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The difficult bit is working out what percentage of pirated copies are actually replacing a sale that would have happened if the content wasn't available to pirate. The more dramatic industry numbers like to claim it's 100%, which is ridiculous. It's certainly more than 0%, though.

I'd assume that for your indie game, there were a lot of people who wound up thinking "I would play this if it's free, but I wouldn't spend $X" on it. Adding successful DRM wouldn't have done anything to them but drive them away, and reduce the amount of buzz the game received. But then, particularly in the indie game space, maybe trading away a lot of buzz for a couple hundred more full-price game sales would have been completely worth it...

This is where the concept of services like Xbox Game Pass seem to be landing. Once someone has paid their fairly-small-amount each month, every game is now "free". Much like fairly-cheap streaming music basically stopped music piracy from being mainstream, cheap game-services might have the same impact on the game industry.

Though, much like streaming music, whether it turns out to be economically viable for the average game studio is certainly a question.

(For the sake of completeness: I don't pirate anything, so I have nothing to justify here.)

Sales or economics is not the only thing a developer may care about. Some people want control over their work and will be upset from people pirating their game even if it doesn't mean they lose a sale. Similarly many artists do not want you to repost their art or use their art as your profile picture.

Sure, but the specific thing the person I was replying to said the developer was complaining about was not getting paid.

Ok, but should we care if those developers/artists get what they want? Some companies would also really like to take games they have sold you away from you so they can sell you the next installment. Some developers don't want certain groups of people they dislike to enjoy their game. Not all things that developers want are reasonable.

Limiting sales to the “right” people is a totally different proposition than revoking sales after the fact. Both are dumb, but one is within a copyright owner’s rights, and the other is not.

What does "control over their work" mean if it's not about losing a sale?

Developers exerting control over a copy that's already in someone's hands has never been a good thing. Too many games have had content ripped out years later because the developer had a change of heart, or was contractually obligated to remove it due to some licensing agreement (unbeknownst to their customers, of course). Both of these scenarios are immoral (arguably illegal) and don't deserve support.

For example an artist may create a character and they don't want that character to be used in relation to politics. Such an action may not affect sales but it would be annoying to happen to the artist especially if the politics didn't match their own. Similarly if it was promoting a religion that was not your own that could be uncomfortable.

> It's certainly more than 0%, though.

Is it? You also need to account to sales that only happened because someone learned of the game via a pirated copy.

compare what nintendo sells to other publishers on PC...

The problem with game pass is that it takes the Spotify model to games. In practice, it doesn't seem to scale well - Microsoft has seemingly hit a market cap of ~35 million users because of a lot of existing aversion to subscription services in games, which isn't enough customers to actually amortize the cost of development, even at an indie scale.

Indie developers in particular don't like Game Pass because it apparently pays Spotify-tier rates, which is pretty bad. Spotify gets away with it because it took a deal with all big music labels for more favorable payouts, but your average indie band on Spotify makes absolutely zilch from your Spotify subscription, even if you listen to them 24/7 every year. Indie bands typically compensate with concerts and brand merchandise, but that isn't an option for games - secondary income sources are typically reviled (microtransactions in paid games) or don't sell to expectations (merchandise). The Spotify model only "works" because they shifted the music industry to rely primarily on those "side" sources (and even then there's a lot of disgruntled musicians who are unhappy with the Spotify model devaluing their craft).

It's true that Game Pass subscriber growth has slowed, but I don't think 35 million is any kind of permanent cap. There are 910 million PC gamers in the world today, and this is growing by approximately 35 million per year. This is, of course, in addition to Xbox owners. As more people become PC gamers each year, more people discover and subscribe to Game Pass. Ditto for existing gamers who discover Game Pass, or decide to finally try it and stick. Tastes and expectations are changing, and just as we accepted subscriptions for music, I think subscriptions for gaming are becoming more normal.

I've gotten tremendous value out of GamePass. I very rarely replay games, so all the games that swing by long enough on GamePass for me to play through and enjoy (and that I would otherwise never have bought) have made the subscription model work really well.

It has also reduced my game "clutter" in a way I very much appreciate.

I think part of the question though is also, would they have been as popular as they were without piracy, which does provide some advertising benefits through audience exposure. It is easy to say a really popular game would still be popular without piracy, but some lesser known games might never have gained any attention at all if there weren't enough people spreading word about it. Of course trying to quantify the sales and word-of-mouth benefits from that sort of thing is extremely difficult.

It’s difficult enough that perhaps we should leave it in the academic / ideological argument space and focus on whether copyright owners should be able choose whether or not to give away for free in the hopes of a net win.

Your story sounds like "World of Goo," which reported a 90% piracy rate from comparing unique IP addresses to number sold. Despite that, they didn't quit and recently released "World of Goo 2" still DRM free.

Yes, hit games are still popular enough for sequels (world of goo 2 came out 16 years after the first one, according to wikipedia, which is an unusually long time). I remember World of Goo being one of the few choices of games for iPad when it was young.

But the vast majority of developers aren't lucky enough to have massive hits, and so money differences can still matter.

>comparing unique IP addresses to number sold

Wouldn't that be beyond a flawed system? I would count as a "new unique" player every few weeks.

I think it was a daily scoreboard so that wouldn't be an issue, but they themselves said the number was flawed, just not that wrong.

> The game had some online functionality (leaderboard or something). They were surprised when the number of accounts accessing the online functionality exceeded their sales by a dramatic number. The developer updates grew more and more sad as they switched from discussing new features to pleading with people to actually buy the game instead of copying it. Eventually they called it quits and gave up because the game, while very popular, was so widely pirated that few people actually paid.

Ok, but why? Whas the game actually unprofitable or did they just feel bad about some people getting it for free. You need to remember that a pirated copy does not equal a lost sale - in fact, sales may even be higher than they would be without piracy as popularity gained from pirated copies also translates to more legitimate buyers.

Yeah people pretending that "piracy" is good because they can try product first before buying which is true but lets be real

out of 100 people doing that how many actually buy product in the end???? if net gain is positive then developer would not pay millions to license DRM

> out of 100 people doing that how many actually buy product in the end???? if net gain is positive then developer would not pay millions to license DRM

Lets not pretend that markets and companies are actually rational.

*people

Does the same go for pirates, or are they the sole rational actors here?

Maybe the game wasn't worth it.

Check out RimWorld.

Small game, no online functionality, never had DRM. It wasn't even big. It was shared all over the place because it was so expensive. It's still there and it's thriving. Still expensive.

Which indie game was that?