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An economist would probably call anyone who buys a single-player PC game a fool. That is because the cost of buying a PC game is $20-$60, while the cost of pirating it is nothing more than the time spent downloading an .iso and mounting it with daemon tools.
Pirating PSP or DS games is only slightly more costly. There's the price of the memory stick / writable cartridge to consider. If you're more than a casual gamer, this cost will easily be offset by the library of cartridges and UMD's that you will not have to pay for.
Thus the arguments that piracy would go down if the quality of videogames increased, their price decreased, or DRM became less of a hassle don't hold water. As long as we are rational human beings, we will pirate because piracy is the rational thing to do.
The challenge for the videogame industry is to bring the cost of piracy closer to the price that the game sells for. Online PC games such as Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft have managed to do this by requiring the user to have a unique product key to access matchmaking servers. It is possible to play pirated version of these games, but that involves tracking down a fast and reliable pirate server. In general, the time it takes to do this outweighs the cost of buying the game at retail.
While online games are relatively safe from piracy, those that are focused around a single-player component are not. Every method of DRM that has been tried has failed; every popular single-player PC game can be found for free on the internet, without exception.
Theoretically pirating all types of games should have the cost of a federal prosecution. Yet unless you’re running a factory that manufactures bootleg DS cartridges, you’ll receive no punishment. This is where I suggest we in the industry come in. Videogame publishers or a videogame trade group such as the ESA should sue individuals who distribute their products illegally over the internet.
I am suggesting that we implement the same strategy employed by the RIAA in its battle against music pirates. While it failed for them, I believe it could succeed for the videogame industry.
It is a suggestion that is sure to have many detractors. The two main arguments against the RIAA’s lawsuit strategy was that it would generate bad PR for the music industry and that it would be ineffective. I believe these same arguments would pop up if the videogame industry tried a similar strategy and I will address them both.
The basis of the bad PR argument is that the RIAA would earn bad press if it started suing music fans. This would lead to a backlash and fewer sales. I’ve never accepted this argument. Why would paying customers get upset if a company sues people stealing its product? Would people boycott Best Buy if it started prosecuting shop lifters? The shop lifters might complain, but who cares what they think? In the case of the music industry lawsuits, I remember some of my CD-buying friends being glad that I could be punished for all of my smug mp3 downloading.
To believe in the bad PR argument also requires you to believe that your average CD buyer is particularly knowledgeable. The person would have to be aware of the lawsuits, know that the RIAA is behind them, know which record labels are part of the RIAA, and finally know which record label their artist works for. I think this vastly overestimates the awareness of your average Britney Spears fan.
The second argument against the lawsuit strategy is that it is ineffective. Obviously this was the case for the music industry, which has been in steady decline since mp3 downloading began in earnest. Yet the differences between pirated games and pirated music are such that the strategy could be successful if taken up by the videogame industry.
A song, at its most fundamental nature, is sound waves. It doesn’t matter if it’s played off a CD, the radio or streamed over the internet. A song whose raw .wav file measures 80MB when on a CD or 200MB on a DVD can be compressed to a satisfying 3MB mp3.
A videogame, on the other hand, is 0’s and 1’s at its most fundamental level. A user must have every last 0 and 1 in tact (more or less) in order for it to function. The fundamental nature of the two mediums makes music much easier to pirate.
The small size of an mp3 eliminates the need for trust that comes with a pirate videogame transaction. A person can stream a low-quality version of a pirated Beatle’s song from a Russian website to ensure it’s the real thing before paying 10 cents for the download. Likewise, if the person’s using a downloading service such as Limewire, it doesn’t matter if 50% of the mp3s are fake because he can download 20 in two minutes. By contrast the average pirated PC game takes hours to download and cannot be previewed.
Pirated songs are also much easier to distribute. Songs can be compressed and streamed from an ad-supported site like YouTube. A pirate website can afford to sell a 5MB mp3 for 10 cents because the bandwidth costs are minimal. Assuming the pirate website used the same pricing scale for a 3000MB videogame, they would have to charge $60.
Hence most game piracy comes from one place – torrent networks where bandwidth costs are shared between thousands of distributors. It is likely to stay that way because, unlike mp3’s, the size of videogames keeps getting larger.
By targeting lawsuits at those who share pirated games via torrent networks, we could put a sizable dent in videogame piracy. While only a small fraction of sharers would receive subpoenas, many would quit using torrents once word of the lawsuits got out.
It’s true that many pirates would switch to more complicated methods of obtaining pirated videogames such as MIRC or Megaupload. Others would use proxy servers to hide their IP addresses and keep using torrents. Still others would put their fate in the hands of programs that attempted to block out all torrent connections but those from trusted pirates. In all of these cases piracy would be more of a hassle thus driving up its cost.
I would love nothing more if the general public associates pirating videogames with harsh financial punishments. This will only happen if we in the industry make it happen. We have a choice. We can either shape our products around the pirates – taking our focus off compelling single-player experiences and abandoning single-player PC games altogether- or we can fight for the artistic freedom that the medium deserves.
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I counter: why not bring the cost of the game closer to the cost of piracy?
To put a finer point on it, games cost too much, and there's good evidence out there that shows that lowering your price increases your revenue. For example, Valve recently put Left 4 Dead on sale for $29.99 and saw a 3000% increase in revenue (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/02/19/gabe-newell-valve-are-very-rich-its-a
wesome/).
And this is a bit of an older reference now, but Cliff Harris as Positech Games wrote up that "Talking To Pirates" post a while back, where he found that "A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating… People talked a lot about impulse buying games if they were much cheaper." (http://www.positech.co.uk/talkingtopirates.html)
And people hate the RIAA and MPAA legal scare tactics because they make law-abiding citizens feel like suspected criminals. Gamers -- indeed, all paying customers -- just wanted to be treated with respect. That means not only adopting an "innocent until proven guilty" stance toward piracy (which is in stark contrast to the RIAA/MPAA approach), but also adopting sensible, consumer-aware pricing.
This is exactly the right attitude. It doesn't matter how many people you sue, how many sites you shut down, etc. people will still pirate your game. To actually combat piracy would require a herculean effort and all of that effort is going to come at the expense of your game quality.
Instead focus on making people not want to pirate your game. Distribute your game through services like Steam and Impulse, provide a incentives when possible, deliver a quality product at a quality price, and do whatever it takes.
Even something as simple as providing a good flow of updates and content can help combat piracy. Combine updates and DLC with a technology like goo. Using DRM that doesn't inconvenience the player and then adding in constant updates that require additional effort/lag to pirate can help encourage players to buy rather than pirate.
Simply put you cannot stop the flow of information. If all you are selling are a bunch of 0s and 1s that are infinitely reproducible then you're not operating on a good business model. If instead you're selling a relationship with your customers where they get more than just the product they will buy it.
And don't forget, even if you magically stop piracy there is no assurance that you'll make more sales. On top of that there are plenty of people making and distributing games for free and in case you've been in a cave some of them are good... really good.
The paradigm has shifted to the power of the people and it can never be shifted back short of taking control of the entire Internet, which will never happen. Companies and the law have never been able to stop the piracy in it's physical form. Why do you think that they will be able to stop it in it's digital form?
You see this in the way most updates and other things are distributed, user authentication systems, and tying your customers to an account. When you take away the vague anonymity of a serial number and replace it with something much more personal like an email address or name you make the person less likely to share that information.
While software solutions to prevent casual reverse engineering will still exist, they're not the primary focus of the industry as a whole. As a business your job is to own your customer, and if you're not able to keep track of how many you have let alone who they are, then how are you going to know if they're law abiding or not? The systems presented in this article and employed by the RIAA are to assume they're not. They don't have a handle on who is and who isn't and so they just start pointing the finger.
Baby steps. The industry needs to know who you are and people need to be willing to share this information. So long as business scares people into saying they're a customer, due to threats and tactics described in this article, the consumer is never going to step in the line of fire. As a consumer many people feel threatened by DRM, and that's not the point. The point of DRM is to protect your investment as a business and the investment of your customers in your solutions.
Threatening your potential customers and end users is what is keeping the end user from believing that the business knows they exist. They're unwilling to compromise their identify or willingly inform you of such. They would rather take the road of anonymity so that you can't point the finger at them, law abiding or not.
When you know who your customers are, and who aren't. Then you can begin to put systems in place to inform those who aren't of why they should be. Then you are managing your assets and your rights, until that day it's not management, it's chaos. Good luck.
The whole point of sales is that you offer a product at a certain price, then you say "for a limited time only you can get it at a greatly reduced price!" and people who had any interest in the product go and buy it during that limited time. That's why you have sales. If you were to lower the price in general I think it would take an even lower sale price to see a similar increase in sales.
It costs a certain amount to develop a game, and you need to cover those costs otherwise you're not going to be able to continue developing games. Only the games with the widest possible appeal can survive and turn a profit at the ridiculously low prices many people demand. I worked on a niche title (http://cota.matrixgames.com/) and it absolutely needed to sell at a higher price. There just aren't enough people in the world interested in wargames to make a lower price point able to support full time employees spending two years working on them.
Second: The companies will be in the right to sue the costumer when they do what they are required to do for the costumer.
To start: Accept return...
Second: Lower some outrageous prices...
Third: Stop acting like the game is a rental, I know a guy that already bought 6 copies of BF2 because EA refuse to send new CDs when the old ones get worn out (and this is common, since the stupid game DRM require the media ALL TIME on drive while playing)
Fourth: Stop making crappy games (seriously, the most recent games made to appeal to "casual" public are plainly crap... Prince of Persia and its autoeverything is a perfect example)
Fifth: SELL THE GAMES DAMNIT... Seriously, here in Brazil (I mentioned already that is the country of piracy, no?), people BUY pirated games (yes, sometimes more expensive than a legal game...) for the following reasons:
Somewhat common: The game is outright not sold here...
Also common: The game is single-player but internet heavy (ie: demands a broadband), this lead to people get hacked copies to cirvuncent that (not even the US has 100% broadband adoption... imagine here in Brazil, where the most common price of broadband is the minimum salary...)
Annoyingly common: When the game is sold here, it is totally non-localized... Since only like 1% of the poulation can read english, and even less other languages (yes, I saw japanese games for sale here once...), you can not expect a lot of people to buy your kick-ass RPG, do you?
And the three top reasons:
Outrageous price... (seriously, actvision asked a royalty of 30 USD for Jedi Knight III to be sold here... The end price was whooping 80 USD and both the distributor and the retailer got 1 USD each profit... while Actvision got 30...)
Unreachable places... (ie: many people buy pirated copies because the pirate dealers are intelligent enough to sell them on places where people actually go... There are hell a lot of people that sell games on totally bizarre places or far away places...)
Sucky support... (this one starts with no-return policy, and ends with companies that never hear the costumer, some do not even provide a way to international costumers to contact them)
Now, IF a company sold me a legal copy, gave me support, asked a fair price, and I still pirated it, then it is right to sue me... But if the company does not even care to sell the software in the seventh most spoken language in the world (portuguese... ahead of japanese, german, french...), it has no right to sue people that got it ilegally, because they do not exist anyway to them...
It's funny that music piracy would be the crux of the argument here. Because, it was the rise of iTunes that turned that wave back. In fact, there is plenty of reason to believe that the record industry created their own piracy problem--by failing to move into digital distribution sooner. (It's also entertaining to watch record companies complain about Apple's power in the marketplace. After all, those major labels had their chance--and they blew it. Boo hoo.)
Fortunately, the game industry is not frightened of technology. Everybody sees the writing on the wall with digital distribution. Full Steam ahead. (Bad joke, I know.)
The game industry should take a few swings at those pesky moles; people need a good scare once in a while--something to remind them that stealing is still wrong... But (in the end) good digital distribution and competitive pricing are the real keys to controlling piracy. The great news is that the industry knows what it. :)
Also I mean Pc gamers are more educated I think and I know people seriously talking about boycotting the entertainment industry after TPB got sentenced in court, the same court that afterwards was found out that the judge was sitting in the same Clubs as the prosecutors, I mean people won't take law suits seriously since they know the bill will be so high the state will have to bail them out.
I'm not sure any seasoned economist would agree with that statement. It's the age-old dilemna of time vs money, and there's no single answer which covers all users.
In simple terms, pirating a game involves time: you need to find and download the game and then find and install the tools (Daemon tools, cracks) required to play it. This also implies some level of technical capability - and there's also the need for ongoing support, as patches/expansions are liable to require re-cracking.
The question then is: does the resource-cost of installing a pirated game outweigh the financial cost of buying the legitimate version? For some demographics (e.g. students), the answer is yes: for others (e.g. 25-35 office worker), it's no. There's also the question of time-to-pirate: a crack may take days or weeks to be produced which means that a would-be pirate is unable to play the game while it's in vogue with his peers.
There's also the longer-term economic issue: piracy in this form offers a purely short-term benefit while blocking the production of further works. It's a classic example of killing the hen which lays the golden eggs.
Litigating against pirates seems like a fine idea in principle. However, there are significant issues - the RIAA has provided a fine example, with major negative publicity, protracted (and expensive) court cases and a limited number of wins - tens of people from a cast of millions. It may be worth going after torrent trackers, but these spring up like weeds, and the recent court-case against The Pirate Bay shows that taking these out is far from easy: the owners may have been convicted, but the appeals process is liable to drag on for several years yet - and there's a significant chance that TPB will win.
I'd also say that it's be better to compare movie-piracy with games-piracy. After all, movies are in the same size-range as games (i.e. 4.5gb for a DVD ISO, with re-compressed movies generally in the 0.65 - 1.3gb range), and the time required to download these doesn't appear to have slowed the piracy rate. There's also a greater need for technical abilities - pirated movies generally can't be played out-the-box on a standard DVD player, for example - hardware DIVX/XVID players may be getting more prevalent, but these are generally constrained to work with a specific set of parameters and are liable to be stumped by changes in media containers (e.g. OGG/MKV), HD resolutions and non-standard audio codecs (e.g. AC3).
A more interesting question would be: what can be done to reduce the appeal of piracy? Apart from the use of anti-copy mechanisms to minimise first-day sales impact, the industry is also experimenting with physical elements (e.g. manuals, posters, figurines, metal boxes), the ongoing integration of online features offers options such as the ability to gift "free" content to early purchasers.
One thing's for certain: litigation and other media exercises have little or no long-term effect.
This is an argument that works in theory, but in practice fails spectacularly; when innocent people are wrongfully sued, it creates a lot of bad PR.
I'm surprised this wasn't addressed since it's the biggest lesson to be learned from RIAA -- don't sue crippled computer-illiterate grandmothers who clearly aren't pirating anything.
I am against piracy, but there are some issues and exceptions. The first (which was brought up already) is that an end of piracy will not necessarily mean more sales. There is no evidence at all that shows that if someone can't download something for free, then they will buy it instead. There have been no good studies to look into what % if any of people would buy or have the money to buy if the free downloads are not availible.
The second issue is that in regards to emulation. I fully admit to playing emulated games, especially on Mame (as I know many posters on this site also do). I can't think of any game released in the last 15 years I play on an emulator, and most of these older games are not available in any other format. Donkey Kong is still one of my all-time favorites, and I will buy the arcade version on Wii when/if Nintendo ever releases it (I already paid for the inferior NES version), but I feel no remorse playing it on Mame for the time being. Plus - emulators keep old games alive for educational/historical/cultural reasons, and most definately warrant a discussion all on their own.
Even if people were sure that it would get them eventually, they would only stop pirating but they would not buy a legal copy anyway...
I have a cousin that pirate PS2 games like mad (he has 60 games, NONE are legal...), I told him that if people do not ever buy a single legal game, the companies that made them would go bankrupt.
He told me (btw: he was 13 years old) that he does not care if the company go bankrupt, usually the games suck anyway (btw: of those 60 games, lots are games that he for got the bizzare daikatana-like hype or because are movie gameS) and that there are more idiot people (like me) that are willing to make great games, more than already exist actually doing them...
I noticed that in fact, he was right... To costumers that constantly get served Matrix games (he has them all), badly advertised Spider-Man games (ie: the last game, that the ADs show the PS3 version and claim that it has a PS2 version too, but when you buy a PS2 version it is totally another game with the same name), or outright insanely expensive games (seriously, I saw castlevania for DS on several local stores for 80 USD... This thing never get cheaper after all those years? What is the idiot that price that? And btw: The game was only avaible in english or japanese, languages equally unknown here, only african dialects are more rare to be known)
Say what you would, but "stop making sucky games" is a BS argument. Price is another red herring. Free games play like free games - bad. Good requires budgets. Justification of wrong doing is nonsense, period.
I'm tired of this constant justification from people that really should know better. It's disrespectful to anyone that has ever worked on a game and tried making a living at it.
Having said that, we can't win. The internet is what it is. DRM is crap too, since the pirate versions don't have it, it only effects the paying customer, which means it has failed while making your game more difficult to play.
Suing isn't any good either. I mean really, how much are you going to get from a 13 year old with a stack of old PS2 games? We can't sue everybody.
The only way I've seen work is on updates and content. Stardock is doing some great stuff there (while also adhering to a Gamer's Bill of Rights).
@Josh Sutphin
The fact that lowering the price of Lead 4 Dead made the sale volume go up doesn't really have relevance on this article because that game is very very difficult to pirate in the first place because of its online nature. Also the price wasn't lowered until months after the game was released at the full higher price. Chances are all the people who really wanted the game (those who would be willing to pay $40 or more) already bought it when it was released.
@Jonathon Walsh
While I agree that things like updates and DLC can provide incentive to buy a retail copy, I don't see why the two strategies can't coexist. I don't think the lawsuit strategy would stop 100% of pirates and I don't think more updates and DLC would either.
@Alan Rimkeit
I completely disagree with your analogy that police have never been able to stop piracy in its physical form. Go to a mall in China and you'll find bootleg products selling in stores. Go to a mall in America and you won't be able to find any bootleg products. It's because the US goverment enforces IP laws while China does not. I would like to see a similar effort on the internet.
@raigan burns
I thought about writing a paragraph on the topic of suing naive computer illiterates who pirate unintentionally, but I didn't really think it applied to PC game piracy. I can easily see a grandma downloading a bunch of mp3s on limewire without realizing that it's illegal. I think pirating games over bittorrent is just complex enough that grandma wouldn't be able to do it. Not to mention most .iso files come with a folder called "crack" as well as a .nfo file explaining how to get around the copyright protection. Hard to believe you wouldn't realize it's illegal.
@Jason Tate
I can see why Lee fired you. You're a real asshole. Haha just kidding. Good luck at Red Stick.
@Tom Newman
While you may be right when you say there are no good studies showing pirates would likely buy the game could they not steal it, I think there are comparisons. For awhile netscape was selling its web browser. Microsoft started giving it away for free and suddenly people stopped buying netscape. So clearly you have a lot of people who would have bought a webbrowser if it wasn't being given away for free.
@kid koexist
I think you bring up a particulary bad analogy to prove your point. It's true that a lot of people keep on smoking despite the cancer risks, but if you haven't noticed, a LOT have quit or decided to never start in the first place. I think you could compare this to what would happen if there was suddenly a cost to game piracy.
@Hélder Gomes Filho
I don't think the bad games argument is a good justification for pirating. I think the reason your cousin has so many shitty games is because they cost him nothing. I'd like to think that if he had to actually pay for games, he'd be smart enough to read the hundreds of game reviews online. He didn't have to buy the game himself to realize that Enter the Matrix sucks.
If we take purchasing power parity in account, a standard console game in Brazil costs the equivalent of US$ 500 in the US. I'm talking about the game, not the console. The equivalent price of the console here would be US$ 3,600 in the US. Think about what piracy would be in the States if mass entertainment was priced like that. It obviously would not be called mass entertainment, and most likely only a few people would pirate it anyway because very few people would have played games to start with (I haven't seen many pirated Laserdiscs, but I am sure there must be afficionados sites).
Now, the different reason is that pirates actually provide services in Brazil and they are ubiquitous. You will be able to buy the top releases while you are fixing your car or riding the bus. Plus, if you buy it and you don't like the game or your copy is broken, they will take it back and give you a different game! On top of that, they will even deliver games to your house and won't charge you any extra for that. No hassle, no questions asked, free support, 100% guaranteed! Now that is some good service, sir!
This is key to understanding piracy in developing markets. People are people anywhere, and they don't want sub-par products or old games. They want to play what everybody else is playing. Companies and governments should have that in mind before assuming crazy prices and taxes and killing a whole market in the nursery.
I think you wholly underestimate the scale of litigation that would be required to make the slightest dent in internet piracy. In spite of the wide net they've cast, the RIAA is still trying to empty a beach full of sand with a Monopoly thimble. How many tens of thousands of cases have they filed over how many years of effort? Imagine how many music pirates there are. Demigod saw hundreds of thousands of pirates before the game had even released. Good luck making the slightest impression on the community as a whole. The only reason that the RIAA's legal tactics see any financial success is because the vast majority of defendants fail to defend themselves (and receive default judgements) or can't afford a proper attorney (and wind up accepting a settlement which is carefully calculated to cost less than an attorney). Small wonder some individuals have accused the RIAA of RICO violations; they're essentially running a legal protection racket (in spirit, at least, if not in a fact of law).
There's a serious problem with certainty. A large number of pirates operate through anonymising proxies or can make a reasonable claim of innocence because their PC is publicly available. Unless you can trust the ISPs to keep accurate logs (which you can't, which has bitten the RIAA several times against competent defendants), or you can get help from the organizations (colleges and universities) sheltering many of these pirates (which you can't, they claim an undue burden), you'll inevitably find yourself targeting infants, technologically illiterate grandmothers, and the long-since dead. That's all not to mention gated communities - it should be obvious how difficult it is to track piracy within a closed circle of individuals who've specifically created a network with a high degree of trust between its agents.
Finally, there's jurisdiction. Suppose you oust the major piracy hubs from the U.S. and Europe. So what? They move their hosting to Russia, to China, to Uzbekistan, or any other of dozens of countries that would gladly take the money pirates give them for bandwidth and server hosting, and now you've got exactly the same problem, but it's based in countries that don't care about your precious copyrights, you greedy capitalistic child of something that isn't respectable. If the country hosting the piracy won't even let you start litigation, then you are, in the video gaming vernacular, pwned.
Widespread litigation cannot be the answer because it is not feasible in the modern world. Should we make an example of an individual that we can firmly nail to the wall? Probably. We cannot, however, use litigation as a blanket policy. We must find better business practices to build our customer base and maybe even convert pirates into customers.
Games like Cave Story, Nethack, The Passage, Spelunky, and Dwarf Fortress would beg to disagree (and those are just the ones off the top of my head).
"While I agree that things like updates and DLC can provide incentive to buy a retail copy, I don't see why the two strategies can't coexist. I don't think the lawsuit strategy would stop 100% of pirates and I don't think more updates and DLC would either."
But money spent on lawsuits is money that's not spent on DLC. Maybe if you're Blizzard or EA you can afford to sue the pants off everyone but I doubt anyone else can. At some point SOMEONE is going to have to pay for the costs of suing and you can be sure that it won't be the pirates. It'll take you a very long time to get a very paltry amount of money from any pirates. So either you're going to cut into your development costs (directly or indirectly) or pass the cost on to consumers. Neither gets you more customers.
On top of that how do you even sue effectively? You can only 'easily' sue those sharing, rather than downloading which is a grey-er area than sharing. So assuming you find the sharers and attach them to a real person you then get to sue them for what? Games aren't like music, people typically won't keep a large stock of games to share or on their harddrive, especially with the way bit torrent works. If you nab some of the top sharers you may make some progress but you won't threaten anyone actually pirating the games. Users will know that as long as they aren't sharing massive game libraries they're safe, just like with music. If you DO go after those sharing in small amounts the amount you win will not even cover your costs to do so. The point is that the only people you can actually go after without great expense are those that are determined to pirate/share regardless of anything. Those people are the ones that won't buy your game regardless. The casual pirates that might buy if they don't pirate aren't going to be phased by your efforts. In short suing, even if it had an effective result, in largely impractical.
If you're trying to base your business model on doing something that's both impractical AND ineffective then I don't think you'll be around for very long.
A customer also doesn't have to know much to stop buying your product. If Blizzard sues a bunch of people, I might decide not to buy GTA. It doesn't matter that the two are unrelated if I perceive them as related. When the RIAA got a lot of bad press, quite a few people just stopped buying all music. If the game industry takes the same approach, I would expect similar results.
I think the current approach of the game industry to add extra value to legal copies of games is a much smarter approach. About 90% of my PC game purchases are through Steam, and the reason is that I can install it anywhere, don't have a DVD to lose, and don't even need a DVD drive on my system. That's enough value for me. DLC is probably winning over even more customers.
I believe rewarding your existing customers will lead to more success than suing your potential customers. Keep in mind the person who downloads a pirated copy of a game is a potential customer, and you can find a way to convert them to a paying customer. Every friend I can think of pirated games in college, and every one of them has paid for their games upon getting a decent job.
Say that do Nethack, MP versions of Wolfenstein and FEAR, Counter-Strike (now it is paid, but up to 1.5 was freeware if you had half-life), Dwarf Fortress, Quakelive (that one is awesome!), FreeCiv, Bloodfrontier, the thousands of japanese freewares (like Demolition Gunner, Zugya-DX, Kenta Cho games...) the shmup freewares (Varia, Warning Forever...), Flow, the thousand mods that exist around, the shareware (ie: the game is already full version and you pay if you want, Galactix is really old, but a good example), the microtransaction MMOs (Cabal, GunZ...)...
@Ian Fisch
Mind you, I mentioned on my post, that pirated games here in Brazil are not free, in fact sometimes they are more expensive than legal ones (obviously the ones that are cheap somewhere else... like, pirate copies of Half-Life is more expensive than Half-Life on Steam, no pirated game can beat those bizarre 60 USD price tags...), so your argument that he has it because it is free, is totally invalid, as I said, sometimes it is the only option, I never saw for example Enter the Matrix sold in any store here, and it is not avaible translated... Winning Eleven (as is known here... because the first PES version to get sold here was 2008, and pirated pirated WE instead of PES), here is much more wildly popular than legal PES copies, plainly because it is properly localized (not only translated, but with corrections on local teams, and sometimes additions of local teams and championships) and the dealer usually give some support (ie: several dealers allow you to play the game on his store... YES PIRATED GAME DEALERS HAS STORES HERE, then he teach you how to play, and if the game is a PC game he can give instruction on how to install it and how to solve the most common problems, and several give his PERSONAL phone so you can call him anytime asking for help)
As as the other guy pointed, some even deliver where you want (some using transport services, but some even in person)...
Mind you, the countries with biggest piracy are the ones with poor internet infra-structure, internet there usually is not free at all, here pirating from internet is MUCH MORE costly than buying original games, because internet fee is outrageous (my 8MBit broadband costs me 200 USD that I divide with my 4 roomates, and has a download limit of 5GB and is quite unstable and in peak days the entire network go down, sometimes entire parts of internet is not avaible because some ISP lost control of his routers and borked all avaible routes to some sites) and download speeds are unberably slow even with good conections because of physical distance (ie: a download from steam, on my 8MBit, never gone better than 60Kb/s, the same testes on other people connections, up to 20MBit... And I once tested the download speeds on a event where a 5GBit internet was being demoed by the same ISP that lose its routers, and the top speed from any non-local site without Orbit or Torrent never surpassed 200Kb/s...)
To you see how internet is diffrent in other parts of the world, know that here Flash based sites are utterly hated, because they load hell slow on nearly everyone computer (since nearly everyone is still using dial-up)
Now into the effects of your sue idea, suppose that users os pirated things got sued, I will say what happened with people that I know:
My 13 year old cousin, has 60 PS2 games... Probably he would drop of the school (here free schools suck) to pay for the suing, and probably he would never get money to pay for a private course, or university, or a new console (btw: here PS2 games are not "old" as someone mentioned, I still do not harnessed sufficient money to buy a PS2 myself... Several people still do not own the console, and the ones that do, like my cousin, or are stupidly rich, or harnessed money for like 4 or 5 years (my cousin case...)
My roomates and me (yes, I will not lie, I do have pirated things, altough happily to me these are a rarity now, since I use open-source things, like Open Office, and I am one of those people that make Valve percentages go nuts when games are sold cheap, and several of the games that I like, Ubisoft released for 5 USD on magazines, like Sands of Time and AoE I and II): We are pay 600 USD each month in our game design course, I have a 30000 USD loan, I would go bankrupt, the same apply to my roomates (in fact, one of them is already bankrupt to the point that he sold his pirated games... as I said, pirated games are not free here, they are bought and sell)
All my classmates: One of them is actually rich, and is the only one that buy lots of legal things, and own both PS3 and XBOX 360... He just would get less rich... Everyone else, would go bankrupt and drop out of university, and the majority would be stuck jobless (since here there are a high unemployment rate, only people with university get a job, and free university is not sufficient to everyone and demands a really, really, really hard test to you get allowed into one)
All the people that I see buying pirated games near where I worked: Mostly of there were students, or young workers (probably students too, like me) or plainly poor people that went there just to buy pirated things (usually the single game that they bought was valued more than their clothes), well... bankrupt too! And the poor ones probably will never pay (they probably do not even has a fully legal house)
Our head of state (yes, he was seen in public broadcast holding a pirated movie on his hand): Sueing him most likely will result in nothing, he will claim that he did not knew that the thing is pirated, and the company will get bad PR for suing a head-of-state that is wildly popular (80%), even if I think that he should not be our president and that he is a obvious real criminal (he is not "stealing" 60 USD from some company, he is involved in scandals around the millions...)
Also, people that CAN buy a legal game and pirate it, if the game is good, they BUY it, you are thinking that this is BS, but it is not, I know many people that done this, even if it took years (I bought a copy of Portal 1 year after I pirated it, and I bought Age I and II 8 years after I got pirated Age I) or it was fast (several people that I know that for example got pirated Mass Effect, liked it, and bought a original copy, altough continued to use the pirated copy, since the original copy DRM borks your system... At least mine needed a windows re-install, and this got me sufficiently mad to do not buy it legal or pirated, and return the borrowed copy, and play it only on someone else computer, never on mine)
You say that "stop making sucky games is a BS argument", when in truth it's actually completely relevant. The entire point of anti-piracy is to boost sales, but it's been seen several times over, that a game that focuses on being good, rather than being draconian in nature sells well. You can look to the recent Demigod as an example, or more precisely, you can look at the various developers comments surrounding it. They didn't add much to stop the game being pirated, instead they tried to build a great game, was it pirated, hell yes it was, did it sell well, damn straight it did.
@Ian Fisch
As far as game reviews go, I think you'd be suprised at a) how few people actually read enough to get a decent picture and b) how misleading a lot of reviews can be. A lot of games get a lot of hype they probably don't deserve, but hey that's marketing. A large number of consumers will merely catch the hype and miss the detailed reviews, a lot of people will get caught up in the "movie game" craze, especially younger gamers. So while reviews go a fair way to preventing people from buying a poor game, they don't nullify it even remotely close to completely. As for this argument being a "justification" it's not really, it's a "reason" it occurs, and as anyone who knows anything about causality knows, if you want to prevent something from occurring, you need to know why it's happening in the first place, and this is one of many reasons.
Also trying to punish everyone who pirates would be foolhardy and impossible to do. Any attempt at law enforcement shouldn't even really consider trying to stem the tide of piracy, it should really be about scare tactics, punish one and discourage 1000, it's how regular law enforcement works, people are afraid of the consequences, even though the chances of being caught and punished for a large number of crimes is relatively low.
I'd also like to point out how often time isn't a factor when it comes to pirating a game. It's the same deal with a movie, a large number of people who pirate merely start the download in the morning, go to work/school/uni, come home and there it is, if it doesn't work it'd be a little frustrating, but that's the risk people associate with piracy. You also note that it would require some serious education and awareness for bad PR to be generated, that's not really true, one news article that flashes up on a site, and from that point it spreads virally, just check the issue Metallica had with piracy. It'd be the same deal with any other major court case, or home invasion, people hear about it.
piracy is one of those things that cannot be stopped merely mitigated, law works off fear, so it always will generate bad PR and controversy, all the other positive methods of mitigating piracy are on the developers end. Find ways to make cheaper games, yet improve their quality (yeah I know that's often in conflict), find better methods of distribution, garner more consumer confidence and loyalty and the list goes on.
Say I love videogames a lot (and I do). I buy (bought) myself a PS2, Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 and Final Fantasy X and XII without a single moment of hesitation, and legal copies for that matter, because I like having the original boxes and manuals. However, this endeavor already cost me a lot of money, and my gaming vice is not yet satisfied! Why shouldn't I pirate? Am I really buying less if I pirate? Would I have bought a PS3 if I only had 5-10 games of PS2 instead of 30ish pirated titles and 5 original ones?
In recent economic literature, it is clear that there is no such consensus of the net benefit/cost that piracy can have. Empirical studies are ALL subject to doubt, essentially because data is scarce and not very reliable, for instance using BSA or MPAA data for regression/statistical analysis. And then theoretical analysis most generally come to the conclusion that, under certain parametrical conditions, piracy can have net positive effects, and under other conditions, it's negative. These parameters usually relate to sampling effects, user quality experience and network effects.
In permission economics, there is strong IP protection that enables the construction of high-budget games, with the expectation that consumers will pay for the additional costs imposed.
In remix economics, there are few protections, all material is of roughly equal cost once made, and consumers are willing to pay only distribution cost, not production cost, so new productions must occur on no budget or as little as possible.
Piracy is the consumer side of the remix economic model feeding off of permission products; it's unable to do much more than consume, though, because IP laws can be used far more effectively to punish creators.
The arguments for both sides ultimately revolve around whether high-budget productions add more value than low-budget ones.
My own opinion is that remixing is far more efficient in its use of resources to produce culture. Most of what I actually see day-to-day as a professional game developer seems to center on wasteful endeavors: Reinventing our own proprietary wheels, publisher/licensor/developer negotiations with the associated approval processes, legalities, groupthink and conflicts of interest, and miscellaneous overhead that is a result of large-scale development. And the gamers almost never bear the full cost of production because they've always pirated. So it's no wonder the industry is so unstable and risk-averse: this model has always been "leaky!" And DRM is a costly way to plug the leaks.
There are alternative business models out there, like sponsorship, subscriptions, and microtransactions. Those models don't leak. They are mostly compatible with remix economics, and when marketed correctly, they're doing an efficient job of making gamers happy without any of this conflict.
Thieves will always offer justification. "Good" games vs "bad" games is subjective; what some people find good I think is garbage and vice versa. Pirate dealers in places like Brazil may offer various services, but that's because they are getting their product free rather than developing it on their own. Even GameStop offers a 7 day return policy on used games, so such a service is hardly a good argument for theft.
Ultimately, it's a matter of people behaving in an ethical fashion. If you steal (in any form) then you must not mind if someone steals from you or harms you in some other way. This doesn't seem to be the case, usually, so people need to consider whether or not they'd be willing to work for little or no pay for their efforts before stealing from others. It's really pretty simple; just don't do it, that's all.
First of all tracking people using torrents is pretty much impossible. Second, how are you gonna prosecute pirates? They live all over the world not just in the U.S.. And don't forget that high profile games are downloaded by 10.000 people or more a day. So prosecuting that many people really is impossible. And yes, the RIAA tryed that and failed. Why? Don't you think they would've continued prosecuting pirates if it was financially and realistically feasible?
I'm disappointed that you didn't tackle the real issue and that is THOUSANDS of pirated DS games (and games for other system of course) on Ebay and other auction sites. Have you ever tried buying a DS game on Ebay? It's pretty "fun".
So the first thing should be prosecuting Chinese "commercial" pirates that sell pirated games by the thousands, not average Joe's, that you can't realistically prosecute.
Also keep in mind, that if 500.000 people pirate a certain game, that certainly doesn't amount to 500.000 lot game sales. I find arguments like that really idiotic. Do you really think that every single one of those people who pirated a game would buy a copy legally if they couldn't pirate it?
I'm also BAFFLED by some of the comments. Games are too expensive? So that's an excuse for pirating games? Are you 10 years old? How much did games cost back in the '80s and '90s? And now adjust those prices for inflation.
Super Mario Bros. (which came out in '86) would cost $91 today if the price was adjusted for inflation. So stop bitching and moaning about prices.
No, you're underestimating the problem -- I didn't mean grey-area people who actually pirate but "seem innocent", I meant people who legitimately have not pirated anything, such as this: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/13/warner-music-sues-pa.html
Because of dynamic IPs, insecure wireless networks, sloppy investigative methodology, etc (who knows -- typos or database corruption could even be the ultimate culprit in some cases), coupled with a semi-automated approach (which is necessary given the number of suits required to have any impact), absolutely innocent people have been identified as pirates when in fact they have not downloaded anything.
If for every pirated copy you had one less copy of the game to sell, instead of one less potential customer, then it'd be stealing but that's not the case. Calling it stealing when it's clearly not is just using a term with a stronger negative connotation to push your own views.
There are a diffrence between Super Mario Bros and Assassins Creed: Super Mario Bros is awesome, has a sweet gameplay, and is nowhere repetitive like Assassins Creed... It servers to show how we are making the money go to the wrong place (graphics, animation, story and audio, in that order, instead of mechanics, story, art... the order that a game should be done)
And the price issue IS a issue, when you think that for example the salary of 70% of the population in Brazil is 150 USD... They will never have sufficient money to buy a legal game for 80USD (new castlevania DS in a store shelf) or 200USD (price that Halo 3 reached here once...), suing them will only make your company look like a big bully stealing money from little people.
@Dave
Piracy is not stealing, you can not compare the two, piracy is counterfeiting, and I do not mind if people pirate my games (of course, if NOONE buy a legal game from me, I am screwed), because there will be ALWAYS pirated out there, you should do like Valve and Blizzard and concentrate in making your non-pirate costumers happy and make them buy more, not concentrate in getting rid of pirates and second-hand sales.
Also we are talking about new games I think, not used... Return policy on used games is nowhere relevant... Even because here not even new games are sold properly (as I said), a store selling used games here is like a pink elephant.
@Seiji
I agree with you
So, what type of environment does piracy(criminal activity) flourish in? One that restricts freedoms. Given a free choice, people in general will opt for the right choice. Take away those freedoms, and underground activities boom and flourish (remember a little thing called prohibition?).
If the average american has $50 a month to spend on entertainment software, then their choices are restricted by cost. If games cost $50 then they can legally purchase one game. If games cost $5 or $10 then they can legally purchase ten or five games respectively. The current average pricepoint is geared towards the $50 pricepoint, which decisively limits the market of legal buyers to upper lower wage earners (over 50k a year). I'll stay away from the tedious details behind my reasoning (and will provide my observations in private request), but basically for every one person in the U.S. that can legally afford the $50 pricepoint, there are ten that cannot.
Computer gaming is no longer a hobbyist's venture like it was in the 80's. Computers have permeated all classes of society, and the entertainment available to them ought to take into account this much broader market that is available. Unfortunately formulas of selling 100k copies at $50 to recoup costs and make a marginal profit is a focal point of most game distributors. If the costs come down, then a broader market is able to buy games. As an aside, a question for marketing folks could be, would you rather have 100k copies sold at $50 or 500k copies sold at $25?
Let me reiterate once again, if the costs come down, then a broader market is able to buy games. The key focus here is 'able to'. For every one person that can legally afford a pricepoint of $50, there are ten that cannot. The piracy stems from those who cannot afford the pricepoint. If we broaden our market focus in general in the games industry and bring the pricepoint down, then game piracy wont be an issue. The problem is people who analyze piracy see that as a potential number of people paying the retail price, but they don't seem to realize that those who pirate cannot afford the retail price. The numbers are through the roof for piracy because there are currently about ten people that cannot, for every one that can, afford the standard pricepoint.
Make games readily attainable for the broader market and you will see profits beyond any seen in the games industry. One prime example of reaching for a broader market is a game that wow's millions of people every day.
We have numerous examples of DRM and restrictions causing good games to implode, and numerous examples of reaching broader markets causing good games to blossom.
If you don't like piracy then help foster an environment that doesn't allow it to thrive.