View From the Bottom #11
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 677
Some developers try to defeat the pirates. Others try to reason with them. There is no point to either activity. All games, no matter how strong the anti-piracy code (often called DRM, for Digital Rights Management), can be stolen. And most people will do it, because it is easy and getting free things makes them feel good. Plus you don't have to find some hacker bulletin board or grubby teenager with a shoebox of floppy disks any more. Everything you could want to steal is one quick torrent search away.
And it is a different world now. The makers of World of Goo, one of the best indie games in a long time (and, for my money, the best Wii game of all last year) compared the number of sales of the PC version to the number of copies people were playing who sent scores to their leader boards, and they estimated that the share of pirated copies out there was close to 90 percent. And this is for a very cool, very cheap indie game. Anyone who would steal it is just a jerk. And torrents of it (and Spore and Fallout 3 and everything I ever wrote) are available for free, instantly.
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The big corporations have been told for years that their anti-piracy measures are not only pointless, but counter-productive. But, while I'm being redundant, saying the truth one more time rarely hurts. Spore has some of the most restrictive DRM ever. It's also one of the most pirated games ever. If you care about, you know, making money, then make people feel good about buying your product, give them real rewards for buying it (limited editions with plastic figures, anyone?), or both. Then, maybe, 12 percent of the people playing your game will pay for it, instead of 10. A tiny percentage difference, but a huge increase in sales... and profits.
