRM failed on us. Almost always at an important point in the project. And I mean that literally: every single one of them failed, without exception. And in every case, the cause of the failure was the DRM. Further, our calls to support for the software were almost always unproductive: "You must not have installed it properly." or "You must have been tampering with the copy protection". Nonsense. We had paid a lot of good money for the software and were not about to treat it so casually.

In such cases, we were forced to either try to break the DRM ourselves, or to try to find a cracked version of the software, just to get the functionality we had already paid for! Which technically made us pirates. But it was DRM that forced us into piracy, not the other way around. Keep in mind that this was specialty software for which there was often no alternative product available. But just FYI, the invariable DRM failures did cause us to look for alternative products. Our official company policy became (this is true): "If there are alternative products available,

Re:Piracy is the result of human nature

[anagama]

So if "piracy" can only refer to seaway robbery, does "hacking" only mean to chop a physical object in a random manner with a bladed instrument? Or is our language flexible and capable of multiple meanings and nuances?