Anonymous Game Creator 2 wrote:I still think that despite your opinion of whether piracy is wrong or right, the pirates themselves don't deserve your ire.
Why not? Money isn't the only factor involved here. All pirates and freeloaders, regardless of their motivation, are the very types of people who collectively sap away at motivation until there's none left. I wouldn't go up and shake hands with a guy who broke my arm. So why should I be expected to do the same for someone who's causing mental anguish? Pirates really don't like to take individual responsibility, yet collectively they have a massive detrimental effect. When these people take advantage of goodwill rather than supporting us, it only makes us question why on earth we should continue showing goodwill to a cause if people are just going to take advantage of it.
The "rule of reciprocity" is a widely accepted ethic of mankind; when you do good things for others, you expect to receive a little bit of goodwill back in return. Considering that, what pirates do is tantamount to a slap in the face. And regardless of their reasons for pirating, I believe they DO need to know that it's not appreciated. Sometimes a voice from the other side is all that's needed to show "casual" pirates that there are two sides to the story. For example, already several people in this thread have mentioned that they might have considered pirating Al Emmo prior to reading the discussions here. And it seems the talk that's taking place here has made them reconsider doing something that they may not have given a second thought to before.
Half the battle is in educating people about how piracy really affects people both financially and mentally. Instead of thinking it as copying a meaningless bunch of 1's and 0's next time you download something; try thinking about exactly what you're stealing, who you're stealing it from, and what kind of effect it might have on the company as a whole if everyone did what you're doing.
I have to agree entirely.
People who think that piracy is somehow a minor problem don't really understand the catastrophic effect it has on game designers. Small publishing houses, routinely, are forced out of business because their game sales are severely eroded by piracy. Take the example of IronLore, the designers of Titan Quest (a really good, high quality hack-and-slash game). They basically were shut down and put out of business because their game sales weren't as high as their publisher, THQ, wanted them to be. So they lost their contracts, and over 30 people were put out of a job. It was disasterous -- and I, personally, knew many of the figures affected by this catastrophe.
Michael Fitch, an exec at THQ,
made it very clear on a vent/rant that Piracy was entirely to blame.. Saying that around 75-80% of all potential sales were, in fact, pirated distributions, Fitch brings up a good point: even if a small number of those pirates had bought the game, he has no doubt that they wouldn't have had to fire IronLore, and could have kept them in business and given them shots at making more great games. But, in turn, what happened was that these game developers went out of business -- and in the future, small game developers aren't going to find large publishers, like THQ, willing to take a chance on their products. Why should they? All any publisher wants is to sell a successful product, and that means catering to the largest possible audience. Let's hear Michael in his own words:
Michael Fitch wrote:Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.
Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.
Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact.
Piracy kills niches, because it never lets them thrive. Is it any surprise that people don't make Adventure Games anymore? Not at all. Piracy is probably largely to blame for the decline of the adventure game PC market, and the prominence of hack-and-slash-ish console-based "adventure-action" games, like Final Fantasy. The next time you wonder why more developers aren't making massively multiplayer online games, and why everyone is churning out mediocre "World of Warcraft clones" to try and capitalize on profit, just think back to this single, cold, hard, fact:
Pirates gave them no choice.