Genuine call for emails from pirates

302 thoughts on Genuine call for emails from pirates

1. Quickly coming out of my mind…

   Why hackers do it ?

   – ego trip, technical challenge
   – underground/anarchy aspect of it
   – peer recognition

   Why people download warez ?

   – not enough money (as pointed out, 50-100$ for a game is too much for most of the world)
   – simply because it’s there and available, so why bother paying for it. Saved money can be spent elsewhere (e.g. hardware)
   – to avoid stupid and invasive copy protection schemes (thought that could also be done with NOCD patches)
   – sometimes pirated games are available online before retail stores have them or the shops are out of stock

   Now, I read about the “going to the store is too long/hard” excuse in the comments. I am sorry to say that to you guys, but that is just LAME. Move your fat ass already!

2. Honestly, I haven’t downloaded any of your games, but I do own a soft-hacked Xbox 360 which I download games and am able to play burned versions of. I do this simply because the cost of the games is astronomical! Most of the time, I play a game once or twice and never touch it again. I think $60 per/game is a bit much for that sort of use.

   I can honestly say that when a game comes a long that grabs my attention for a long time…and I’ve actually played it worth $60, I will go out and buy that game. I’ve done this with Halo 3 and Ninja Gaiden II. Demos come out and they’re fun…but they only last my normal attention span anyways. There’s been tons of demos that I’ve loved and then gotten the game and haven’t touched after the 1 or 2 time usual.

   If retail shops weren’t so greedy about selling back shitty titles, as soon as the game is open it’s only worth a fraction of what you paid for it, that also helps me make the decision. This way, I am able to play it, make an honest opinion about it, and never touch it again without losing $60.

3. I don´t pirate games, but i always check if the game have DRM, and if that is the case i wait for a crack of the game before i buy it so i can crack it to remove the DRM and if i don´t find a crack for the game i usaly buy some other game instead, i play most types of games so i don´t have time to play all good games that gets relesed (fps, rpg, car racing, space, strategy etc.)

   However i have made a few bad purchases (with pre-orders) so now i wait until my friends have tried the games before i buy them, its not that fun to spend 50++ € on a game thats boring and or takes less than a day to finish.

   And DRM have fucked up my system a few times(before i started removing DRM and/or not buying stuff that have it), for example X3 bricked a Plextor dvd burner for me, that drive is so messed up in the firmware that no OS is bootable if it is conected to a ide cable (tried XP, a few diffrent versiones of *inux) so if a game have Starforce DRM i will not buy it, hell i would not install it even if i got it for free, another problem with DRM is incompability with dvdburners and players, for example i can´t install Neverwinter nights 2 on any of my computers because of the DRM used (my dvdwriter and dvdplayer can´t find the disc.) realy nice system when you have payed extra to get the collectors edition (80+€)(and i have opened the box i can´t return it so its just collecting dust).

   There is also another reason to avoid DRM, and that is if you want to playit on another platform like Linux(even if the game is made for a MS OS like XP it is possible to run it in Linux with programs like Wine) or the next MS OS…

   So for me the important factors when desiding what game to buy is “is it fun to play?”, “game lenght?”, “DRM?”. so to put it in a short formula, i will not buy the game even if it is fun and the best game evermade if it has a evil DRM.

   /AA

4. The comments so far have made many good points, but the way I see it, ther are two issues.

   The first is that many developers hate their customers. They make them jump through DRM hoops, dig up a CD for no good reason, make them type in 16 digit alpha-numeric keys made only of O’s 0’s B’s and 8’s, validate with some server that will go offline in 5 years…. the list goes on. Furthermore, its not like any of this stuff hasn’t been cracked by hackers.

   The second and more serious issue s that they overestimate the value of their game. As a game programmer (C++, OpenGL – none of that VB bullshit) myself, I understand how much work goes into a game, but the work has no bearing on its value to customers. I bought UT2004 because it was worth $50 _to me_, not because Atari put $50 worth of work into it. Few games are worth that much. Considering that I’m only going to play the average mass produced EA crap game once or twice then get bored of it and never play it again, its not worth more than $5 to me. ITS DISPOSABLE. There is zero residual value to 95% of games out there. I can buy Starship Troopers from walmart for the same $5 and will offer twice as much lifetime value.

   Want people to buy your games? Either make a good game that you can play forever and price it at or below $40, or make a cheap on-shot game and price it at or below $5. Not enough money? You can’t blame consumers for not valuing a product as much as you want. That’s just the way free markets work.

5. I’ve actually not pirated any of your games, but I do want to detail why I’ve done this in the past.

   Please do publish what you learn! This is a brilliant discussion and I suspect everyone involved is going to learn a lot.

   When I did pirate games it was for the following reasons:

   1. Fear of the demo being like movie trailers –the only sizzle in the production is in the trailer!

   2. System portability. There have been times when I’ve had to move a game, or maybe just wanted it available on more than one machine for logistical reasons. Just going and getting a cracked version is easy.

   3. The nature of the game was questionable. Maybe it’s not the sort of game I want to be associated with as a player, but just wanted to play it anyway.

   4. Have little interest in playing the game through it’s course, but instead just wanted to know what others were experiencing. Also of interest is technical analysis. How does the game differ from others, techniques, etc… So this is kind of a meta-game experience more focused on analysis or critique or maybe just curiosity.

   Doing this one is expensive on the up and up, and because of #1, sometimes not realistic.

   Been watching games since the old VCS. It would have been too expensive to experience the hobby as I have.

   BTW: I’ve kept almost nothing recent. And have kept some for the next point:

   5. Emulation. This does not yet apply to your productions, but does apply to others. Again, exploring the hobby, comparing hardware, exploring how developers realize their ideas is just fun! Can’t really do it without piracy, particularly if retro is your thing.

   6. Lost / stolen media. When I’ve paid fair and square, and find my media damaged or lost, it’s tough to repurchase. On this one, I’ll do it if the game ends up in a collection or something! That way it’s kind of a bulk loyalty buy and worth it. Did this with ID games actually.

   7. For the fun / challenge of it. Get the original and crack it. Have done this since the 8bit days and it’s just fun. I’ve never released a crack to the wild. I have however discussed how it’s done and have shared that experience with others.

   This is similar to banging around on hardware to make it do stuff.

   Playing the game is secondary, in this case, for me.

   8. Kind of ties into #1, but worth breaking out. Fear the game is not worth stated price. The catch 22 here is that after a significant play experience, it’s worth even less!

   I strongly suggest tiered pricing of some sort. Many will respond to this. Make it more work, or more ads, or something for the lower price, and easy cheezy, less ads, or whatever for the premium price. Something!

   9. Failure of game to operate on my computing platform, or for simple usability. Games that are tethered to things really suck for those who pay, yet those who pirate run unencumbered. This matters to me, and I don’t know how to solve it, but I do know it’s an ongoing issue.

   10. Want to hack on game. Playing the game is fun, but when it’s done, it’s often fun to tinker with the game itself! This is harder these days with large productions, but it’s still a reason people do this. Frankly again, I like games where this is possible. Look at all the ID stuff where people do their own thing with the game engine. That scene is worth the price of admission, BTW, and I’ll buy every time!

   11. Want to share game experience with friend for discussion. Sometimes a trade is the best. When the game is on physical media, this works and is easily done. There is the risk of loss though, so what to do?

   Using copies is best then, but that leaves you with a dilemma. Solving this one somehow, maybe even by simply shipping two, would be interesting don’t you think? Having players self-pimp the production cannot be bad, can it?

   Your games appear to be reasonable targets for this and the user content bit and I would consider it, if it were me.

   Perhaps it’s just nice to have the game available. Perhaps it won’t work with some marginally compliant hardware, and that such hardware has other advantages; namely, that it’s the current hardware and replacing it might not be worth the game experience.

   12. Unable to obtain the game legally. Sometimes it’s outta print, only available in other nations, etc… Your stuff does not currently fall into this category, but could someday…

   13. Perception that publisher is onerous. This is a spite thing and is not defensible, but people do it. I’ve done it! What can I say, humans kind of suck.

   Have you read some of the terms and conditions attached to a lot of software? I have and it’s scary stuff! Running the pirate copy means not having to enter into the agreements!

   14. Fear of non-permanence. The game could be rendered unplayable without a license server or some other active authentication and permission scheme. That sucks, and really is a rental more than a purchase. I don’t like those and generally avoid them.

   15. License / copy protection scheme corrupt / damage hardware or operating environment. I had a winamp plug in do this just the other day. What a PITA! Had to do some sorting out of my computing environment just because somebody else thought their protection was worth more than the stability of the machine I’m gonna try and use their work on. That sucks too.

   Anyway, getting back on topic. That’s all the reasons I’ve pirated anything ever. Hope it helps you to realize some more equitable solutions.

   Many of these apply to applications too. Frankly, software licensing is onerous enough to force me to go completely legal since 2000. I’ve ditched all of it, moving to open source software and games. I’ve bought nothing commercial, EXCEPT for games, since.

   Professionally, I let others buy the closed stuff, which I am happy to use to help them and me make money. No worries there. On a personal level, I no longer do it.

   Games are an exception as they are experiences and do not have longer term utility and or skill dependencies. Having one’s skills linked to closed software is a tax on being able to make a living. So I avoid that.

   Coupla other datapoints:

   I’ve been avoiding PC gaming for a while now. Consoles are cheap, games can be rented and sampled rather easily, and the bigger productions appear to play well, if not better, on many consoles than they would the PC, unless the PC is extremely well equipped. Often that’s not worth the hassle.

   Also have been avoiding newer games more often. Some of this is a function of where I am in life, age, free time, desires, etc… but it’s also a function of the art being somewhat stale right now. Not enough new forms to entertain, or maybe too difficult to find new forms. Don’t know.

6. Want to respond to AA.

   I avoid DRM on principle these days. If a production has it, I generally won’t purchase it.

   What that means is I simply do other things. Perhaps that’s part of why I’m not into new things so much right now. I don’t like feeding the DRM beast.

   There have got to be ways to do this that don’t just break so many other things. These ways will only be found if there is pressure to explore and find them.

7. WTF? I went to look at one of your games (Democracy 2) and then couldn’t use my BACK button to get back here. Crappy web design choice there. Now I even forgot what the game was about but not a chance I’m going to go look at it again or any of the others.

8. I’ve never heard of your games, so if I were to pirate one of them, it would be to try it out and see if it’s worth my time/money.

   I’ll buy any game I feel is worth it. Diablo II, Ratchet&Clank, Super Mario Galaxy. I bought Hellgate: London at release after playing the beta, hoping the bugs would be resolved. They weren’t. Felt a little cheated.

   Sadly, I simply don’t have time for too many games nowadays. The university and my involvement in The Pirate Party takes up most of my time.

9. This is a very easy question for me. Poverty. I can’t afford games. I love gaming, especially with games that are downright literary like Half-Life and Bully, or ingenious masterpieces of the medium like Gish or Abe’s Exodus. But with my body falling apart at age 19 while I work manual labor jobs, it’s hard enough to feed myself.

   So it’s either buying drugs or pirating games to relieve the stress of an impoverished life. If you want to start buying me goofballs, I’ll stop pirating.

10. From the age of 10 through to 23 I played games heavily and 99% of those games were pirated. I did not know any other way, when younger I could not afford it and by the time I could it was habit.

    I took a break from games to focus on, well life and business. Now, almost 30 I’ve return to them (although not as hardcore). This time round I’m paying.

    Why?
    1. Convenience
    2. Decent prices
    3. Instant satisfaction
    4. Updated content

    How?
    Predominately: Steam. They have struck a good balance between protecting the product and serving their customers.

    Prices?
    Steam prices are US based – an expensive game is $40 US, or £20 which I’m happy to pay if the game is good. I will not however, pay the £39.99 that most UK retailers charge for the same game (that is far from a joke). I’ve also got a lot of catching up to do – so things like the Orange, ID and Eidos packs are great value for money.

    Now don’t get me wrong, I will still draw from pirate (stupid word) resources when required. Spore Creature Creator – bought a license from EA but I’ll be damned if I’m going to install any of their DRM. Compromise; legit serial, cracked software. Should I have to put up with such crap. No. Valid serial for new content – sure I can deal with that.

    On that note, I think that is the only way to beat the pirates – convert them – provide new content for an already great product. No DRM – simply require the serial for the new content / upgrade *when* its requested. That way the boxed / legally downloaded product is as user friendly as the pirated version – but offers more future value that the pirated copy.

    That said, people who cannot pay won’t – they can’t and should not be considered a loss sale. At the very least they should be considered a possible future customer.

    Right, off to watch a 1080p MKV. I wish I could download at decent prices sans DRM – looks like I will have another habit to break in 5+ years…

11. Why do I pirate? Well the recent games I played are a good example.

    Just logged out of Lord of the Rings Online. A MMORPG I do NOT pay a monthly subscription to, because I bought the Collectors Edition on launch that came with a lifetime subscription. But Turbine also screwed the owners of the CE with items missing from the box and by shortly launching a Gold edition that gave better in game items and then making a limited competition open to all. DO NOT SCREW YOUR CUSTOMERS, Business 101.

    I recently quit Age of Conan (full game with 2 month game card) that I didn’t renew because it was just bug ridden mess with no improvement in sight.

    When I was pissed off with AoC I downloaded the various Tomb Raider games. I bought a couple when they first launched but have long since lost the discs. Does this count as piracy?

    A couple are hopelessly outdated and hard to buy, one or two are bugged and impossible to play but I just tried them for a few minutes to see how bad it was.

    Some of the later ones I purely pirated, BUT I played them with trainer on because frankly, the games are to twitch for me and I just want to finish them. Should I pay full price for a game I am not going to play more then a couple of hours?

    Then there is the DRM, Securom? No way. I remember an ancient game called Frontier that used a protection scheme that required paying players to look up a word in the manual every so often during gameplay.

    That seems to be on the increase, less hassle for the pirate, the game is released earlier, often debugged and the right version so that you don’t have to wait for patches for your regions version.

    Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and Battle of Britain (Lucasarts games) came with ringbound manuals filled with details like an interview with a historian and a detailed history of the war. X-Wing had a black and white 4 page “manual” that didn’t explain anything. Later games had a PDF. That hardly gives me a reason to pay for the box does it?

    Basically, on big games, it pays to pirate.

    I buy some games, from companies that don’t screw me. Bethseda lost me recently, bought Oblivion and all their previous titles but the Horse Armor shit lost me as a customer. For yet another reason. I have no credit card, I live in Holland and don’t need one. How do I buy online? SOE was the first MMORPG company to have special payment options for europe. Be amazed at how hard Steam is to use when you ain’t got a CC.

    Frankly if you want ME to pay for YOUR product. Do NOT screw me in the ASS.

    Do NOT use DRM that only affects your paying customer.
    Make the game FUN to play for a proportional amount of time for the money invested. Unlockable secrets do NOT count, locked difficulty levels do NOT count.
    The game should be ready to play, I am not going to wait half a year for you to patch it.
    Make it easy for me to pay for the game.
    Release it worldwide at launch, I am not going to wait month, not even a week, not even a day.
    Put something in the box other then a DVD. Goodies, I want them, they seperate the pirate from the buyer.

12. Well theres multiple reasons.

    1. Piracy is handy. I like games I haven’t played in ages and cant be bought on media anymore, to be able to be on my PC in a click of a button. Also, when I want to listen to some MP3’s I only have on record, Its there online on Rapidshare or similar sites.

    2. Money. PC Games are getting overpriced now, £49.99 for the new FSX?! I bought it because I love the game, but I could pirate easy. When I dont have that $6 to go to the cinema or just dont want to, I’d rather cuddle up cosy and watch it on my PC so its there to watch over and over again until I buy the DVD or not at all. Also, Without having a credit card and a low wage its really hard to find the cash to buy it.

    3. The Size. This is mainly for actual Market Pirates. Some games are over 6GB In size, I dont want to have that on CD in case I lose it, but I dont want to download that on a slow connection, or I want the game but I dont want to download a demo which is the size of the game!

    4. DRM/Copy Protection. When I pay for an MP3, I want to be able to listen to it on my cell/mp3 without it bitching at me that its copy protected. Also, I dont want my Email address incrypted in the songs I buy on iTunes, Thats really pissing me off.

    5. Un-readable Console DVD’s/CD’s. When I want to give up my console but keep my games, I cant rip it legally, so I have to download it. Sometimes for emulation, I have to dump the BIOS and being its not the exact copy of mine, Its illegal. I want to emulate my old titles.

    Well, Thats my 2 cents, If you want to talk more, You’ve got my email.

13. I haven’t pirated any of your games either, since I have just heard about them from slashdot for the first time as many others here. Anyway, here are my top reasons:

    #1: Lack of money. When I was a student, I was constantly broke, so I just couldn’t afford buying games all the time. Of course, if you really, really want something, you can always scrap together some money, but the 50 Euro price tag for AAA titles is just too hefty. (Yeah, I’m from Europe.)

    #2: Testing how it works and whether I really like it. Demos are often too short or have different system requirements in a subtile way. Sometimes I downloaded games, because I didn’t want to get ripped off (boring levels, too low framerates ). I’ve been burned too often, especially with alleged top titles that were unplayable or buggy.

    #3: Ease of use and availability. In Europe, you often have to wait for months until a game is available that is already out in US, and then the localized versions often turn out to be buggy, have weird DRM, and often are incompatible in MP mode with US versions. I don’t give a fuck for localization, actually I always prefer the original US English version, but the publishers usually don’t give you a choice.

    #4: Curiosity. Sometimes I download a pirate copy just too play around with the game a bit. Usually, I’m really happy that I didn’t spend so much money on it and trash it afterwards. This has happened a lot of times. Try out a game that you would never buy anyway.

    That’s about it. #1 is the top point. I now have a job and more money available, and I’ve almost stopped downloading pirated copies. I still do it sometimes, though, when I know from reviews that I don’t like a game enough for the hefty price tag (usually AAA titles), but I’m still curious about it (point #4).

    I believe Indi games have different customers, and if there is a pirated copy floating around, I find it very unlikely that this really causes a drop in sales. It’s like with certain shareware, some people will never pay for it, whereas others will always pay for it.

14. I don’t really pirate games but I do install them with no-cd cracks or download pirated versions of games I have already purchased. Why would someone do something so insane? Because I have kids. I personally don’t play the games, the kids do, and anyone who has 8-12 year old boys can tell you that they either 1) destroy the cd/dvd or 2) lose it.

    Oh, they do enjoy playing the game against each other over the lan from their own computers and there is no way in hell I’m paying for a game twice just so they can play together. Anyone that wants to charge you twice for a game so that your kids can play it together needs to have their head examined. Seriously.

15. Because what I wrote was long, and because trackbacks aren’t being picked up due to your database undergoing collapse, I’m just annoting my response here.

    http://fullof.bs/dear-mister-harris-because-they-can

16. A friend of mine used to get pirated copies of games.
    The main reason was cost: living in mexico, a good game would cost up to 70 USD out of the box, or up to 140 USD in real terms (once to take into account purchase power parity).

    So at those prices, who can afford to pay for a game? downloading is just too tempting.

    I’ve never download an illegal copy of a game, but in recent years, I’ve been avoiding every release that I find uses any sort of DRM. And I’ve missed on some good games! (half life 2, bioshock,etc). Some games with light restrictions to it’s use (like NWN, or the witcher) are ok, but they are still very very anoying. I would love to be able to copy the damn cd to the harddisk and play from it. Far faster.

17. I’ve never played or pirated one of your games before, but I feel compelled to give you my answer.

    The reason I’ve went to piracy is the DRM. Completely.
    When I have to validate a game online, then install a program that dials back to the mothership to verify that I haven’t changed a single file within that install; and then when on top of all that I have to have the CD inserted at the same time I find it simply unacceptable.

    I used to have Half Life 2 until Valve deactivated my steam account for inactivity and I didn’t have the information to get it renewed. I bought Half Life 2 ep. 2 and I was going to have a blast on it until it demanded that I connected to the internet. I had 56k at the time, and it decided that I needed a 100mb update. I broke the DVD and immediately pirated it as soon as I got broadband back. – The last game I went out and legitimately purchased was Sim City 4. I had downloaded a crack of it and enjoyed it so much that I wanted to pay for it. (Yes, this happens!) .. but it demanded that I have the disc in the drive at all times, so I ended up installing the cracked version over it.

    I pirate because I can’t stand any kind of copy-control measures.
    If I pay $30-50 for a game I will play it any goddamn way I please, if somebody tries to control how I can play that game; without a doubt they will lose the profit that I would have most certainly have given them.

18. I haven’t pirated any of your games. I will get to this below.

    But I will tell you why I have pirated other games in the past. It is a complex consisting of several factors.

    *It is impossible to get unbiased reviews of games, because it is impossible to know who is on the take and who is not.

    *Games are hyped, sometimes for years. Large amounts of money are spent on this, oftentimes more than the original cost of the game.

    *Games are of uniformly execrably terrible quality. The number of games that are actually any good at all in any given genre is vanishingly small among the loads of shit that the industry puts out.

    *It is impossible to return a game to the store, for obvious reasons.

    All this ends up with the consumer getting screwed. It is impossible to make an informed judgement in this marketplace, and 95% OR MORE of games are pig-in-a-poke ripoffs. We have turned around and put the onus back on the publisher and the developer. You collectively rip us off, we’ll collectively rip you off.

    Most of the games I have pirated are ones that I wouldn’t buy one way or another and just wanted to look at. This means that you haven’t lost any money on me, because I wasn’t likely to buy the game anyway. In fact, many games I’ve ended up buying, I’ve pirated first and liked them so much that I wanted to play them online. Many of these games ended up selling me the initial game and all expansions that came out.

    If you want people to buy a game, you need to generate an engaging and replayable game experience. Use things like procedural maps and enemies to ensure a huge replayability space. Include a free service that goes along with the game, like matchmaking servers, Spore-like user-generated content, et cetera.

    Gone are the days where you can make a game with 30 levels, sell it, and make money on it.

    Think about the products you’re competing with. They have entrenched playerbases and budgets larger than the GDP of some countries.

    To compete with that, you can’t outdo them at what they do. You have to make games that are original and engaging. If you want to sell these games, you have to come up with server-based serial checking measures. That’s the only way. If you don’t do that, games will not sell.

    The largest thing for me with games, though, is not the financial cost but the opportunity cost. That hour I spent playing game X is an hour I will never get back, and so the game had better repay me with more fun than I could get otherwise. In my case, this is not difficult to do, but many games fail. We’re seeing more and more crappy clones that cost a lot of money, look great, but do not deliver the fun. C&C3 is a great example of this. Looked great, sucked balls compared to any previous games in the franchise or any of the spinoffs (generals, etc.)

    What does this mean? It means that if I pirate a game, it’s to see if that game is something I want to waste my time on. If I want to waste time on a game, I will most likely buy it. That means maybe 3 games per year.

    I looked over your games. I understand that some people like the Democracy games, but personally, none of these games turn my crank. You need to come up with something more interesting and engaging, with massive replay value. I suggest procedurally generated content. That in itself will make me look at a game because it typically repays time investment. If I want to spend time on something, it’s to get good at it, and for me to want to get good at something it has to have more than 30 levels each with its own boss sprite. It sure as HELL has to be more than the latest FPS.

    I have a number of other thoughts on this subject, and I could go on and on. If you want to talk further, get in touch.

19. What puts people off buying games?

    *Inflated prices – Developers may blame piracy for this, but games have become ridiculously expensive. Why would anyone pirate a game if it was sold for a reasonable price? Basic economy teaches us that demand rises when prices are slashed.
    *More eyecandy than substance – Some games are woefully substandard. They look nice, but the AI couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag, couldn’t even find its way out of a paper bag (RTS) or is just script-generated aliens or whatever coming at you from entirely too predictable angles and/or forcing you to go one specific way instead of allowing for non-linear gameplay (RPG/FPS).
    *Inflated system requirements – Why shell out for an expensive game if you’re not even sure it works on your system? Better to try it first, see if it even runs in the first place!
    *Annoying Copy Protection – Rootkits and other crap that make it hard for you to make use of a legitimately bought game, or make you refuse to buy it at all once you find out your machine will basically be taken over.
    *Too many bugs, too few features – Games are often rushed out because of a deadline, cutting down on features and resulting in bugs. Some games, indeed, some studios, are notorious for being unplayable until updates which don’t come out long after the game has already been put aside by people who bought it. Duke Nukem Whenever is the opposite example, deadlines exist for a reason, but if you can’t make them AND come out with a decent game, then please just spend some extra time on at least making sure that it meets the expectations that have been generated and at a bare minimum (but don’t expect to make a stack of money) a game should be STABLE. Nothing is worse than buying a game you’ve been looking forward to is not as interesting as you thought it was and won’t be until some add-on comes out with additional units/scenarios or whatever and it is absurd that console games always work out of the box while many PC games just don’t work until several patches have been applied, while others are just basically abandoned as soon as they have hit the shelves.
    *Game Y looks strangely like game X – Some games are horribly unoriginal. Once there is a hit, be it GTA, Doom, or Dune2, other companies rip the basic idea and come out with some kind of knock-off that is just more of the same. One of my pet peeves is that RTS, isn’t. There is basically no RTS game on the market. Most games are RTT at best, most games which claim RTS have some kind of resource gathering system which is then turned into units, never mind the fact that soldiers are not trained on the battlefield and that tanks don’t run off the assembly lines and onto the frontlines. Red Alert 3 is more of the same shit we’ve been seeing for years, albeit with really odd but flashy units. But hey, it worked before, so why change a formula? Homeworld and its sequels, while beatiful and original in that it was a real 3D game were still so linear that all the eye-candy and the extensive storyline could not hide that fact. Game Developers seem to be afraid to do something truly original. But that is what commerce is all about. Commerce is about taking risks, investing in something not knowing for sure if it will do well. A lack of creativity, of originality is a death sentence. Gamers want to be surprised, want to be kept on their toes, especially with a RPG or whatever. *Cheating – I used to play Counterstrike, did so for a very long time, but eventually gave it up. Too many cheaters, it was impossible to play without bumping into some guy who was so obviously cheating it wasn’t funny anymore. Most of them would leave before getting caught, making it a pain to go after them, only to know that even if they were banned, they would be back with another key or some other guy would replace them, just because the system couldn’t identify them. If other players are spoiling the fun and the developers can’t seem to do anything about it, it’s time to bail out.
    *Because games can be pirated – Pirates probably also take pleasure in showing off, proving that they can overcome anti-copyscheme 2008.
    *No money – Some people just genuinely don’t have the money. Some people just download games, movies, whatever, see if they are good and then buy them later when they think they’re worthwhile and when they -do- have the money. Of course, by that time, the price has usually gone down.

    Not sure if this applies specifically to any games you’ve worked on, but I think at least one or more of these things apply to almost any game, depending on who you’re dealing with and which game you’re talking about.

20. Price. I’m a full time student, if I didn’t pirate these games I’d never get the opportunity to play them.

21. Alright I dont really pirate very many games. But here are my reasons…

    1) DRM is the biggest one. I am *NOT* going to support any company who employs heavily restrictive DRM schemes. If you are going to treat me like a criminal before and after I purchase your product then you can go to hell. I’ll take the path of least resistance.

    NOTE: DRM Schemes that require you to put your CD/DVD into the drive DESPITE the fact that the installation copies everything from it to the hard drive really really piss me off personally. The fact is that not all optical drives are good and some will actually scratch CDs and such. Anything beyond the typical ‘type the CD Key here’ is an imposition an hassle to deal with. Also the fact that most of these CD’s are heavily guarded by DRM to prevent copying of them so that you can exercise your fair use rights to back up your CDs so the original isnt put at risk with kids and what not running around. If you are going to go this path then offer up some way for the customer to reacquire the original in the event some 4 year old brat decides to play frizbee with it and breaks it.

    2) I prefer to demo games before I buy. Many games do not provide demos or incomplete demos or only provide some sorta ‘trailer’ type setup where you dont get to try the game at all. The few games I’ve pirated to ‘try before I buy’ have been extremely buggy and not worth it to the point where I have deleted the games. If you have a high quality product and give a high quality demo that accurately reflects the true gameplay it’d help reduce piracy IMHO.

    3) Just because you think your game is worth $70 doesnt mean your customers will. The pricing point for most people is probably on the order of $20-30. MMO’s do this really good because they back load the money. You only pay like $20-30 up front and then like $10-12/mo. As long as people are having fun with the game people are more than willing to drop $10-12 a month on the game.

    How to stop piracy: Convert your game to a MMO. Naturally if you dont have a large playerbase then this option will suck. Stop DRM, drop prices to reasonable levels (is it any wonder Photoshop is the most pirated software when the price is $800+? if it was $80 they’d sell about 100x more copies).

22. I’m now in the business of selling software – I’ve “gone legit”, so to speak. That being said, I’ve sat down on a number of occasions, going over my former life as a software pirate. Heck, I even released a couple of apps, and produced a few cracks.

    Here’s what _I_ came up with, as a matter of some self-introspection:
    1) Price. When I was 16, I couldn’t afford to plop down $40-50 for a game, unless I was absolutely certain it was good. At $30, it was a lot more doable. At $5-20, it was an impulse buy.

    2) Impulse acquisitions. The easier it was for me to get something, the more likely I was to do it. This held true for piracy, and for retail sales. I’m willing to take a risk on a $5 game, no questions asked.

    One of my favorite games, Fallout, was such an impulse buy – it was in $10 at EB Games. I had never seen it, heard of it, and all I had to go on was the box and the price. It was $10 well spent. After Fallout 2 came out, I gave it to a friend, and picked up the double pack at Fry’s Electronics. Fallout 2 was low risk – I knew what to expect.

    Going over the games I actually purchased when I was younger:
    Quake 1. Loaned to me by a Friend for a few days – loved the manual, especially the description of the rottweiler. He wanted the game back, so I made a copy on my HDD. Bought it at Circuit City near Lakewood, CA.

    Command and Conquer. Loaned to me by the same Friend – it came with 2 disks. Bought it. Bought the expansion pack. Bought Red Alert, Counter Strike, Aftermath, bought Red Alert (again) when my disks got scratched. Gave the disks away, bought it _again_ as a collection, so I would have a friend to play against. Bought RA2, Yuri’s Revenge, Generals, Generals: Zero Hour, etc. Bought it all _again_ as part of the First Decade collection, and gave away more disks.

    What can I say – I know what I’m getting, and I prefer to play against people I know. For a truly fun game, I will give away disks if that’s what it takes to get an opponent.

    Infrared Remote Control software (don’t remember the name). Was $15, and I couldn’t get a pirate copy.

    C&Cheat. Tried the demo, liked it, bought it for $6 or so from one Kevin Cernekee (kevinc43@aol.com) – still remember it. Couldn’t find a crack. Did some work for my parents, they mailed the check. He took my money (cashed the check), and never sent the software.

    Duke Nukem. Downloaded first episode from the PBS-BBS on a 1200 baud modem. Bugged my parents to buy it – they picked up the rest of the episodes.

    Commander Keen – Same as Duke Nukem.

    Wolfenstein 3D – Same as Duke Nukem.

    Doom – got the game on a shareware cd we picked up for $5. Bought Doom, Doom II, multiple copies.

    At least for me, crippled demos don’t work. I tried it once – got burned.

    Commander Keen, Wolf3D, Doom, etc – gave away the first episode – real, full games. I knew what I was getting, and was willing to buy the rest.

    The other games I bought were given to me by a friend who knew me, and knew what I would like. The copy protection wasn’t “in your face” (activation, etc.), and I played enough to get me hooked.

    I’ve spent something like $700 on Command and Conquer over the years, despite a couple of “not as good” games, but as long as the games are fun, I will keep buying them.

    Remove the risk (something I’ve played the full version of), provide something with replay value, and I will buy it.
    Remove the risk by dropping the price to $10 or less, and I’m willing to play it on a lark. I’ve certainly paid more than $10 for some bad movies in the past.

    More than $10, and no way for me to know what I’m getting? Forget about it.

    FWIW, our prices are the result of market testing. It makes absolutly no sense to me, but $8 is the sweet spot for (for example) our CoreAVC product. More than that, and it still sells, but the volume drops a bunch. Less than that, and our revenue drops faster than the sales increase. Coupons, pricing specials, etc. let us determine the best price to set.

23. The reasons I pirate:

    1. I don’t feel it’s wrong, I am generally very honest insanely, I lie to no one, large corporations included, find money on the street I give it to charity, however I don’t believe taking potential profits from someone is wrong.

    2. Convenience, it is easier to pirate software than buy it, people pay for convenience, it seems in software you are paying for inconvenience. You are selling to people you should make their experience the best you can.

    3. Trust, I don’t like giving credit card details or email address to anyone on the web. (why is my email address required to make a post?)

    4. Not getting value for money, the price for a game is too high to just simply try it, perhaps a refund policy would work, you don’t like it you get your money back, sure you could not guarantee that they didn’t pirate your software but it is so easy to do anyway why care. People are lazy by nature; I think most people would not get a refund. This sort of thing works in other areas like supermarkets offer money back + replacement if something is wrong with the product, I hardly ever use that, cash-back on things I am sure the only reason they offer this is because some people don’t bother claiming it because its inconvenient.

    Also the perceived marginal cost to the developer seem to make the game very expensive

    But the biggest factors for me is definitely the no guilt and convenience

24. I do live in the U.S. and I’m 37 years old. I’ve worked in computers and I.T. for about 15 years now, and wrote my own BBS software package (subsequently sold a few copies of it) back in 1986-87.

    I agree with some of the other comments left here, like being strongly against DRM on principle, and prices of games just being too high. (I realize the counter-argument to THAT one; “If you can’t afford it, just don’t play it. It doesn’t give you a right to pirate a copy.” But what about when you DO buy as many titles as you can afford, and you feel like you’ve given a particular game company a “fair amount” of your money? Then, pirating other titles THEY release could be viewed as “morally justifiable, if not legally so. You’re simply claiming you’ve helped fund their programming projects to the extent you’re able to do so already, and you’re just trying to get your money’s worth in return.)

    Additionally though, I find myself occasionally pirating a program, simply because I want to check it out – but know I lack the free time to get anywhere near my money’s worth out of it. It’d be like paying to watch movies in the theater, knowing every time you did, your pager would go off and you had to leave before seeing about 1/4th. of the movie, at the most. Pretty soon, you’d give up on that.

25. I live in Brazil, my main point is that launch games costs between R$200,00 (reais) to R$250,00. That is around 100

    U$ to 130U$, and even if it costed 50U$ directly translated in reais it would still be too expensive. The last game

    I bought original was Warcraft3 + The Frozen Throne last year because I found it in a store for R$30 (R$15 each). I

    do not even need the original since I play on Garena and not on the battle.net because of the lag I get here while

    playing against people from other countries.

    I’m a college student and my family gives me R$600,00 per month, and I still can be considered rich. With that money

    I have to pay the rent, the internet connection, water, electricity, all of which takes around R$300,00 per month.

    The rest goes to food and entertaiment.

    On the other hand even if I had enough money I would probably still not buy most the games I play simply because

    most games are crap. The last good launch game I played was Elder Scrolls 4 around 2 years ago. Most of the games

    that I played after that where only mediocre. I might buy TES4 if I ever play it again and find it for up to 50

    reais. Portal was pretty good but the 10 hours play time isn’t wroth the 20 U$. The whole orange box on the other

    hand was pretty nice, I would buy it if I had the money.

    I think the best reason for the widespread piracy is the games consumer market, that is people from 13 to 27 years

    who are very low on money because they depend on their parents or are just entering in a career and need the money

    for car/get married/buy a house. The second is the low play time of most recent games.

    Being able to get the game from my home is a big plus, but not reason enough. DRM is a big down, but like being able

    to get it from home it’s not the main reason.

    The other big reason is quality, games are lacking it. NWN2 was unplayable at launch and after months and tons of

    patchs it’s still bad and the load times kill the experience, aside from that the game is overall bad. There are too

    many bad games, games that can be considered just a thing to spend time like watching a mediocre TV film. I wouldn’t

    rent that movie, I wouldn’t buy that game.

26. Why do people pirate software? At the most basic level, because they *CAN*. Of course, it’s very true that just because one can do something that doesn’t mean that one should, but whoever said that would stop people?

27. Back when I had time to play games I did pirate a lot of them. For all of the reasons listed above, ease of access,lack of Cash, NO DRM, ability to copy CD, Lost CD keys and so on.

    The games I bought were either good enough to spend my limited cash on or offered more than the pirated copy. LAN play, multi player, Add-ons and so forth.

    However now that I don’t have so much time to play games I’ve purchased more games in the last two years than in my entire life. Why? Because I’m buying for my son.

    Currently he is seven years old and playing HMM 3 & 4, Civilization 4, Age of Empires – all of them, I’ve also purchased railroad tycoon and a whole bunch of reader rabbit games.

    So if you want to sell games make them fun to play like AOE or CIV and more educational. Then market them to parents. While I would have pirated a game for myself I would never pirate one for my son.

    Oh yes, and port your games over to linux. The only reason my son stopped playing in Edubuntu was because AOE didn’t work there.

28. im a kid, and i aint made of money. hardware is hard enough to come by. you wouldnt get money out of me anyways, since i dont have a dime. that’s why i pirate games

29. I agree with everyone that Valve’s use of Steam is the right way to go. They have confronted piracy on both fronts:

    1. They fight the pirates – It’s much harder to play a pirated version of halflife2 than games from other companies. Playing the cracked version involves a whole process, and it also wasn’t available right away like it is with every other game out there.

    2. They help the consumer – it’s nice and easy to download a game from them. They offer cheap prices on bundles, they cut their prices quickly, and generally offer you a very good deal. There are also no DRM limitations. You can download the game as many times as you want. Having to format your hard disk doesn’t ruin your game selection. You can also log onto steam from any computer, anywhere and download and play all the games you own. Which is the best, if i’m on vacation, at work, at my friends house, I always have access to my games. I would never purchase a game EXCEPT through steam, which I do quite frequently. They have ratings for all their games, screenshots, and often a demo to try out to. I’ve even given up pirating games newer than 10 yrs old, which is the only way you can get them anyway. I’m not even sure if that classifies as pirating.

    So to sum it up, game companies deserve the piracy(to some extent), at least the big ones that have the ability to do what valve has done. Valve solved the piracy of online games long ago with counterstrike 1.6, and counterstrike 1.5 was still a BIATCH to play cracked, and that’s when we were mostly computer nerds playing it.

    Unless valve lost huge revenues on creating steam, other companies have no excuse for their draconian DRM they put on their games, inability to download a game YOU own more than a couple times, or only have access to download it for a year or two.

    I bought halflife1 and some other old games on steam because it’s so much easier to find everytime I get a new computer or am at a different location. It was only $10 anyway and then I could play counterstrike 1.6 as well.

    AND, all that DRM and their game is still cracked right away and easily avaiable, come on, get a clue and offer gamers what they want…. something that has all the benefits that STEAM does.

30. Wow I have no idea who you are and I’ve never heard of your games. I’m pretty sure nobody is pirating your stuff. This is a great publicity stunt though!

31. It seems to me the more game companies fight pirates with products that don’t benefit the consumer, the more determined programmers are to crack it and give it away for free. I would never purchase BIOSHOCK because of the insane DRM. Even if I did purchase it I would just dl the pirated version anyway, because it’s better and free of DRM.

    And the more they help consumers the less inspiration there is to crack it. It’s the same with something like the daily show being put online for free by comedy central. Nobody bothers to rip out the 30 second commercials and repost it now that there’s an easy alternative.

    I’ve downloaded my share of pirated games, but many of the downloads were games I owned but lost the cd, or didn’t wanna go searching for it. It was just easier. Steam makes it even easier than searching for a torrent and hoping you don’t get a virus.

32. I pirate games because I am often disappointed by what I play.

    I thought “what games?” when I saw this entry, and clicked on your link, and it turns out I bought The Wonderful End of the World on Steam after playing the demo.

    I don’t want this to sound like a slap in the face, but I wish I had pirated your game instead of playing it. It entertained me for a solid 30 minutes. For $10 I can go see a ridiculously overpriced movie that will last 1:30-2 hours (which I wont do anyway, I go to the dollar theater.)

    I’m not cheap, I’m not a stingy person, but I consider my time to be VALUABLE, and I’m annoyed when I PAY for something and then feel like I wasted my time AND money. I didn’t feel like I wasted my time with your game, I enjoyed it, but I did feel like I wasted my money.

    This is the kind of experience that turns decent people into pirates. I only buy games when I *know* they are good, because I am so often disappointed. The Bioshock demo was almost as fun if not more fun than the full game (when you consider the end-game as rushed and kind of lame), making my purchase of the full game feel kind of like I was being cheated (and out of $50!) admittedly Bioshock sucked a lot of hours out of my time, and it wasn’t a BAD experience, but by the end of it I felt disappointed and wished I had only paid $20.

    People just have different values. I pirate games in order to see if they are good or not. I pirated COD4, played through all of it, and then ended up buying it a few months later (still at the $50 price-point, too). I’ve pirated a few games that I didn’t get much further than 20 minutes into before I went “phew, glad I didn’t pay for that shit.”

    Keep in mind, there is NO RETURN on PC games in just about every retail store. There’s no returns on Steam, as far as I know. You can’t even return console games these days, I think, without taking a hit. Demos are more often than not completely misleading, either they show you the best parts of the games or they show you the boring beginning stages. The only way to actually know if a game is worth money is to PLAY IT, and unfortunately there is no way to actually play a game before handing over your money than by doing it illegally.

    Why is this OK? You want a lawnmower, you go to the store, you look at the lawnmower, you take it home, you use it, if it doesn’t work, you GIVE IT BACK and GET YOUR MONEY. This metaphor is flawed, of course, because games hardly exist in the physical realm, and a lawnmower is a long term investment where as a game like Half-Life 2 can be beaten in a single sitting if you’re a machine. Online play creates replayability (Bioshock and End Of The World don’t have it) which makes incentive to buy the game so you can keep playing online.

    But the point is, there are a few pirates out there who do it because it just doesn’t make sense to hand over $50 you’re not going to get back for a product you might not like. I’m sure the majority of pirates just steal because they’d rather spend the money on Taco Bell.

    P.S. Steam has caused me to buy more games than I ever thought possible. It’s so… impulse-buy friendly. Unfortunately, disappointment sometimes rings up pretty high because of it.

33. I don’t pirate games. But, I don’t buy overpriced games, either.

    Believe it or not, I worked at a game company and 90% of you pirating turds have no idea how much blood, sweat and tears goes into making even a simple game. There’s game designers, artists, coders, publishers. Even without buying boxes, discs and marketing space at your local game store, there’s a HUGE overhead in game production.

    How can games be overpriced? Well, there’s return on investment. I may play a good game for a year. Most games will be played for far less. I can get an awesome, productive app like Pixelmator for $60. I will use Pixelmator for 18 months or more. A casual game that may only interest me for a month or two costs $30.

34. I haven’t pirated any of your games, but I DO wish I had pirated Rock Legends.

    Had I known that there’s nothing to do after reaching the top, replacing the crew and reaching the top again from the demo, I wouldn’t have bought it.

    Democracy 2 has some replay value. Rock Legends barely has any replayability.

35. Pingback: I’m Tearing It Up Today | staires

36. I would agree with all the above comments. One additional factor. its a bit of a thrill to “fight the system”, and get something illegal for free. Bit like some people shoplift for the thrill of it. And modding my xbox and installing pirated games on the HD gave me a real sense of accomplishment (sad).

    Though for all those who complain that DRM mucks their systems, my systems have been worse hit by dodgy cracks and malware infested progs over the years – note to self – must install a VM.

37. I just finished your Democracy demo. It is simply not long enough. You do not let the potential customer play through an election, which seems to me an important aspect of the game. I am a huge sim fan, but I’ve been burned on several sim games. They started out fun for the first hour or two, but then, because of ui problems or poor simulations, they deteriorated.

    Democracy looks fun, but there are a couple ui and modeling issues that looked like they could significantly reduce replayability. I won’t buy it without a more extensive trial. I haven’t pirated since my college days — my time is now worth more than my money, and safe torrents are difficult to find — but you might almost prefer I did, because I always purchased the games I liked. If Democracy is a good sim with the requisite replayability, you should not be afraid to let me play for 60 or so turns, because at the end of those 2.5 terms as PM, I’ll want to try out several of the other dozen countries for a couple hundred turns each. That’s when I’d buy.

    If your game doesn’t have replayability, then I guess a longer demo wouldn’t help. In that case, I’d beef up the in-game economic explanations and sell classroom licenses to schools.

38. …

    It’s because you’re using the wrong business model for your games.

    Instead of selling something that is totally free to copy, use the ransom business model. You’ve already made games, and people are buying them, so you have at least some reputation for making games. Leverage it.

    Instead of putting the game up for sale, put up a list of things you want to make in the future, and let people vote on which one they want next with money. Put the price you think is a fair amount for you to make the game, expansion pack, or whatever, and when you get that money, start making it. Once it’s made, make it free for download. Piracy issue solved, permanently.

    Yes, this means that you can’t just sit back and gather in money for things you wrote seven years ago, but practices like that are one of the reasons people pirate in the first place.

39. I don’t pirate your games. I don’t play games much anymore & don’t bother with pirated stuff. I can list a bunch of reasons why for you.

    1. I will not touch any games that are “steamed” or “activated” on the web in any way. I had to play a friend’s version of Half Life 2 because I won’t patronize the DRM paradigm. Case in point why: MSN just turned off their license servers, all suckers who bought their DRM’d music are listening to silence now. It’s physical disk or nothing for me. It’s also why I stopped buying Symantec’s activated products. Or moving to Vista? But that’s another story.
    1A. Starforce. Latest Securom (web activation). Hostile. Bullcrap. Enough said.
    2. Games are $50-$60 USD. Screw that! Too expensive!
    3. The “replay value” doesn’t exist for games these days. Some are too short, some are “hyped” such that once you play it, you say “I waited two years for THAT?”- either as an unplayable letdown, or a “once you know the story, there’s no need to replay it”. There is no cerebral experience to them. A friend just lamented to me of how he wasted $$ on Half Life 2 Episode 1, that it’s more McSame Half Life 2, nothing new, and doesn’t know if he should buy Ep 2.
    4. (ok, 3A) Most are full of pretentious movies, cutscenes, high-paid (Hollywood) voice actors, motion crap-ture. And yet they missing a key element. FUN. Games are art experiences these days, not “games”. Games only try to out-do the last game in terms of graphics.
    5. Demos aren’t made available, or are not made available in advance in order to drum up interest. If I had the demo for Eidos’ Deathtrap Dungeon (the concept was intriguing) I would have ran away from that POS. Or Doom 3. Maybe that’s why demos aren’t made available- games are crap these days.
    6. Console-itis. Any game that has it’s roots in a console, or even hints of the stench of a console-port will be guaranteed poo. I hate the concept of boss levels, save points, forced cutscenes, ported controls, ported fugly graphics.

    Games are shadows of what they once were. Would you agree all of those reasons make piracy seem attractive?

40. I don’t think Pirating is completely right, but I do so anyways. I would love to stop, but the fact that once I do I will have to go out and and buy the product just to play. Demo’s make me want to pirate even worse because downloading a game within an hour and turning on the TV is much easier than going out and buying it. I know there is online digital buy/download like direct2drive. I also use Steam and have bought games there, but I honestly would rather to own a Disk if I were to buy said product.

    DRM only makes things worse. When I buy a product and run into a problem caused by DRM it really does piss me off. It drives me to ignore buying any products any further from a company and just pirate the game then using a no-cd crack.

    The standard rate for a PC game is around $50. For freaking ridiculous. Paying that much money in today’s economy is kinda hard for me. Especially since a whole lot of games offer horrible content for $50 or more.

    Graphics aren’t what needs to be concentrated on. All we need is sub par graphics that work on most computers so you don’t need to keep on upgrading hardware. We need BETTER content in the game. slapping together a game that looks beautiful and then a boring story line is…eh. (I.E. Crysis).

    Hardware is another reason I pirate. I have to spend hundreds of dollars on new hardware around once a year and that leave little money to actually buy. This is why consoles are so successful. They don’t need upgrades to play games that look almost as good as a game on PC.

    I hope I could help you understand and I respect you for asking politely. I don’t expect you to be very happy with me and my decisions but I hope this helps.

41. Why Pirates crack games? It’s very simple really. Its a challenge. Often better than the actual game. And for Kudos. Its the same reason why crackers break into computer systems.

    Why People download pirated games? Game quality has declined as graphics quality has inclined. Games now are very pretty, but lack the depth that the intellectual mind craves but also the freedom that the true explorer desires.

    People play games to escape the reality of life, let them get lost, not walk from point A to point B, killing some creatures, solving some simple puzzles, reading some pointless storyline, yawn! That’s only slightly better than the, drive a vehicle around a track, play someone else song on a stylised joystick, answer quiz questions, boring!

    Points for the future games people make that will lead me to actually buy a game:

    First Person Shooter: Co-Op mode. Ref Quake 1. Its all well and good killing your mates, but its so much better to kill with them.

    Adventure Games: Mazes you can get lost in. Areas that can be explored but have no real relevance to the story. Random spawns to keep you on your toes. Multiple solutions to opening doors, accessing chests. Random dungeons that you can get stuck in. Ref System Shock 1, Daggerfall, all the ADnD games of the C64/Apple2 era.

    At the end of the day, give us a reason to reply a game, and we’ll buy it. Produce yet another piece of tried and proven recipe game, and it’ll be downloaded, cracked, clocked and deleted in 48 hours. And that’s only if interesting enough to finish, most games are never played beyond the first couple of levels.

42. Hi Cliffski i can’t really say that i’m much of a “pirate” now days since it’s been a while since i played computer games but i belive that my reasons for piracy are still valid.

    The problem isn’t really that games now days are too expensive; it’s that they are too expensive to buy without testing.
    Imagine going to a car dealer and asking to buy a car, you walk around at the lot and you find a car you think that you could really enjoy driving, so you start talking to the car salesman and he tells you that you’re welcome to buy the car but you can’t test-drive it first and if you buy it he’ll have to weld the hood shut before you go.

    So the big problem now days are that you pay 40-70USD for a game that “might” be entertaining, sure you can read reviews and even watch gameplay clips but you can’t really know that the game wil live up to your expectations so you download the game and try it out.
    Now i’m sure alot of people leave it at that and settle with the pirated copy but quite alot of us go out and buy the game if we like it.

    I’m not too well versed in marketing but i belive that offering a free download of the game on the company webpage would be a good idéa.
    Use some kind of DRM protection like they do with some songs so that the copy will be rendered inactive after a couple of days of testing the full game so that people can try it out legally without being marked as criminals.
    I understand that this copy would most likely be cracked in a matter of hours but sooner or later all games get cracked but it’s worth considering that pirates are not careér criminals but regular people who tend to have morals and a consience so with a sign of good faith from the industry like a free time limited download for testing it’s quite possible that they would buy the game instead of pirating it.

    I know i would and hey i’m from sweden.

    //MVD

43. Here in Australia, games range from AUD$79 right up to AUD$110 (most console games). Which is ridiculously overpriced.
    The only times I have resorted to piracy (or even cracking) is mainly due to idiotic DRM schemes that render the system inoperable or crash the game! I then have to resort to a cracked version so I can actually PLAY the game that I spent my money on!!

    I think of DRM like going to a shop, buying a shirt, getting the security tag LEFT ON THE SHIRT. And then everytime I enter any shop with my shirt, the security alarm goes off and then I have to prove that I have legitimately bought that shirt! That is what DRM feels like. Why must I prove every time I start a game that I actually bought the game?!?!?
    And don’t get me started on DRM that breaks my system. That just feels like a slap in the face from the Developer/Publisher – it makes the dev/publisher come across that they think their customer is a potential pirate.

    DECREASE THE PRICE OF THE GAME! The most common reason I have seen for piracy is the price of the game!! For gods sake! If you decrease the price, then I reckon MORE people are likely to buy the game. Especially in Australia, where publishers are making the excuse that the Aus$ is doing badly! THAT IS UTTER RUBBISH. The exchange rate between us and the U.S. has been very good, and yet publishers still insist on charging us up to 3 times what a U.S. gamer would pay for the same game.

    GET RID OF DRM: DRM is idiotic and makes legitimate customers feel like they are not appreciated for actually paying the dev for their effort. If the publisher is soo paranoid, then offer online activation. Or offer special features that are only available with a valid game serial number (special patches, special items for game etc). Use the MMO model. In particular, if a game has multiplayer aspect, only allow multiplayer to people with real serial numbers. If it’s a pirated game, you can’t access the multiplayer.

    Also, I too feel that for some games there are no Demos, so pirating becomes a “try before you buy” type of thing. Also some Demos are way too limited.
    Also, why do demos have DRM?? Its a freaking demo, and yet my system becomes infected with DRM rubbish.

44. people like free shit.

45. Piracy is done for many different reasons. The most logical reason is that people either don’t WANT to pay for it or CANNOT pay for it. Video games cost way too much money these days and sometimes no matter great a game might be, some people won’t buy it, even if they have to in order to play it. These people, who I think make up the majority of pirates, aren’t part of any company’s target market because they wouldn’t buy their product even if they couldn’t pirate.

46. I think a big part of it is the fact that you cannot return a game after you’ve tried it. No store that I know of will take it back, unless you wanted to exchange it for the exact same game (it was defect initially).

    Demos are usually very short and don’t give you a true feel of the game, since most companies may put the best levels into that demo while the rest of the game blows.

    Copy protection schemes that are very restrictive are also another reason. Copy protection should be something simple, because if it gets too difficult for the user then they will just return the game and try to get a refund. Not everyone has the time to try to get a game to work on the PC when they have a Wii or and Xbox.

    OCD is a big one, why pay $40 for a game you will play for 3 hours and never play again.

    “How will the game work on my PC vs the pictures on the box?” is one. Why do all companies have to use the highest end hardware when they make their screen shots? Why? because of bad code, because they pushed the game out the door. “Don’t worry, we’ll patch it later”

47. I don’t know what games you’ve made, but I can respond in general for all digital (or digitisable media):
    1. I don’t have the money to spare. I wanted some music the other day and couldn’t find it anywhere except buying direct from the independent artist. I couldn’t afford it.
    2. I think that 99% of the money is going to some nameless faceless corporation.
    3. If the game is closed source, I think I’m basically throwing money out as whatever insights the developers made will be lost and whatever the graphic artists have produced is copyrighted.
    4. I’m not getting anything I want. A few files on a hard drive is highly convenient. Doesn’t require Blu Ray players, HDMI, a specific operating system etc.
    5. I DO ACTUALLY BUY things that I do want. Eg. I might buy a T-Shirt, a collectable, or some kind of cool thing that is associated with the product, but a CDs and DVDs that wear out, or files that have to be authenticated in some way are a negative value proposition for me. I’m considering getting the Fallout3 collectors edition, because it comes in a lunch box. I don’t have a console or a TV and I’ll probably never play the game – but I would like the lunch box.

    I’d buy a select few things if:
    * most of the money was going to the creative people behind the product
    * I got something tangible – a signed photo, a coupon for a t-shirt, etc.

    but at the end of the day I couldn’t afford even a tenth of the content on my hard drives

48. I’m not a pirate, but the reason is very simple :

    DRM

    I will not… ever… buy a game with DRM in it.

    I know my friends are the same. Many download pirate versions because it’s DRM free, hassle free, big brother free.

    I just want to play a game… not eternal damnation to hell with all sorts of rootkits and junks.

49. If you want to lower the piracy, you simply have to put your games to steam example.

50. I don’t buy most of the games I play, because, 1. they are overpriced 2. I don’t know if they are good or not (trying out demo is stupid, when u can test the real version, how about trial, where u can do anything, but u can play it for only few days?) 3. they are hard to buy, I mean, using Steam is good, since u can EASILLY buy games, and download them online (and with my account, the games stay there forever, downloadable, in fact, i think this is better way than having a real copy of my games) 4. stupid CD/DVD protections. + u have to keep CD in all the time (when i can just download unofficial noCD/noDVD patch, and game without all the work of finding the CD etc.)

    I do wanna support the gamemakers, for making good games for us.

    how can the Illegal copies be so much easier than official. I just go to one website, type in nime, and click. the game downloads through internet to my computer and i just install and play it. (if u can charge me REASONABLE fee somewhere between, sure, i would be happy to do it like that. and I do believe that STEAM has succeeded in this, i even have downloaded/bought some games through it)

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