So I came by this little article in my travels. It made me smile. This fits right in with an earlier post about creative ways that game development companies have come up with to screw over pirates. Of course this is a sort of in your face this is what you are doing to us. A bit of what goes around comes around.
We will all admit that piracy has now become so common place that if a person doesn't pirate stuff then they at least know someone who does and where to get it. I recall one company I worked for where on night shift it unusual for there not to be a large hard drive of pirated content being passed around. And by large we are talking in excess of 100 gig. Everyone else brought in their own large hard drive and the work computers soon became content copying machines. No one even thought about it. Occasionally there was the odd joke about the sheer amount of piracy that went on in the company but no one even blinked. Even management was in on the act, they would actively look for people with the best content.
There was no need to download it yourself in this situation, the chances are someone else had done so already and was willing to share. What better way to earn brownie points with management than to be the source of their favorite TV shows, movies, music and so on.
I believe now days you would be hard pressed to find any person who hasn't pirated at least one item in their life time. Copying a CD for instance. The grandparents who didn't know any better when their grand kids put something on their computer. The kids who pass around copies of their fave songs. Its everywhere.
What this article attempts to highlight is that given the chance people would rather steal something that pay for it. Fair enough, given half the chance we would rather keep our few dollars in our pockets and get it for free. And who wouldn't rather get something for free. A lot of people have to work an hour to pay $8 USD for the game mentioned in the article. A lot of people in the US however would probably have to work a couple hours to make that money. When you think like that then you realize why people would be reluctant to shell out for a game that's only a couple dollars in value.
The game industry however is like a lot of media industries. Every country has its own rules. So what flies in America might not in Britain for instance. So if you want to view this release in its original format (The latest iteration of the Mortal Kombat series comes to mind here) you don't have much choice but to pirate if you live in a country that has a stricter system in place for media. For instance a number of games that were popular (Grand Theft Auto 4, Mortal Kombat) but initially banned in Australia until they were censored because of their graphic content were available through places like eBay or other online stores based in other countries. If you ordered from one of these locations then you could get thrown in jail in Australia for importing explicit banned content. However if you illegally download it then the chances they will catch you out are slim to none.
These are a couple of the motivating factors for piracy. There are many more. Being cheap right up there. But if you consider the second motivation, the one where the pirate doesn't want a censored version, then there will always be a market for pirated media because lets face it, not everyone wants the sanitized church version and they would like to be able to make up their own minds about things. Its the ones who don't actually play the games but blab on about kids getting access to this stuff that sanitize things. See a previous post here for a rant on that one.
However I do have sympathy for the indie developer. Games, unlike other media content, don't really have any other streams of income other than charging players for a copy. Music has their tours, movies have movie theaters TV shows have their adverts. Games don't really have a lot else. In fact a lot of software doesn't. Unless they go the path of the whole social pay per play route. Then I just walk away from the game. If I'm gonna give my hard earned money for a game at least make it something worth my time and not the time wasters that games like Farmville are. Farmville is just to fill in the void that exists between the cradle and grave and I frankly have better things to do with my time. (I was unemployed once and sunk a great deal of time into this game and have now seen the light. Luckily I was too broke to sink any money into it)
So in the case of games I would actually be on the side of the developer. Especially an indie developer. Indie game houses are the ones that give us the best and freshest ideas. They don't have the stock standard formulas in place, the can experiment and play and give us a game that is worthy of our time. They deserve our support and our $8. They are the ones that will save us from the void of pay per play Farmville like games and save our Facebook news feeds from endless spam about how such and such got a new cow for their farm.
In the case of a game with DRM ... that is just crying out to be hacked to teach anyone with online DRM not to mess with their player base.
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