Unconvinced Pete: Of Publishers and Piracy
The current state of DRM and license agreements in PC games is an utter mess. While I can argue until the cows come home with claims that we have ever had true ownership of our games, the situation we find ourselves in currently is unacceptable. All that people want is to feel like they can do the sorts of things with their games that they would ordinarily conceive of doing. Playing them on multiple computers that they have access to, being able to get at them both online and offline, playing them whether now or in five or ten years time without finding they can no longer reach the content and so on; all of these and more are reasonable expectations. For publishers to put us in a position where any of this is in doubt is nothing but exploitative.
Current technology has enabled publishers to control distribution of their PC games with a collar and leash. Notwithstanding the shrinkage of the PC games market in comparison to consoles, it’s a dream position for them to be in, to control how their products are bought and severely restrict opportunities for any sort of legitimate rental, exchange or second-hand market to exist. All objections that the end user might have can be dismissed with a wave of the hand and utterance of one magic word: Piracy.
You only need to look at any old torrent site to realise that piracy is a true problem but the same sites will demonstrate what so many have argued by now: that the current solutions are no solutions at all. But I don’t want to talk about that old argument, because it’s perfectly obvious to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the situation.
That brings us to the shareholders. Shareholders are mainly interested in one thing: what should the company (legally) do in order to maximise share prices? Conversely, then, they are concerned that anything that might lower share prices is dealt with. You can therefore understand how the following conversation is not a good one to be having:
Shareholder: We hear lots of people play the games illegally without paying.
Publisher: That’s true.
Shareholder: That seems like a problem. What are you doing about that?
Publisher: Well to be quite honest there’s not all that much we can do.
Shareholder: Oh, well how to you expect me to maintain my confidence in the business, then?
Obviously, it looks a lot better if they have this conversation instead:
Shareholder: We hear lots of people play the games illegally without paying.
Publisher: That’s true.
Shareholder: That seems like a problem. What are you doing about that?
Publisher: We’re exploring a range of options but our main approach is to package in various protections which make sure only the people who have paid can play.
Shareholder: Does that work?
Publisher: Well, lots of people are still getting around it but it’s harder for them and we’re constantly researching new approaches. Here are some examples…
What piracy does is create a tidy excuse, allowing the publisher to dance gaily around the real issue here, which is controlling the market. Without the carrot of defeating piracy constantly being dangled, most shareholders would be able to clearly see that the currently accepted DRM and licensing situation is awful PR, damages their brand in the long term and is unethical towards the customers in a way that is unrivalled by any similar industry.
While publishers must surely take the bulk of the blame for using the issue of piracy to forward their own agendae, let us not forget that it’s the pirates themselves who have handed this useful excuse to them.
As for people trying to justify piracy, I’ve heard flawed arguments left right and centre:
- “I pirate because I just can’t afford to buy all the games I want.”
It’s a shame you can’t afford games but, sadly for you, they aren’t a fundamental right.
- “I pirate because I object to the way publishers treat us as customers.”
And so you help to perpetuate the very thing that gives them their phony excuse.
- “I pirate because I am treated unfairly in some other financial aspect of my life and I consider this a fair way of repayment.”
I hardly see how you treating someone else unfairly is supposed to make up for a different, unrelated unfairness.
And I’ve even heard:
- “I pirate because as a game developer I need to play lots of games… for research.” (Seriously.)
Well, then I’m sure that your bosses or publisher will be willing to put this vital research on expenses.
If any grey area exists, then it must surely be in the case of so-called Abandonware. While not on legally solid ground there is certainly an argument that if a publisher has not provided any way to legitimately play a game, it is in a poor position to complain when their potential customer gives up and downloads a pirate copy.
Apart from that, occasionally someone will cut through all the bullshit and say “I pirate because I just don’t particularly care about any of the moral implications.” They’ve made up their mind and they’re honest about it. That’s something, at least, because what gets me most of all is the disingenuous way in which most pirates argue. I may frown upon it; I may even try to talk them out of it but I’ll spare them the sermons and diatribes.
Oh – except for this one thing:
You pirate games, even a little bit, and you forfeit the right to kick up a fuss next time a publisher treats you unfairly with DRM on a legitimate purchase. I don’t want to hear it and, I suspect, neither does anyone else who goes out of their way to pay for their games even in the face of publishers severely trying our patience. For your small part in creating the atmosphere in which DRM and strict licensing exists, you deserve not one tiny bit of sympathy when it comes back to bite you.
“You pirate games, even a little bit, and you forfeit the right to kick up a fuss next time a publisher treats you unfairly with DRM on a legitimate purchase.â€
Nonsense—unless you propose that this goes both ways: that game dvelopers and publishers should forfeight the right complain about piracy if they opt to use DRM, in which case it would be reasonably equitable.
@Velvet Fist, Iron Glove: Having a little trouble discerning what your point is. You say it has to work both ways but I don’t see why that follows logically at all.
To go back to the article, I say DRM is a problem in part because piracy hands publishers an excuse to enforce strict control of content – that’s why pirates shouldn’t complain. But the relationship isn’t symmetrical: piracy would be a problem with or without DRM. So I don’t see why publishers shouldn’t complain (although you tend to find that publishers that don’t use heavy DRM make less fuss about piracy – interesting).
There are certainly things publishers shouldn’t complain about, though. For example, when they start to suffer because their DRM strategies are turning customers away.
Your last paragraph makes a statement that clearly shows that you are a honest person, because pirates do not ramble about a DRM hassle on a game they legally bought; they just get the pirate version of it and keep the original game in the box.
I pirate. Why? I get the better product. No need to excuse myself.
And don’t come screaming “if we all were to pirate, no more gaems”. Not gonna happen. There will ALWAYS be paying customers.
As a pirate, I do not feel responsible for the “state of gaming/DRM”, for two reasons:
1.: Everyone knows that piracy has not that disastrous of an effect on sales. Because the “rampant piracy” really isn’t. It is substantial, yes. But far away from life threatening to the future of gaming. Gaming survived piracy for more than 20 years now, and will continue to do so.
2.: Customers, in general, are stupid. The completely stupid ones (naturally the biggest group) will rant about missing dedi servers or releasing sequels too soon and still go out and buy Modern Warfare 2 and L4D2 and hence support the new bullshit the market gives them. I have no problem riding on their sorry backs. The “legal” economy does that too, so no big difference except in nomenclature.
The ones a bit more educated will convert or boycott sooner or later. (The ones who are intelligent and decide to stay in the bulk of the DRM-suffering crowd for the sake of a clean slate – i salute you. You ARE better than me.)
Abandonware pirates should not be thrown in with the “new-game”-pirates. Because the motives to pirate Abandonware often are really not “i want to get free games”, nor “i want to run that game i bought 2 years ago”. It can be so much different to that. Documentation, History, Preserve of culture are some aspects that are present in a lot of ROM-collectors heads. Have a look at projects like resurrection xtras or MAME.
@NoZart:
“I pirate. Why? I get the better product”
The better product you get is not the one that the publisher is offering. Does that make you entitled to opt for your own, better product illegaly and without paying? How?
Sure, it’s true that if you pirate you end up with something better than what the publishers are offering, but the cost is that you keep giving the excuse the publishers need to keep doing this crap – it doesn’t really matter if that excuse is genuine or not (and as hinted at in my article, I expect it isn’t genuine.)
Whether piracy is as big a problem to sales as it is claimed is almost irrelevent. The simple fact that it appears that way to people like shareholders who are helping to shape the decisions lets publishers play the piracy card over and over. Publishers are very naughty for doing this, but the pirates themselves are hardly blameless.
@Peter “SurplusGamer†Silk:
Pirates do not think about legality or morality. That is the biggest problem with the dialogue between honest people and pirates.
The first sword fight between the young boy and Jack Sparrow described it best:
Q: “YOU ARE CHEATING!”
A: “I am a Pirate, duh”
Pirates feel entitled to anything they can get their fingers on. And are blatantly ignorant to the voice of reason.
So yeah, if i can get a better product for less money*, i will do so. I just follow the rules of capitalism the same way the big corporations quasi-promoted them:
Rip off the idiots and get the maximum bang for your buck.
*Pirating costs money, too. But its dead cheap compared to legal, that’s why it is often labeled as “cost free”.
Also, pirates are selfish. Your point that the cost of my free game is worse DRM in the future? Well, not for me because “There is a crack for that”…
Yeah, we are cheap assholes. Not denying it, not rationalizing it.
But the DRM situation would have come even without piracy. Maybe not in that form, but it would. The first DRM-implementations on wmv did NOTHING in the ways of piracy, it just gave the content owner the possibility to lock playback for a forced browser pop-up. Now it is video downloads that invalidate the content after one playback or a certain amount of time. Does nothing have to do with piracy.
So, DRM was always meant to be, pirates just helped shaping it. You are right, we are responsible for some very bad stuff going on now. I have no problem being a scapegoat.
P.S.: I do NOT sell pirated copies. I do not make a business out of modding consoles. Those are even worse than the consumer-pirates, because they give “lost sales via piracy” a valid number and act as enablers.
P.P.S.: The contradiction between the first post and the second regarding being responsible for the situation is due to me thinking about the arguments a little more.
@Peter “SurplusGamer†Silk: That bit of the article read like an exasperated rant, so I responded fairly flippantly.
You’re right, piracy will be a problem regardless of DRM; but that’s really an argument about the relationship between the natural features of information and the artificial restrictions of copyright, and a bit too off topic to delve into.
I do believe though, that DRM would probably still exist (though perhaps less, and less justifiably) without piracy—and in fact the next generation of game consoles will probably have strict DRM on physical media for this reason—because of its ability to control second-hand sales of media. I believe publishers have been coming to grips with reality a little more these days, realising that piracy’s potential revenue stream is largely hypothetical, while second-hand sales are an actual, measurable revenue stream that the publishers aren’t seeing a penny of. And they’re not happy about that.
@Velvet Fist, Iron Glove: Mm. I pretty much agree with your points.
Really I call for more honesty on both sides. Publishers should be more honest about their desire to control various markets, pirates should be more honest about their disregard for consequences or how their actions affect other people.
But there’s a slew of anti-publisher sentiment out there already that I largely agree with, I thought it was about time for an article that focused on how the pirates aren’t helping.
Thanks for the mention of abandonware, where I would agree, the only gray area for piracy exists.
If the creator isn’t selling or supporting it any more, then maybe I start to see that there is no harm really being incurred here because there isn’t a reasonable way to put money in the hands of the creator or owner. Its still a little shadey, and a shrinking category, what with publishers mining their old content for easy sales now, but it at least it is an area, but it is an area where I do think some arguments can be made, because for a crime to have occurred, harm must be incurred.
If you want to download some old, obscure game no one is selling now but the gouging second hand stores, I say go for it, personally, but for fucks sake, there’s no excuse for pirating something new, other than being a douche bag.
So where does the trend of no PC demos fit into all of this?
@DrBrian: wasn’t there some plan to make people pay for the demoes somehow?
God I love Dwarf Fortress.