Gabe Newell: Game "Piracy Isn't About Price"
games.ign.com
games.ign.com
Useful software for < $50 on the App store? Buy.
Useful iPhone app for < $10? buy
Useful software I use rarely for $800 (Adobe CS5.5)? Pirate
Drm free music album for $10? buy
Movie rental I can't find on iTunes for < $5? Pirate
TV Show season on-demand without commercials? Netflix, or Pirate
I don't justify that behavior, but I've noticed I buy when it's easier, and I pirate when it's easier.
I sort of feel the same way about the MPAA, but they were less obnoxious in the late 1990s/early 2000s (mainly due to technology not allowing video piracy to the same extent).
I also think all Disney content should be pirated as much as possible, due to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.
If you're not, you're just trying to justify your intellectual theft.
Very few credited contributors are going to have points on the gross of a Disney movie, especially not the animated ones.
. . . but yeah, a gaffer doesn't get royalties for the move on whose set he worked. You seem remarkably naive about how this stuff works.
Still . . . if people are going to acquire it anyway, it's better if they're not giving money to Disney eighty years after it was created thanks to copyright extension robbing us of our culture.
People pirate because they're cheap, the amount of people that pirate because of DRM is tiny and anyone who takes part in these online communities (gaming.reddit for example) will be part of the small small group that pirates for "moral" reasons.
2DBoy, creators of World of Goo, a game that had 0 DRM and was available, as Gabe says, to EVERYONE without any conceivable inconvenience (beyond the need to purchase) reported over 90% piracy rate: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
Steam have very high purchase rates because it's a convenience, most definitely, Steam is a fantastic convenience and encourages me to purchase some games much like it encourages others, what it does not do is encourage pirates to purchase instead. It seems most people that share Gabes view are just hoping if they say it's true enough then bad DRM will go away...
Minecraft for example has huge piracy rates, yet it's available to anyone (same purchase requirements as Steam) and there's no real DRM, there's no conceivable justification for pirating Minecraft beyond "I don't want to pay" yet people do it...
The Wolfire team suggests (http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy) that a better metric would be proportion of the gaming audience that pirates. For example, if 5% of the gaming audience pirates, but pirates download 50x as many games on average as legitimate users purchase, then it'll look like >70% of users pirate games, when the real number is 5%.
Or even never play them. There are a small[1] of people who collect all ROMs of some (or all) console systems, with no intention of playing them.
[1] I agree that in terms of overall piracy this is a tiny number.
Those who pirate for other reasons, while they may be a small proportion of pirates overall, can be a large proportion of potential customers. These are the people who don't buy your game because the pirated version actually works better. If you can provide a better experience through legitimate channels then you can get their money.
In short: piracy really is two separate and mostly unrelated phenomena when it comes to this question. People who pirate purely to avoid paying don't care about this stuff, but neither should software publishers care about them.
The bundle is (was?) accessible from http://sos.gd/bundle/
The transaction takes place in 3 steps:
1. download
2. purchase - this step is optional
3. play
unspecified 4: purchase if you haven't, still optional
4207 downloads and $276 earnings within a single day. 6.5% of the downloaders purchased the product, regardless of whether they liked what they saw.
The cry of this age is 'me, me ,me.'
This depends on the DRM and the software. Software which has high international demand but is region-locked to specific countries will be pirated because of the DRM at rates that sometimes dwarf "freeloading" pirates.
I agree that Gabe is pretty much just pandering, but in the end, DRM doesn't really help piracy rates. Maybe for an immediate period after release, which is desirable in some circumstances as a matter of convenience, but that's it.
The real question is whether the piracy rate is indicative of the loss of sales due to piracy, which is clearly contested in some situations. Would Mojang profit more if Minecraft piracy was -- hypothetically speaking -- impossible? Probably a little bit, but a lot of users will look for something else to pirate, not roll their eyes and say "ugh well I guess I have to buy it now".
I suspect it's true in the NH bubble, but I strongly suspect that very few pirates then go on to buy the product.
When I've wanted to give some money to the author of a book I've downloaded it's really easy; I just go to a store (or Amazon, where buying stuff is really easy) and buy any book from that author on the same publisher. But for digital stuff it's often harder, with annoying websites, weird cart checkout systems, a stupid bit of credit card security theatre thrown in, some spammy email checkboxes to remember to click (or not click), etc. And this is when you want to buy it - that's too much friction for most pirates.
I'd love to see some decent research.
I think that in other conditions where pirates never go on to buy something they've pirated (gawd, "pirate" is such an awful term for this -- there are no eyepatches and cutlasses involved), they just wouldn't fucking buy it in the first place if they couldn't pirate it.
> But for digital stuff it's often harder, with annoying websites, weird cart checkout systems, a stupid bit of credit card security theatre thrown in, some spammy email checkboxes to remember to click (or not click), etc. And this is when you want to buy it - that's too much friction for most pirates.
That's a bad business model, and in no way contradicts the notion that people who pirate would like to buy later a lot of the time. Reduce the friction in the purchase process, and you'll make more money. It's almost tautological. Keeping the hurdles to purchase high then blaming the results on piracy is completely asinine.
But anyways, I generally think it's pretty nonsensical to imply that piracy is a question of a maturity. Young people might simply have other reasons to pirate.
The reason I don't is that I have seen how easy it is to trigger these kinds of errors by mistake (or from my personal philosophy of assuming malicious intent until proven wrong) and how beneficial it is to the creators of the programs.
"First is Monthy Python. A while back, the Monty Python team made a shedload of their sketches freely available in high quality on their own YouTube channel, hoping that as a result people would buy more DVDs. According to this widely linked story, the experiment has been not just successful, but wildly, crazily so. They’re reporting that sales of Monty Python DVDs at Amazon have increased by 23,000% — that’s 231-fold — since they made all that material available on Youtube."
(Neil Gaiman on books he published for free) "Then I started to notice that two things that seemed much more significant. One of which was that places where I was being pirated -- particularly Russia (where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading it out into the world) I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. And then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies.
"That's really all this is. It's people lending books. And you can't look on that as a lost sale.... What you're actually doing is advertising. You're reaching more people. You're raising awareness. And understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web was doing is allowing people to hear things, allowing people to read things, allowing people to see things they might never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that's an incredibly good thing." "
Source: http://reprog.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/everyone-wins/
Minecraft may of had huge piracy rates, but it still made a huge profit. You won't ever get rid of piracy but you can still make a nice profit.
r/gaming has about 850,000 users on it as well. The communities that pirate because of DRM may not be huge, but they are of a decent size.
How many people do you think have a credit card? I know a LOT of pirates (here in South America), and most of them fit this profile:
- very low or no income - no credit card - lots of spare time - cheap internet connection
Would they pirate World of Goo? Yes. Have they paid for a game? Rarely, they buy CDs or DVDs or game cartridges on cash, but the originals are outrageously expensive for the average consumer here.
Is it an excuse? No. Would they start purchasing once they archieve a decent income level? It's hard to say, but I'm inclined to think they won't.
In my case, I now have a decent income level, but I don't have any spare time to speak of, so I don't purchase videogames (anything past a U$ 2 app on Android).
Even worse is when the DRM software tells me to uninstall my virtual disc drive which isn't related to the game at all. I use it to make a copy and store it on my HDD so I can use the image rather than the physical thing.
Of course, sooner or later all the important code will be on the server (again!) and we'll chuckle that this was ever an issue.
The money is immaterial, it's the feeling that I'm being taken advantage of.
Admittedly the few times I did pirate Steam games it was about price (as in I didn't want to commit the money while not knowing anything about the game, some really great titles like Super Meat Boy are a bit more expensive than you'd expect, but are absolutely worth it if you happen to like the genre). Steam is almost infinitely preferable to a pirate torrent, lacking only a sane download manager. But otherwise I consistently get faster downloads with less annoyance and I get nice integration with multiplayer and my friends' gaming.
* The content isn't available in the US yet. Being a big fan of British television, this is probably the biggest reason.
* I want to watch a TV show and the full series isn't available instantly on Netflix or Hulu. I don't bother with the hassle of mailing back DVDs anymore. I suspect this is really a ploy to get me to buy the DVDs. Sorry, but I'm not buying all 7 seasons of House for $15-$30 a season.
* My options are: 1) Pay and get something later, or 2) don't pay and get something now. This is why I don't buy shows off of iTunes.
Ultimately, I doubt my motivations are much different from most people who pirate that would otherwise be paying customers.
For example a consumer may be downloading the content for the following reasons:
- Trialing
- Replacing lost/broken content
- Replacing content that is outdated VHS/DVD/Bluray/HDDVD/Cassette/Vinyl, you name it.
- Countering simulated geographical boundaries
- Getting around censorship or getting the uncensored version
- The media is simply not available (e.g. special editions, or event recordings.)
- Dealing with maligned DRM schemes
- Updating to a version of the software which isn't buggy as hell (adobe)
- Acquiring media that is no longer in distribution/supported by the author.
- Dongle keys are either incompatible, broken or taking up a free port on the computer.
In many examples here the consumer was never likely to buy or repurchase content, it's no money lost, and often saving the company needless harassment.
Here are reasons why people circumvent paying:
- They don't have the money to begin with
- The price is unreasonably high (microsoft learned this with office, when will adobe follow)
- The content is DRM'd, or locked to a particular system. (e.g. streaming services.)
- There is no way to purchase the content legally (regional or otherwise)
- The company has a monopoly on a file format or operating system. (many feel if they're forced to use something they shouldn't have to pay for it too.)
- The media does not present a value offering (differing to a high price, i.e. software that is known to be buggy, or is purposefully single use.)
- Exploitation of consumers (buy our product and we'll spam you forever or require your software to check with our servers every time you use it.)
As you can see there is a gamut of reasons why people turn to non-official channels, and the motive is not always greed or theft, often these are replacing other legal methods of acquiring the media.
What Steam, the iTunes music/app/book stores, amazon and Google(heck even allofmp3 knew it) have all realised is that removing artificial limitations on digital content allows consumers to buy digital content to satisfy their various requirements before even looking up a torrents site. It's not only easier and less risky (malware/getting sued), but it's usually faster, supported and reasonable.
- Getting a version of the product in the local language. (e.g. software, for which there's no official translation, and which is unofficially localized by "pirates").
Similarly,
- Getting a version of the product in the original language. (e.g. Hollywood movies in English).
but this is already covered by "the media is not available".
I've run across quite a few people who actually buy a DRM-infested copy of something to "pay the creator" (even though the creator often gets screwed by the people actually collecting revenues), then "pirate" a DRM-free copy that isn't a hassle to use (listen, watch, play, whatever). I frankly wish they'd skip the purchasing step in most cases, because the behavior of the vendors is often so egregiously bad they should probably be locked up for racketeering rather than paid real money.
My own reaction to horribly restrictive business models, though, is to simply not engage them, to the extent I'm motivated to do anything at all. I'd rather not even advertise for restricted content by telling people I have a copy and like it, regardless of where I got it.
I think there's an impedance mismatch between this guy's definition of success and that of a lot of other people engaged in business models involving materials covered by copyright. Most of the idiots in these industries think of "success" as "having the most" -- having more of the market than a competitor, having money from as many people as possible, and so on. They are so focused on a comparative measure of "success" that they are probably more willing to operate at a loss than to let anyone "get away" with enjoying what they make without paying for it or to let a competitor operate at less of a loss than them. Gabe Newell, on the other hand, seems to measure success by making enough profits for everyone to benefit, getting people involved in the industry as customers, and having a sustainable business model that is not dependent on the forebearance of the vagaries of momentary changes in circumstance. His company is working on developing a business model that is largely independent of copyright, and is enjoying great success as a result; everyone else is trying to use copyright to punish anyone who isn't buying a product through official channels, including those who are buying a different product instead, and some people who are buying the product, because to them "success" is more about who's prevented from doing what they don't want than about providing value in exchange for a comfortable level of revenue generation that isn't likely to dry up tomorrow.
I think saying that piracy isn't about price is overly simplistic. Computer performance is about CPU and RAM and efficient code and storage media seek time and a lot of other things, but in a given circumstance seek time might e the bottleneck; I think that in this case what he has identified is the fact that service and delivered value constitute the bottleneck that creates a piracy "problem" for vendors, and that price is not the major bottleneck in most cases. That's different from price not being "the problem", but it's close enough for government (or journalistic) work.
Others, I feel, pirate from a sense of entitlement. You do not have to look very far to find people complaining about people making profits while talking on their iPhone while carrying a laptop. Where "World of Goo" is concerned some Linux users think all software should be free.
Side note: Notice how most media outlets will tell you pirated software is always full of viruses? In my experience most distributors/hacker groups take great offense to saying their releases contain viri.
I have read things like that a few times recently. Since when is Russia considered a part of Europe? They have this small Exclave in Europe, but really the bulk of Russia is Asian. I mean, you could probably hide Europe somewhere in Siberia and no one would notice!
Saying that Russia is about to become the biggest market in Europe is like saying that the US is about to become the biggest market in Ohio. It just doesn't make sense.
Five Russian federal districts are located before the Urals: Northwestern, Central, Southern, North Caucasus, Volga.
Only two are located beyond.
European ones total for 105 mln of population, so even if we could only count those the picture would not be dramatically different.