Genuine call for emails from pirates

302 thoughts on Genuine call for emails from pirates

1. This is brilliant. I mean that. I really looking forward to the results, I hope you get some great insight. You should create a survey!

2. I cannot wait to hear what conclusions this find.

   Hat’s off to you good sir.

3. Ease of use (versus PC games with copy protection)
   Laziness (to go to the store)
   Cost (D’uh)
   Impatience (digital copies tend to be out before the physical ones!)
   OCD (some of us just like to collect them all, and don’t even play them. But that may be just cause our hacked DS/Wii has no good games)

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5. Excellent Idea, Cliff! You rock! ^_^

   @Tahiri: Some of your suggestion don’t apply

   Ease of use – i don’t think downloading something illegally is easier then a legal purchase. Could you explain?

   Laziness & Impatience – Cliff’s games are distributed digitally so that doesn’t count.

   OCD – interesting. If somebody downloads a game illegaly but only to “collect” it and never plays. Is he still a pirate? Hm….

6. Isn’t is just so ridiculously obvious? When you pirate something, it’s because you don’t want to pay for it!

7. aboutthescene.com

   read this for your “why”

8. I really have to chime in with the OCD thing… I’m completely obsessed with collecting everything companies like New World Computing, Sierra On-Line and Lucasarts have made, even though I never have time to actually play the games.

   I do buy games whenever I find something nice – I have a lot of Sierra collections, and most Might & Magic + Heroes of Might & Magic games for example – but the only realistic way for me to collect complete sets is to do it with pirated versions. I may have a slight OCD-ish behaviour, but I simply won’t pay for old games that I realistically know that I won’t play through.

9. Oh, and I just mentioned my own experience as an example – but I can easily see how the same could be true for newer games as well. “Gotta collect all FPS games from 2008!” “Gotta collect all casual games released on Reflexive!” “Gotta collect all Wii RPGs!”

   …Okay, the last one isn’t all that hard. :)

10. I’ve stumbled upon a lot of your comments on Slashdot and you seem an interesting person from the comments so when I saw your topic on Slashdot’s Firehose, I thought I’d give it a try.

    I never actually pirated one of your games, I actually heard about your company and the games from your signature on Slashdot (and from the list I see they’re not really my type of games)

    In my country (Romania), I guess the first reason of game piracy would be price, and the second would be availability.

    The average monthly wage here in Romania is about 250$ and most gamers are young, so rely on parents to provide them with allowance.

    Most companies don’t consider discounts or lower prices to match the buying power of the customers here (for example Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare costs here about 95$, with the 19% taxes) and kids just don’t have the money to buy such games, and parents would rather buy food, clothes and other more important things with the money.

    Even if you would want to buy some games, in some cases you can’t or you don’t benefit from 100% of the game’s features. For example, a major game seller in Romania decided to stop selling Xbox360 games here because games couldn’t be validated or there was no support for the games in Romania and if there were problems with the DVDs you would have to send them in US or something like that (Microsoft considers the market here too small to bother and while they import consoles and games, the console repairs take months and in some cases don’t even bother to send a replacement DVD for the bought game)

    Fortunately for me, I am lucky to have a better income, working as a freelancer, around 1300$ a month. I could afford to buy a 50$ game once a month but even with this income, it’s hard for me to actually buy games.

    With that 50$ I could also buy 2 GB of memory or a quad processor, which would increase my productivity and allow me to make more money and live better.

    If a game would be about 10-15$ and would come in a nice shiny box, I would probably buy the game, if I like it.

    There are actually some games, that sell for around 10-15$, and I was almost convinced to buy one, Heroes of Might And Magic 2 or 3, I don’t remember now which one. What did it stop me? It was simply a CD in a plain DVD case, with a low quality cover that you would think it was printed in a newspaper printing company, with nothing else.
    Yes, it is value, but really, when you make thousands of CDs, do you really have to save a few cents on a game cover? Would it have been hard to insert a 4-5 pages of manual?

    If I would have bought the game, it would still have had protection, and I would still have to download patches and I probably would have to download a No-CD crack, to prevent the DVD from scratching. The actual game on the CD is exactly the same as the one I get from Bittorrent and that already has the main executable without protection, ready to play.

    If that value game would offer something more than just the CD, I would have bought it.

    I would also buy right now a game like Half-Life 2 Episode 3 or something like this for 10-15$. I don’t see why I should pay 40-50$ for the right to download, when I know that 33TB of bandwidth (100 mbps unmetered) is available to me for less than 500$ a month. With Valve having hundreds of computers, it surely costs them cents to deliver a 1-2 GB file to a person so all those 10-15$ are profit. They don’t have to pay for DVD case, for actual DVD pressing, for transport, for distribution, for the profit of the shop who sells the game and so on.

    Maybe I’m also a bit older now, at 25 years, and my opinions are influenced by this. I’m not a hardcore gamer anymore, like i was when Half-Life appeared (played more than 12 hours a day games). Now I mostly play games in brakes, when I wait for a message from a client, or an hour or so before I sleep.

    Hope it helps.

11. Oh and one more thing I forgot.

    Considering a lot of the people are young, less than 18 years old, how would they pay for the game?

    If there is a person actually thinking of buying the game, they don’t have a credit card, so they can’t pay you. They don’t have Paypal, again, because they’re not old enough. Parents would not buy for a kid a game, but the kid may put aside 3-4 weeks of allowance to buy a game, without the parents knowing (because the parents wouldn’t approve).

    Going back to the previous example, Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, which is available in a store for 95$, maybe a kid cant afford to buy at that price, but maybe it could go to Amazon and buy one for as low as 23.99$ (used & new, 45$ new).

    Valve is making a step in the right direction here, for most multiplayer games you can buy only the license key here for about 10$ and you download the game from Steam. The kid can actually pay the postman when the envelope arrives, so they pay for the key, especially since it’s cheap. Same for World Of Warcraft subscription, they buy cards with 45 or 90 days of gaming or something like that.

    If it’s as easy as possible for a kid, and you provide incentives (think about Bioshock for example, and the toy the box came with), people will prefer to buy the game instead of pirating it (though they’ll probably download the pirated version anyway and start playing the game while they wait 2-3 days for the package to arrive). Kids are impatient.

12. Maybe people are trying to solve the wrong problem when trying to stop piracy. Maybe its not why people download but more why people upload things for others to download. People downloading things for free is far more understandable than why someone would upload something.

13. Part of the problem with people pirating your games is simply a lack of widespread public knowledge and enthusiasm about the game. I know bad marketing sounds like a strange reason to have people steal from you, but I’m serious. To put it another way, I will very often pirate these types of games if they’re things that none of my friends have heard of. I’m less likely to spend money on something if I don’t know whether it’s any good.

14. What possible use is there in doing this Cliff?

    Unless you’re willing to contemplate fundamentally changing the way your games work (i.e. not retail) then I don’t see what it matters whether people pirate 5% or 500%. It won’t affect sales of your next game either way.

    http://friendfeed.com/rooms/theplayroom

15. > I’m less likely to spend money on something if I don’t know whether it’s any good.

    Then why not try the demo? That’s what it’s for. :-)

    Honest question, not rhetorical. Do you not play the demos of “these types of games” because you didn’t realise they existed? Do you perhaps not want to run the risk of losing your progress if/when you transition to the full game? Is it just easier to download the full game rather than get the demo and contemplate having to buy it later? Is it because you don’t like getting nagged to buy it? Would your habits change if the demo was a Flash game, sitting right there in the browser (zero effort required to install)? Is there some reason I haven’t thought of (likely)?

16. The reason why I download games from suspect (read small and unkown) companies is that theres either not a Demo or the Demo was to short. We also have the factor of money. You get Nothing out of buying the game you wouldnt get from pirating… If the game is good I usually buy it (Examples of this for me is Baldurs Gate, Halflife, Unreal Tournament, Unreal, The Sims 2(Not all Xpacs ofc)). Piracy is free PR in several ways. But unless we get a good look at the software and can get an aproximation of how “good” it is theres no way any sane person would blow away 500SEK on a game…

    I’ve been burned by bad quality one to many times, that’s why I pirate…

    And the reason why it cant work with flash? Gesh, have you looked at the capabilities with flash compared to C++ or other languages? Not to mention the amount of data to send…

    Demo’s? They are spoiling the plot usually, they are way to short and they are usually just almost as big as the full software not to mention they usually lock out several features.

    Well thats my 10 cents

17. Oh, and pirating from big companies? Lets take a few examples:
    EA? Lousy support, DRM
    Bioware? Sometimes makes moronic decisions like keeping a software on a console, teamed up with EA
    Microsoft, To test the games out as they have such a wide variety of quality
    Square, Already had the games for the PX; not paying twice for a game

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19. I remember when Baldur’s Gate came out. I bought it cheap for 30$ back then. Why do I remember? That was the first and last game I could afford at full price.

    My last christmas present was Fahrenheit (budget version), but it didn’t work with my keyboard. 13$ down the drain!

    And the Lionhead games I waited for so much turned out to be lame. All of them. Thank God I didn’t pay 60$ for them!

    I never pirated your games, but I can’t afford them either…

20. One thing not mentioned here : the enviroment factor. Gaming is part of a huge “entertainment” network comprised of cinema, tv,music and gaming. All these supposedly provide an escape from the tiresome commercial world out there ..and are all accessed mostly in the little precious freetime that the consumer has.

    So you go to the cinema and get bombarded by relentless advertising even though you have paid a lot for the ticket, you watch tv and find yourself watching more adverts than actual programmes , you pay a fortune for music cds since record companies get together and fix the prices…
    and the gaming industry churn out increasingly buggy games, release games that are not worthy of release etc etc i could go on but i wont..

    this creates a real “scratch my back and i will scratch yours”, a fuck you, who cares enviroment.. and you, cliff, unfortunately, are an innocent victim of this commercial war.

    i dont agree with pirating at all, i work in this industry too, but i understand vaguely the urge to hurt the other side.. if you get hit, you strike back.

21. Yeah I pirate left and right. its so easy to download! 90% of the games I play for 1-2 hrs and throw away (not interested). Im just curious to try many games. Some games are interesting enough to play them thru or play MP for some time – I buy those( if they get released in my country on time!)
    Demos are fine, if they offer atleast about 1hr of real gameplay. But not many games have those. I cant justify throwing away 50eu just to find that its another boring shallow hype like halo3, asscreed, bioshit etc etc. But I gladly pay for stuff like gta, coh, cod4 – those games provide many hrs of fun sp and mp

22. I used to pirate quite a few games. Usually this was a matter of convenience and cost – however I’d always buy a game I knew I’d care about, like multiplayer games that I’d end up playing a lot. Actually now I think about it, most games that I pirated were single player games – maybe due to there being less hours of gameplay, or perhaps that they’ve got better anti-piracy protection.

    Nowadays I do buy most of my games from Valve’s (valve being a developer I’ve never pirated a game from) Steam. Steam totally eliminates the entire “convenience” aspect – it’s easier to go on there with your credit card, buy the game, and download it than hunt out a torrent and run the keygen in a VM for security etc.. So recently all my game purchases have been legal and via Steam. It does help that I have more cash now (though I am still a student). I’ve also pre-ordered “World of Goo” from their site online, and would consider using Direct2Drive or whatever they’re called.

    I think this is an effect seeping in from other online purchases such as hardware and books, showing that it’s nice and easy to buy things online – so why not computer games, especially when they come so much faster?

    Demos also feature significantly in purchasing decisions. I know developers often get them out late, but really, I find it hard to justify piracy when there are numerous decent reviews and a demo available. I’ve just played the World In Conflict demo and certainly intend to purchase it.

    In summary, I think developers (especially indie, though smaller games are harder to find to pirate) and publishers must offer easy online buying and representative demos, and in return the consumers that can buy will buy. The rest of the pirates I suspect are a lost cause.

23. Maybe it’s also ease of use with regards to the software. Nearly anything a person could want can be downloaded from a torrent site using a single application. That’s so easy!

    To gain access to all that stuff on the torrent site legally you’d have to have loads of applications. You’d need iTunes for music, the countless download managers that casual portals make you download to play their demos/games, EA have their own download manager. I don’t know about anyone else but I don’t want all that crap on my computer. I just want to download the thing I wanted to download in the first place; preferably with one click.

    I think the user reaches a point where they rely on their torrent app, or whatever, for everything. They know if they need something then they can get it from their trusty torrent site, quick and easy. It’s not due to malicious intent, or lack of money, it’s just that muscle memory kind of thing that makes them go their first. It’s a subconscious act.

    So, the solution to piracy is a global download manager application that allows you to search for anything and everything on the internet and download it with one click of the mouse. If you want to download something that costs money then it automatically comes up with a payment confirmation screen for you to accept the charge (the users card details are already stored in the application). Easy easy easy!!! It probably has it’s flaws but shit it’s as good a solution as any. And I came up with it first! :P Booya!!

24. Convenience: Going to a store to buy a game is a pain.

    Cost: Free is cheaper than paying for something.

    But why doesn’t everyone steal everything?

    Human disconnect: Game developers are letters on a screen to the majority of people who pirate games. There is no guilt, no remorse. We’re not hurting anyone because they aren’t actually putting in any extra effort to produce that additional game. It’s a false belief, but it’s an easy one to hold on to. There are no gatekeepers to prevent stealing downloadable games- no 17 year old clerk giving you shifty eyes or a 55 year old mum staring you down.

    Resentment: PC gaming companies have been at war with it’s market for a long time. Sky rocketing prices, insane DRM programs, games that destroy hardware, zero support, and a quick discontinuation of promised services have become standard practice. You may be a swell guy, and may produce the best games ever and provide support, downloads, and candy for a decade after your games have been released- but people have been burnt too often and will not trust a company unless they’ve built that trust.

    Unknowable enjoyment: We’d all like to be able to ‘try before we buy’ with almost every purchase. Most products this isn’t possible, some companies give away free samples in supermarkets. With games sampling has become the norm. The thing people often say is ‘why don’t you just download the demo?’- blame that partially on game developers who often release demos that are out and out lies where the final game has little to do with the demo release. Of course someone downloading a game could intend to buy the game if they enjoy it- but once you’ve already played through a significant proportion of a game it becomes less likely that you’ll actually buy it unless the game is truly impressive.

    CDs: I’ve been forced to pirate games that I’ve bought because the CD no longer installs. I’ve been forced to download cracks because putting the CD in the drive every time (or tracking it down) is just plain irritating. Warez versions of games are easier to install and easier apply noCD cracks to (often bundled with the release).

    But this doesn’t really apply to games that are online purchase. But everything above applies to the main point.

    Habit: Once you start pirating games there’s no real incentive to stop. There is no guilt, no real public ridicule, an infinite amount of excuses as to why it doesn’t really matter, an endless supply of stories about gaming companies screwing the consumer, and an almost celebrated regard for doing it from anyone below the age of 30. Unless you have a real respect for a company you’re likely going to want to try before you buy, and then you’ll likely not make the purchase because the minimum standard for purchase becomes ‘exceptional’.

25. It’s fascinating/frightening to see how many of these comments that start with “I haven’t pirated your games but…” and then ramble on about pirating in general when the entire purpose of this poll is to find out why you pirated cliffski’s games.

    /shakes head in disbelief

26. I’m sending you an email

    but I can assure you, I haven’t pirated any positech games (didn’t buy one either, but I saw this blog on slashdot)

27. The conclusion maybe is that cliffski’s games aren’t much pirated.
    That answers his question.
    I didn’t know his games actually.
    And they just look like themed life simulation games, so i won’t buy them, nor pirate them. I’m just not interested. (although i might be wrong about what it is).
    In the end, i might answer why i didn’t pirated his games. :) *lol*
    I think the most pirated games, are the most sold ones. The ones with a lot of hype around them. Since your games doesn’t to be very well known, they are probably not much pirated.

28. Your games are not the type of games I play, so I haven’t played them.

    But, here are my 5 cents:

    The reasons why people download their games are:

    1. They aren’t available were they live.
    No matter what publisher you choose, they won’t get your games to every city in every country.
    2. Unreasonable retail prices.
    In some countries, legal games are prohibitely expensive, even if they were available. Here, MS games 5 years old still retail for as much $ as when they were new. And in general, games are far more expensive than the same games in the US or the UK.
    3. Most people in the world can’t pay for them, no matter how low the price for the legal game is.
    95% of the world population can’t pay for the legal games. Accept it, most people are poor! They barely can pay their internet access, and even if it’s a big part of their paycheck they still do, because they can actually save money by downloading stuff for free they could otherwise not get. So see them, their downloads, as charity done on your behalf.

    Cheers!

29. Why not release a full downloadable version of the game. After 1 hour of gameplay the user must either uninstall the game or enter his credit card info ( thus buying the game ) to continue playing.

30. Martin:

    > why you pirated cliffski’s games

    Nobody pirates cliffskis games ;-)?

    Btw, after reading the comments I am intrigued enough to actually spend some time and find out what kind of games Cliff produces…..

    So as a PR stunt this has worked beautifully…

31. You guys have it all wrong. Price? It’s a trophy thing. If I create a hack for a game and make it run better/longer/for less or no money, it allows to impress the circle. If you trade said game with your peers, you’re considered an interesting source. Social networking and all that. All kids collect. Used to be stamps, used to be games, used to be p2p l/ps, bet it’s zombies soon. It’s a power trip for those “in”.

    If you want a more pedagogical answer, the warez and demoscene worlds were once interlinked, and well known breeding places of todays “game design talent”. You don’t learn this stuff at any school, not even at the recent hot ‘games academy’ fad.

    So, what I’m saying is.. if you want to build a kingdom, you have to dispense a bit of power to your entourage..

32. I haven’t pirated your games… but it’s something that’s been considered.

    I’ve been dissapointed with democracy and with Democracy 2. The games just don’t have the depth that I want to see… and the demos were constructed such that what I saw as flaws didn’t become apparent.

    Now? While Kudos and Rock Legend look interesting, I’ll be getting a full copy elsewhere before I decide to buy or not.

    When I was in uni and broke, I pirated because I couldn’t afford to sustain my habit. Now… I hardly ever pirate anymore, and it’s only when I find a game interesting, have been dissapointed by the creator previously and want to truly try the game out.

    As for me… if the demo was a full version that deactivated itself after 1-3 days or so, I wouldn’t consider pirating your games. I’d try it out in-full, then when it deactivated itself I’d make the decision to buy or not.

    And something that isn’t applicable to your situation now (but might be in the future) is that I will refuse to purchase games that have overly intrusive DRM. Some examples are Bioshock, Mass Effect for the PC, and Spore.

33. The problem I see is game developers have the same myopic understanding of their products as the MPAA and RIAA have..

    In the material world, matter can’t be created or destroyed. So in order to sell a widget, you have to make a widget first, and when you DO sell a widget, you only get to keep a fraction of the money you make, since the majority of the price has to go into MAKING ANOTHER WIDGET.

    In the digital world, information CAN be created and destroyed. it is very easy to create, and very difficult to destroy once created. So in order to sell a digital widget one merely needs to make a copy and trade material money for it. however, the party RECEIVING the money gets to keep 100% of that money since generating a new digital widget takes no industrial effort at all to make (or allow to be made) more copies.

    As the internet spreads around the globe and everybody has faster and faster access to information, there’s no scarcity. ONCE a program has been WRITTEN, it can be infinitely replicated by anyone who has a copy. ..So, crying foul because people are pirating or copying your digital products literally makes no sense. No one gets rich by digging one ditch. If you don’t want your information copied, don’t put it out there for people to access.

    I’m not saying I have the solution for “piracy”, nor am I attempting to explain the motivations behind “pirates”. All I’m trying to illustrate is the physics of what the situation is for software developers, and music and movie producers, and all the other people trying to “capitalize” on the information age.

    everybody’s motivations in this matter are merely based on physics, not greed or morals.. enjoy the spread of computers, technology, and bandwidth! ^_^

    -m

34. People started pirating because games mostly sucked, required $40 of your hard earned money (back in the 80’s this was a ton of loot for most of us) and there was a NO RETURN policy at gaming stores.

    As with music, and movies, each purchase was a $40 gamble since returns were not accepted.

    After being burned a few times, some consumers said “screw it” and turned to piracy rather than be ripped off time and time again.

35. I pirate games because I like to try before I buy. With game prices at way too high of a plausible price, and very few demos, there’s no other option.

    And sometimes getting the cracked version of the game is easier than dealing with overzealous copy protection junk and having the ability to play on a computer without online capabilities (Steam games, I’m looking at you). If developers went the way of Stardock’s policy, I would be much happier and happy to ditch the “try before I buy” scheme if prices were lower and just buy the game to support them.

36. I don’t play video games much but I usually don’t bother buying them and even stopped playing for the following reasons :
    – I’m not sure they will run on my system (I’m a Linux user and often must use Wine which I see as a waste of my time),
    – I’m not sure they are worth their price,
    – Most of them won’t work in the not so distant future unless I use some sort of emulator (another waste of my time).

    The first two can be seen as a need for test before buying. Unfortunately when I was happy with the result (a workable *and* fun game) I had no further incentive to pay for the game itself (and even didn’t want to reward the developers/editors with my money when they put so many obstacles for me to overcome).
    The last one is more a personal thing : I don’t like to waste things, and have little interest in things more or less designed to become useless in the future.

    Note : the last game I played was purchased : Doom 3 (ID software support for Linux is good and they even open-source their engines when they lose their commercial value). I know I will be able to reinstall Doom 3 in 10 years on whatever will be the standard PC and it will just work just like the original Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake just work on my current PC and even my PDA and I even enjoyed playing with them a little again.

37. I usually try to buy the games I really enjoy, but the main reason I would pirate a game is:

    1) just want to try a game but no demo exists
    2) the game is not for sale anymore (old games).
    3) i’m at a lan party and people want to play a game I dont have, so they send me a pirated copy so we can all play.

    I’d say that 90% of the games I have pirated are games I play for less than an hour.

    mainly #1 and #2 though.

38. i pirate games all the time for the following reasons:
    1) i can get them a few weeks before they’re on shelves
    2) i get to try the parts of the game i’m interested in, not limited like demos. if i like a demo and i want to continue playing i almost always have to uninstall, buy it, install it, reconfigure all my settings and start again. if i like a game i’ve pirated i just keep playing it.
    3) i can download a pirate copy to a folder and install it from the iso without messing about with disks.

    copy protected games that require a disk i will always crack with a nocd. protected games that require the disk in the drive for multiplayer (most FPS games) and which don’t have a nocd i just won’t play, the tiny impulse that i get to start a game is totally masked by the pain of finding a safe home for the disk already in my drive, finding the game disk, swapping them over etc etc etc. so i just don’t play them. my pc has no floppy drive and my next likely won’t have an internal optical drive either.

    i work from home as a programmer and all of my development tools are OSS or legit, though i do pirate software for testing it. the difference between me buying this software and not buying most games is that all my paid for software has been downloaded and installed, no disks. i can’t think of a single application that can’t be paid for and downloaded whereas with games this is still rare and even when it’s doable it’s through 3rd parties.

    games i’ve paid for recently:
    orange box (steam has none of the issues i’ve listed above and portal is amazing)
    armadillo run (it’s great and cheap)
    cod4 (i downloaded an iso, played the single player and wanted to try multiplayer so i bought a cd key from direct2drive. the cd key allowed me to continue with exactly the same installation and no hassle. has shootthroughwalls shit which i haven’t seen before, makes a big difference for multiplayer)
    unreal tournament 2007 (i played 2004 a lot but haven’t played this at all)

    if you could download a demo, play it to the end and then just get a slick menu “enter cc/paypal/googlecheckout details for the next 25% of the game for £5” all of my issues with games would be solved. paying up-front for an entire game when there are so many shit ones just isn’t going to happen and i don’t have time to scour reviews for details.

39. Three reasons for me to pirate a game. I don’t know if any of these conditions concerns you since i haven’t tried any of your games.

    1) I wouldn’t buy anything with drm on it.

    2) I wouldn’t buy anything that doesn’t have a client for my os. linux and/or bsd

    3) Almost all of the games don’t deserve the 50$. I’d rather spend it on recreational drugs :p Exceptions: Max Payne, Grand Theft Auto, Quake 3 Arena and maybe 3-4 other games.

    Console gaming is more profitable cause it involves stupid consumers. I remember my self being 10 years old and buying crappy games for my psx.
    Guess what though, because of these stupid games i was led to not buying games anymore.

    I would buy a game, whose gameplay is nice, that met only the first two conditions. That would make my 50$ or even 100$ well spent.

40. @Martin:
    Even if people haven’t pirated Cliffs games, I’m pretty sure if they gave a response as to why people pirate in the first place, it will give him some more information.

    I personally have done it because of being lazy. It’s so convenient to download a game from one medium and to play it. For example, games on Steam I tend to buy because it’s so easy to obtain them. It takes about as much effort to buy games off steam as it does to pirate them. Not to mention there are a lot of deals on steam.

    Another reason for pirating is because the games replay value. If I know I’ll only play the game one time through, what’s the point in buying it? I spent $50 on a game I’ll only play through once, that took a few hours to beat. If the game has multiplayer then I buy it.

41. People pirate (download) software when they think that the pain that they get (the potential for law enforcement or a private party to take them to court, the time and effort to find, download and apply a crack) is less than the pain that they will get by paying for a product (all of the negatives involved in licensing software, cost).

42. number one reason not to buy a game: DRM
    number two reason: not worth the price

    number one reason i buy a game: i only buy my very favorite games
    number two reason to buy a game: i know my favorite developer needs food

    NUMBER ONE OBVIOUS THING THAT ARTISTS SHOULD INCLUDE ON THEIR WEBSITES:
    a donation, paypal pretty much sucks but a lot of people use it, also credit card donations would be nice. if i pirate your game due to ease and i really like it i want to donate, not “buy” it since most of that money wont go to those who deserve it.

43. I don’t pirate your games. Mainly because I’m not interested in them. If you made a game I were interested in I’d pirate it rather than download the demo because very often demo’s have the best bit of the game in them, they rarely include the lame stuff.

    I think the main thing you need to worry about is making sure it’s easy to pay for your games. I apply the same rules to all games, if I like it I buy it. Obviously AAA titles can be bought in shops so they’re easy, the main prob with indies is actually paying for the games in a convenient way. If there’s a choice between a PC download and Xbox Live Arcade I’ll often just buy it on Arcade (as long as there isn’t a strong online multiplayer or community modding scene) because it’s so easy.

    I think I’ve seen at least one of your games on Steam, which is a good start. It’s a bit of a pain buying from Steam in the UK though, what with having to pay VAT and thinking about currency conversions etc. I do use Steam though!

    So yea, don’t worry about pirates. As long as it’s easy to pay, the people who like your games and can afford it will pay.

44. I don’t pirate a lot of games, but when I do, it’s usually because I’ve heard either bad things about the copy protection they use or I’m not completely interested in the game and only want to try it out.

45. The quality/price ratio for indie games is normally very low compared to that of a commercial game. You pay $60 for MGS4, which hundreds of developers have spent years in the making delivering beautiful graphics and stunning gameplay.. or you pay $15 for an indie game, which has 1/10000 of the development efforts in comparison, and thus $15, is quite an expensive buy.

46. I live in Europe. Back when I was younger, I bought games several times. Almost every one of the games I bought (PC or Mac) failed to install or to work because of antipiracy or region issues. The latest one was a Douglas Adams game for Mac, about 4 or 5 years ago . I was so happy when I saw it in a shop in a European country, it never worked. I still remember Doom II which I bought looked at my Windows system and told me I was in the wrong geographic region and I should buy another “legal” copy.

    I never had these issues for the games I pirated. I think I have pirated fewer games than I bought, I’m not a gamer, but as I say buying never worked.

    In the end what I did was I bought consoles because games for consoles ALWAYS work when you have paid for them. The consoles were well worth the price for what they saved me in non-working games.

47. I remember playing a downloaded copy of Democracy a while ago. Why did I not buy it?

    The short and simple answer: It didn’t entertain me enough to seriously consider spending money on it. After a few hours I uninstalled and deleted it. Not my kinda game.

    The long and not quite so simple answer consists of two parts:
    – For at least the past five or six years I have not bought any single video game, film or music record without having sampled the full version beforehand. The reason is quite simple: I have been screwed over too many times. Buggy games with crappy copy protection. Half-assed films that consist of the trailer plus 90 minutes of filler. Music albums that are technically crippled, the “booklet” consisting of three pages in terrible qualilty and not even containing the bloody lyrics, mixed so badly they sound like MP3s at 96kbps. So instead of merely praying for usable and valuable content I try it out and see whether I get what I am supposed to pay for. If I’m satisfied, I make a purchase. But only then.
    – I only have a certain amount of cash that I can spend on entertainment. This is divided between social activities, books, music albums and concerts, films on DVD and visits to the cinema, games, visits to the theatre, and gadgets. I could never afford all the stuff on my harddisk. In this way I don’t see my downloading as causing “damage” or even lost sales.

    What this means specifically for you:
    – I’d always download your games before purchasing them, no matter what you do. I don’t buy a pig in a poke.
    – Whether I purchase your game after downloading it depends on a) how much I like it compared to the other stuff I currently look at and b) the amount of money I can afford to spend on games.

    To raise the chances for a purchase:
    – Charge a reasonable price. The $29 you want for Democracy 2 (boxed) basically seem reasonable to me, but I don’t know what the package contains. If it’s really just the download version burnt to disk with nothing else in it, the price difference would feel like a rip-off. If a sizable printed manual is included, I’d be ok with it, I guess.
    – Deliver a technically sound product. No show-stopping bugs, decent soundtrack and voice-acting, no stupid copy protection measures (online activation, disk-in-drive checks etc.), sound and accessible user interface.
    – Deliver a package that gives me more than what I could get from ThePirateBay, ie. give me a stable case with a nice-looking cover, create a nice, useful booklet, maybe add a card with keyboard shortcuts or a map of the area the game plays in (whichever is applicable).
    – Show commitment. If you already have plans for add-ons, say so. If you want to add content with later patches, let me know. All games, no matter how original and fun, get boring over time, so the perspective of getting fresh stuff to fiddle around with adds value to the game.
    – Often overlooked, but quite vital in my eyes: Allow and foster player-made modifications! They might add more value to your games than you could ever imagine. Half-Life comes to mind; it’s a cash-cow even today.

    All this does not guarantee a sale. But it’d make it much more likely.

48. I play “pirated” games much I like would a demo. I prefer that to a demo as demos are hobbled. If I like the games, I’ll buy it. If not, then I just uninstall it. Ususally I give each game a few hours before I decide. Sadly, there are not too many games that I’ve liked well enough to buy. . . maybe 12 or so in the last ten years. Those few I totally play the hell out of! :)

49. This is as simple as removing your belief that the majority of the world makes it a priority and/or has the extra income to buy every game made……anyway if we did, as with all such products that are actually purchased and eventually made to be generic, the quality goes in the toilet.

    TO further this point, In 2006, the median annual household income in the US was around 48 G….thats a family of 4. 12 G each….pretty meager means huh? how many games do you think you’d be getting this year in that family? I’m fairly certain these numbers are even more glum in the UK.

    I can appreciate that “creative” expression is something that should be compensated, however it seems to be that your commodity doesn’t even fit your priority list….. “Despite being genuinely interested to hear from you, I do NOT think it’s acceptable, and for obvious reasons (not least rising fuel and food bills in the UK) I want people to BUY the games, not pirate them.”

    Keeping up with the Jones has stretched most to the limit…Did I need a new iphone…Sweet Ps3! OMG the Wii is fun….HDTV! sure I’ll take two…see a movie?? Macbook! sure!….if you get my drift….EXCESS EVERYWHERE.

    I pay for the good games…everything else is taken, whored for the few hrs of entertainment it might generate and tossed aside as it should be.

    My advice, try making a game that changes the industry….I’ve heard there’s money in that…..obviously goal #1 here. Rock Legend…are you serious…this is not creativity…same general idea as every other music oriented game that has come out.

50. I can’t say I’ve ever bought any of your games, but I haven’t pirated any of them either; I simply hadn’t heard about any of them until I saw this story go live on Slashdot.

    I’ve pirated my fair share of games, but they have always been because of one glaring reason: DRM. It’s why I buy CDs instead of music, and its why I couldn’t play my legally purchased copy of BioShock. It was why I couldn’t play either one of the Knights of The Old Republic series, and it was why I couldn’t play Battlefield 2 or Battlefield 2142. It was why I couldn’t play Rainbow Six: Vegas. These are all games that I had legally bought, but they all required the original CD as well as installing malware on my system designed for the sole purpose of limiting what I could do with my legally purchased games. So I pirated them. It wasn’t about the money; it was about the fact that I had purchased something that didn’t function, and couldn’t take it back, so my only recourse was to find a copy of it that DID work. Frequently, with the shitty support you get from EA et al, you can’t get an unencumbered copy of it from the developer; usually, this means hunting down a cracked version.

    After that, I decided to vote with my wallet and decided to only purchase games released by Stardock. I can play Galactic Civilizations II on my Thinkpad x61 (which has no built-in CD drive) under Wine, since I don’t have to worry about any deeply-embedded malware using obscure API hooks that won’t work. I can play it without an internet connection, I can play it without lugging my USB cd drive around. I can play it without having to think “What kind of communication is going over the internet from this application that I have to worry about?”. I can trust the developers at Stardock to produce a game; that is, an application for me to spend my free time with; I don’t need to worry about having to perform deep packet inspection to see what other activities the game might be up to over teh intarweb, I don’t have to worry about the game not working because of obscure Win32 API hooks.

    I can’t see any legitimate reason to pirate your games; there isn’t any reason that they won’t work. I can play it without an internet connection, I can play it without a CD.mate reason to pirate your games. You provide demos and games unencumbered by malware DRM. Neither the “try before I buy” or “I can’t play it with DRM” applies; I’m going to head on over to your store and buy every single one of your titles as soon as I’m done writing this.

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