Pirated Games – Deal With It

One of my favourite indie authors is Cliff Harris, otherwise known as Cliffski. His background includes stints doing game development at Elixir and then Lionhead. Upon leaving Peter Molyneux’s outfit he moved into indie games, starting out with niche title Democracy, following up Kudos, Rock Legend, and Democracy 2 (amongst others), all available from the Positech website.

Cliff’s rants are not for the faint-hearted, in particular when it comes to the topic of piracy. However, he did a very brave thing and confronted the problem head on, putting out a public question on his blog asking why people pirate games.

In this post he talks about what happened, the mass of responses that he got, and how he is reacting to them. I urge you to go and read his page directly and I’d also like to add a few comments of my own.

Piracy is a difficult subject – it ranks up there with religion on the Internet hateometer. However, it isn’t a simple topic, unless you’re Bruce Everiss anyway (link to be followed with care). I’ve always had a live and let live view of software piracy where software is being given away, but not where it’s being sold.

In the case of freebies, I’d wager that 90% of the people would never have bought the software anyway, possibly even more other than in exceptional cases. This contrasts with someone selling software that someone else made, yet not paying them for it. That pisses me off. Why should some eBay seller, market trader or criminal outfit sell my game and pocket all the cash?

So, on to Cliffski’s post. To be honest, little I read was a surprise. Out of the many responses he received, the most common reasons given for using pirate games were:

• Price of games
• Game Quality
• DRM
• Ease of obtaining vs going to shops
• Political reasons
• Taking advantage of free stuff

The latter two I’ll give short shrift too. I’d wager almost anyone giving political reasons is too young or stupid to understand that people need to make money from their work. And as to anyone taking advantage of free stuff, that’s just human nature and, to be brutally honest, all of us do this at some point in our lives – be it music, photocopying, or games.

Let’s look at the other four topics in more detail.

Firstly, the price of games. It’s important to understand that there will always be consumers who complain about price. Whoever picks the price point of any goods or services is making their decision based on what they expect their audience’s opportunity cost to be of buying the game. This is an economic term which basically says, “If the price of A is this and the price of B is that, I’ll pick product B. However, if the price of A is just a bit less, then I’ll buy product A instead. Product B sucked anyway.”

What this means is that you can’t keep everyone happy. Some people will buy at $20, some at $25, and some only at $5. Consumers have a lot of choice when it comes to spending money, and they will value your game as they see fit. Games are priced too high only if revenue is not being maximised at that price point, and the maximal revenue situation is a lower price point. Selling more copies doesn’t mean making more money.

My bet is that if indie and casual games were reduced by $5 across the board, revenues would either remain broadly static or even drop. I’m basing this on the fact that $20 for the entertainment hours that a game provides is not a lot of money, and also hasn’t changed significantly in years. This contrasts significantly with other forms of entertainment, particularly cinema and sport. That said, there are ways to make lower price points work, such as through subscription schemes and 2-for-1 deals.

Of course, this is just my opinion.

Actually it isn’t, because casual game companies have done endless price point testing and as a pure individual download game price point, $20 maximises revenue. What they are finding out is that some people won’t pay that but you can earn money from advertising to them, selling in-game items, subscriptions, and so on.

Summing up, the price of games will always be an issue, so the best solution is to go for the standard price for the class of game you’re working on, perhaps with some allowance for your profile and target audience. You can play clever on the price with bargain weeks, package deals, and lowering the price after a period of time or when the sequel comes out. There is something to be learned here, but I’d say it’s also something that should be in the back of any indie developer’s mind if they are selling direct to their audience.

The next issue is one of game quality. In my view this is something of an excuse because these are the days where demos rule. Not all demos are created equal of course, but most these days show enough of the game for users’ to know what they’re getting. The fact is that many people still buy on hype, or have undue expectations. In both of these cases a longer demo is simply going to lower sales, and is not going to solve the piracy issue.

No one goes out to write a shoddy game, but it happens for many reasons. We have released a few real dogs in our time. Vin Diesel hated one of our games but of course he had no clue how it went down or that we weren’t allowed to feature him in it per se.  Still, I’m so proud to be have been slated by such an esteemed actor.

Vin, I’m waiting for a phone call so we can discuss why “your” game was crap but since it’s been six years’an all I don’t expect much. Right, now I’ve got that rant out of the way…

Games are pirated whether good or bad. In fact, a very good game is generally pirated in massive numbers and poor games much less so. I’ve never seen any evidence to link demo quality to piracy numbers. What does this tell us? Well, probably that people using game quality as an excuse to pirate games are not people you’re going to sell to easily. All you can do is try to write a good game and gain a good reputation, something all developers should be doing anyway.

So we move on to the problem of DRM. There is no doubt in my mind that bad DRM experiences have cost sales on the PC platform, certainly for games at retail. Many of us have had nightmares with DRMs which are cack-handed – EA’s handling of the Spore editor was tedious to say the least and definitely puts me off buying EA PC products. When nasty DRMs make their way to download games as well, the people responsible should be hung, drawn, quartered, shot, slapped, tickled silly, then put out of their misery.

There is no excuse for painful DRM – it just kills your customers. This is doubled when your DRM can then go out of date, and I include DRMs which insist on you being connected to the Internet (PC or console) or specifically limit you to one machine. It’s your game, you should be able to do with it as you wish using your own registration code.

Cliff has decided to remove DRM completely from his games for the time being – a brave decision which I applaud. We did the same for our first ever game back on the Amiga. I was one of many school yard file swappers in the 8 and 16-bit days and I cut my teeth on game hacking, so I know what a waste of time heavy protection is.

Still, these days I would use a simple system of on-line registration and then leave people to it. All I want to do is stop the act of copying to USB stick or simple file sharing. Anyone who is prepared to go beyond that is welcome to play my game – the more the merrier – but I’m not going to waste time and effort chasing them down for money when I’d rather be doing real work. Besides, I hope that they’ll come looking to buy one of my games in the future, perhaps when they do have money.

Finally we come to the final excuse, “it’s easy”. To be fair, it’s really good to go on-line and download what you want, legally or otherwise. I much prefer downloading to traipsing down to a store who’ll probably sell me a scratched second hand CD at near full price and probably without telling me. Well, except for my early Steam experiences with Half-Life 2. The less said the better. Teeth. Gnashing. Lots of.

Cliff’s respondents stated that Steam was a good system and implied that users seemed to prefer it to direct downloads. I wonder if that’s because once you have a game on Steam, you can effectively take it anywhere – it’s attached to your account. While the Steam software has a somewhat painful history, this is one aspect of it I do really like. I tend to have multiple installs across my machines.

As Cliff himself points out, if only it were easy for all indies to get on Steam. The iTunes model anyone?

In summary, Cliff has done a very brave thing and I believe that many people can and should learn from his findings. The most useful thing for me was to see the apparent love for Steam. It really, really is a waste of your time, as an indie developer, chasing down pirates. In pure financial terms, you’ll earn more developing your next game than chasing dodgy copies, it’s that simple. And it’s more fun.

This will sound harsh but I’ve always said the same thing:

PIRACY HAPPENS

DEAL WITH IT

If you think dealing with it is to constantly chase pirated copies and moaning about it, stop! Turn around and – in the immortal words of Why Don’t You – go out and do something else less boring instead.