Talk About Pirates Day – Indie Game Piracy
Piracy is quite a controversial topic in the gaming community. People tend to have strong feelings about it – to the point of incomprehension on the opposite side. There are some developers who take “piracy is the devil” stance, while others simply shrug their shoulders. Added to the discussion is the issue of anti-piracy measures, like DRM. Having underdeveloped self-preservation instincts, I’m going to splash some oil into the fire.
95%
That’s what surveys by several indie game developers have shown the piracy rate to be. I don’t know about you, but this is shocking to me. Only 1 in 20 people cares enough to support the person who works to entertain them. Do you know what the 2nd and 3rd top search strings for “world of goo” are? It’s “world of goo torrent” and “world of goo download”. This is a game which is made by 2 people, has no DRM and costs as much as a dinner out – the standard excuses that pirates spew just don’t apply here.
Frankly, the people who pirate games make me sick. It’s not that they copy the games and shaft the game creator – I can deal with that. What really gets me are the sickly explanations that people bring up when called out on it.
My Nautical Voyages
Let’s get a couple of things straight, first. I come from a country where copyright law doesn’t exist, in practice. Western Europe and America have several centuries of entrenched intellectual property tradition. The former Soviet sphere, by contrast, doesn’t. Because the government controlled all media for the last 100 years, copyright as you know it didn’t form in the Soviet Union. Sharing bootleg music and books was a way to get around the communist system. Instead of screwing over the creator, you were doing them and your friends a favour by sharing their stuff.
It’s not a surprise then that I grew up blissfully unaware of all this copyright stuff. Nobody got rich being an author in the Soviet Union anyway. Since my dad was a programmer, we always had tons of pirated software around the house. It never occurred to me to ask why somebody would spend all that time and energy making this stuff. It was just there – poorly translated into Russian by enterprising pirate groups.
When I moved to Canada, it dawned on me that people were actually selling software for a living – what a novel concept! As I got a job and started to earn money, I stopped copying programs and started buying them. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, I wanted to support people who create awesome games, books and music. If we don’t pay these artists money, they’ll have to go get a job, and the flow of goodies will stop. The second reason is that most of everything is crap. I can’t even be bothered to pirate it. I just don’t have the time nowdays to play most games or read most books. I can afford the 1% that’s relevant, so why not buy it, just for convenience’s sake?
Excuses and Justifications
As you can see, I’m not some sort of frothing-at-the-mouth RIAA crusader. Heck, I don’t even sell any games! I’ve pirated stuff in the past, so this is not a case of “holier than thou”.
No, what really drives me up the wall are the cowardly justifications that are offered by pirates on the Internet. If you’re too cheap to pay $20 or you think the game sucks or you don’t give a damn about supporting creators, just say so! But no; instead we get a chorus of whines blaming everything else in the world. Here’s a sampler:
- “The game is too expensive.” People pirate $0.99 games on the iPhone; how much lower do you want to go? False excuse.
- “Evil publisher…blah…blah…DRM…blah.” DRM sucks, but games without DRM by small indies get hit just as hard. False excuse.
- “I just want to try the game.” Games with demos get hit as badly as games with no demos. False excuse.
- “Game’s not very good.” If the game’s not very good, why are you playing it – is it some sort of masochism? False excuse.
- “Easier to pirate the game than going to the store.” Most games are available online now and they still get pirated to death. False excuse.
All of these excuses are just people trying to justify their behaviour to themselves and their peers. It’s not social activism, politics or anything else. Here’s the real reason:
“I can get the the thing that I want for free without getting caught.”
If people would admit this, maybe I wouldn’t get the urge to punch them through the Internet every time I read a thread on piracy.
What Then?
Now that we’ve established the real reason for piracy, let’s talk about it from a small developer’s perspective. Before we plunge into that, however, let’s recognise something.
If you’re a small software developer, you have no right to complain about piracy.
Ho! What’s this? Haven’t I been doing this for the last 10 paragraphs? Well, no; read it again.
It helps to view piracy as a natural phenomenon. If your garden gets eaten by a swarm of locusts, it doesn’t help very much to get angry at the bugs. The locusts aren’t out to get you (it could be your neighbours cursing you though; might want to gather a mob). In this case, piracy is a side effect of the Internet destroying social norms.
Humans aren’t adapted to living in societies of millions, communicating across the globe. Our intuitive morality can deal with tribesman Thunk breaking your best spear, but not patent law. Pirates are being jerks, but it’s only because they don’t realise it. In a way, they are comparable to sociopaths. Sociopaths lack the ability is assess the moral dimension of their actions in normal situations. Pirates can’t assess the moral dimension of their actions because they are placed in an abnormal situation.
Hug a Pirate Day
You should be happy about piracy. Why? As I’ve mentioned, piracy is a side-effect of the Internet. It’s just one of the consequences of opening the information tap. What other effects are there?
Well, one is me being able to type this from my bedroom and you reading it. If I make a game and sell it, I can only do so because of the ‘net. If you’re an indie developer, chances are that you would not be able to exist without the Internet (or its grand-daddy, the BBS). The truth is that the creative destruction wrought by electronic communication has benefited the small guys the most.
Of course, if you’re working for a large publisher right now, you have my permission to stay mad. Sucks to be you. This is why the large publishers are thrashing left and right in the PC. Well, that and used sales.
How to Defeat Piracy
Drumroll! You don’t. Piracy is a feature of the landscape. It’s the new reality of the world that we live in. The sooner that you can accept it, the faster you’ll be able to work around it. See it as a river that floods once a year and washes away your crops.
I know that it sucks to see your stuff be copied, but it’s not something worth worrying about. Even if you could force every single pirate to buy a copy of your game, you’d barely feel it. Conversion rates for pirates are miserable. These people are not your customers – they’re background noise. Focus on the guys and gals who are paying you the big (or small) bucks.
The most important thing for a small developer is to recognise that the normal rules don’t apply in their case. Piracy doesn’t kill you – obscurity kills you. That’s why your first concern should be to promote your game and to build your audience.
This is why we see these strange effects in the indie space. Asking people to choose their own price drives up sales. Games that become free for a week sell more than they did the months before. Tarn Adams makes $1500 per month from donations while working on a game that most people can’t play. The normal rules don’t apply. If you want, you can even make some $$$ off of the pirates. Just sell them premium stuff that’s a pain to find for free.
Summary
What can you offer with your product that makes it more valuable than FREE? Is it a great community? Faster support? Bonus items? Fuzzy feelings? What would you do if someone cloned your game and made it open-source? Stop thinking of this as a moral issue and start seeing it as a business reality. The sooner your recognise this, the faster you can get to solving the real problems.
P.S. You should also write an article on piracy to promote your game. Hey, it worked for World of Goo and Cliff Harris! 
Attack of the Paper Zombies
March 27th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Tarn Adams is a very special case were people are convinced he can actually make that dream game he has been talking about for years, and I am still waiting to get my $30 worth! (DF is great don’t get me wrong, but that update seems so far away T_T)
This debate, I must agree with you, it’s not relevant to the indie community to damn the pirates altogether, but it would be nice if we could bring them down to 90 or 80% as that would double profits.
I love helping indie devs, mostly because I get a warm fuzzy feeling, also because I know I am buying a piece of some developers soul, even if he goes on to make commercial games he made this indie which is special, if not to others then to him. (him/her, sorry)
March 27th, 2010 at 5:05 pm
The only issue I take with this is the reasons given for piracy. This issues given in this article have had their meanings twisted. Here are the reasons in their entirety.
Very few people actually pirate $1 games on the iPhone. The highest leeched torrent for the iPhone on KickAss Torrents (with more than 1 seeder) has 213 leechers after 11 months. Most PC games have numbers as high as 10-11 thousand after first release and popular games will have easily a few thousand a year after their release and a few thousand more in several similar torrents. That iPhone torrent is a mega pack with 9 GB of stuff. People just download that and see what they got later so that is like having a total piracy rate for the platform of 213 people. Considering the number of iPhone owners, piracy on the iPhone is negligible.
DRM isn’t so much an argument for not pirating a game so much as it is an argument for not buying a game. A great many pirates who pirate games later turn around and buy the good ones. Personally I have pirated World of Goo, Torchlight, and Trine. I later bought all three. Notice none of these have DRM. You will not see me buying Assassins Creed 2 or Starcraft 2, even if I really like them, because they have too much DRM. I wouldn’t think twice about pirating such a game.
Demos are the most horrible things to buy games off of. I have very little income. In my current situation I am legally prohibited from obtaining employment. Thus I must be extremely careful what I spend money on. I have bought two (and only two) games based on the demo and both times the demo was far more polished than the rest of the game and upon finishing the demo the entire game is pretty crappy. I don’t buy games off of demos. All three of those DRM free games I bought I bought after I had finished them. Then you know that the game isn’t about to let you down once they have your money.
As for the “Game’s not very good.” argument, no, actually I am not playing it. This is because I am not masochistic. I probably played it once (maybe twice, but no more) and since then it has been sitting on my hard drive gathering dust. This is what people are saying when they say that the game is not very good.
“Easier to pirate the game than going to the store.” This is a terrible excuse. The people who use this are the sort of people who should be slapped upside the head. If you purchase it online it is usually even more convenient than if you torrent it.
March 27th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
Richard, I doubt that most people buy games after they’ve finished them, even if they’re good.
I do, but I’m weird and I want to make games for a living…
March 27th, 2010 at 5:47 pm
I read the comments and went “What, I don’t recall commenting here!”
As a non-pirate, I hope immensely that micropayments can be cultured into the Internet, that people won’t mind spending more than a few dollars on things they really like, and that parents start setting up allowance wallets for their kids
I think my biggest concern about pay-for things online is that it can lock out people without credit cards.
March 27th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
I’m noticing a trend in your articles where the first two thirds are filled with misleading or pointless generalizations while the ending third is filled with great truths. I feel like your points would be stronger if you just cut out the rambling intros and got straight to the endings. I suppose they’d be less fun to write, though
I remember a particular iPhone dev saying he made no money yet hundreds of people pirated his game. At no point did he ever ask, “Am I getting attention anywhere other than torrent trackers?”.
Of course no one was going to buy it. The only people who even heard of it were pirates. He should have focused on trying to sell his game instead of tracking pirate behaviour.
March 27th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Evan, it just takes me a while to get warmed up. Where would I be without my over-generalizations?
I do feel like I need to a bit more careful with my ranting. It seems to distract people from my points. Then again, it could be a tactic to keep you reading.
March 27th, 2010 at 6:57 pm
It’s refreshing to see a such a well articulated article on this issue. Most anti-pirate stuff is often hateful self-righteous bile, characterising all pirates as drooling, selfish, parasitic morons.
Overall, I agree with your conclusions. Piracy does harm indie developers. The primary reason I dislike most anti-piracy rhetoric is it paints every download as a lost sale and equates it with physical theft. Likewise it paints every pirate as a freeloading thief – someone that has the resources to get games legitimately but chooses not to and deprives the producer of their cash.
Many pirates are like this, but painting every pirate like this is false and potentially counter-productive.
*A lot of pirates are also keen consumers and purchase as well as pirate.
*Not every download is a lost sale.
*Some people are genuinely poor. I’m not talking about $10 indie games, but rather commercial games. Not everyone on the Internet can afford luxuries many people take for granted. For example, I work very hard but often have trouble making ends meet. A mid price range commercial game is my food budget for a week. Its a relatively big expenditure.
I’m an (occasional) pirate. Although I do draw the line at indie games (being a huge freeware and indie fan)I won’t hesitate to download something, simply because its simple and I can. Or even just borrow a game from a friend rather than buying it!
On the other hand i’m happy to buy games as well and frequently do – when I have the money!
For me, buying a game (or donating in the case of freeware) rather than pirating it gives me a feeling of actually “owning” it. Pirating doesn’t have the same meaning behind it has having a physical copy or actually contributing to a freeware project. Of course, that may just be me, but I don’t think i’m alone.
I apologise for the rant!
March 27th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
No need to apologise, and that was hardly a rant.
Both extremes in the piracy debate bother me. On one side you have the Pirates = Thieves fanatics. On the other are the pirate apologists.
It’s unfortunate, but I suspect that the traditional model of funding artistic work is getting crushed by new technology. I suppose that it’s possible for the government to crack down, but what do you do when the majority of the population pirates? What happens when these people start voting?
That’s why I think the answer is to find new funding models. Otherwise, you’re just a scribe at the invention of the press.
March 27th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
I just have issue with this point,
“Easier to pirate the game than going to the store.” Most games are available online now and they still get pirated to death. False excuse.
I’ve downloaded the spirits engine 2 when it wasn’t a freeware yet and i did it because i had no means to pay for it online. I would happily go to a store and buy it if it was available there. There are people out there who are just like me with no debit/credit card to pay for stuffs online.
It actually becomes easier to go to the store than trying to buy it online.
March 27th, 2010 at 10:20 pm
Sue, I’m sure that there’s a very good reason for you not having credit cards, but do you believe that 95% of the population is in the same situation?
We’re not talking about a few isolated people here.
March 30th, 2010 at 7:41 am
I have a pretty good friend at work (well, did; he left a while ago). I don’t think you’d know him. Anyway, just about the only tension between us was on the topic of piracy – in that case, music, not games. But it’s the same principle, is it not?
His view: piracy helps musicians because it gets their music distributed more widely faster. The RIAA is pure evil.
My view: its the artists’ music, if they want to give their music away free, fine, but it should be *their* decision. Copying a track illegally is no different from going into London Drugs and stuffing a CD into your backpack when the clerk isn’t looking.
While I am fairly solid in my anti-piracy beliefs, on the other hand, I think it’s great that music companies are on the hot seat and the RIAA probably is somewhat evil.
On another other hand, piracy, like Internet porn, seems like an unavoidable consequence of Internet freedom, much as $200 million executive salaries seem to be an unavoidable consequence of capitalism, and TS is an unavoidable consequence of coming to work
March 30th, 2010 at 5:59 pm
I don’t take such a hardline stance towards piracy. Certainly nothing like piracy = theft. My concern is preserving the overall system.
People forget that copyright and patents were originally established for the benefit of society. They are a social contract between the public and the creators.
Unfortunately, both sides have been abusing each other lately.
June 7th, 2010 at 3:16 am
Hey guys!
While the piracy is bad, if you make your own super protection, like I did, you get parrots to distribute your game ‘as is’, out of respect, I assume, but not fully sure, though.
Cheers!