10 ms·

As a game developer, there are two conflicting stories I have heard about game piracy for multiple decades. From the consumers: Piracy doesn't matter. Pirates

As a game developer, there are two conflicting stories I have heard about game piracy for multiple decades. From the consumers: Piracy doesn't matter. Pirates were never going to buy anyway. From the AAA producers: >50% of lifetime revenue for a game is made in the first 3-6 months after release. During that time, they sit and wait in dread for "Crack Day". The exact day the DRM crack is released, revenue permanently drops hard. I've read similar stories from small non-game desktop ISVs here on Hacker News. That they can clearly see on their revenue graphs the release dates of updates that contain DRM changes. Of course, most people on HN work on web-based software. Web based software has pretty much completely overtaken desktop software because of it's many advantages --such as being impossible to pirate. I wonder how many people here have actually worked on a pirate-able product? Phone apps are technically pirate-able. But, like console games, pirating is such an inconvenience (compared to desktop piracy) that it is relatively rarely done. But, even on phones, most of the revenue is to unlock server-based features. I can say from experience that app hacking for client-side features in phone apps happens quite a lot despite the inconvenience. Meanwhile, Minecraft was a story of someone in exactly the opposite situation from a AAA developer. Having zero reputation and zero marketing budget, it made complete sense for Notch to give away his game for free at first and slowly increase the price as consumer awareness and confidence grew. At all points Minecraft was the Indie Dream Story of starting as a nobody and gradually growing an audience who hands you money out of respect for your product rather than as a requirement of transacting with you to attain it.

ben_w 6y ago
Every piece of Mac shareware I made was hacked instantly, judging by the “free license codes and patches for games” lists they appeared on. The patch must have been an automated attack, too, given I’d made the deliberate business decision to have a license code check of: licenseText.length > 0
juskrey 6y ago
I can confirm that publishers were begging to install the copy protection which at least lasts for several days, not even weeks or months. The math for that was pretty simple - on average, most impatient gamers, who buy the product in the first days, really do not care about the price but will prefer free option. To repeat, this is on average and works given 90% of games die after first weeks of sales in any case. Economies of megahits are way different.
yarcob 6y ago
I make client side Mac app with trivial copy protection and unlimited free trial, and people still pay for licenses. My app is practically almost free except for a nag dialog, and I still make a living from it. Piracy may matter to big companies that have lots of employees who try to extract every possible cent from their audience. If you just want to make a living from your software, you should not waste time worrying about piracy.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  > Piracy may matter to big companies that have lots of employees who try to extract every possible cent from their audience. I don't necessarily think AAA game studios are trying to extract every cent. But they do exist in a pretty unique situation in software. Since they invest a ton of money up-front to produce a game, and something like 85% of their sales occur in the first month or so. And those profits are invested back into the creation of the next game. Piracy is very much an issue in this situation. Delaying a crack by one week is probably the difference between solvency for studios. It is absolutely the case that some game studios might not be effected by piracy. Either because they don't make their money from the game, but instead from selling in-game items, their product needs online support for maximum fun, or some other reason. But the industry is definitely big enough for piracy to be both a problem, and not a problem for different players.
  - TrevorJ 6y ago
    > I don't necessarily think AAA game studios are trying to extract every cent. While this is true, the ones who don't tend to get eaten by the ones that do, eventually. Fantastic game studios are one flop away from closing their doors most of the time, so attrition is high, and the allure of recurring revenue via predatory microtransactions is hard to ignore.
- finiteseries 6y ago
  macOS software automatically excludes >95% of the human population from its user base, and the remaining bit is incredibly wealthy and used to the macOS tradition of high quality botique software for a price. The PC and Android gaming markets are slightly different beasts.
csallen 6y ago
The "lost sales" point seems like a red herring to me. Theft is about taking rivalrous goods. If I steal your apple, you no longer have your apple, which is injurious to you. That's why theft is illegal. Piracy and copyright are about, literally, copying. If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3 and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually just a better more abundant place now. Copyright is about granting limited monopolies as an incentive. We make it illegal for people to copy based entirely on the idea that more people will create stuff if they know they can monopolize the profits for a time. Which is sensible in some cases, but I personally believe people would still create all kinds of stuff, if not more. Regardless, I do think lost sales exist. I made a paid iOS app that was cracked and saw my sales drop. But I also think it's important to recognize that this is still not theft. It's a copyright violation. These words mean different things.
- vimy 6y ago
  Theft is taking something without paying for it. In the case of games, music, etc, you don’t pay for the file itself but for the work the artist put into it.
  - dcow 6y ago
    In a society where copyright exists, sure. I think the point is that meatspace copyright laws don't translate well into cyberspace because they were designed to apply to a world where the act of creating copies itself takes work. You aren't paying for the work the artist put in, if you were that would be called a commission. You are paying for the right to experience a copy of the artist’s work. Usually you’re not even paying the artist, either. The studios and publishing companies reap the profits. It’s not different for studio developed games. Do I pirate things these days? No, I am capable of paying and we’ve figured out streaming. Will I buy a proprietary product without trying it first? Probably not. Would I pay if I didn't have the means? Absolutely not. I firmly believe that once a work of art has been created, it is oppressive to try and dictate who can experience it. I’m copyleft, not a rampant pirate.
  - c1ccccc1 6y ago
    > Theft is taking something without paying for it. According to this definition, dumpster diving would be theft. The harms caused by theft and copyright infringement are different. Calling them both theft is just a marketing ploy. Stealing something deprives the owner of its use. Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government to an artist on a piece of intellectual property. This is socially beneficial because it means more people can make a living by creating art. Copyright infringement means evading this monopoly, and is harmful for the same reason that granting the monopoly is beneficial. For example, dumpster diving is neither theft nor copyright infringement. It's not theft because taking food that has been thrown away isn't depriving anyone of its use. It's not copyright infringement, because we as a society do not deem it socially beneficial to grant anybody a monopoly on food production. This is true even though the dumpster diver is taking food without paying the farmers who produced it.
XorNot 6y ago
The thing about revenue is I wonder how much of that breaks down demographically. While I'm sure there are some anti-culture adults in the mix, the biggest motivation to pirate anything is when you're not an adult who has independent, disposable income (and in years gone by, the whole "debit Visa" thing didn't exist and meant online purchasing was basically locked off to the young) is that it's a completely viable and easier option to just bypass the people in your life who control that access (parents). Even if your parents are willing to sometimes buy you games or software or whatever, there's got to be an element that a much easier path is just downloading it once a crack is available since you're more worried about burning that extremely finite supply of political capital then someone else's profit.
jimz 6y ago
* From the consumers: Piracy doesn't matter. Pirates were never going to buy anyway.* Really? Maybe times have really changed but I know a lot of people, myself included, who pirated software - starting in the mid 90s for me - because we couldn't buy software since we were too young to make money and lived in constant fear that the one time our parents do buy some game or piece of software it turns out to be total crap. At this point, even though my education have led me to a more nuanced and philosophical objection to the enforcement of intellectual property in the manner at least the United States does, and equates physical property either on par with it or even underneath it, the only times I pirate software now is if there's no trial version, and if it's something I really want to use long term I'd purchase it anyway. Effectively the only long term sort of piracy I conduct at this point is to circumvent blackout rules on sports streaming because for whatever reason a whole fifth of MLB is blacked out on mlb.tv where I am but the biggest streaming package only shows 2 of those teams. Access, ultimately, determine whether someone pirates. That includes cases when access is outlandishly expensive or simply barred, and even knowing my share of anarchists and career criminals as defined by state I really don't see people who are ideologically committed to piracy in an absolutist sense. It's like, if I can pay $25 a month for unlimited access to JSTOR it would entirely be for my intellectual curiosity but I'd do it, but that's not an option so sci-hub when the article isn't available is kind of the only reasonable option. The alternative is simply to give up and find something else to be curious about. Some aspects of reverse-engineering/cracking in the scene was gamified to such an extent where it became a prestige sort of thing, a competition for its own sake. That tends to stop where-ever your rivals stop, and as a result it's never a sure thing that patches would be cracked, for example.
- magnetowasright 6y ago
  > Access, ultimately, determine whether someone pirates. Totally agree. Netflix’s streaming service is a great example of this. Initially, Netflix provided easy access, so most people I know stopped pirating films and shows. Mostly with the exception of new episodes of shows that aired in Australia weeks (or more) behind the US air date. Nobody wants to be weeks behind on GoT, not when the internet explodes as the episode airs. Then Netflix’s Australian library was gradually gutted. VPNs were a pretty good way around the lacklustre Australian offerings. Then that became a tenuous workaround at best, especially as major studios split and made their own platforms, each at least $10 a month, with no guarantee that the things worth watching were available to Australians. So what do a bunch of people with VPNs do with nothing to watch? They pirate. Sci-hub is unfortunately so necessary. The whole situation feels a bit like Spotify where the creators of the content that these journals/companies charge for don’t really get any of the money. What an ’innovation’ that is.
npteljes 6y ago
Notch got really lucky. These views about piracy not mattering are practically survivor bias. There are the rare vendors who I think profited from the pirates in the end, Microsoft and Adobe. Them making their software easy to pirate, coupled with the existing laws at the time basically made and maintained their flagship products the de-facto standards which can be felt to this day. But these again are the rare examples where piracy was useful - for most, it just sucks money out their pocket.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  > These views about piracy not mattering are practically survivor bias. It's not about survivorship bias. It's about where he was starting from and the risks involved given that. An indie game dev's largest risk is remaining in obscurity and never making anything. In comparison, piracy is basically a non-factor. Of course large, well known studios care about piracy. Because they're already large and well known - they don't have to worry about making literally $0 in revenue on a title.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  You are using part of a proof to reason about an entire domain. What happens if we treat music and software like recipes? We don't know because we have not proved it. I used to think as you do. This is a much larger issue than trying to preserve the business model of a lobbyist.
  - account42 6y ago
    This and at least one other post of yours in this thread were [dead] with no responses so you might have been shadowbanned.
stevenwoo 6y ago
I worked at Blizzard a generation ago and there was no copy protection and then copy protection was added to products while I was there. IIRC what a producer told me was they had sales numbers for Starcraft in Germany without copy protection. Based on projections (prior Warcraft expansions) they expected the expansion to sell 1/3 the copies of the original game. But they added a simple CD copy protection scheme to the expansion and sales of the expansion in Germany were 3x the original game, so about an order of magnitude greater sales, which one can sort of infer that piracy accounted for 80-90% of Starcraft player base in Germany. This is just my one anecdote, YMMV.
p0nce 6y ago
Not only that, but consumers routinely understimate the risks of using software of dubious origin that has been tampered with. It should be avoided for security concerns alone.
pdimitar 6y ago
> From the AAA producers: >50% of lifetime revenue for a game is made in the first 3-6 months after release. During that time, they sit and wait in dread for "Crack Day". The exact day the DRM crack is released, revenue permanently drops hard. I'd like to read more about this. How much revenue is actually lost? Is there a proof that this revenue would have continued coming in? If so, what is the estimated percentage of that revenue compared to all-time revenue? I am leaning on the side of "piracy doesn't matter, pirates were never going to buy anyway" but there is a nuance. It's the same as torrenting movies as opposed to subscribing to a streaming service. If the streaming service is VERY convenient and affordable, torrenting drops. Recently it started increasing again because streaming services fragmented the market a lot and everybody wants you to subscribe to their service while realistically people want ONE entry point from which they can search and watch for anything and everything. To me the keyword is: convenience. If piracy is convenient and easy then yes, I'll agree with you that a real revenue will be lost. I am sure of it. But if piracy requires people to go through a bit more hoops than they wanted then I am very sure they won't bother. Seen it happen before my eyes years ago. But IMO it's really important to answer my questions above because without their answers the "we lose revenue on the day our product's DRM is broken" proposition remains mostly a theory. Still, I am willing to have my mind changed by looking at data. Do you have any links? (Another, albeit unrelated, example is that many people held off their Cyberpunk 2077 buy because they wanted CDPR to fix the most egregious bugs first -- and some people shared on gaming forums they won't pirate CP2077 because they are afraid the pirated version will be buggier than the retail one.)

ben_w 6y ago

Every piece of Mac shareware I made was hacked instantly, judging by the “free license codes and patches for games” lists they appeared on. The patch must have been an automated attack, too, given I’d made the deliberate business decision to have a license code check of: licenseText.length > 0

juskrey 6y ago

I can confirm that publishers were begging to install the copy protection which at least lasts for several days, not even weeks or months. The math for that was pretty simple - on average, most impatient gamers, who buy the product in the first days, really do not care about the price but will prefer free option. To repeat, this is on average and works given 90% of games die after first weeks of sales in any case. Economies of megahits are way different.

yarcob 6y ago

I make client side Mac app with trivial copy protection and unlimited free trial, and people still pay for licenses. My app is practically almost free except for a nag dialog, and I still make a living from it. Piracy may matter to big companies that have lots of employees who try to extract every possible cent from their audience. If you just want to make a living from your software, you should not waste time worrying about piracy.

mywittyname 6y ago
> Piracy may matter to big companies that have lots of employees who try to extract every possible cent from their audience. I don't necessarily think AAA game studios are trying to extract every cent. But they do exist in a pretty unique situation in software. Since they invest a ton of money up-front to produce a game, and something like 85% of their sales occur in the first month or so. And those profits are invested back into the creation of the next game. Piracy is very much an issue in this situation. Delaying a crack by one week is probably the difference between solvency for studios. It is absolutely the case that some game studios might not be effected by piracy. Either because they don't make their money from the game, but instead from selling in-game items, their product needs online support for maximum fun, or some other reason. But the industry is definitely big enough for piracy to be both a problem, and not a problem for different players.
- TrevorJ 6y ago
  > I don't necessarily think AAA game studios are trying to extract every cent. While this is true, the ones who don't tend to get eaten by the ones that do, eventually. Fantastic game studios are one flop away from closing their doors most of the time, so attrition is high, and the allure of recurring revenue via predatory microtransactions is hard to ignore.
finiteseries 6y ago
macOS software automatically excludes >95% of the human population from its user base, and the remaining bit is incredibly wealthy and used to the macOS tradition of high quality botique software for a price. The PC and Android gaming markets are slightly different beasts.

csallen 6y ago

The "lost sales" point seems like a red herring to me. Theft is about taking rivalrous goods. If I steal your apple, you no longer have your apple, which is injurious to you. That's why theft is illegal. Piracy and copyright are about, literally, copying. If I copy your MP3, you still have your MP3 and haven't been deprived of anything. The world is actually just a better more abundant place now. Copyright is about granting limited monopolies as an incentive. We make it illegal for people to copy based entirely on the idea that more people will create stuff if they know they can monopolize the profits for a time. Which is sensible in some cases, but I personally believe people would still create all kinds of stuff, if not more. Regardless, I do think lost sales exist. I made a paid iOS app that was cracked and saw my sales drop. But I also think it's important to recognize that this is still not theft. It's a copyright violation. These words mean different things.

vimy 6y ago
Theft is taking something without paying for it. In the case of games, music, etc, you don’t pay for the file itself but for the work the artist put into it.
- dcow 6y ago
  In a society where copyright exists, sure. I think the point is that meatspace copyright laws don't translate well into cyberspace because they were designed to apply to a world where the act of creating copies itself takes work. You aren't paying for the work the artist put in, if you were that would be called a commission. You are paying for the right to experience a copy of the artist’s work. Usually you’re not even paying the artist, either. The studios and publishing companies reap the profits. It’s not different for studio developed games. Do I pirate things these days? No, I am capable of paying and we’ve figured out streaming. Will I buy a proprietary product without trying it first? Probably not. Would I pay if I didn't have the means? Absolutely not. I firmly believe that once a work of art has been created, it is oppressive to try and dictate who can experience it. I’m copyleft, not a rampant pirate.
- c1ccccc1 6y ago
  > Theft is taking something without paying for it. According to this definition, dumpster diving would be theft. The harms caused by theft and copyright infringement are different. Calling them both theft is just a marketing ploy. Stealing something deprives the owner of its use. Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government to an artist on a piece of intellectual property. This is socially beneficial because it means more people can make a living by creating art. Copyright infringement means evading this monopoly, and is harmful for the same reason that granting the monopoly is beneficial. For example, dumpster diving is neither theft nor copyright infringement. It's not theft because taking food that has been thrown away isn't depriving anyone of its use. It's not copyright infringement, because we as a society do not deem it socially beneficial to grant anybody a monopoly on food production. This is true even though the dumpster diver is taking food without paying the farmers who produced it.

XorNot 6y ago

The thing about revenue is I wonder how much of that breaks down demographically. While I'm sure there are some anti-culture adults in the mix, the biggest motivation to pirate anything is when you're not an adult who has independent, disposable income (and in years gone by, the whole "debit Visa" thing didn't exist and meant online purchasing was basically locked off to the young) is that it's a completely viable and easier option to just bypass the people in your life who control that access (parents). Even if your parents are willing to sometimes buy you games or software or whatever, there's got to be an element that a much easier path is just downloading it once a crack is available since you're more worried about burning that extremely finite supply of political capital then someone else's profit.

jimz 6y ago

* From the consumers: Piracy doesn't matter. Pirates were never going to buy anyway.* Really? Maybe times have really changed but I know a lot of people, myself included, who pirated software - starting in the mid 90s for me - because we couldn't buy software since we were too young to make money and lived in constant fear that the one time our parents do buy some game or piece of software it turns out to be total crap. At this point, even though my education have led me to a more nuanced and philosophical objection to the enforcement of intellectual property in the manner at least the United States does, and equates physical property either on par with it or even underneath it, the only times I pirate software now is if there's no trial version, and if it's something I really want to use long term I'd purchase it anyway. Effectively the only long term sort of piracy I conduct at this point is to circumvent blackout rules on sports streaming because for whatever reason a whole fifth of MLB is blacked out on mlb.tv where I am but the biggest streaming package only shows 2 of those teams. Access, ultimately, determine whether someone pirates. That includes cases when access is outlandishly expensive or simply barred, and even knowing my share of anarchists and career criminals as defined by state I really don't see people who are ideologically committed to piracy in an absolutist sense. It's like, if I can pay $25 a month for unlimited access to JSTOR it would entirely be for my intellectual curiosity but I'd do it, but that's not an option so sci-hub when the article isn't available is kind of the only reasonable option. The alternative is simply to give up and find something else to be curious about. Some aspects of reverse-engineering/cracking in the scene was gamified to such an extent where it became a prestige sort of thing, a competition for its own sake. That tends to stop where-ever your rivals stop, and as a result it's never a sure thing that patches would be cracked, for example.

magnetowasright 6y ago
> Access, ultimately, determine whether someone pirates. Totally agree. Netflix’s streaming service is a great example of this. Initially, Netflix provided easy access, so most people I know stopped pirating films and shows. Mostly with the exception of new episodes of shows that aired in Australia weeks (or more) behind the US air date. Nobody wants to be weeks behind on GoT, not when the internet explodes as the episode airs. Then Netflix’s Australian library was gradually gutted. VPNs were a pretty good way around the lacklustre Australian offerings. Then that became a tenuous workaround at best, especially as major studios split and made their own platforms, each at least $10 a month, with no guarantee that the things worth watching were available to Australians. So what do a bunch of people with VPNs do with nothing to watch? They pirate. Sci-hub is unfortunately so necessary. The whole situation feels a bit like Spotify where the creators of the content that these journals/companies charge for don’t really get any of the money. What an ’innovation’ that is.

npteljes 6y ago

Notch got really lucky. These views about piracy not mattering are practically survivor bias. There are the rare vendors who I think profited from the pirates in the end, Microsoft and Adobe. Them making their software easy to pirate, coupled with the existing laws at the time basically made and maintained their flagship products the de-facto standards which can be felt to this day. But these again are the rare examples where piracy was useful - for most, it just sucks money out their pocket.

bcrosby95 6y ago
> These views about piracy not mattering are practically survivor bias. It's not about survivorship bias. It's about where he was starting from and the risks involved given that. An indie game dev's largest risk is remaining in obscurity and never making anything. In comparison, piracy is basically a non-factor. Of course large, well known studios care about piracy. Because they're already large and well known - they don't have to worry about making literally $0 in revenue on a title.
datavirtue 6y ago
You are using part of a proof to reason about an entire domain. What happens if we treat music and software like recipes? We don't know because we have not proved it. I used to think as you do. This is a much larger issue than trying to preserve the business model of a lobbyist.
- account42 6y ago
  This and at least one other post of yours in this thread were [dead] with no responses so you might have been shadowbanned.

stevenwoo 6y ago

I worked at Blizzard a generation ago and there was no copy protection and then copy protection was added to products while I was there. IIRC what a producer told me was they had sales numbers for Starcraft in Germany without copy protection. Based on projections (prior Warcraft expansions) they expected the expansion to sell 1/3 the copies of the original game. But they added a simple CD copy protection scheme to the expansion and sales of the expansion in Germany were 3x the original game, so about an order of magnitude greater sales, which one can sort of infer that piracy accounted for 80-90% of Starcraft player base in Germany. This is just my one anecdote, YMMV.

p0nce 6y ago

Not only that, but consumers routinely understimate the risks of using software of dubious origin that has been tampered with. It should be avoided for security concerns alone.

pdimitar 6y ago

> From the AAA producers: >50% of lifetime revenue for a game is made in the first 3-6 months after release. During that time, they sit and wait in dread for "Crack Day". The exact day the DRM crack is released, revenue permanently drops hard. I'd like to read more about this. How much revenue is actually lost? Is there a proof that this revenue would have continued coming in? If so, what is the estimated percentage of that revenue compared to all-time revenue? I am leaning on the side of "piracy doesn't matter, pirates were never going to buy anyway" but there is a nuance. It's the same as torrenting movies as opposed to subscribing to a streaming service. If the streaming service is VERY convenient and affordable, torrenting drops. Recently it started increasing again because streaming services fragmented the market a lot and everybody wants you to subscribe to their service while realistically people want ONE entry point from which they can search and watch for anything and everything. To me the keyword is: convenience. If piracy is convenient and easy then yes, I'll agree with you that a real revenue will be lost. I am sure of it. But if piracy requires people to go through a bit more hoops than they wanted then I am very sure they won't bother. Seen it happen before my eyes years ago. But IMO it's really important to answer my questions above because without their answers the "we lose revenue on the day our product's DRM is broken" proposition remains mostly a theory. Still, I am willing to have my mind changed by looking at data. Do you have any links? (Another, albeit unrelated, example is that many people held off their Cyberpunk 2077 buy because they wanted CDPR to fix the most egregious bugs first -- and some people shared on gaming forums they won't pirate CP2077 because they are afraid the pirated version will be buggier than the retail one.)