9 ms·

'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator

148 points by Luc 16y ago

wccrawford 16y ago
Sadly, pirates don't actually convince their friends to buy it. They help them pirate it. He's right about doing what he can to provide features that pirates can't take advantage of, though. That's the only way to actually combat piracy.
- patio11 16y ago
  Put it online and downloading the client lets you pirate the game like downloading Firefox lets you pirate Basecamp.
  - NickPollard 16y ago
    I believe this is (most of the time) the best solution these days, but it's still starting from a position of assuming the customer is a criminal. If you're not actually adding any useful internet-based features, then this is just another DRM system that will piss off paying customers when they want to play but don't have a net connection because they're using a laptop on a plane flight.
    - mquander 16y ago
      What's wrong with assuming the customer is a criminal if the big majority of your customers are, in fact, criminals? (Presuming that by "customer" you just mean "person playing your game.") The question should be: how do you account for the fact that your customers are criminals and still make money without crippling your game? Putting useful features online is a good answer to that question.
      - dingy 16y ago
        Well, if I'm the (non-criminal) customer and you're the game producer, what's wrong with it is that you're making your problem my problem. It isn't, it shouldn't be and I'm not going to let it be (and no, I don't pirate, I just don't buy stuff I dislike).
        mquander 16y ago
        That's why I said "without crippling the game." You're right, though; most developers will make their problem your problem, either to a small degree (by making sure that some useful things are only accessible for authenticated online clients) or a large degree (requiring always-on connectivity, nutty DRM schemes.) I don't think there's really anything "wrong" with that, though. It's not very fair, but that's how the world works. Given that people are going to continue to try making money from games, it seems like an optimal outcome.
        dingy 16y ago
        So, it's not fair but there's nothing wrong with it? I don't think we have the same definition of the word "wrong".
        mquander 16y ago
        I guess we don't.
        chc 16y ago
        I'm not sure it's an optimal outcome. It might help it some cases, but it definitely feeds the problem it's trying to solve. The less people like you, the less guilty they'll feel screwing you over. I don't pirate games, but pirating Activision titles would feel downright good. It also often creates the paradox that pirates get a better experience. Once the pirates work around all your antifeatures, the pirated version is actually a better product than the one you're selling (which makes piracy even more tempting).
      - frobozz 16y ago
        There are two reasons: 1) It drives your customers to your competitors If you had a choice between a shop that detained you in an "interview room", and checked your bags, pockets and body cavities against the receipt, every single time you went there, and one that just had a few CCTV cameras, which would you choose? 2) It makes people think "If I'm going to be punished anyway, I might as well commit the crime" In some countries (IIRC, both Finland & Netherlands do this), purchasers of recordable media are "treated as criminals" and pre-emptively fined for copying music (specifically music, not software). If I were subject to that kind of treatment, you bet I'd copy as much music as I could lay my hands on.
  - eli 16y ago
    What if it doesn't really make sense to add online or multiplayer support to the app/game? Then isn't it just the typical DRM anti-feature? I'd be pretty annoyed if I couldn't play my fun new game on a plane because it needs to constantly connect to the internet to prove I didn't steal it.
    - eru 16y ago
      That's why the Minecraft creator's solution is sane. He does not block any features without network access. But some features only make sense with network access.
      - mquander 16y ago
        I understand the perceptual difference (it's annoying when features that are already there are "taken away," and less annoying when new features just don't appear.) But is there an actual difference? The time he's spent on network-dependent features may have been spent on other, more interesting features for everyone if the networked features didn't also serve as piracy prophylaxis.
        nlawalker 16y ago
        Bingo. I worry about the state of gaming when the primary question on a developer's mind during design is "how can I make online servics a part of this game so I can actually make some money off of it?"
      - eli 16y ago
        Yeah, I get it. But it stinks that developers now have a bias towards online features (because they combat piracy) instead of potential offline features that are more useful or better serve customers.
    - patio11 16y ago
      As somebody who makes a living selling software, I do not consider the author getting paid a minor feature. Apologies for the inconvenience, take it up with 80% of your generation.
- storm 16y ago
  > Sadly, pirates don't actually convince their friends to buy it. They help them pirate it. Pirating software is often a pain - find a proper release, install, replace a binary, generate a key, avoid online services, seek out cracked updates (or go without them). If your time has value, it's hardly free. Do you really think everyone pirating anything is going through this process for every Tom, Dick and Harry they know, as opposed to just saying, "Yeah, it's $50 at Gamestop..."? What the author is talking about sounds like the far more common scenario -- friends will see a pirated game being played (or just hear it being praised), and make a purchase later if they so desire (perhaps on services like Steam, where hordes of people who used to exclusive pirate games now periodically pay for the simple conveniences of being legit). And the pirates themselves are occasionally 'turned' by the kind of value-adds that the author is taking about. How many people who really liked the single-player modes in their pirate copy of MW2 didn't go legit so that they could play multiplayer? Piracy can unquestionably lead to expanded mindshare and buzz, it's silly to assert that it merely spawns more piracy. Piracy of Photoshop isn't destroying Adobe's profit, it's securing it. How many legions of designers and photographers cut their teeth on a pirated version, in the process trained themselves to all its concepts, quirks and idioms, and later became a paid seat in a professional context (where using a pirated version is astonishingly stupid behaviour)? Edit: This is clearly an emotional issue. Parent is getting a steady stream of upvotes for blithely making a generalization about how all pirates behave, whereas I saw a downvote faster than what I've wrote could even have been read.
  - lhnz 16y ago
    I agree with others that the OP really over-promised by saying that pirates will convince friends to buy. However, you don't deserve to be down-voted. A large number of people pirating something often causes it to become popular enough to get many sales. Word-of-mouth is not always a pirate explaining to others how to get something for free, it's often them just saying something is 'good' (which for many people implies worth buying).
    - _delirium 16y ago
      It's especially true in the indie-game sphere, where people get their recommendations from random reviews on blogs, mailing lists, wikis, forums, whatever. Lots of those reviews are not by people who paid for the game, but some people who read them might pay. Maybe not most of them, but often non-zero. It's useful enough that some indie-game devs are pretty liberal with their "review copies"; if you're going to write up even a blog blurb on a medium-traffic blog, they'll just send you a free copy and save you the hassle of pirating it. Really the biggest likely pitfall facing indie-game developers is that they release their game and nobody notices or cares, not even enough to pirate it. There are a ton of indie games that come out every year that never rise out of obscurity, which is the main thing publicity attempts have to overcome, at least early on. Enough people pirating it to generate some forum/blog buzz is one possible way, like underground musicians who get their initial publicity via people trading mix tapes.
- zephyrfalcon 16y ago
  "Sadly, pirates don't actually convince their friends to buy it. They help them pirate it." The article says: > But what if that person likes that game, talks about it to his or her friends, and then I manage to convince three of them to buy the game? The author is hoping that he can convince these friends to buy the game; he isn't suggesting that pirates do the convincing. In the next paragraph he describes how to do it: > Instead of just relying on guilt tripping pirates into buying, or wasting time and money trying to stop them, I can offer online-only services that actually add to the game experience. Online level saving, centralized skins, friends lists and secure name verification for multiplayer. None of these features can be accessed by people with pirated versions of the game, and hopefully they can be features that turn pirates from thieves into potential customers.
- mquander 16y ago
  I don't understand the logic at all here. Do you have some reason for believing that?
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  That's actually not always true. Check out the reddit thread on this topic, and you'll see plenty of people who pirated first and then actually bought it. I know plenty of pirates use the "I try before I buy" line, but some of them actually do. You're right on your second sentence, but do you have anything whatsoever to back up your first?
  - gyardley 16y ago
    Back when my company was using our analytics to track piracy for iPhone applications, we found that 1 out of 243 people who stole an application later installed a legitimate copy. We stopped tracking piracy when we realized that we were getting into a cat-and-mouse game with application pirates and the feature wasn't worth the resources, but I can't imagine these stats have changed much since.
    - jokermatt999 16y ago
      And how many of those people would have bought the application if it wasn't available to pirate? I'm guessing it would still be a much smaller number. There's a massive gap between being able to get something for completely free and having to pay for it.
    - scott_s 16y ago
      Thank you for bringing data into the discussion.
      - steveklabnik 16y ago
        While I agree with you that data is nice, this data in particular doesn't say a whole lot. It's like saying "1mm pay Google for the enterprise version of Google apps, and 100mm don't. They're leaving so much revenue on the table!" When discussing freemium, nobody talks about those who choose the free plan as 'pirates', even though they are doing the exact same thing that 'pirates' do.
        scott_s 16y ago
- yason 16y ago
  I'm maybe 15 years behind the current trends but all games I've ever bought (when I was still buying games...) were carefully screened and test played using pirated sources. Piracy has always been the de facto news channel for new games: not magazines or demo disks. You had the game coming from your friends first and you saw it weeks or months later in a magazine. Investing actually money into something as brittle and vague as a video game simply requires that I certainly know what I'm buying. Thus, the title must either be a few-in-a-decade known hit or tested with a pirated version. If the situation is even remotely like that these days, game publishers are making their money because of piracy, not despite of it.
  - jpdbaugh 16y ago
    I often find demos to be misleading of what the final product will be like. Games are expensive, at least for me, and demoing the final product is the only way I will know for sure that I am not going to waste $60 if I decide to buy something.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      The 90s shareware approach was almost ideal for me from that perspective. I could play 1/3 of Doom and then decide if I wanted to buy the remaining 2/3 or not.
      - jpdbaugh 16y ago
        I am not really sure why this died? Ten minute demos are just not enough time to judge a game.
        chc 16y ago
        It's the same thinking that leads to antipiracy misfeatures. They don't want to give away any more for free than they have to, even if it winds up hurting the game itself.
- dlytle 16y ago
  I helped my friends pirate the first 10 audiobooks of a series I love, by handing them a flash drive with the MP3s on it, and the condition that if they liked the series they should buy the new ones as they come out. Now 6 of my friends (who never would have been hooked on the series otherwise) own legal versions of the two most recent novels starring our favorite wizard-detective. Those sales would not have been made if they hadn't gotten a taste of the series beforehand. Sure, this situation isn't the rule, and they pirated 5x the books they've purchased... but 2 sales each is better than 0, and with 8-10 more books coming in the series, the author/publisher have come out far ahead.
  - pilif 16y ago
    as a huge fan of audibooks myself: Can you tell me what series you are talking about? (see? Another chance to hook somebody)
    - blaqsmith 16y ago
      Based on dlytle's description, he's likely talking about the Dresden Files series.
    - dlytle 16y ago
      The series in question is the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, read by James Marsters, If you're an audiobook fan, I also recommend looking into GraphicAudio. Unabridged audiobooks with a full voice cast, music, and sound effects. The Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks is good in GraphicAudio, as is Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson. Warbreaker is stand-alone, so it may be a good starting point. There are a few rough bits, but there always are; some sections with awkward musical choices, some re-used recognizable sound effects, but they're no more common than errors in standard audiobooks. (Disclaimer: GraphicAudio books are abridged, but functionally unabridged. If it's raining, they play the sound of rain instead of having the narrator say "it was raining". By definition, that makes them abridged, despite no loss of content.)
- Vivtek 16y ago
  That's the only way to actually combat piracy. No. That's the only way to make money in an economic reality that copying is free. It's redefining what you sell so that it cannot be pirated because it's a different product/service to start with. You're not combating piracy when you offer a non-copyable service - you're just redefining your terms to work with reality.
- flannell 16y ago
  I agree with you. However, truly outstanding apps will always do well. I downloaded Angry Birds Lite to my itouch, played the first few levels and promptly bought it. I also did the same with Tower Madness. There was an article on a flash games company that could detect when the app was running on illegal web servers. It would display an advert inside the game saying where it came from which resulted in a spike of traffic and revenue for the original owners. I believe a few developers are now treating the pirates as salesmen to reach a larger buying audience. It's not ideal, just goes with the territory
- njharman 16y ago
  > Sadly, pirates don't actually convince their friends to buy it. Untrue, I have direct personal proof to the contrary ;)
rsbrown 16y ago
"why fight the biggest revolution in information flow since the printing press when you could easily work with it by adding services that actually add some value beyond the free act of making a digital copy?" This is very intelligent insight on the author's part. It's also the same argument that has been staring the RIAA in the face for over a decade: you can't fight the future, so you'd better figure out a better way to earn revenues. With Minecraft, Mojang has an opportunity to monetize illegitimate users by creating incentives through community play and online rewards that may not be available using pirated copies of their product.
- bkmartin 16y ago
  Sort of like putting measures in place so that pirates are using more of a trial version of your software. I think this is the way most new programs are going these days. But that still doesn't solve the music aspect of pirating. What bonus stuff can you give over the music that can convert a considerable number of the pirates to paying customers?
  - rsbrown 16y ago
    Except for the tiny percentage of superstars, musical artists have always made more money through live performances than recording contracts. Ticket sales, merchandise and other such revenues are much less susceptible to pirating.
    - billybob 16y ago
      Be that as it may, can you see that it's legitimate for a musician to want to make, record, and sell music - not an associated industry of products? And there are fans who don't go to concerts or buy t-shirts, but really like listening to music? If you're a fan like that, and you don't give back to the artist at some point, you're making it less likely that the recordings you want will be made in the future. Notice that I'm not throwing around moral claims. I'm just making an observation. If you want something to be made, and it costs time and money to make, you can encourage its creation or not. But don't complain that the music selection sucks if you don't financially support the music you like.
YooLi 16y ago
All he did was describe the freemium model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium
- maushu 16y ago
  Not exactly. More like the freemium model but with the free part "hidden" for most users.
  - gregpilling 16y ago
    It is not hidden. They can see that if they pay, they get the extra features. If they don't pay, then play the restricted version without the online stuff.
    - Vivtek 16y ago
      Except the "restricted version" is the product that is actually being sold to most users.
Das_Bruce 16y ago
Am I the only person who has bought a game after pirating and playing it through? Also I'd be more inclined to buy more games first if there was some way of getting my money back if I really don't like it. I'm looking at you, GTA4, you blurry, poo sandwich.
- KoZeN 16y ago
  I personally haven't done this but you bring up a good point. What is so crazy about releasing a fully playable free demo that lasts 10 days that enables you to save your progress and pick up where you left off after purchasing the full version? No doubt a system like this would have multiple weaknesses but if this system existed I can guarantee you that I would own more games.
  - lhnz 16y ago
    Agreed. And while we're all at it, somebody needs to bring back shareware. (Especially on mobile devices!)
  - nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
    Sony is starting to implement this sort of feature with the PS3. You can download the entire, full version of the game to your console, and then you have 24 hours from the first game start to play the game, including saving your position, as much as you want. Once the 24 hour period is up, you can keep your game saves, and either delete or purchase the game, at which point you can continue from your game saves. It's just too bad so far that you can only do this with an extremely limited selection of games that have already been on the market long enough that I would have bought them if I was actually interested in them. But the concept is great.
  - smallblacksun 16y ago
    The problem is that it is very, very easy to disable time-based lockouts, thus making piracy even easier.
- coffeeaddicted 16y ago
  I never did buy a game after pirating it (and no I don't pirate these days, but I was younger once...). But I did several times buy the following game of a company when I really liked one.
ErrantX 16y ago
But what if that person likes that game, talks about it to his or her friends, and then I manage to convince three of them to buy the game? This is as bad as the logic spouted by the media industry that a piracy = one lost sale. If not even worse (because it is just plucked from thin air)
- lhnz 16y ago
  Yes, I'd love to see some statistics for the probability of a pirate actually convincing somebody else to buy.
nlawalker 16y ago
"I can offer online-only services that actually add to the game experience." It doesn't matter what they are, what they do, or whether or not the network aspect of these services/features is integral to them - pirates and consumers who insist that any features not on the disc at install-time are an inconvenience will still cry DRM. Are these "online services" integral to the game? If they are, then what happens when they go down? It's really not much different than what happened when the Assassin's Creed 2 validation servers fell over. Are they not integral to the game? Then pirates will do without them or find ways to replace them, and some people will still bitch that they shouldn't be so inconvenient. There's no getting around the fact that creating copies of a digital work is free, and so there's no solution that's going to make everyone happy. It's unfortunate, because every developer now feels the need to create online services as a part of their game, even if their idea doesn't really call for it.
- higher 16y ago
  It is pretty easy to distinguish DRM from net-enabled features. You simply need to ask "Could the feature exist without an internet connection?" You claim that users will conflate the two regardless, but I doubt this. Imagine an alternate dimension in which StarCraft shipped with LAN support but never supported online play over Battle.net. The StarCraft community would be based on gamer-oriented VPNs, and would likely be about as healthy as it has become in our dimension. If, when StarCraft II was announced, players learned that LAN play would still be supported, but play over Battle.net had been added, I don't think very many people would complain that the product had been deliberately crippled. In our world, StarCraft supported LAN play and Battle.net play, while StarCraft II does not support any type of multiplayer other than over Battle.net. Battle.net play has resulted in half-second latency for all players and several days of downtime since release. Additionally, it is known that a "Professional" version of StarCraft II exists that supports LAN play - the feature has simply been removed from the retail version. I think it is pretty clear which of these is a feature and which is not.
barkingcat 16y ago
Perhaps then the goal is to have a mutable pricing structure that responds to market pressure. If it really doesn't cost anything to produce 1 additional electronic copy, something like this might work. At launch date / first to market, there is a high price tag for the digital good (whether it be music, game, movie, etc). This is so that the vendor/author can make sure that they can sell at a high price to those "first movers" that actually want to pay $1000 to be the first person on the planet to have that special ring tone, ahead of everyone else in the market, for example. As time passes, and as more people buy the "product" (which is done via a download or a file transfer) - the price of the product goes down - because the as demand rises, the cost of production actually doesn't change - and the author already made some money, so there's no point being greedy, because then people would go and pirate it. Once this price goes down, it goes down for EVERY SINGLE customer, including those who bought it during the high initial price. I mean, the vendor does have the customer's credit card numbers. Do a residual, scaled, periodic refund for every single customer, based on the differences between the current discounted price and the original price at which the customer bought the good. As the # of units sold increases, the price of the product decreases - of course the relative rates can be tweaked so that the vendor is still making more money than they are discounting, because as an electronic/digital good, there are no factories or warehouses - it's easier to make money at mass scales when it comes to digital goods (vs physical goods like bicycles). Existing customers feel validated - the more people they recommend to buy the product, the more money they get back. New customers don't feel like they're getting ripped off - the prices are falling all the time, and you "buy into" a whole discounting structure. The original vendor/producer can finely tune the ratio at which the prices fall in order to control profitability, popularity, and sales rate as a factor in promotion and marketing. Again, if you take advantage of the fact that if you sell 10 copies, the cost for building the software/digital good is no different from when you sell 100,000 copies, then you can exploit that "efficiency gap" if you can call it that between the existing pricing structures and a variable pricing structure that I describe. At some point, you will reach a "price floor" at which the producer is comfortable reaching their target cumulative total profit. Since altering the price changes the price for every single customer since the beginning of the lifetime of sales for the product, you can actually say - I want x million for this product in 3 years time - and actually be able to hit that target by planning out the way the price changes. OR if you believe in the long tail, go ahead and have a constantly decreasing price - as you reach the hundreds of millions of people in the long tail, you can charge 1 cent - and you would get hundreds of millions for a product you made - providing usefulness for all those people at a great price - AND being able to protect your livelihood during those critical first few sales. Of course, this requires every single sale to every single customer to have its own merit, its own tracking system, its own values. BUT personalized sales is exactly what we are looking forward to in the future. And I think technically, it's not super hard - I mean we have nonstop systems and mainframes and clusters of all kinds - that analyses the trillions of collisions in the LHC - what makes us think that we can't track six or seven billion consumers who are alive on this planet, who might be making 5 or 6 million transactions a year? It's not that bad when you consider the scale that google / national science foundation / CERN operates at.
math0ne 16y ago
Man i wish minecraft ran on my computer :(
njharman 16y ago
Article had absolutely nothing to do with how piracy works. (I expected details of "couriers"/cracking/distributers/etc) It was about author's opinion that the copyrights of copying and distribution can't and should not be enforced in digital "age".
Revisor 16y ago
What he describes can be summed up as "Don't sell games, sell services". And I wholeheartedly agree. Games-as-a-service in the future?
- Groxx 16y ago
  Present. There are a number of games that require internet access - MMOs, some where your save file is online, and some which simply phone home frequently. ie, Assassin's Creed 2.
  - Revisor 16y ago
    Not considering MMOs, those other examples sound more like a nuisance (DRM) than an extra service.
    - benologist 16y ago
      It absolutely is a nuisance - I regret buying Command and Conquer 3 because it is intrinsically tied to EA's servers, you can't even play single player games without being signed in and online. Even your saved games only exist on their servers. But I bet it was more effective than any other form of DRM they've used over the years.
    - Groxx 16y ago
      I wholly agree. Just pointing out that they're "games as a service", even if that service is a disservice.
  - teamonkey 16y ago
    In the case of Assassin's Creed 2 your save file can also be saved online.
- teamonkey 16y ago
  I much prefer the Metaboli/Gametap rental model. You pay a reasonable monthly fee and you have access to their full library to download and play as you wish. Profits are apportioned to the developers according to what is being played. A bit like Spotify, I guess. Unfortunately their catalogue is pretty old and weak (a few diamonds but nothing special) and I'm more of a console gamer. If a similar rental system was available on the consoles I'd probably never buy retail again.
bryanh 16y ago
Once again, by moving a crucial portion of the game online, you can mitigate the effectiveness of a pirated game while being able to deliver content that enhances the game for everyone. The problem is, what if I want to play it on a flight? Enabling this enables pirates. So, is this worth it?
deleted 16y ago
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abronte 16y ago
I think Notch's biggest way of combating piracy right now is his price point. The game is only $13 USD and has endless amounts of playtime and creativity. Time and time again, all these big publishers keep putting out big name titles with only 8-16 hours of gameplay for 60$. No wonder their games get pirated...
Dove 16y ago
If someone pirates Minecraft instead of buying it, it means I’ve lost some “potential” revenue. . . . But what if that person likes that game, talks about it to his or her friends, and then I manage to convince three of them to buy the game? I’d make three actual sales instead of blocking out the potentially missed sale of the original person which never cost me any money in the first case. I hate this argument. People who want to pirate games or music frequently say that by pirating, they are actually providing a benefit to the author by giving him exposure. That's true sometimes, but I don't think it's always true. In general, with any creative product, you want to try to turn some portion of it into exposure and some portion into money. You might divide things up 10/90 or 50/50 or 70/30 or even 100/0-but-I-charge-for-support, depending on what you think is optimum for your goals. But pirates presume to make that decision for you. (Though I agree that smart authors will embrace the fact that copying is free and easy rather than trying to fight it. The piece of your product you want to use for exposure can be copyable, but the piece you want to sell shouldn't be. Or if it is, you should be honest about your income being from donations or exceptionally honest people.)

148 points by Luc 16y ago

Sadly, pirates don't actually convince their friends to buy it. They help them pirate it. He's right about doing what he can to provide features that pirates can't take advantage of, though. That's the only way to actually combat piracy.

patio11 16y ago
Put it online and downloading the client lets you pirate the game like downloading Firefox lets you pirate Basecamp.
- NickPollard 16y ago
  I believe this is (most of the time) the best solution these days, but it's still starting from a position of assuming the customer is a criminal. If you're not actually adding any useful internet-based features, then this is just another DRM system that will piss off paying customers when they want to play but don't have a net connection because they're using a laptop on a plane flight.
  - mquander 16y ago
    What's wrong with assuming the customer is a criminal if the big majority of your customers are, in fact, criminals? (Presuming that by "customer" you just mean "person playing your game.") The question should be: how do you account for the fact that your customers are criminals and still make money without crippling your game? Putting useful features online is a good answer to that question.
    - dingy 16y ago
      Well, if I'm the (non-criminal) customer and you're the game producer, what's wrong with it is that you're making your problem my problem. It isn't, it shouldn't be and I'm not going to let it be (and no, I don't pirate, I just don't buy stuff I dislike).
      - mquander 16y ago
        That's why I said "without crippling the game." You're right, though; most developers will make their problem your problem, either to a small degree (by making sure that some useful things are only accessible for authenticated online clients) or a large degree (requiring always-on connectivity, nutty DRM schemes.) I don't think there's really anything "wrong" with that, though. It's not very fair, but that's how the world works. Given that people are going to continue to try making money from games, it seems like an optimal outcome.
        dingy 16y ago
        So, it's not fair but there's nothing wrong with it? I don't think we have the same definition of the word "wrong".
        mquander 16y ago
        I guess we don't.
        chc 16y ago
        I'm not sure it's an optimal outcome. It might help it some cases, but it definitely feeds the problem it's trying to solve. The less people like you, the less guilty they'll feel screwing you over. I don't pirate games, but pirating Activision titles would feel downright good. It also often creates the paradox that pirates get a better experience. Once the pirates work around all your antifeatures, the pirated version is actually a better product than the one you're selling (which makes piracy even more tempting).
    - frobozz 16y ago
      There are two reasons: 1) It drives your customers to your competitors If you had a choice between a shop that detained you in an "interview room", and checked your bags, pockets and body cavities against the receipt, every single time you went there, and one that just had a few CCTV cameras, which would you choose? 2) It makes people think "If I'm going to be punished anyway, I might as well commit the crime" In some countries (IIRC, both Finland & Netherlands do this), purchasers of recordable media are "treated as criminals" and pre-emptively fined for copying music (specifically music, not software). If I were subject to that kind of treatment, you bet I'd copy as much music as I could lay my hands on.
- eli 16y ago
  What if it doesn't really make sense to add online or multiplayer support to the app/game? Then isn't it just the typical DRM anti-feature? I'd be pretty annoyed if I couldn't play my fun new game on a plane because it needs to constantly connect to the internet to prove I didn't steal it.
  - eru 16y ago
    That's why the Minecraft creator's solution is sane. He does not block any features without network access. But some features only make sense with network access.
    - mquander 16y ago
      I understand the perceptual difference (it's annoying when features that are already there are "taken away," and less annoying when new features just don't appear.) But is there an actual difference? The time he's spent on network-dependent features may have been spent on other, more interesting features for everyone if the networked features didn't also serve as piracy prophylaxis.
      - nlawalker 16y ago
        Bingo. I worry about the state of gaming when the primary question on a developer's mind during design is "how can I make online servics a part of this game so I can actually make some money off of it?"
    - eli 16y ago
      Yeah, I get it. But it stinks that developers now have a bias towards online features (because they combat piracy) instead of potential offline features that are more useful or better serve customers.
  - patio11 16y ago
    As somebody who makes a living selling software, I do not consider the author getting paid a minor feature. Apologies for the inconvenience, take it up with 80% of your generation.
storm 16y ago
> Sadly, pirates don't actually convince their friends to buy it. They help them pirate it. Pirating software is often a pain - find a proper release, install, replace a binary, generate a key, avoid online services, seek out cracked updates (or go without them). If your time has value, it's hardly free. Do you really think everyone pirating anything is going through this process for every Tom, Dick and Harry they know, as opposed to just saying, "Yeah, it's $50 at Gamestop..."? What the author is talking about sounds like the far more common scenario -- friends will see a pirated game being played (or just hear it being praised), and make a purchase later if they so desire (perhaps on services like Steam, where hordes of people who used to exclusive pirate games now periodically pay for the simple conveniences of being legit). And the pirates themselves are occasionally 'turned' by the kind of value-adds that the author is taking about. How many people who really liked the single-player modes in their pirate copy of MW2 didn't go legit so that they could play multiplayer? Piracy can unquestionably lead to expanded mindshare and buzz, it's silly to assert that it merely spawns more piracy. Piracy of Photoshop isn't destroying Adobe's profit, it's securing it. How many legions of designers and photographers cut their teeth on a pirated version, in the process trained themselves to all its concepts, quirks and idioms, and later became a paid seat in a professional context (where using a pirated version is astonishingly stupid behaviour)? Edit: This is clearly an emotional issue. Parent is getting a steady stream of upvotes for blithely making a generalization about how all pirates behave, whereas I saw a downvote faster than what I've wrote could even have been read.
- lhnz 16y ago
  I agree with others that the OP really over-promised by saying that pirates will convince friends to buy. However, you don't deserve to be down-voted. A large number of people pirating something often causes it to become popular enough to get many sales. Word-of-mouth is not always a pirate explaining to others how to get something for free, it's often them just saying something is 'good' (which for many people implies worth buying).
  - _delirium 16y ago
    It's especially true in the indie-game sphere, where people get their recommendations from random reviews on blogs, mailing lists, wikis, forums, whatever. Lots of those reviews are not by people who paid for the game, but some people who read them might pay. Maybe not most of them, but often non-zero. It's useful enough that some indie-game devs are pretty liberal with their "review copies"; if you're going to write up even a blog blurb on a medium-traffic blog, they'll just send you a free copy and save you the hassle of pirating it. Really the biggest likely pitfall facing indie-game developers is that they release their game and nobody notices or cares, not even enough to pirate it. There are a ton of indie games that come out every year that never rise out of obscurity, which is the main thing publicity attempts have to overcome, at least early on. Enough people pirating it to generate some forum/blog buzz is one possible way, like underground musicians who get their initial publicity via people trading mix tapes.
zephyrfalcon 16y ago
"Sadly, pirates don't actually convince their friends to buy it. They help them pirate it." The article says: > But what if that person likes that game, talks about it to his or her friends, and then I manage to convince three of them to buy the game? The author is hoping that he can convince these friends to buy the game; he isn't suggesting that pirates do the convincing. In the next paragraph he describes how to do it: > Instead of just relying on guilt tripping pirates into buying, or wasting time and money trying to stop them, I can offer online-only services that actually add to the game experience. Online level saving, centralized skins, friends lists and secure name verification for multiplayer. None of these features can be accessed by people with pirated versions of the game, and hopefully they can be features that turn pirates from thieves into potential customers.
mquander 16y ago
I don't understand the logic at all here. Do you have some reason for believing that?
jokermatt999 16y ago
That's actually not always true. Check out the reddit thread on this topic, and you'll see plenty of people who pirated first and then actually bought it. I know plenty of pirates use the "I try before I buy" line, but some of them actually do. You're right on your second sentence, but do you have anything whatsoever to back up your first?
- gyardley 16y ago
  Back when my company was using our analytics to track piracy for iPhone applications, we found that 1 out of 243 people who stole an application later installed a legitimate copy. We stopped tracking piracy when we realized that we were getting into a cat-and-mouse game with application pirates and the feature wasn't worth the resources, but I can't imagine these stats have changed much since.
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    And how many of those people would have bought the application if it wasn't available to pirate? I'm guessing it would still be a much smaller number. There's a massive gap between being able to get something for completely free and having to pay for it.
  - scott_s 16y ago
    Thank you for bringing data into the discussion.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      While I agree with you that data is nice, this data in particular doesn't say a whole lot. It's like saying "1mm pay Google for the enterprise version of Google apps, and 100mm don't. They're leaving so much revenue on the table!" When discussing freemium, nobody talks about those who choose the free plan as 'pirates', even though they are doing the exact same thing that 'pirates' do.
      - scott_s 16y ago
yason 16y ago
I'm maybe 15 years behind the current trends but all games I've ever bought (when I was still buying games...) were carefully screened and test played using pirated sources. Piracy has always been the de facto news channel for new games: not magazines or demo disks. You had the game coming from your friends first and you saw it weeks or months later in a magazine. Investing actually money into something as brittle and vague as a video game simply requires that I certainly know what I'm buying. Thus, the title must either be a few-in-a-decade known hit or tested with a pirated version. If the situation is even remotely like that these days, game publishers are making their money because of piracy, not despite of it.
- jpdbaugh 16y ago
  I often find demos to be misleading of what the final product will be like. Games are expensive, at least for me, and demoing the final product is the only way I will know for sure that I am not going to waste $60 if I decide to buy something.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    The 90s shareware approach was almost ideal for me from that perspective. I could play 1/3 of Doom and then decide if I wanted to buy the remaining 2/3 or not.
    - jpdbaugh 16y ago
      I am not really sure why this died? Ten minute demos are just not enough time to judge a game.
      - chc 16y ago
        It's the same thinking that leads to antipiracy misfeatures. They don't want to give away any more for free than they have to, even if it winds up hurting the game itself.
dlytle 16y ago
I helped my friends pirate the first 10 audiobooks of a series I love, by handing them a flash drive with the MP3s on it, and the condition that if they liked the series they should buy the new ones as they come out. Now 6 of my friends (who never would have been hooked on the series otherwise) own legal versions of the two most recent novels starring our favorite wizard-detective. Those sales would not have been made if they hadn't gotten a taste of the series beforehand. Sure, this situation isn't the rule, and they pirated 5x the books they've purchased... but 2 sales each is better than 0, and with 8-10 more books coming in the series, the author/publisher have come out far ahead.
- pilif 16y ago
  as a huge fan of audibooks myself: Can you tell me what series you are talking about? (see? Another chance to hook somebody)
  - blaqsmith 16y ago
    Based on dlytle's description, he's likely talking about the Dresden Files series.
  - dlytle 16y ago
    The series in question is the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, read by James Marsters, If you're an audiobook fan, I also recommend looking into GraphicAudio. Unabridged audiobooks with a full voice cast, music, and sound effects. The Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks is good in GraphicAudio, as is Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson. Warbreaker is stand-alone, so it may be a good starting point. There are a few rough bits, but there always are; some sections with awkward musical choices, some re-used recognizable sound effects, but they're no more common than errors in standard audiobooks. (Disclaimer: GraphicAudio books are abridged, but functionally unabridged. If it's raining, they play the sound of rain instead of having the narrator say "it was raining". By definition, that makes them abridged, despite no loss of content.)
Vivtek 16y ago
That's the only way to actually combat piracy. No. That's the only way to make money in an economic reality that copying is free. It's redefining what you sell so that it cannot be pirated because it's a different product/service to start with. You're not combating piracy when you offer a non-copyable service - you're just redefining your terms to work with reality.
flannell 16y ago
I agree with you. However, truly outstanding apps will always do well. I downloaded Angry Birds Lite to my itouch, played the first few levels and promptly bought it. I also did the same with Tower Madness. There was an article on a flash games company that could detect when the app was running on illegal web servers. It would display an advert inside the game saying where it came from which resulted in a spike of traffic and revenue for the original owners. I believe a few developers are now treating the pirates as salesmen to reach a larger buying audience. It's not ideal, just goes with the territory
njharman 16y ago
> Sadly, pirates don't actually convince their friends to buy it. Untrue, I have direct personal proof to the contrary ;)

rsbrown 16y ago

"why fight the biggest revolution in information flow since the printing press when you could easily work with it by adding services that actually add some value beyond the free act of making a digital copy?" This is very intelligent insight on the author's part. It's also the same argument that has been staring the RIAA in the face for over a decade: you can't fight the future, so you'd better figure out a better way to earn revenues. With Minecraft, Mojang has an opportunity to monetize illegitimate users by creating incentives through community play and online rewards that may not be available using pirated copies of their product.

bkmartin 16y ago
Sort of like putting measures in place so that pirates are using more of a trial version of your software. I think this is the way most new programs are going these days. But that still doesn't solve the music aspect of pirating. What bonus stuff can you give over the music that can convert a considerable number of the pirates to paying customers?
- rsbrown 16y ago
  Except for the tiny percentage of superstars, musical artists have always made more money through live performances than recording contracts. Ticket sales, merchandise and other such revenues are much less susceptible to pirating.
  - billybob 16y ago
    Be that as it may, can you see that it's legitimate for a musician to want to make, record, and sell music - not an associated industry of products? And there are fans who don't go to concerts or buy t-shirts, but really like listening to music? If you're a fan like that, and you don't give back to the artist at some point, you're making it less likely that the recordings you want will be made in the future. Notice that I'm not throwing around moral claims. I'm just making an observation. If you want something to be made, and it costs time and money to make, you can encourage its creation or not. But don't complain that the music selection sucks if you don't financially support the music you like.

YooLi 16y ago

All he did was describe the freemium model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium

maushu 16y ago
Not exactly. More like the freemium model but with the free part "hidden" for most users.
- gregpilling 16y ago
  It is not hidden. They can see that if they pay, they get the extra features. If they don't pay, then play the restricted version without the online stuff.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Except the "restricted version" is the product that is actually being sold to most users.

Das_Bruce 16y ago

Am I the only person who has bought a game after pirating and playing it through? Also I'd be more inclined to buy more games first if there was some way of getting my money back if I really don't like it. I'm looking at you, GTA4, you blurry, poo sandwich.

KoZeN 16y ago
I personally haven't done this but you bring up a good point. What is so crazy about releasing a fully playable free demo that lasts 10 days that enables you to save your progress and pick up where you left off after purchasing the full version? No doubt a system like this would have multiple weaknesses but if this system existed I can guarantee you that I would own more games.
- lhnz 16y ago
  Agreed. And while we're all at it, somebody needs to bring back shareware. (Especially on mobile devices!)
- nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
  Sony is starting to implement this sort of feature with the PS3. You can download the entire, full version of the game to your console, and then you have 24 hours from the first game start to play the game, including saving your position, as much as you want. Once the 24 hour period is up, you can keep your game saves, and either delete or purchase the game, at which point you can continue from your game saves. It's just too bad so far that you can only do this with an extremely limited selection of games that have already been on the market long enough that I would have bought them if I was actually interested in them. But the concept is great.
- smallblacksun 16y ago
  The problem is that it is very, very easy to disable time-based lockouts, thus making piracy even easier.
coffeeaddicted 16y ago
I never did buy a game after pirating it (and no I don't pirate these days, but I was younger once...). But I did several times buy the following game of a company when I really liked one.

ErrantX 16y ago

But what if that person likes that game, talks about it to his or her friends, and then I manage to convince three of them to buy the game? This is as bad as the logic spouted by the media industry that a piracy = one lost sale. If not even worse (because it is just plucked from thin air)

lhnz 16y ago
Yes, I'd love to see some statistics for the probability of a pirate actually convincing somebody else to buy.

nlawalker 16y ago

"I can offer online-only services that actually add to the game experience." It doesn't matter what they are, what they do, or whether or not the network aspect of these services/features is integral to them - pirates and consumers who insist that any features not on the disc at install-time are an inconvenience will still cry DRM. Are these "online services" integral to the game? If they are, then what happens when they go down? It's really not much different than what happened when the Assassin's Creed 2 validation servers fell over. Are they not integral to the game? Then pirates will do without them or find ways to replace them, and some people will still bitch that they shouldn't be so inconvenient. There's no getting around the fact that creating copies of a digital work is free, and so there's no solution that's going to make everyone happy. It's unfortunate, because every developer now feels the need to create online services as a part of their game, even if their idea doesn't really call for it.

higher 16y ago
It is pretty easy to distinguish DRM from net-enabled features. You simply need to ask "Could the feature exist without an internet connection?" You claim that users will conflate the two regardless, but I doubt this. Imagine an alternate dimension in which StarCraft shipped with LAN support but never supported online play over Battle.net. The StarCraft community would be based on gamer-oriented VPNs, and would likely be about as healthy as it has become in our dimension. If, when StarCraft II was announced, players learned that LAN play would still be supported, but play over Battle.net had been added, I don't think very many people would complain that the product had been deliberately crippled. In our world, StarCraft supported LAN play and Battle.net play, while StarCraft II does not support any type of multiplayer other than over Battle.net. Battle.net play has resulted in half-second latency for all players and several days of downtime since release. Additionally, it is known that a "Professional" version of StarCraft II exists that supports LAN play - the feature has simply been removed from the retail version. I think it is pretty clear which of these is a feature and which is not.

barkingcat 16y ago

Perhaps then the goal is to have a mutable pricing structure that responds to market pressure. If it really doesn't cost anything to produce 1 additional electronic copy, something like this might work. At launch date / first to market, there is a high price tag for the digital good (whether it be music, game, movie, etc). This is so that the vendor/author can make sure that they can sell at a high price to those "first movers" that actually want to pay $1000 to be the first person on the planet to have that special ring tone, ahead of everyone else in the market, for example. As time passes, and as more people buy the "product" (which is done via a download or a file transfer) - the price of the product goes down - because the as demand rises, the cost of production actually doesn't change - and the author already made some money, so there's no point being greedy, because then people would go and pirate it. Once this price goes down, it goes down for EVERY SINGLE customer, including those who bought it during the high initial price. I mean, the vendor does have the customer's credit card numbers. Do a residual, scaled, periodic refund for every single customer, based on the differences between the current discounted price and the original price at which the customer bought the good. As the # of units sold increases, the price of the product decreases - of course the relative rates can be tweaked so that the vendor is still making more money than they are discounting, because as an electronic/digital good, there are no factories or warehouses - it's easier to make money at mass scales when it comes to digital goods (vs physical goods like bicycles). Existing customers feel validated - the more people they recommend to buy the product, the more money they get back. New customers don't feel like they're getting ripped off - the prices are falling all the time, and you "buy into" a whole discounting structure. The original vendor/producer can finely tune the ratio at which the prices fall in order to control profitability, popularity, and sales rate as a factor in promotion and marketing. Again, if you take advantage of the fact that if you sell 10 copies, the cost for building the software/digital good is no different from when you sell 100,000 copies, then you can exploit that "efficiency gap" if you can call it that between the existing pricing structures and a variable pricing structure that I describe. At some point, you will reach a "price floor" at which the producer is comfortable reaching their target cumulative total profit. Since altering the price changes the price for every single customer since the beginning of the lifetime of sales for the product, you can actually say - I want x million for this product in 3 years time - and actually be able to hit that target by planning out the way the price changes. OR if you believe in the long tail, go ahead and have a constantly decreasing price - as you reach the hundreds of millions of people in the long tail, you can charge 1 cent - and you would get hundreds of millions for a product you made - providing usefulness for all those people at a great price - AND being able to protect your livelihood during those critical first few sales. Of course, this requires every single sale to every single customer to have its own merit, its own tracking system, its own values. BUT personalized sales is exactly what we are looking forward to in the future. And I think technically, it's not super hard - I mean we have nonstop systems and mainframes and clusters of all kinds - that analyses the trillions of collisions in the LHC - what makes us think that we can't track six or seven billion consumers who are alive on this planet, who might be making 5 or 6 million transactions a year? It's not that bad when you consider the scale that google / national science foundation / CERN operates at.

math0ne 16y ago

Man i wish minecraft ran on my computer :(

njharman 16y ago

Article had absolutely nothing to do with how piracy works. (I expected details of "couriers"/cracking/distributers/etc) It was about author's opinion that the copyrights of copying and distribution can't and should not be enforced in digital "age".

Revisor 16y ago

What he describes can be summed up as "Don't sell games, sell services". And I wholeheartedly agree. Games-as-a-service in the future?

Groxx 16y ago
Present. There are a number of games that require internet access - MMOs, some where your save file is online, and some which simply phone home frequently. ie, Assassin's Creed 2.
- Revisor 16y ago
  Not considering MMOs, those other examples sound more like a nuisance (DRM) than an extra service.
  - benologist 16y ago
    It absolutely is a nuisance - I regret buying Command and Conquer 3 because it is intrinsically tied to EA's servers, you can't even play single player games without being signed in and online. Even your saved games only exist on their servers. But I bet it was more effective than any other form of DRM they've used over the years.
  - Groxx 16y ago
    I wholly agree. Just pointing out that they're "games as a service", even if that service is a disservice.
- teamonkey 16y ago
  In the case of Assassin's Creed 2 your save file can also be saved online.
teamonkey 16y ago
I much prefer the Metaboli/Gametap rental model. You pay a reasonable monthly fee and you have access to their full library to download and play as you wish. Profits are apportioned to the developers according to what is being played. A bit like Spotify, I guess. Unfortunately their catalogue is pretty old and weak (a few diamonds but nothing special) and I'm more of a console gamer. If a similar rental system was available on the consoles I'd probably never buy retail again.

bryanh 16y ago

Once again, by moving a crucial portion of the game online, you can mitigate the effectiveness of a pirated game while being able to deliver content that enhances the game for everyone. The problem is, what if I want to play it on a flight? Enabling this enables pirates. So, is this worth it?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

abronte 16y ago

I think Notch's biggest way of combating piracy right now is his price point. The game is only $13 USD and has endless amounts of playtime and creativity. Time and time again, all these big publishers keep putting out big name titles with only 8-16 hours of gameplay for 60$. No wonder their games get pirated...

Dove 16y ago

If someone pirates Minecraft instead of buying it, it means I’ve lost some “potential” revenue. . . . But what if that person likes that game, talks about it to his or her friends, and then I manage to convince three of them to buy the game? I’d make three actual sales instead of blocking out the potentially missed sale of the original person which never cost me any money in the first case. I hate this argument. People who want to pirate games or music frequently say that by pirating, they are actually providing a benefit to the author by giving him exposure. That's true sometimes, but I don't think it's always true. In general, with any creative product, you want to try to turn some portion of it into exposure and some portion into money. You might divide things up 10/90 or 50/50 or 70/30 or even 100/0-but-I-charge-for-support, depending on what you think is optimum for your goals. But pirates presume to make that decision for you. (Though I agree that smart authors will embrace the fact that copying is free and easy rather than trying to fight it. The piece of your product you want to use for exposure can be copyable, but the piece you want to sell shouldn't be. Or if it is, you should be honest about your income being from donations or exceptionally honest people.)