Gaming, Piracy, and Weary Eyes
Gaming, Piracy, and Weary Eyes
I’ve spent the last week trying desperately to come up with a well-informed and well-researched post for you all to defend my position on file sharing. I’ve talked about it before, saying to anyone who would listen that it doesn’t really hurt the industry and that there’s no way to stop it and x y z you know where this is going. Now, my position hasn’t changed but it is… Let’s just say it’s “in flux” and let the physicists get their TI-84s in a knot about it. My ideals haven’t changed at all, nor have my reasons for supporting “piracy” and calling it by a different, more appropriate name*, but I have been forced to think about it from a different angle recently.
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I appreciate this very honest assessment of your own thoughts and opinions on the subject. In turn, I will give some of my also-conflicted-and-not-totally-backed-up opinions.
Here’s the thing about piracy (or file-sharing, or what have you, but I’ll use “piracy” for convenience): I hate what big corporations do to combat it (DRM, online passes, etc.) and I also scoff when they pretend that every pirated copy equals one lost sale and try to calculate their losses that way. I also hate many of the things you mention about current game companies (collecting our information, etc.)
However, while I hate all of those things, I also kinda hate piracy. Actually, “hate” is a strong word, but I definitely have problems with it. See, there are many people who, when defending piracy, say that they only pirate games that have bad DRM practices, or that do not have demos, or they say if they like the game they’ll buy a legit copy. Those things may be true for some people, and I can sorta get behind them on a limited basis, but it’s not like all pirates are just protesting bad business practices. Mostly, I think people just want free stuff.
People pirate small indie games all the time, and that pisses me off. Talk to almost any published indie dev, and they will tell you how many copies of their latest game were purchased legally, and how many were illegally obtained, and the ratio is usually 1:10. Sure, not every one of those illegal copies represent a lost sale, but that’s a hell of a lot of people taking for free what these people worked so hard to create. Do I really care if EA loses a couple thousand sales? Eh, probably not. But if you take a couple thousand sales away from a 3-person indie team who is just barely scraping by, that could put them under.
I’m not totally unmoved by the argument that these games are “information” that should be able to be freely shared, but I also know that if I create something, especially if it takes me lots of time and lots of money and is a new and interesting creation, and tons of people just snag it for free off the internet without the slightest thought for me, I’m going to be hella pissed. A lot of people don’t consider piracy “theft” since there is no physical object being stolen, but I guarantee it will feel like theft (and a personal violation) when it’s your work being downloaded.
Now, in the interest of keeping things honest, it may be important to point out that I buy all my AAA console and handheld games used. When you seem me talking about playing Ico or Okami or Beyond Good and Evil, I bought all of those used. Not a dime of my money ever made it to the developers, and in my own small way, I was part of why these games failed commercially. So in reality, for the effect I had on these games, my conduct was just as “bad” as that of pirates; it just happened to be legal.
I understand the potential hypocrisy in denouncing pirates while buying used, and I honestly don’t know how to resolve that conflict. But in my defense, I think my moral code still holds, because I’m more than happy to put my money down when it comes to indies and projects I believe in. I’ve donated to Kickstarters and Indiegogos; I’ve upvoted and bought Steam Greenlight games, and I buy ALL my indie games new. Because as I said earlier, I’m not overly concerned if a giant corporation loses my one sale, but if a small studio makes something really cool, I want to make sure they get paid for it.
So there it is, my completely honest current thoughts on piracy. I’m sure many of you feel differently, so why not take this opportunity to put your own thoughts down? Basically, mine boil down to this: I wish not so many people did it. If you’re doing it in protest, I suppose I understand, and if you’re doing it to EA or Activision, I probably won’t get too worked up about it, but when you do it to indies, I think it makes you an asshole.
There are far more conclusive data in favour to the notion that piracy is actually beneficial, rather than a problem. At least to most companies. The most notably sane interpretation of that is that it acts as an equalizer between large comapnies, small companies and consumers.
I take a bit of an issue over how you (correctly dismiss) the copy downloaded = lost sale at the beginning of your post, and then seemingly come to accept it when it concerns indie games. A downloaded copy is not, and will never be enough proof to justify saying that it was a “lost sale”, even if we are talking about indie developers. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just be trucking over that whole part where you said lost sales matter a lot to indies.
Moving on, I find that the “I think people just want free stuff” argument most smells of “poisoning the well”, with a bit of an attribution error. You are assuming a personality predisposition of the majority of file-sharers without presenting any data to support it, and also exposing your view in a way that mainly leads others to conclude file-sharers are too greedy to actually support artists they like, and use serious concerns such as the need for privacy just as an excuse. (not only that, but it also disregards the fact that, with more and more file-sharers talking about privacy concerns, it means there are more PEOPLE talking about that, and that is always something good)
That is also underestimating the fact that with more people sharing the content, there are people how actually know the content exists in the first place. This is, undeniably, free advertising and it does bring in more sales, just ask Notch, Edmund McMillen, Paulo Coelho or Neil Gaiman (or even Dan Bull, for the matter, who reached top sales charts with his freely-shared song “Sharing is Caring”).
And I guarantee, not only is file-sharing not theft, but it also does not feel like so. It doesn’t feel like anything at all, actually. That is what happens when you try to sell individual copies of information, when both humans and computers are extremely well-adapted to copying it, albeit in different ways.
Let me try an example: you make a game, and someone experiences it. After that, they tell a friend, in details, of how was it that they experienced the game, who then decides not to buy it. Luckily, there are laws in place to protect the first gamer from the copyright system, because what they just did was remix your game and broadcast their remix (a review). That is a violation of copyright, for the remixing, another for the broadcast, and if they were paid for that review (like happens frequently in journalism), they committed a third violation for seeking profit. Put that gamer in jail, after all they are making you lose sales!
Moving on to the “used games” example… There’s just nothing wrong in it. Legally nor morally. Someone bought a copy, and later decided to sell their own property, which you bought. That’s just how it is supposed to happen. If it weren’t so, how would we even be able to have a supermarket in every other block?
The thing about piracy, is that the best way to make it go away is by making it obsolete. It invalidades the “profit a bit on each of several copies” business strategy that middle men like so much, but that’s ok because you can just go and get upfront funding, or its most popular sibling, crowdfunding. Or, if you release your content over time (like an youtube channel with music/videos), you can sell substrictions for early access to content, or even let your fans be your patrons. There are several extremely valid, well-supported by current technology, and profitable business strategies, but people are just stuck on this “sell copies” mindset that they can’t seem to see it.
Source: sardonicious
Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.
I think I can safely say that Super Meat Boy has been pirated at least 200,000 times. We are closing in on 2 million sales and assuming a 10% piracy to sales ratio does not seem unreasonable. As a forward thinking developer who exists in the present, I realize and accept that a pirated copy of a digital game does not equate to money being taken out of my pocket. Team Meat shows no loss in our year end totals due to piracy and neither should any other developer.
For the sake of argument, some of those people that did pirate Super Meat Boy could have bought the game if piracy didn’t exist but there is no actual way to calculate that lost revenue. It is impossible to know with certainty the intentions of people. With the SimCity fiasco and several companies trying to find new ways to combat piracy and stating piracy has negatively affected their bottom line I wonder if they’ve taken the time to accurately try to determine what their losses are due to piracy.
My first job outside my parents cabinet shop was at KMart. KMart, like countless other retailers, calculates loss by counting purchased inventory and matching it to sales. Loss is always built into the budget because it is inevitable. Loss could come from items breaking, being stolen, or being defective. If someone broke a light bulb, that was a calculable loss. If someone returned a blender for being defective, it wasn’t a loss to KMart, but a calculable loss to the manufacturer. If someone steals a copy of BattleToads, it’s a loss to KMart. All loss in a retail setting is calculable because items to be sold are physical objects that come from manufacturers that have to be placed on shelves by employees. You have a chain of inventory numbers, money spent and labor spent that goes from the consumer all the way to the manufacturer. A stolen, broken, or lost item is an item that you cannot sell. In the retail world your stock is worth money.
In the digital world, you don’t have a set inventory. Your game is infinitely replicable at a negligible or zero cost (the cost bandwidth off your own site or nothing if you’re on a portal like Steam, eShop, etc). Digital inventory has no value. Your company isn’t worth an infinite amount because you have infinite copies of your game. As such, calculating worth and loss based on infinite inventory is impossible. If you have infinite stock, and someone steals one unit from that stock, you still have infinite stock. If you have infinite stock and someone steals 1 trillion units from that stock , you still have infinite stock. There is no loss of stock when you have an infinite amount.
Because of this, in the digital world, there is no loss when someone steals a game because it isn’t one less copy you can sell, it is potentially one less sale but that is irrelevant. Everyone in the world with an internet connection and a form of online payment is a potential buyer for your game but that doesn’t mean everyone in the world will buy your game.
Loss due to piracy is an implied loss because it is not a calculable loss. You cannot, with any accuracy, state that because your game was pirated 300 times you lost 300 sales. You cannot prove even one lost sale because there is no evidence to state that any one person who pirated your game would have bought your game if piracy did not exist. From an accounting perspective it’s speculative and a company cannot accurately determine loss or gain based on speculative accounting. You can’t rely on revenue due to speculation, you can’t build a company off of what will “probably” happen. Watch “The Smartest Guys in the Room” and see how that worked out for Enron.
Companies try to combat piracy of their software with DRM but if loss due to pirated software is not calculable to an accurate amount does the implementation of DRM provide a return on investment? It is impossible to say yes to this statement. Look at it as numbers spent in a set budget. You spend $X on research for your new DRM method that will prevent people from stealing your game. That $X is a line item in accounting that can be quantified. Can you then say “This $X we put into research for our DRM gained us back $Y in sales”? There is no way to calculate this because it is not possible to quantify the intentions of a person. Also, there’s no way of accurately determining which customers would have stolen the game had there not been DRM.
To add to that, the reality of our current software age is the internet is more efficient at breaking things than companies are at creating them. A company will spend massive amounts of money on DRM and the internet will break it in a matter of days in most cases. When the DRM is broken is it worth the money spent to implement it? Did the week of unbroken DRM for your game gain you any sales from potential pirates due to the inability to pirate at launch? Again, there is no way of telling and as such cannot be used as an accurate justification for spending money.
So what should developers do to make sure people don’t steal games? Unfortunately there is nothing anyone can do to actively stop their game from being pirated. I do believe people are less likely to pirate your software if the software is easy to buy, easy to run, and does what is advertised. You can’t force a person to buy your software no more than you can prevent a person from stealing it. People have to WANT to buy your software, people have to WANT to support you. People need to care about your employees and your company’s well being. There is no better way to achieve that than making sure what you put out there is the best you can do and you treat your customers with respect.
Lets loop back to what’s going on with SimCity. I bought SimCity day one, I played it and experienced the same frustrations that countless others are experiencing. For total fairness, I know the always on DRM isn’t the main issue, but I can’t help but think that the server side calculations are a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” version of DRM. I won’t claim to know the inner workings of SimCity and this isn’t a Captain Hindsight article because that is irrelevant. EA and Maxis are currently facing a bigger problem than piracy: A growing number of their customers no longer trust them and this has and will cost them money.
After the frustrations with SimCity I asked Origin for a refund and received one. This was money they had and then lost a few days later. Applying our earlier conversation about calculable loss, there is a loss that is quantifiable, that will show up in accounting spreadsheets and does take away from profit. That loss is the return, and it is much more dangerous than someone stealing your game.
In the retail world, you could potentially put a return back on the shelf, you could find another customer that wants it, sell it to them and there would be virtually no loss. In the digital world, because there is no set amount of goods, you gain nothing back (one plus infinity is still infinity). It’s only a negative experience. A negative frustrating experience for a customer should be considered more damaging than a torrent of your game.
Speaking from my experience with SMB, I know for a fact we have lost a lot of trust from Mac users due to the Mac port of SMB being poor quality. I could go into the circumstances of why it is the way it is but that is irrelevant…it’s a broken product that is out in the public. We disappointed a good portion of our Mac customers with SMB and as a result several former customers have requested and received refunds. I’d take any amount of pirates over one return due to disappointment any day.
Disappointment leads to apathy which is the swan song for any developer. If people don’t care about your game, why would people ever buy it? When MewGenics comes out, I doubt many Mac users are going to be excited about our launch. When EA/Maxis create their next new game how many people are going to be excited about it and talking positively about it? I imagine that the poison of their current SimCity launch is going to seep into potential customers thoughts and be a point of speculation as to “Is it going to be another SimCity launch?”.
This is not a quantifiable loss of course, but people are more likely to buy from distributors they trust rather than ones they’ve felt slighted by before. Consumer confidence plays a very important role in how customers spend money. I think its safe to say that EA and Maxis do not have a lot of consumer confidence at this point. I think its also safe to say that the next EA/Maxis game is going to be a tough sell to people who experienced or were turned away by talk of frustration regarding SimCity.
As a result of piracy developers feel their hand is forced to implement measures to stop piracy. Often, these efforts to combat piracy only result in frustration for paying customers. I challenge a developer to show evidence that accurately shows implementation of DRM is a return on investment and that losses due to piracy can be calculated. I do not believe this is possible.
The reality is the fight against piracy equates to spending time and money combating a loss that cannot be quantified. Everyone needs to accept that piracy cannot be stopped and loss prevention is not a concept that can be applied to the digital world. Developers should focus on their paying customers and stop wasting time and money on non-paying customers. Respect your customers and they may in turn respect your efforts enough to purchase your game instead of pirating it.
Interesting point of view, albeit it is something that is being said for a long time now. DRM is a complete lack of repsect for one’s costumers, to the point of deying people ownership over something thye legally paid for. That, and the fact that not only losses due to piracy are not quantifiable, but that they can also be negative (meaning they induce more profits).
You wouldn't steal a car
But what if you just looked at it on the street, and then built one just like it with your own effort and materials? Clearly, there is no stealing involved. And yet, that is exactly the image that is painted of a pirate: someone who steals. How can copying be stealing, when the original is preserved?
That’s the copyright monopoly for you, preventing people from using their own property to build something with their own effort since the 18th century.
With people freely copying anything, there will be no more incentives for artists to create
Soon, no one else creates any form of art, and all that we can see is every non-copyright-monopoly-dependant industry using whatever resources they have at hand to try and sell their products. Several fashion companies are just using and reusing Mona Lisa’s face in their clothings, no originality in design is ever seen again.
Or, at least, until an employee of one of those companies decides to make a bold move. They run to the management and say: “I have a bright new idea for a design. Pay me a month’s worth of my work here and it is yours to use”. Surely a risky undertaking, and as the manager pushes the idea on to the CEO, the company decides to go for it. “If anything goes wrong, we fire that person and stick to business as usual. We can afford that much risk”.
What happens next is that the new design is a success: surely, in an age where all that was seen are pure copies, people flocked like birds when the new product arrived. Other companies could now copy the new design as much as they liked, for the consumers knew where the new idea had originated from. And with that, the company decided to keep this positive feedback loop running, and commissioned that one employee again for another new design.
Soon all the other companies figured out what this new business model was, and started asking for design submissions from their employees, and the profit followed. Consumers could not believe how quickly things had changed, how quickly innovation had came.
That happens because people are naturally creative. We make and invent new things not (only) for profit, but just because we can or we want them to exist.
Or do you really think that, should copyright disappear and “rampant piracy” reign, people will just sit on their own homes, playing Skyrim and Angry Birds forever?
P.S.: This is just a draft of a short story being used to make a point. Don’t expect any literary excellency here.
Instead of making anti piracy advertisements, they should make advertisements on the dangers of not seeding your torrents after downloading them.
Piracy (copying) is not stealing. Get it right, kids.
Piracy is not the same as theft, but it’s still pretty dickish.
Not dickish, really. Is it dickish to take a picture I found on, say, Flickr of a beautiful waterfall and use it as my desktop wallpaper? I mean, I like staring at it. What if I showed said picture to my friends? What if said friends thought it was a nice picture and decided to comission the photographer for some more nature shots?
It only sounds dickish if you believe you are losing something when someone pirates your art, but in the end you aren’t. You aren’t even paying for the electicity it took to transmit the data (and believe me, it wasn’t much) so why act like a victim? If someone pirates from you, you literally feel nothing whatsoever of it. No losses, no pain. You don’t even know someone pirated from you.
No offense, but I seriously cannot sympathize with someone claiming to have lost anything due to piracy. At a worst case, it is one giant advertising campaign for your work, which you’ll never have to pay for. How bad is that?
It’s dickish in that it’s not helpful. Sure, an act of piracy is rarely a lost sale, because people who pirate tend to find little value in things.
But when you choose to pirate rather than buy, your saying “I really want to benefit from the hard work you’ve put into your ____, but I don’t give a shit if you can pay your rent.” When you pay for something you like you allow the creator to continue creating, sometimes with a bigger budget so they can create better things!
I get why people pirate -I did so a lot when I was in high school, and I’d be lying if I said I never do anymore. But that doesn’t mean it’s a justified or good thing.
Piracy is dickish because you’re befitting without giving anything back. It’s an act of greed, even if it isn’t an act of theft.
I don’t think fighting against piracy is particularly helpful either. DRM and the like end up being nothing but harmful. Piracy can’t be stopped, it’s become a fact of life when you’re creating something. DRM won’t stop you. Complaining and blaming poor sales on it won’t do you much good either. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay.
Also, the photo analogy falls flat since the photo was posted on Flickr by the photographer for free for everyone to enjoy. That’s not piracy, that’s a free picture. Piracy is when the work was made with the intention of selling copies. (Usually so that the creator can do things like pay rent, eat food, and make more things for you to enjoy.)
Yes, I did realize my picture analogy was flawed the moment I posted it, but alas, I preferred to just leave it there so I remember to double-check what I write at 3 A.M. before posting. Sorry for (unintentionally) trying to mislead you, guys.
Also, you’re assuming two things: First, that everyone who pirates actually has a means of acquiring the original work. That is wrong both because not everyone has money to actually invest in every single thing they want to appreciate (not “consume”. The work of art you stare at does not disappear after you finished staring at it, neither does the software you copy when pirating), and that lots of times stuff aren’t available where they live through “legal” means (quote marks because fair use, which includes personal use, which most of the times characterizes piracy, IS LEGAL). Second, you’re assuming that the only way one can help a developer is through buying the work. That is false, and to back that up I bring up again my “advertising” argument. Maybe you did not ask for your fans to advertise for you, but they will do that, they will let their friends know of your nice game, and that WILL, eventually, turn into revenue for you, at the expense of your fans’ time.
My issue here is with piracy being taken as an immoral act, when it actually only consists of admiring someone’s work. The monetization of knowledge and information is entangling it with the notion of property, and that is causing a lot of damage to our capacity to admire, be inspired by and sharing art and culture. Honestly, people complaining of piracy reminds me a lot of people saying that libraries would make writers to disappear from the face of the earth (Falkvinge’s site seems to be out for now. Sorry for being unable to provide a proper working link for this reference. Site is back on).
(via gamedesignnovice)
Source: dwukich
Piracy (copying) is not stealing. Get it right, kids.
Piracy is not the same as theft, but it’s still pretty dickish.
Not dickish, really. Is it dickish to take a picture I found on, say, Flickr of a beautiful waterfall and use it as my desktop wallpaper? I mean, I like staring at it. What if I showed said picture to my friends? What if said friends thought it was a nice picture and decided to comission the photographer for some more nature shots?
It only sounds dickish if you believe you are losing something when someone pirates your art, but in the end you aren’t. You aren’t even paying for the electicity it took to transmit the data (and believe me, it wasn’t much) so why act like a victim? If someone pirates from you, you literally feel nothing whatsoever of it. No losses, no pain. You don’t even know someone pirated from you.
No offense, but I seriously cannot sympathize with someone claiming to have lost anything due to piracy. At a worst case, it is one giant advertising campaign for your work, which you’ll never have to pay for. How bad is that?
(via gamedesignnovice)
Source: dwukich
Can fold a crane with only one hand.
