Comment by Aurornis
6 hours ago
I’ve followed a couple indie game developers over the years who started with lofty ideas about selling DRM free games. As soon as they add an online component of any type (e.g. a leaderboard for ranks or high scores) they’re blown away by the number of connections coming in because the number of people playing the game is so much higher than they would have expected from sales alone.
If you’re the kind of person who actually pays for games even when you could pirate them with a few minutes of searching, you probably don’t fully understand how widespread the problem is. Many people will simply not pay for something if there is an option to get it without paying by default.
The only developers who can afford to do DRM-free games are those with such a high volume of users that they’ve passed their target threshold for income and are okay with leaving money on the table. For every 1 person you see claiming they will only spend money on DRM-free games in comments on HN or Reddit, there are probably 100 to 1000 more who don’t care about the DRM status of the game, they just want to buy it and play for a while.
The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option? How many of the people who would try a new game by downloading a pirated copy will actually continue playing it, instead of just trying a bunch of different games, in which case they would prob have refunded anyway? The mere fact that X number of pirated copies are downloaded and executed does not mean that X number of sales would have happened.
Moreover, for offline games, there have always been ways to crack DRMs. I do not have data on that, but I have seen pirated versions of all these DRMed games and I doubt that DRM on its own actually inhibits pirating. Let's not forget that DRM precedes steam, and before it was usually about having to put the cd in order to launch the game. I have used cracks for games I actually owned because I did not want to use the cd, and often a damaged cd could mean being unable to play the game otherwise, even if all assets and files were installed on the hard drive. When a new kind of DRM came out, the only question was how long it would take for it to get cracked.
Pirating software comes with its own price/risks. The people who have less to lose are probably the ones that do not have the money to spend on all these games in the first place. In general going from number of pirated downloads to sales lost is far from straightforward. There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.
> The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option?
I don’t think this is as much of a question outside of social media attempts to justify piracy. If only 10% of the pirates would buy the game, that’s still lost sales.
The social media justifications for piracy always assume that the only reason anyone pirates a game or video is because they either couldn’t afford it or wouldn’t buy it anyway. The same arguments were made when Netflix clamped down on account sharing: Everywhere you would find predictions that Netflix would suffer as a result, people would start cancelling their accounts, and they’d regret the decision. Yet the opposite happened and they had more users sign up.
> There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.
I agree with this statement, but in the opposite direction. The misunderstanding is the mental gymnastics that go into painting all pirates as all poor individuals who have no money and therefore no choice but to pirate games. The reality is that piracy is just a choice of convenience and taking something for free because they can. People from all tax brackets do it.
I do not care about the moral judgements. If somebody cannot afford the game or doesn't want to pay, then they will most probably not buy it, whether they pirate or not. Sure, there is always money to squeeze, but 10% sounds overestimation, esp when the squeezing comes essentially to the expense and inconvenience of the people who actually buy the thing. Which is solely what I care about here. In any case, DRMs never stopped games from being pirated.
Pirating is far from a "choice of convenience" nowadays. Getting a pirated copy is much more complicated than getting it in gog, you do not get updates (I assume you have to search and install it again), and involves serious risk installing malware. Especially with how bug-ridden new games tend to be nowadays, I cannot imagine getting a newly released game without some form of auto-updater.
A lot of successful DRM-free games exist, and games that have DRM are still pirated just fine. Pirating existed in games since ever. It is not for the lack of DRM that a game may fail to sell.
I've got gamer friends who live in countries / situations where ten dollars is an exorbitant amount of money. Buying a new release at 60+ just isn't a realistic option for most of the population.
So what should they do? Go back and change where they were born? Abstain from participating in modern culture? Or reach out and take the thing which is free?
Your friends can afford the type of gaming PC necessary to play those $60 titles, but they can’t afford to buy any games for said PC?
And they can’t even wait for them to go on sale? They need to buy them right at launch, at their full $60 price?
> Or reach out and take the thing which is free?
It’s not free. It has a price.
You can play most games to some degree on hardware that's 10+ years old, but yes, hardware is usually something they've scrounged and saved for.
And do tell, what is the practical price of pirating a game you couldn't afford anyway? Risk of a virus? Some abstract cost to society itself? Nobody cares.