That being said, what FSLabs did is of course inexcusable.
I tend to agree with you though, if you make a game that requires incredible attention to detail, hugely time intensive modelling work, and know that the target market is a tiny niche then maybe the product is just not viable.
I hear this argument a lot but can't see how it possibly be correct. Sure, not everyone who pirates would buy instead but at least some people would (it probably is a small percentage, but it is not zero).
One can imagine that the effect of those few is amplified for titles with high costs per unit.
There's also the "photoshop effect", where piracy helps ensure that the application remains the de-facto standard. Admittedly this is less applicable for games but it might help with 3rd party controller support, modding community etc...
I also believe that in the age of Steam specials, refunds, etc, people who pirate your game are not "lost sales". They are usually doing it because their appetite for games outstrips their budget, and they were highly unlikely to pay for it in the first place. But there is a significant chance may convert to a paying customer, or at least market the game by word of mouth.
I also regularly NOT buy games (but nowadays also don’t pirate them, in the past I might have) if they hnave intrusive DRM
If we've already start speculating, such part might be offset by people like me, who tend to buy games only they like. I often pirated new game just to see if it's worth buying. And I've recently bought most of games on GOG I had played as pirate versions when I was a poor teenager, even though I barely play computer games anymore.
Consider that for lack of a demo, or other scenario, people who pirate the game but end up purchasing it later. Sure, not all pirates would buy the game they've pirated, but at least some people would (it probably is a small percentage, but it is not zero).
>One can imagine that the effect of those few is amplified for titles with high costs per unit.
I would argue mainstream titles would make up that difference through volume of pirated copies though.
Piracy isn't a non-issue, but it's just not a dire threat either. Decades of video game piracy has demonstrated that.
Averages don't mean that the small development house with the high cost per unit product doesn't go out of business when a small percentage of those who would have bought their product pirate it instead.
I didn’t read it, but apparently that EU funded study found that piracy doesn’t harm sales. At least, that’s what the news reporting said about it.
None of this excuses them, but I do wonder about how the piracy data actually pans out for small, expensive shops like this.
Nonetheless, several plugin companies do seem to be able to nicely balance the ability to protect their software, while avoiding arduous copy protection methods. The method I think seems to work best is a combination "honey pot + time bomb" type method, where you provide an "easy" method for the pirates to "crack" and get on the usual sites, while also including a more difficult to reverse engineer that activates at some point later. (This kind of nudges those who kind of use piracy to "try and buy" but sometimes, er, need a bit of motivation to actually purchase the product. Even people who can afford the software and make a pretty decent living with the product have been caught with pirated plugins in interviews (https://torrentfreak.com/avicii-and-other-djs-produce-hits-u...).
You definitely don't need to include malware to protect your product.
The problem is nobody really knows that because it's nearly impossible to do a controlled experiment for this.
What happens in practice is that a company's first product is unprofitable. So they go back and make significant improvements, spend five times as much on marketing, and add anti-piracy code. Then the new version is more profitable.
The people who want the solution to have been the anti-piracy code credit it with the improvement, but there is no way to know if it was that or the product improvements, or the marketing, or more favorable market conditions at the time of the second launch, or the fact that the same marketing effort now produces 50% more customers because there is now an existing user base (including the pirates) who are easier to convert because they're familiar with the previous version, etc.
To actually know the answer you would need a statistically valid sample of product launches where the determination of whether anti-piracy measures are taken is made at random. But as far as I'm aware no one has ever attempted this, and the choice to use anti-piracy measures has to be randomized or you could trivially be measuring the wrong thing, e.g. larger products with more resources are both more successful and more often include anti-piracy measures but the causation is reversed.
So nobody really knows the answer and it's all just wild speculation.
The impression I get is that coding some degree of protection is worth it, as long as the protection does not impact the user experience that much (and judging from what I see, this is quite possible). There's no excuse however for emulating the warez guys and bundling malware with your software... there's smarter ways to protect products.
That still doesn't really tell you the answer though. The hypothesis is that pirates can be converted to users, but that doesn't necessarily happen immediately.
Suppose the product hits the piracy sites and 100,000 people download it. 5000 of them would have bought it, so you "lost" 5000 sales right away and you have your dip. But then over the course of the next year or two 7000 of those pirates realize they like the product and go on to buy it.
That's definitely a thing that happens, the question is what the real numbers are and whether they balance.
> I also know that there's one plugin developer (u-He) who has posted that the "time bomb" method he uses does drive sales the instant those "time bombs" go off.
Same problem here. Obviously you're going to get an uptick when the timer expires. But suppose you timebomb 100,000 people and as a result you immediately get 4000 sales, but then 96,000 people stop using your software. If 7000 of the 100,000 would eventually have paid you anyway, now you've just kicked 3000 of them out.
I don't think the number is zero, as seen in this thread. But overall I don't think humans are that altruistic. :) This is probably particularly true for user-oriented niche software (like the software in question, premium flight sim DLC). Some software in the past (eg Adobe Photoshop) that was marketed primarily for businesses possibly benefited a little from consumers pirating it, but again, that "benefit" is hard to quantify as well.
The reason I like the "time bomb" approach though is that I think it gives a bit of a "push" to anyone who is actually using your product extensively. If they aren't using your product enough to care to pay for it, it's probably not a big deal if they stop using your software. If the "time bomb" is at a reasonable period, I have serious doubts that they'd suddenly decide n months later (with no time bomb) that it's all of a sudden worth it to pay for software the have for "free".
I don't think niche products unfortunately can do what mass market products are doing these days... which is switching business models towards ones where piracy can be controlled a bit more or is less of a big deal. (Freemium / DLC, cloud-based, subscription-based, etc.) In fact the only alternative model I see for niche is the Kickstarter one where the consumers themselves front the initial business costs (which can work out for consumers sometimes, and not work out other times).
I've seen numerous people who could absolutely afford games, stealing them. Hacked Xbox's filled with every game imaginable. These people would have bought some of these if they couldn't steal them, without a doubt. Would they have just gave up video games? No way. So, it absolutely displaces sales.
Before CD-RW lots of games were available on floppy disk, which were simple to copy. And even without a CD-RW you could copy the data off the CD. Perhaps you don't know about no-CD cracks? They were everywhere. There were plenty of ways to pirate CD based games without a CD-RW. It might seem difficult or complicated compared to 2018, but only if you didn't live through those times. At the time that's the way it was, and it was relatively easy.
>Everyone had their own copy of an album. A select few would make cassette tape copies, but you were never satisfied with that.
Forgive me, I never say this, but it's appropriate in this case: LOL
-- Do you have any evidence, data, metrics of any kind to support that?