Genuine call for emails from pirates

302 thoughts on Genuine call for emails from pirates

1. Not sure if this has been covered in comments already …

   Regarding price, I’m a bit surprised more companies don’t consider a metered rate for playing their games. Whether it’s $60 or $30, I’m being asked to plunk down a lump sum, regardless of how much I eventually play the game.

   If I’m lucky, I’ve been able to take the game for a test drive via a (usually constrained) demo. Still, I’m required to speculate up front how much lifetime value I’ll get from the game and then determine whether that exceeds its price.

   Imagine instead a model whereby I pay, say, US$3 to download the game and to play it for up to 5 hours. Each hour I play beyond that costs me US$0.50. Once I’ve spent US$30, the game is considered fully purchased, and I receive a validation code that I enter to stop further metering.

   Why can’t more companies price games (and other digital goods, for that matter) using a price structure that ensures I’ll always feel I’m getting good value?

   Lastly, kudos to you, Cliffski, for spurring this discussion. I found your blog and Web site thanks to the Future Tense episode that featured you. Now I’m off to try a couple of your demos and will absolutely consider purchasing them if I like what I see.

   I would never have encountered your site (I’m not much of a gamer) had you not asked this question and – more importantly – show that you’ve learned something from the experience. I sincerely applaud what you’ve done.

2. I never downloaded any of your games but have downloaded tons of others and software. We share because we love something, we will buy it.
   We dont pirate. Pirate is to sell stolen stuff and make a profit.
   1. High Cost.
   2. DRM renders the game usage and we like to have it on our HARD DRIVE without the actual cd. Runs better and smoother and the game disc wont get damaged.
   3. We pay for what we value. How many times have you bought a game and it sucked.. Glitchy, crashes, no update for months and then they CHARGE you even more money. You cant take it back once you buy it.
   4. TRY Before we buy. If we hate it, we arent going to buy it. If we love it, we may end up buying it, but it could be used and off ebay or on sale 6 months later.
   5. I rather buy milk and food for my child then a game that i may play for only 2-3 hours a month.
   6. You put a game out and if their is no pirated copies floating around.. You would still find someone to blame for loss sales instead of the slumping economy and high gas prices. 1 person sharing a game is 1 person that WOULD have never bought the game. If their is no piracy, you would stil sale the same amount of game. People who download really had no intention of buying but if they love something, their going to buy it to support the publisher.
   7 You can make more money if you selled ISO format of the games and let us burn them.. If you make them cheap enough no one would share it or care. They would pay the 5 bucks and you wouldnt have to hurt the environment in shipping out games in large trucks and cutting down trees to put it in a box.

3. Hey Cliff,

   I like your approach to this and I wish you luck. To be honest, I too have never heard of your games, but I tell you what, I would support you by buying them, simply because you are listening to your customers.

   Reasons for pirating? Pretty much what people are saying.

   1) DRM and all forms of coy protection. I don’t what to shuffle around looking for a cd just so I can play the game. Also, I bought the original Sims 2, CD 1 got scratched, the kids liked playing it. I called the company, they couldn’t give me a replacement of cd1 , and i was willing to pay for it! You think I bought another copy? No, I don’t think so.

   2) I think there are too many games churned out these days. they tend to follow the same theme, nothing really original anymore. The game company that has a name of a large swimming creature for eg. Far too many produced, all too similar, why would anyone buy them all? Originality needs to come back(Cliff! I’m your age) so I remember the old days of gaming, there was originality, there was longevity, and you got something cool in the package. Remember getting maps, trinkets and so on? It’s been so long since I played a game that made me want to go back again and again. Somethings missing.

   3) Price, now, yes they are expensive, but to be honest, they aren’t too bad compared to years ago! They young people would be shocked by this, but I remember games were approx. $100 for the Atari 2600, this is back in what? 1982? Still, nonetheless, because of the quantity of games and people seem to be flooded with the same old type of game with different sound and visuals, but the games are just dull. My situation is, I can’t afford to buy games, i’ll be honest. Occasionally, for that special one I think deserves it for the effort put into it, I will buy, but today, like you said, with rising fuel costs etc. games are a luxury.

   4) I can understand you feeling lose of money seeing pirated copies of your games, but you got to think, are they really lost sale? Would they have paid for it or even know about it if it wasn’t pirated? I think the lost sales are very minimal.

   5) Availability! I doubt I could even buy your games in my country, and with all these damn restrictions, censorship etc. I don’t bother with shops anymore.

   I’m sorry, but I can’t offer you any more suggestions, but atleast some answers I hope you can use to ponder. I’ll check out your demo’s, and you never know, since you are being so upfront and honest, i may send you some dollars for your efforts, i’m actually rather amazed one person can still write and produce games.

   Good Luck.

4. I’m not gonna lie. i faked the required info to post this comment.

   i havent pirated your games. nor do i pirate games normally or anything recent. to be honest i could tell you everything i pirated and would be in the clear due to the stature of limitations.

   i’m not here to tell you why you get pirated. but i want to help you not be pirated.

   first off. if your games cost on average of 50$ then about 10% of the pirates will be doing it to avoid paying while 20% may be people who just cant afford it. lower your prices a bit and see how it works out.

   2nd. id software is one of the most well respected computer game companies of all time. for many reasons but heres a couple. they have the source code to their very well known “quake engine” readily available free of charge. that wins the respect of every hacker and programmer on earth that plays games and id software is one company i will never pirate from because of it.
   2 they have some free games. wolfenstein enemy territory is a totally free game of theirs. free to play and download and is moddable. so its extremely popular. and they are making quake live. which will be free to play. this wins the respect of all gamers as well as allowing them to show what they have in their games.

   3rd. demos. if your going to charge for your game then you have to have a demo somewhere thats easy to get to. if people can try your game they are more likely to pay for it than pirate it.

   4th. drm and reinstall and various other anti-piracy techniques.
   gamers, hackers, programmers, pirates. we all hate drm with a passion. it takes away our freedom. if you will allow people to reinstall their games easily then they are much less likely to pirate. an example of how poorly security measures are going to work out are some new games are coming out that will only allow 3 installs. those games will see less than 1/2 the usual sales and they will be cracked and up to be pirated within a week of release.

   5. make your games easy top find and buy. some people pirate just because its a whole lot easier than fighting through the pages and pages of registration, payment, and delivery of games. forcing people to go through a lot of crap just to buy your game will turn off everyone.

   6th. simply just make your games fun :) if you do the above stuff and make quality games then people will buy because the games are worth it. dont believe me? just look at computer gamer forums and read about it.

   hope this helps

5. if you want me just google EmuWizards, im keeping it sweet & simple

   DRM is BS – cds will get scratched, i dont understand why the industry doesnt cross over to using “Read-ONLY USB’s” much faster & no scratches

   Prices – i simply refuse to pay $100 for a game i will finnish in 10mins & end up not liking(non of your games i havnnt even heard of you till today)

   Shallowness of games – yes they are short. BS themes, weak story lines, & no originality.

   Demos – sry but i dont like downloading a massive 10GB file on dailup, break it up into parts, also after downloading a massive file id really like to play for more than 30mins.

6. 1st thing i can get the game anytime anyplace…
   2nd try before i buy
   3rd fun… warcraft i dld it, like it, i bought it, wolf same deal ….and the list goes on
   4th cd in drive… sucks ass… even with original game i crack the games …
   5th 80% of game crashes got fixed with cracks.. (example is star trek elite force)
   6th There is nowhere i can buy a game where i live… if i buy over the net it will take me two weeks to get my hands on it… over a torrent / p2p …couple of hours.

7. 6th:
   http://www.amazon.com
   They ship.
   or steam or impulse or gamersgate or positech…

   Its silly to suggest its either pirate a game or wait 2 weeks to buy it in a store…

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11. I stumbled across this doing research for an article on piracy. I’ve never pirated your games – although when I saw one on the election and democracy I was tempted but 1) you humanized yourself through this post 2) it’s too old for my daughter 3) I don’t play games.

    I’m not into games, but I do download educational games for my 8 year old. I’m disabled, don’t have a car, and live far below poverty level with 3 kids at home and 3 in college. I download because the items I download are extremely useful for my daughter’s education and I don’t believe poverty should inhibit education and don’t feel what I download is hurting anyone. I share (and I agree with the other poster that it is more interesting to investigate those who upload..) because I believe we should be a “sharing society” and people should have a desire to share instead of a desire for greed. I also share because I believe I can help make the life more enjoyable for another mother who has limited resources. Also, we don’t have a t.v. so I download educational movies and classics. Now that that is out of the way…

    After I paid a visit to your blog I paid a visit to linkedin to do some research and this gentleman’s post is highly relevant to your topic and had some interesting points. He basically suggested to do what you did, but I’ll post it here for you.

    “here is no ‘best’ way, no single answer. The best practice I have seen is to research how, and why, your software is being pirated.

    The How: see the avenues of distribution, and see if you can communicate with those pirate points. Join their community and follow their deeds. Learn what the breaking point is. Nothing is crack-proof, there is merely an event horizon that is not worth crossing. Eventually, it’s just not worth the effort needed to crack it.

    The Why (and the meat of your answer: Find out why people are willing to steal it. Does it cost too much? Is it not worth the purchase price to the bulk of your customer base?

    For example, I point to 3DS Max. Way back when, around version 4, this was the only real, usable, learn-able 3D modeling program. People wanted to learn it, but the $40,000 per seat license is a bit of a turn off. So, they pirated it.
    The company tried some crack protections, but soon realized they need to counter the price tag, the event horizon was off the charts on this one. So they chose a different tack, and one that worked great: they listened to the pirates. They asked what they wanted, why they pirated it, and respected the privacy of those who answered.
    they learned the why, and created GMAX, a free, watered down version for game creators and modders to learn on. the end result was that the new product became a huge tool for advertising their core product, as well as a very large core of up and coming 3D modelers that were brand loyal. These people, when they entered the professional market, bought licenses to the core product.

    Now, due to competition, 3DSMAX is comparatively cheap now, and a learner’s license can be obtained for about $400, and the full version for a couple thousand, so this model is no longer viable. GMAX has, subsequently, been killed off. But the core concept is very valid, and likely saved 3DSMAX as a product when the competition got strong, by culling a core user base in the game industry.”
    James Wood
    Innovative, Solutions-Oriented IT Manager

12. Oh ya – p.s. I also prefer downloading because my daughter’s dvds don’t last very long. I’m lucky if they last a week or two…I’ve wasted a lot of money buying dvds…I’m glad to see you offer a download version…

13. I think pirating games has a valid use
    to TRY it before buying it
    demo versions of games arent very good anymore, they either suck horribly, or dont represent the game very well

    Here are some examples
    SPORE – SO MUCH HYPE and good reviews, then its released..big a disspointment
    AGE OF CONAN – great, oh and i bought this, and the game id dying very quickly, wasted money
    Sins of a solar empire – ROCKS, bought it after trying it, the company doesnt stick on tons of copy protection and garbage other game companies do and they care about their customers
    Assassin’s Creed – great game, but it finished before i realized how incomplete of a story it has..why buy now..its got no replay
    Hellgate – this represents everything wrong with gaming companies(well EA to)..and its that they falsely advertised this game BIG TIME and LIED to customers at the end of beta saying they had an internal build that fixed all the issues..and now look..this game is dead and the bargain bin even feels dirty havin it along

    The quality of games has dropped immensely, or the bar has been by companies like Blizzard. Warcraft 3-Old game, but with its customization ability it has insane replay value
    WoW – this drug addiction keeps finding new ways to hook users

    So to summarize
    Bad Demos
    No replay value
    Always has tons of technical issues
    End quickly
    No multiplayer
    These are many reasons why a game isnt worth buying, yet theyll charge 60-70 bucks for it..RIPOFF

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15. People pirate your games, because of the same reasons that they pirate any other digital content. The natural price for digitally distributed content is extremely low, because scarcity does not restrict supply.

    On top of this, physically packaged digital content, such as music CDs, DVDs and games, can be converted into digital content, thus transforming those scarce products in ubiquitous ones, impounding the problem.

    People will therefore either pay the price, if they think it is fair (to them), in relation to their leisure / entertainment budget, or not pay it (which may lead to piracy). In a world wide audience, this could be any price from nothing, upwards.

    What you really need to ask is, “based on my UK audience, why do people in the UK pirate my games?”. The second question you need to ask is, “why do people consider piracy of digital content to be acceptable?”. My feeling is that the answer in 90% of cases is always the price. The remaining 10% will always pirate.

    Music producers have concerts, and film producers have the cinema. In each case, it is the scarcity that allows them to charge the price they do.

    Games developers are lucky in that they have a distinct advantage over movie and music producers. Games developers have better alternative income methods such as an online only, in browser, customer subscription model, which does not require a download.

    Nothing to copy, pay to play, means the only option is to pay, or no access. In this case you control scarcity, and hence the price determines the consumers interest in your product. Unfortunately for you, that means development in a completely new environment. The benefit is you’ll know exactly how much people are willing to pay to play your games.

16. I’ve only pirated 2 games, neither of them yours, and both because I object to games which include DRM.

    Generally I see games as being roughly worth the amount charged, as opposed to music which I will constantly pirate. However I think if I buy something, it should be “mine” whereas software licences are in truth only renting the product to me. I object to DRM for 2 reasons – firstly its putting a load of invasive software on my machine and secondly restricting the amount of installations that I can do is preventing me from using the product that I have paid for (especially in the case of Spore which has a 3 install limit).

    I wouldn’t object to copy protection on games if there was a decent length demo and if the protection was something like a dongle rather than DRM type things. And I think your approach will pay off – when I get home I’ll go & look to see if any of your interesting games are Mac compatable, and may even buy one ;-)

    My reason for pirating music differs – for every album sold at current average price (approx £14) the store gets about £7 of that whereas the band only gets about £0.17 between them, with the remainder going to the label & associated staff. If I like a band’s music I pirate their album & buy some of their merchandise instead, as a far higher percentage of those profits go to the band.
    For movies, I watch a pirated copy & if I like it I go and buy the proper DVD.

17. I hate waiting for release dates when the game is done or out elsewhere

18. I hate demos,dvd`s difficulty of installing… Oh jeah the price!! hell no!! i think u should have servers where to dnld game and to buy a serial via internet. Then ull save materials and u could have lower prices.

19. I pirate some games for a number of reasons:

    1) The wife nags me about buying games.
    2) Disposable income with 2 kids is not what it was.
    3) I hate having rubbish DRM SecuROM etc installed on my machine from legit games.
    4) If I play a game beyond 2 or three days (about 1 hour a day) I will usually buy the game.
    5) I just bought Spore (even though it has SecuROM) as I find it interesting and novel. Another FPS I would probably download and play. I also just got 4 second-hand games (originals).
    6) Buying games is an investment. Not only of your money, but your time. Too many times I have spent the money to find that the investment of my time is worthless (buggy, rubbish games). An example: Assasin’s Creed. That was pirated and I played it solidly until I finished it…Guess what…I did nothing in that game that I hadn’t done in the first 30 minutes, the story was poor. It’s why the Cinema is becoming a no-no for me, too many rubbish films being churned out. All reviewers in the pay of some company to give a rubbish film a good review…

    Games are entertainment. If they don’t entertain for the price they cost too often, they get pirated. Too many rushed projects out the door. Oh I could moan forever…Bring back some originality to the Games…

20. surely if the game was rubbish, you wouldn’t have played the whole thing to the end?

21. I just wanted to throw out a reason why “someone” might pirate.
    I know “someone” who bought a student version of a mathmatics software package for $100 to use on thier laptop and was very annoyed to discover that it required the CD to be in the drive in order to start up!
    Having a CD all the time in a laptop is very annoying, and noisy when it spins up, especially when the professor asks everyone to run the software on the laptop while in class.
    This “someone” searched for a crack to remove the cd check and was annoyed to find out that no one bothered to crack the student version, they only cracked the full blown expensive version, likely because someone who wanted a cracked version wouldn’t bother with the student version.
    So this “someone” ended up downloading that full version somewhere and using the crack for that, despite the fact that the “someone” only needed a tiny fraction of the capabilities of the student version, let alone the full version.

    Similarly, some people who “pirate” games or just use cracks do so after they’ve purchased a legitimate copy, because the copy protection is annoying.

    I’ve even heard of some people buying a liscense of windows and using a downloaded corporate edition so they dont have to mess with the silly activation.

    So not all downloaded copies results in a lost sale.

    Ideally, I’d like to see companies follow in the footsteps of blizzard. They’ve released patches that remove copy protection from older games after a while. Epic did this with some of the Unreal games too.
    In other words, retail packaged games (I know this doesn’t apply to you anymore since you removed your DRM), sell most of thier copies in the first few months or first year. In fact, some game companies have said publically all they are looking to do with copy protection is delay pirates for even a few days (usually not even that happens).
    After that first year, why not remove the annoyances of copy protection so that the true fans who continue to play can play without bother, and the majority of the money has been made already on the game. The cd key check for multiplayer can stay in, thats usually transparent.
    Unfortunately almost no company bothers to do this.

    One final note… about stardock, I like how they use the carrot approach (give extra downloads and bonuses to people with legit serials) instead of the stick approach (treating people like criminals with the silly 3 activation thing on spore that could get used up in a couple reinstalls, and reinstalls are often the first thing suggested to fix problems with a game).

22. Wow, so sad to read a lot of these replies that tend to boil down to “I want it and I’m not going to pay for it, it should be free.” I would love to see how they would feel if their employee felt the same way about them. “I want your work but I’m not going to pay you.”

    I do agree with a lot of other reasons though. I’m the type that “tries” a game and if I like, I will buy, even if I already finished the game. Fair is fair.

23. I think a lot of people pirate just because they can. Most people wouldn’t go out into the street and steal a car, committing grand-theft auto but if they could do it and know that they would never get caught, ever, then maybe a lot more would. Or, look at how many people speed. They think it’s not a big deal but it’s breaking a law that is there for a reason. I think the consequences of pirating software are not severe enough.

    But, then you take that a bit further and you’re into RIAA territory, a place where you treat everyone guilty until proven innocent and that’s definitely not a smart way to deal with a customer base.

    I wish I could come up with a proper solution to all this so everyone wins.

24. Several reasons.

    First of all my approach is pirate games first, pay for them later, so many issues plague games today that can make them almost unplayable, with strict UK sellers not taking back opened games if you’re screwed over in any way, you cannot get a refund.

    Getting screwed over inlucdes but not limited to the following:

    Unplayable due to stupid bugs.
    Unplayable due to unsupported hardware (that meets min spec)
    Unplayable due to horrific frame rate issues even on good hardware
    Unreasonable install demands such as needing administrator access to play.
    Unreasonable EULA terms which can only be read after opening the game.
    Heavy handed DRM which limits our rights and usage.
    Bad quality games due to cross platform development, no PC gamers dont want console games!

    Even if the game does suit all your needs you have to realise that people have a limited amount of money to spend on entertainment, and most people want more than they can spend. I buy lots of games, but I can only spend X amount each month, you can’t get blood from a stone!

    There comes a point where you simply cannot afford to buy anything else, so you’re faced with either not playing the game, or pirating it knowing you cant pay for it.

    But honestly, whats the difference? Piracy only “hurts” developers when the customer who pirates the game would have otherwise have bought it, theres no other material cost involved. If I download 10 games one month and can only afford to buy say 5, 5 games aren’t going to get paid for. Pirating it doesn’t effect your sales if they were never going to buy it in the first place.

    I think morally thats not exactly on the terrible side of things, the developers dont lose out on anything, overall trying before I buy allows me to give my money to the developers who do the best job by my standards.

    Some people will pirate all the time, irrelevent if they can afford it or not, irrelevent if they liked it or not, but are these cheapskates really potential customers to begin with? Would they pay for the game if that was the only option? Probably not.

    The popular belief is that every pirated game is a lost sale and thats just not true by any stretch of the imagination. Build your game so the users want it, and do a good job, and you’ll sell games.

25. First, for those people who say intellectual property should be free: Go to work everyday then without getting paid, because your labor should be free too. That is complete nonsense. I am a programmer too (not a game developer), and I certainly wouldn’t do this for free all day long. I have bills to pay just like you.

    To answer why I pirate games/apps:

    1. I cannot possibly afford everything I want/need. If I were making more money, I most certainly would prefer to buy something over downloading a free version of it.

    2. I will download a full pirated version of a game instead of rushing out to buy it or playing a demo for a very good reason: To test it out and see if I really like it. With the price of games being about $50 brand new I can’t afford to buy a crappy game that I can’t return for a refund or an exchange. If I try it and find that it well made and has a great replay value I will usually spring for the full retail version as I like to actually own the game if it’s worth it.

    And here’s a tip: Instead of DRM, game designers should incorporate bonuses and features into their games that you can only get if are online with a valid registration code that comes with the retail package (that is one reason I wanted so bad to own a legit copy of Brothers In Arms; that and I loved the game so much I just had to buy it…of course I only paid about $30 for the game, which wasn’t such of a hit to my wallet, and that further enticed me to purchase it).

26. Hi all,
    I’m not a thief and I don’t think I would ever download I find it insulting as the extraordinary people who programmed the game and architect it just get treated like S**T. Well I’m not here to rant on how much it frustrates me I’m here to say why they do and it is for the simple reason ‘why pay for something when I can get it for free?’ although it may take for a week on a wireless G connection (and you have the risk of you’re house, car, job, all the money you ever had going) there mad they really are. I know plenty o people that do it actually too many but I’m not going to mention no name’s (as if you would know them any way) :-). Well I’ve tried to answer the question as well as I can so now I think it is time for me to stop ranting on :-) Thanks.

27. I just counted.

    I have bought 217 games over the last 8 years, 6 windows licences, about $20k worth business software. And yes I’ve never even opened a single case. I own the lisence and pirate the software, game, operating system. Why? It’s easier. I can never misplace a cd or dvd. And if I wanna install it 3 times I don’t have to call microsoft.

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29. Never heard of you or your games.

    I am intrigued by the number of responses you have gotten, in just a couple of months.

    I have purchased all of my major games, but only the ones that are top rated-C.O.D.4, HL2, Crysis, etc. I do have pirated mp3’s, software utilities, and some lesser games.

    It boils down to convenience, curiosity, and price.

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35. hy, Give something to help those hungry people from Africa or India,
    I added this blog about this subject:
    at http://tinyurl.com/5t2jg6

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37. When i pirate a game it would usually be from some big name company who has executives making 10million+ a year. I don’t like pirating from the little guy and I don’t support it, but sadly my wallet doesn’t support my beliefs. As a pirate, but also as a person I don’t plan on just taking your games, and if I did I would buy it later, because I want to give back.

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39. Hello there, don’t mind having it public so I’m posting my response here. I don’t read any of the ‘techy’ rags and zines, so I found out about this through a danish music zine talking about music piracy (surprising amount of similarities if you ask me, as well as movies.)

    I have also now read your followup, and I would say one thing that was overlooked was censorship. (the political blowhards whom apparently responded do a disservice by always calling it fascism as it’s coming from the opposite wing.) In the US, this isn’t such a big issue, save for a few key games (over half of Persona 2 was written out because of a homosexual relationship in the first part, which was a bit more ‘touchy’ six years ago, and instead you start at the halfway point to the end of the game, it would be like buying a Baldur’s Gate expansion without Baldur’s Gate, you can play it, but you’ll be missing out on a lot!) but game companies should NOT expect to sell an equivalent percentage of their game to their niche interest in another country when that country’s censorship laws impact it in a negative way. A lot of the EU countries have laws against excessive violence. The US goes ape over explicit sex. Games catering to either won’t go over well. (and may even start a moral panic)

    Another problem is that many people still do not see games as an effective storytelling and/or entertainment medium (Roger Ebert’s criticisms for one major published example.), and unfortunately many of those old fogeys are in positions of power or in media watchdog groups that vote on which kinds of games to, at the least, discourage. The game companies should lobby as aggressively in those countries as tobacco lobbies in the US. Most every game that came to Germany while I resided there had the blood removed, and if it appeared in a cut scene the cut scene was edited or chopped out entirely. Guess what kinds of games I spent most of my time playing then? Heh, maybe I should thank the BPjM for saving me so much money. (Mind you this delves into REAL piracy too, as I started back when the only ‘pirate’ option available were carts with cloned chipsets, and so was paying a fraction of the cost to a third party not involved in any way with making the game.) Also any game which was intended for under 18 but had ‘controversial content,’ most devs didn’t even bother to try so I figure they wouldn’t care anyway.

    Heck, it’s still happening.
    From wiki:’Gears of War and Dead Rising were refused rating by the USK. Gears of War EU version was put on the Index (part A) on November 26, 2006, and therefore cannot be advertised nor disseminated to minors. Dead Rising was put on the Index (part B) and confiscated by Hamburg County Court’s decision of June 11, 2007. Microsoft refrained from publishing them in Germany. In a recent announcement, Sega has confirmed that recently announced The House of the Dead: Overkill and MadWorld will not be distributed in Germany.’
    so you either drive over the border, pay extra for ordering from out of country, or pirate. As neither of the first is rational in the least…And it’s only going to get worse as the economy continues to slump.

    Of course NEC got most of my money, since it was the least popular of the three 16bit systems it was moderated by watch groups the least. Whatever came out tended to come out intact, unless it had movie/anime cutscenes or ‘interactive’ cutscenes.

    Since leaving, it really does seem DRM has become more invasive and crippling (let no one ever forget the Sony music rootkit debacle) while gameplay has fallen, and although in general story-writing is up, that is only because they have more cliches to choose from. Most of the stories aren’t actually very original in characterization, but you know what? That part only matters to us old farts who were around for the first round. That sort of thing only annoys the old guard, if the gameplay is still good they will get it regardless. At the very least they need to hire new writers. Ones that can make cliches (or the turning of them) work. Advance Wars, there’s a good example. One of the most basic turn-based games I’ve ever played, but the writing has a charm all its own, even though that’s basic and straightforwards as well. As one of the GBA’s biggest hits, it should have shown the big boys there are many ways to achieve a ‘balanced’ game, not just shoving everything to one side or the other and pushing back and forth until it appears centered. Still, it does only attract the newer crowd. I can’t bear to play most any console RPG anymore, aside from a handful of quirky ones.

    One method of ‘DRM’ that was effective in the old days, manual-based codes, though perhaps should have been weekly instead of every time the game starts. I’ve been around a long time, long enough to have played the old Sierra games, and burn out a computer doing nothing but Tie Fighter and X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. Before you were able to play they asked you to enter words or symbols out of the manual. Unfortunately that specific method is easy to override now (they just include a pdf of the manual in the rar) but perhaps there could be a captcha-style password system, where when you buy the game you receive a password to completely unlock it, and every downloaded ‘demo’ gets a different password automatically upon installation.
    Spiderweb software used something a little like that, but because it was only 5 digits it was simple to brute force. On that note, I purchased Avernum2 and up. I beat #1, but the last 20 or so main story quests I found a boring chore. I only beat it to see the ending. When a pirate says they beat a game but then talk about replay, and not having gotten ‘value’ from it, they’re measuring it as if they had paid for it. Good story, bland gameplay. 2 pretty much doubled the content, balanced out the spells, adding a few more, and halved the fetch quests. Sounds a little presumptuous but if I had played 2 first, I would have expected the endgame to be just as good based on the demo, purchased it, and found I disliked the final set of missions. Since I did play all the way through, well, I was able to realize I’d never touch it again afterwards, compared with my fourth time through #2.

    As far as the new drive to one-use content goes…I think it should be increased to three or even five, should you decide to sell it down the line. This is especially true of single player games, or online games where you put the content directly onto your system (see:any PS3/Xbox360 game really, but most especially Little Big Planet)

    As far as demo content goes…it’s probably too much of a pain in the ass for smaller devs, but larger devs should randomly pick a few mid-game levels instead of the opening levels. Squaresoft seems to have learned that as the past few Final Fantasies. (not really my cup of tea but a refreshing change from a level which never makes it in (especially annoying if it has good concepts), the very very first stage, or a purely action/combat-oriented mid-game or early late-game area) FFX’s demo had just enough exposition and combat variety, and smartly included the leveling tutorial section. The first option is the first area of the main game, the second about 4 hours past.

    By the way, I hate to say it but nothing you have is really to my style, but I’ll pass the site around to everyone else living away from mainstream media sources in case there are some, just because I love what you’ve done here, taken the time to actually listen to the complaints instead of dismissing the pirates as ‘cheap bastards’ or ‘lost sales’. (a lot of the time they wouldn’t have bought it in the first place!) Styrateg looks interesting however, so I believe I’ll try that. On a related note I tend not to play many casual games, but Tradewinds Legends is among my favorites.

    For a very old (and odd) game that I believe still has awesome staying power (odd memory leak aside), check my website link.
    May require some messing around to get it running, I still have 2000 so I don’t know how it holds up to XP and Vista. Interesting to note it’s by people not typically involved in game design too.

40. Not sure if your still reading these comments cliffski, I hope you are, as I’d really like your thoughts on…. well, my thoughts, lol.

    Heres an unavoidable fact. People who download pirated software (like me) do actually pay for and own some games, quite a large amount of games even, which I myself do, and on various gaming platforms. Now, if we were doing this purely cos we wanted to avoid paying for games we wouldn’t own any games we’d paid for, surely? Obviously as I already mentioned that’s wrong.

    I remember years ago some blokes from Codmasters gave a talk about the games industry at the Art College I was attending, and how lucrative it was as a business. To illustrated this he showed how the biggest (in monetery terms) business in the UK (some road surfacing, tarmac, etc, business) made only a miniscule profit compared to the huge costs, where as the games industry was the complete opposite. Small costs for a large return.

    Games have nearly ALWAYS been overly priced, since day one, sometimes they’ve been so overly priced some government body has had to step in, as with the situation many years ago with SNES games n the UK, (£40 – £70 in some cases at the time) Why are games so bloody expensive? When you compare them to the price of a DVD film for example, a game is double, triple, even four times as much, yet costs much less to produce, and exactly the same to manufacture.

    As for digital downloads, there the biggest rip-off of them all. They should be £2 – £3, maybe £5 max, and if they were I’d download them without even thinking of tracking down a cracked version. For the sake of saving £2 – £3 it wouldn’t really be worth the hassle. Also, I reckon piracy of digital downloads is worse because your not even losing out on any packaging, artwork etc. Your getting EXACTLY the same as what you would if you paid for the download.

    Can I add that STEAM definitely encourages piracy of digital downloads. Who want to own/play a game that is totally dependent on being online? Not only that, what if the STEAM service ends?

    Piracy has kept alive many older games that would have slipped away and been forever forgotten. Also, the cracked version of the game often works when the original won’t on operating systems that weren’t around at the time of the games initial release. What will happen with the original downloads of STEAM games 10 – 15 years from now? Most likely they will no longer work, the STEAM service may no longer exist, they may even discontunue service for games over a certain age, who knows. The fact is, getting a cracked version would ensure this doesn’t happen, and will keep the game alive or future retro fanatics. STEAM is a greedy and destructive method of distributing games. I loathe STEAM in case your in any doubt!

    There are alot of sh!t games out there, which doesn’t help. People are stung a few times paying for sh!t games, then begin to download cracked versions and eventually it becomes all to easy to download the cracked copy, than take a chance on forking out money when the game could be crap.

    I remember a situation where I was desperate to buy Alien Shooter 2 via digital download. The publishers were deadly slow at implimenting a digital download option, and eventually I got sick of waiting and just downloaded a cracked copy ogf the DVD version of the game. Sale lost. I did buy a boxed version some time later, but it was second hand, so a sale was still lost really.

    People have argued all kinds of points in the posts above, but to me the bottom line is games are WAY to expensive (for what they are) especially the digital downlod variety. IF they were so cheap that it outweighed the hassle of tracking down and downloading the cracked version, then applying the crack/patch/seriel/workaround etc, then I reckon most people would just buy the game. I know I would, provided you did NOT need to be online to play that is.

    Just a quick mention. The fiasco with BIOSHOCK put me off buying retail/boxed games for life. Until they stop pulling shit like that, I will NEVER buy a retail/boxed game again. Shit like that gives creedence to piracy if you ask me, even among people who normally would be against it.

41. Pingback: Software pirata, el eterno problema sin solución | Incognitosis

42. All these answers about politics, game quality, DRM, they’re all bullshit. People do have these opinions, they may hate copyrights guts etc, but the only real answer is money. People don’t want to spend money when they can get it for free, simple as that. All this other stuff is just mental masturbation.

43. Although there are many incentives to pirate pc games (it’s free, no copy protection problems, easy, convenient, etc.), most of them can be put to rest, when considering legal digital download platforms like Steam.

    When comparing to those platforms, the only incentives for doing piracy is it’s still free and games typically come out before they hit street date.

    And who does not want to get a hyped game as early as possible?

    This is in my opinion the most critical incentive to do piracy. Of course it only applies to games which have not come out yet.

    Ask yourselfs this:
    Think of a game that you really really anticipate. A game that comes out sometime in the future. A game that you feel commited to somehow and that you instantly would buy. A game that you know will give you a lot of entertaining hours and high production values, etc.

    Now think of this:
    If that game came out illegally on the internet earlier, say two weeks earlier, would you download and play it? Most people would respond yes.

    And some of those would then also say that when the game hits the stores, they would still buy it, even though they have played it, perhaps completed the game. And that’s the problem. people just don’t buy it, because they already ‘own it’ and have played it. Why should they pay money for it now.

    So one of the biggest problems with pc game piracy is that most games arrive early on the internet.

    This generates a problem for those honest and legit people that in reality want to buy the game.

44. I just download the full game first just to make sure it’s worth the money. If it is i go buy it from the store, ( or in your case) online. If it’s not worth the money then i just don’t play it

45. Same reason as Bob(That and the fact that I’m broke right now).

46. 1 more thing any chance you makeing ports of your games for Zune HD?

47. Wow!! It’s nice to see an article like this. It convinces a lot of people to read it. Great Job.

48. I pirate those games because i dont think you will send it to uruguay and i realy want to play those games :(

49. I had a hard time finding this, finally found it, amazing!
    Thank you so much for it! It took me long time trough google, nice!

50. I would’ve bought them, but they don’t seem to sell in shops(at least not in NZ), and I don’t have access to a credit card. My whole family are against credit cards, because they apparently get people into real deep shit. Probably true, too.
    -Kiwi

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