Piracy Revisited

FingerKicks, an app kidnapped by pirates.

Once again we can read a sad tale about piracy, this time about a soccer app for iOS called FingerKicks. The story is worth reading, about how a dedicated developer create a soccer game for iOS and sat back to await fame and fortune. Sadly, they were only selling a couple of hundred copies. But then they saw on Apple's GameCenter that 5.000 people were playing their game! Joyous celebration... until they realize that only 160 of those were paid copies.

The rest were due to their app being featured on a pirate web site. What really honks them off is that Apple's Game Center made no distinction between legitimate copes and pirated copies. Not surprisingly, these developers are annoyed that Apple doesn't make that distinction. I agree; Apple should restrict Game Center to legitimate owners of legitimate copies.

But on the whole piracy issue, I'm afraid I don't fall neatly into a category, either the yo-ho-ho crowd or the he-man pirate-hatin' publishers. I think piracy shouldn't be promoted, and people should be buying copies if they want to play a game. But I also don't think that the enormous claims of lost revenue that you see from publishers and publisher associations are legitimate. I think if there were some way to keep games from being pirated that was 100% foolproof, you wouldn't see a game's sales increase by 100% of the number currently being pirated. The true number would be somewhere between 0% and 100%, and I think it would be much closer to 0% than 100% of the pirated copies.

Lots of pirates grab copies of things because they can. Others because they can't pay for a legitimate copy; they're too poor. Neither of those would pay for a copy if that was the only way to get it.

Reality is that efforts to stop piracy never seem to work. Many of these efforts make it more difficult or annoying to be a legitimate owner, while not stopping the determined pirate. There's a constant arms race going on between Digital Rights Management (DRM) and piracy, and the pirates always seem to be a step or two ahead.

I think it's a waste of time trying to stay ahead of the pirates. Sure, stop the commercial copiers if you can; the factories churning out DVDs and the like. But the casual copying is nearly impossible to stop.

I think your time is better spent figuring out how to use piracy to your advantage. It's a viral marketing tool, if you can figure out how to monetize it. Additional digital content sales are a good way to do this. If you're running a server that players compete on, you should be able to restrict that to legitimate owners.

I think the best way to deal with piracy is a free-to-play game where you make money on the digital goods and just give the game away. Then piracy is just a marketing tool for you; look at the League of Legends guys. They're making a lot of money with a game they give away for free. I'm sure they don't spend any time worrying about piracy.

Yes, encourage people to pay for your software as much as you can. But don't waste time in rage or ineffective measures to keep people from grabbing copies of your game, if those would never really be legitimate sales anyway. Look for ways to reward the people who give you money, and then the freeloaders will become unpaid marketing assistance for you. Which is really the best revenge of all.

They Just Don't Get It

Typical software pirate?

Sometimes you just have to shake your head in wonderment at how people can refuse to see the obvious. Here's a good example: Lionhead's Mike West, the lead combat designer for Fable III, complains about secondhand sales being worse than piracy. Well, he's complaining about both, really. I can understand that if you think pirates are taking away your game sales you'd be mad. But no one really know how many actual sales are lost to piracy. Sure, sure, there are estimates... from organizations with a vested interest in estimating high. It's certainly not clear that a pirated copy would have been a purchase if piracy was impossible. Certainly, some percentage of pirates would buy a game if they had no other choice... but is that percentage really high? No on knows for sure.

Complaining about secondhand sales, well, that's somewhat different. First of all, secondhand sales are perfectly legal. And in this industry you have to be careful about saying too many nasty things about secondhand sales of games, because pretty much all the major retailers sell secondhand games right along with the new ones. You really don't want to piss off your major retailers that give you the majority of your revenue, do you?

Ultimately, though, developers can do very little about either piracy or secondhand sales. You have to figure out how to deal with those realities. Sitting around complaining about them does not help your profits one little bit. Counting up money you might have made if someone had bought a new copy of your game instead of a secondhand one is a waste of time. Developers need to embrace the realities of the marketplace and figure out how to use them to their advantage.

Piracy means that people are learning about your games and hopefully enjoy playing them... which is then an opportunity to sell them something. Perhaps DLC, perhaps a special edition with the cool figures they can't get anywhere else. If you've got a regular service going on, piracy is not a problem... Blizzard doesn't worry about it. Sell them physical goods that can't be pirated. Have them sign up for access to special forums, but only if they are registered users. Does Zynga worry about piracy? No, they don't. They spend their time refining their games to appeal more to their players, and coax them into buying items.

Secondhand sales have become a significant part of the business because prices are too high for the value contained in most games. Which is why customers are flocking to social games and mobile games, and free-to-play MMO's... they can try things out, and spend money where they see it's worth it to them. The mobile game model of free or low-cost is going to be in the family rooms soon, so developers had better learn how to make money from it. The developers who spend their time complaining instead of designing are the ones who will fail in the new game industry landscape.

Piracy Gets Real

Piracy has long been a favorite bogeyman for electronic game publishers (and the music industry, too). THe tough part has been actually quantifying the size of the piracy problem.  Ars Technica has a post on the government's attempts to really look at what's known about piracy. It seems that when you look at it more closely, the claims about economic impact are impossible to quantify, and the numbers that have been bandied about before aren't to be trusted.

Really, I've found the whole piracy debate (which has since become important in traditional publishing and paper gaming as well, with the spread of e-books) to be missing the point. To me, the salient facts are that (1) piracy exists and (2) there is no way to prevent it, technologically. (Despite many attempts.) That being the case, I think publishers have two choices for constructive action about piracy. They can (1) Ignore it, or (2) Use it. How do you use it? I think we're seeing that with the free-to-play model, for one example. If the game is copied and distributed freely, that helps the publisher make money. Another variation is the free version that you can upgrade to a paid version. Give the customers a taste so they know what the product is, thus satisfying curiosity that might otherwise lead to piracy.

Bottom line: Make piracy work for you.