Jesus was first pirate, has to be said.
Just bought World of Goo because of this article. Works great under Wine on Ubuntu 8.10. They are working on a Linux release also, and you get it for free if you buy it from 2dboy.com
I cannot believe that we’re still faced with DRM, especially with recent controversies.
As this is probably an American-centric Blog most people would not know of this, but during the release of Football Manager 2009 the thousands of people that bought the game could not finish installing it. This year the developers used DRM to lock users’ down where the software required the user to use a code provided with his/her game to log onto the DRM server and unlock it.
The problem, naturally, is that Football Manager is a huge game in Europe, and the developers didn’t anticipate the amount of people that would either pre-order or purchase it on the day of release. Thanks to this, the DRM server was trashed, the phone lines were clogged and eventually closed and their entire website (even Sega Europe) was dead. After a full day I was lucky enough to find a patch the developers had been torrenting to fix the issues, whilst thousands more casual users either returned their games or kept plugging away for answers for days.
Ironically, those that pirated the game were able to play it two days before those that played it.
Jeff -
You should print the whole letter. It’s worth reading.
I kicked myself for accepting a bundle of Microsoft compilers when I bought a Kaypro II circa 1983. I had time to rewrite the disk de-blocking software, but not the compilers. A home system.
You write:
- Have a great freaking product.
- Charge a fair price for it.
I’ll add a third entry:
- Make it more convenient to buy than to steal
- Provide instant gratification
About convenience:
Pirated media is not free to the pirate. He pays with his time. Now you can’t compete with the price of time for people who don’t work. To most teenagers, time is way less valuable than money. No matter how convenient you make buying your stuff, these people won’t give you their money. However, that is not the case for people who have jobs. To people like us, even finding a working torrent file may not be worth the hassle if we can instead open the Amazon MP3 store, type the name of the song we want and click buy.
In many cases, the price doesn’t even enter the equation. To me, whether I have ten bucks more or less on my credit card statement at the end of the month simply doesn’t matter at all. What matters is whether I spend ten minutes looking for a song, or ten seconds.
Ironically, DRM makes it less convenient to buy, thus giving potential customers more incentive to pirate.
About instant gratification:
If possible, allow users to download whatever you’re selling. Don’t make them wait for the Amazon package to arrive if you can avoid it. Give them a file they can download right after clicking buy, and don’t make them pay additionally for the privilege.
As a user of Steam, I wonder if titles released exclusively through that platform are pirated less than other games. Especially the casual and/or under-$20 games. The reason is that Steam is very user-friendly, thereby making the barrier to purchase incredibly low.
If you account the exchange rate on World of Goo, it would cost almost half the minimum wage of my country. If in their figures they count only the target market of their sales (North America/Europe) I wonder how much the piracy estimate would be. My guess is 50%, which still is heck lot high.
It’s fine to buy software so long as you demand that the license is GPLv3 or similar, for your own and everyone’s sake.
Without piracy theres no successful software. Without successful software theres no money. Without money there’s no business.
Piracy is a fact of life in software business. Microsoft, Symantec, Autodesk,…, and the worlds greatest software companies have piracy based business models. So don’t worry if your software has been pirated, worry if it don’t.
(i’m no english native speaker so excuse my orthography).
Re: Mike
This is ultimately the case: the Bonly/B people who are ever hurt by DRM are the legitimate users.
Piracy isn’t right; but screwing over your customers isn’t either.
In other news, I do hope that IWorld of Goo/I gets ported to Linux like I keep hearing that it will. Everyone I talk to who has played it really seems to like it.
sep322: I think you hit the nail in the head! Exactly - just search for a title, click download, wait few hours, and have it with no DRM, no system services running all time to protect a software you use once in a week… no registration, no mail confirmation, no spammy newsletters, and you can be sure that the software will function even when evil overlords shut down their DRM system.
Steam? Almost, just remove 90% of its code, remove all the installed services, autoruns, ads, junk code that does something all the time in the background, and give me some warranty that my purchased software will run even after Steams shuts down. Less is more, get it, Valve?
I used to pirate a lot of games. These days, I only pirate games I can’t buy new.
There are some products I avoid because I can’t afford them (Microsoft Office) or don’t like their DRM (Spore, although I picked it up over Steam during the current Holiday Sale).
Hmm, my workplace has one of those Home program deals with Microsoft, so I suppose I could get MS Office if I wanted to.
Jeff, just to let you know, I bought the World of Goo after reading this post, and I love it.
The new Prince of Persia game is also free from copy protection. I might buy it. This is quite a surprising move from a company like Ubisoft although writers at Ars Technica [1] suspect that they only did this to watch it being pirated and come up with told you so. I hope they are smarter than that…
Also I actively boycott any game with heavy DRM. Especially when it limits the times I can install it, most of which are EA games like Spore, NFS Undercover and Red Alert 3 (though these games are a bad example since I wouldn’t buy them anyway because of the poor quality… so I don’t pirate them too).
[1] http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081212-pc-prince-of-persia-contains-no-drm-its-a-trap.html
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html has a really good (but VERY long) essay on piracy. On page 4, it has a number of sources indicating that the world piracy rate tends to be around 30-60% (a very wide range since it’s so hard to measure accurately). World of Goo is somewhat exceptional in the 90% rate.
That last line will get quoted out of context somewhere.
Goodness of the human spirit? Heh. Good one.
I think the best morality to aim for is balance. Not going overboard with copy protection, but not neglecting it. Not going overboard into open source anarchy land, but not going overboard with cheap/expensive pricing either. Finding that ‘just right’ area is about all you can do.
Nothing against open source, of course. Just some people have to eat I’m afraid.
I take it as a credit to the free world that anything at all can be readily had with only some smarts, and no more. In fact, it is a resounding affirmation of the human spirit that we are not readily intimidated by allegations that their time is always and ultimately worth more than ours. If they want 100%… equity??.. maybe they should start drilling for oil.
Am I the only one who noticed that the ‘factors’ Jeff lists are completely backward. Users having a dynamic IP address would make the piracy rate HIGHER and people opting out of submitting there scores would make it LOWER. Come on guys, I thought you programmers were a bit better at math than this.
If you target you product for a target audience with little money, you shouldn’t be surprised that people are hesitant to throw out that little money they have. Taking the kids pocket money, that is just mean.
(This comment is oversimplified to make a point)