8 ms·

People only pirate games because the publishers make it too painful to play games legally. I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play. T

People only pirate games because the publishers make it too painful to play games legally. I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play. This pattern has been shown time and time again. When people pirate, it's usually due to a problem with the experience. People pay for convenience. Now a days a lot of people are pirating games because the quality of games has gone down the drain. Publishers are releasing unfinished games and pricing them at record high. Consumers are pissed at the lack of value.

oriolid 9mo ago
I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money (and games were incredibly expensive back in the day). The people who I copied them from did it to show off their collection and connections, or just because they were my friends.
- badsectoracula 9mo ago
  > I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money Yes, but if it was impossible to pirate, you'd still have no money to buy the games, so in the grand scheme of things nothing would change.
- buran77 9mo ago
  For people who have no money to spare for games it really doesn't matter if games come with DRM or not. They wouldn't afford them anyway so "for free" is the only option that matters. For people who have money for games but don't want to pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers). For people who have money for games and are willing to pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the first place.
  - mindcandy 9mo ago
    > especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers). “Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue. And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.
    - fwipsy 9mo ago
      Do you have a source for sales data when a crack becomes available? If so, that seems like definitive proof that piracy does affect sales.
      - bendangelo 9mo ago
        When the Nintendo Switch became hackable, ie can play any game, Nintendo saw a massive decrease in sales in Spain. Btw people in Spain pirate the most games in Europe. The decrease was at least 40%. The idea that this is a service issue and piracy doesn’t affect sales is just PR speak. If the game is offline, it’ll be pirated a lot.
        fc417fc802 9mo ago
        Both you and GGP make concrete claims but fail to provide evidence. Can anyone cite published sales data or is this all mere conjecture? We've been exposed to what seems like FUD about piracy killing sales since approximately forever - you wouldn't dOwnLoAd a cAR - but seemingly zero actual evidence to date.
        mindcandy 9mo ago
        My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public. The best public report I can find is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1875952124002532 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months. What I’ve observed from internal reports from multiple companies is that, if you don’t assume an outlier blockbuster game, major game studios’ normal plan is to target a 10% annual profit margin with an expected variance of +/-20% each year. So, assuming you have a solidly on-target game, DRM not just being there, but surviving at least a couple months is the difference between “10% profit moving the whole company forward on schedule” vs “10% loss dragging the whole company down” or “30% profit, great success, bonuses and hiring increases” depending on the situation. Outside of games, I have seen many personnel reports on Hacker News over the years from small-time ISVs that they find it exhausting they need to regularly ship BS “My Software version N+1” just as an excuse to update their DRM. But, every time they do, sales go back up. And, the day the new crack appears on Pirate Bay, sales drop back down. Over and over forever. Thus why we can’t just buy desktop software anymore. Web apps are primarily DRM and incidentally convenient in other ways.
- andrepd 9mo ago
  The thing is teenagers or poor people or people from third world countries that pirate for financial reasons just would not buy those games regardless. I'm unconvinced that those pirates affect sales in the end to any meaningful degree.
  - nurettin 9mo ago
    When I was a kid, piracy was the norm. If your friend had a game you liked, you would just grab the tape, go home, insert into the recorder and make a copy. I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.
    - technothrasher 9mo ago
      > I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s. Really? When we were pirating games off each other as teenagers in the early 80s, we absolutely knew we were getting games for free that the publishers wanted us to pay for.
  - NegativeLatency 9mo ago
    Also teenagers grow up eventually having money to buy the games on their own. I’m a Diablo and StarCraft fan because of pirated games played during my childhood when I couldn’t convince my parents to let me buy them.
    - fc417fc802 9mo ago
      I was exactly the same! But then StarCraft 2 came out, I went out of my way to purchase the retail box, it had nothing more than a slip of paper with a CD key inside, I grudgingly went to download it and Blizzard demanded a bunch of PII from me. I regret the purchase. Not making that mistake twice. I imagine this is one of the reasons that Steam is so successful. No surprises and near zero friction. Why risk going elsewhere as a consumer?
      - immibis 9mo ago
- immibis 9mo ago
  So basically your sources weren't lost sales because you don't show off your mad sk1llz by buying a game, and you weren't a lost sale because you had no way to buy it. But I'm sure you did talk about how cool the game was, including to some people who could buy it. This sounds fairly typical.
jamespo 9mo ago
No, paying nothing is very compelling for a lot of consumers, you can see this in many other areas of content as well.
- Mathnerd314 9mo ago
  Research from the University of Amsterdam’s IViR “Global Online Piracy Study” (survey of nearly 35,000 respondents across 13 countries) found that for each content type and country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content legally, and their median legal consumption is typically twice that of non‑pirating legal users.
  - rvnx 9mo ago
    Fun fact, this study was financed by YouTube to create a legal shield. In 2017/2018, they were in the position where MPAA and RIAA were saying: "Piracy costs us billions; Google must pay" + they had European Parliament on their ass. Google financed that 'independent' study to support the view "Piracy is not harmful and encourages legal spend". So the credibility of "independent" studies, is something to consider very carefully.
    - fn-mote 9mo ago
      My real world observations agree with the direction of the study, so I don’t entirely dismiss it as fake based on its funding source. I am cautious about the conclusion, though. It seems clear there is a spectrum from “unscrupulously pirate everything” to “consume legitimately after pirated discovery”, and quantification is necessary.
    - scotty79 9mo ago
      Doesn't make it false.
  - eviks 9mo ago
    Why do you think this contradicts anything? Heavy users hit a budget limit and continue consuming more via pirating. You really need something way better than some shoddy survey to counter the obvious fact that price matters
andoando 9mo ago
No they don't. I am tired of this feel good nonsense. I pirated games because it was free and I did not want to pay $60. Just make your games a donation model if you really believe this. Or lets put up a version of Steam where all the games are free cracked copies of the game and see how it affects sales. People pay precisely because they dont want to deal with the hassle pf pirating
- stavros 9mo ago
  I can pirate games easily, but I buy them on Steam because it's more convenient. If it's too expensive for me, I just never play it (or wait for a deal). I can't be bothered dealing with the installers and the potential viruses and the hassle.
  - andoando 9mo ago
    >because it's more convenient Yes, now imagine if we just removed the barrier to piracy completely. An easy to use client just like Steam, except all the games are free cracked copies. There is no way thats not going to drop sales.
    - afiori 9mo ago
      What has been proven many times is that people overwhelmingly choose the least effort/risk option. A free Steam full of certified pirates games with official games updates would obviously drop sales but this is moot as it will never exist.
      - Tarball10 9mo ago
        Isn't that exactly what companies use as justification for DMCA and DRM protection? Without those, you'd have sites full of pirated game downloads easily found through search engines. DMCA takedowns force those sites into shady corners of the internet, making them harder to find and riskier for the average user. And (effective) DRM makes users have to wait for a crack which may take weeks or months. The result is that it's easier for the average person to just log into Steam/Epic/PSN/eShop and spend $60 to play immediately.
basisword 9mo ago
>> I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play. Can you share some examples of instances where the legal route is too difficult? I haven't felt this way in a long time. What are the changes necessary for you to purchase?
- afiori 9mo ago
  The main reason that Russia had a fame for pirating a lot of software was that a lot of publishers either skipped it as a market or did shitty localisations and pirates offered a far better service.
- crtasm 9mo ago
  They say they own the game so presumably did purchase it. Not having to deal with Ubisoft/similar game launchers frequently forgetting my login, nagging to update itself, etc. is one reason I might choose to run a cracked copy.
  - Shacklz 9mo ago
    Ubisoft launcher being so bad that people prefer the cracked, launcher-free version should go down in the history as example of some of the worst product-management there is. I'm totally in the same boat; I've not bought several Ubisoft-games I was interested in playing because their launcher is such a cancer (if anyone from Ubisoft is on HN: What on earth are you guys smoking?). I'm too lazy to bother with pirating games these days (I have more games than time to play them anyway), but younger me would've certainly went to the high seas to circumvent their ridiculous insult of a game launcher.
- yeputons 9mo ago
  One does not have a debit/credit card at all (e.g. they're young, or don't have enough documents, or are an immigrant from a sanctioned country). Alternatively, the card is rejected because "fraud prevention", see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424584 Or the game is not available in my "account's region", which is chosen arbitrarily based on God knows what.
- 9mo ago
abustamam 9mo ago
I think a lot of people pirate for a lot of different reasons. I don't pirate games anymore because I just play PS5. But I definitely did so as a teenager because I was broke, not because the experience of buying games was bad. Now I'll pirate if providers make it hard to do things right. I know I never "have" to pirate, but my wife once "bought" a movie on Amazon. A few years later, she was no longer able to access it. And she didn't get refunded for her purchase. So guess what? Screw you Amazon, I downloaded that movie and saved it on my home media server. Another example, I was playing a mobile game that allowed me to watch ads to get a bonus. I'd always say no because they use one of the shittiest ad provider in existence. Then they started showing me ads even if I elected not to get the bonus, with a fun "pay $20 for ad free forever!" Well screw you game dev, I'm pirating the ad-free version of your game. > Consumers are pissed at the lack of value. I think this is true, but I don't think this is necessarily causing piracy. Why would people want to pirate a shitty game?
- qubitcoder 9mo ago
  Or, just don’t play the game. I don’t mean to be flippant, but why waste time on software employing shoddy practices? Wordle and Apple’s mini crossword-minis are sufficiently stimulating and quick. My tolerance for software like that is very limited. It’s almost an immediate long-press and uninstall.
  - nottorp 9mo ago
    Why do you people even look at mobile games? They're all free to play and their design is fundamentally affected by this. You end up either paying with time or with money.
  - abustamam 9mo ago
    It's a good question. My only response is that it's genuinely fun.

oriolid 9mo ago

I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money (and games were incredibly expensive back in the day). The people who I copied them from did it to show off their collection and connections, or just because they were my friends.

badsectoracula 9mo ago
> I'm not completely convinced. When I was a teenager I pirated games because I didn't have money Yes, but if it was impossible to pirate, you'd still have no money to buy the games, so in the grand scheme of things nothing would change.
buran77 9mo ago
For people who have no money to spare for games it really doesn't matter if games come with DRM or not. They wouldn't afford them anyway so "for free" is the only option that matters. For people who have money for games but don't want to pay, the presence of DRM matters very little. 99% of games are usually trivially cracked, especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers). For people who have money for games and are willing to pay, DRM turns out to be maybe an inconvenience, but definitely a guarantee that they don't actually own the game. The game can be taken away or even just modified in a way that invalidates the reason people paid in the first place.
- mindcandy 9mo ago
  > especially if you are willing to wait for some days or weeks after launch (an important sales window for the publishers). “Important” is an understatement. Even for long-term success stories, the first three or four months often accounts for half of a game’s revenue. And, despite so many people theorizing that “pirates don’t have money and wouldn’t pay anyway”, in practice big publishers wait in dread of “Crack Day” because the moment the crackers release the DRMless version, the drop in sales is instant and dramatic.
  - fwipsy 9mo ago
    Do you have a source for sales data when a crack becomes available? If so, that seems like definitive proof that piracy does affect sales.
    - bendangelo 9mo ago
      When the Nintendo Switch became hackable, ie can play any game, Nintendo saw a massive decrease in sales in Spain. Btw people in Spain pirate the most games in Europe. The decrease was at least 40%. The idea that this is a service issue and piracy doesn’t affect sales is just PR speak. If the game is offline, it’ll be pirated a lot.
      - fc417fc802 9mo ago
        Both you and GGP make concrete claims but fail to provide evidence. Can anyone cite published sales data or is this all mere conjecture? We've been exposed to what seems like FUD about piracy killing sales since approximately forever - you wouldn't dOwnLoAd a cAR - but seemingly zero actual evidence to date.
        mindcandy 9mo ago
        My source is first and second hand reports from management of game companies having worked in the industry for decades. But, they don’t make numbers like that public. The best public report I can find is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1875952124002532 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18759... which shows a median difference 20% of revenue for games where Denuvo is cracked “quickly” but also no significant difference if Denuvo survives for at least 3 months. What I’ve observed from internal reports from multiple companies is that, if you don’t assume an outlier blockbuster game, major game studios’ normal plan is to target a 10% annual profit margin with an expected variance of +/-20% each year. So, assuming you have a solidly on-target game, DRM not just being there, but surviving at least a couple months is the difference between “10% profit moving the whole company forward on schedule” vs “10% loss dragging the whole company down” or “30% profit, great success, bonuses and hiring increases” depending on the situation. Outside of games, I have seen many personnel reports on Hacker News over the years from small-time ISVs that they find it exhausting they need to regularly ship BS “My Software version N+1” just as an excuse to update their DRM. But, every time they do, sales go back up. And, the day the new crack appears on Pirate Bay, sales drop back down. Over and over forever. Thus why we can’t just buy desktop software anymore. Web apps are primarily DRM and incidentally convenient in other ways.
andrepd 9mo ago
The thing is teenagers or poor people or people from third world countries that pirate for financial reasons just would not buy those games regardless. I'm unconvinced that those pirates affect sales in the end to any meaningful degree.
- nurettin 9mo ago
  When I was a kid, piracy was the norm. If your friend had a game you liked, you would just grab the tape, go home, insert into the recorder and make a copy. I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s.
  - technothrasher 9mo ago
    > I didn't know about buying games or what I did was bad until well into the 90s. Really? When we were pirating games off each other as teenagers in the early 80s, we absolutely knew we were getting games for free that the publishers wanted us to pay for.
- NegativeLatency 9mo ago
  Also teenagers grow up eventually having money to buy the games on their own. I’m a Diablo and StarCraft fan because of pirated games played during my childhood when I couldn’t convince my parents to let me buy them.
  - fc417fc802 9mo ago
    I was exactly the same! But then StarCraft 2 came out, I went out of my way to purchase the retail box, it had nothing more than a slip of paper with a CD key inside, I grudgingly went to download it and Blizzard demanded a bunch of PII from me. I regret the purchase. Not making that mistake twice. I imagine this is one of the reasons that Steam is so successful. No surprises and near zero friction. Why risk going elsewhere as a consumer?
    - immibis 9mo ago
immibis 9mo ago
So basically your sources weren't lost sales because you don't show off your mad sk1llz by buying a game, and you weren't a lost sale because you had no way to buy it. But I'm sure you did talk about how cool the game was, including to some people who could buy it. This sounds fairly typical.

jamespo 9mo ago

No, paying nothing is very compelling for a lot of consumers, you can see this in many other areas of content as well.

Mathnerd314 9mo ago
Research from the University of Amsterdam’s IViR “Global Online Piracy Study” (survey of nearly 35,000 respondents across 13 countries) found that for each content type and country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content legally, and their median legal consumption is typically twice that of non‑pirating legal users.
- rvnx 9mo ago
  Fun fact, this study was financed by YouTube to create a legal shield. In 2017/2018, they were in the position where MPAA and RIAA were saying: "Piracy costs us billions; Google must pay" + they had European Parliament on their ass. Google financed that 'independent' study to support the view "Piracy is not harmful and encourages legal spend". So the credibility of "independent" studies, is something to consider very carefully.
  - fn-mote 9mo ago
    My real world observations agree with the direction of the study, so I don’t entirely dismiss it as fake based on its funding source. I am cautious about the conclusion, though. It seems clear there is a spectrum from “unscrupulously pirate everything” to “consume legitimately after pirated discovery”, and quantification is necessary.
  - scotty79 9mo ago
    Doesn't make it false.
- eviks 9mo ago
  Why do you think this contradicts anything? Heavy users hit a budget limit and continue consuming more via pirating. You really need something way better than some shoddy survey to counter the obvious fact that price matters

andoando 9mo ago

No they don't. I am tired of this feel good nonsense. I pirated games because it was free and I did not want to pay $60. Just make your games a donation model if you really believe this. Or lets put up a version of Steam where all the games are free cracked copies of the game and see how it affects sales. People pay precisely because they dont want to deal with the hassle pf pirating

stavros 9mo ago
I can pirate games easily, but I buy them on Steam because it's more convenient. If it's too expensive for me, I just never play it (or wait for a deal). I can't be bothered dealing with the installers and the potential viruses and the hassle.
- andoando 9mo ago
  >because it's more convenient Yes, now imagine if we just removed the barrier to piracy completely. An easy to use client just like Steam, except all the games are free cracked copies. There is no way thats not going to drop sales.
  - afiori 9mo ago
    What has been proven many times is that people overwhelmingly choose the least effort/risk option. A free Steam full of certified pirates games with official games updates would obviously drop sales but this is moot as it will never exist.
    - Tarball10 9mo ago
      Isn't that exactly what companies use as justification for DMCA and DRM protection? Without those, you'd have sites full of pirated game downloads easily found through search engines. DMCA takedowns force those sites into shady corners of the internet, making them harder to find and riskier for the average user. And (effective) DRM makes users have to wait for a crack which may take weeks or months. The result is that it's easier for the average person to just log into Steam/Epic/PSN/eShop and spend $60 to play immediately.

basisword 9mo ago

>> I have pirated games that I own simply because it's easier to play. Can you share some examples of instances where the legal route is too difficult? I haven't felt this way in a long time. What are the changes necessary for you to purchase?

afiori 9mo ago
The main reason that Russia had a fame for pirating a lot of software was that a lot of publishers either skipped it as a market or did shitty localisations and pirates offered a far better service.
crtasm 9mo ago
They say they own the game so presumably did purchase it. Not having to deal with Ubisoft/similar game launchers frequently forgetting my login, nagging to update itself, etc. is one reason I might choose to run a cracked copy.
- Shacklz 9mo ago
  Ubisoft launcher being so bad that people prefer the cracked, launcher-free version should go down in the history as example of some of the worst product-management there is. I'm totally in the same boat; I've not bought several Ubisoft-games I was interested in playing because their launcher is such a cancer (if anyone from Ubisoft is on HN: What on earth are you guys smoking?). I'm too lazy to bother with pirating games these days (I have more games than time to play them anyway), but younger me would've certainly went to the high seas to circumvent their ridiculous insult of a game launcher.
yeputons 9mo ago
One does not have a debit/credit card at all (e.g. they're young, or don't have enough documents, or are an immigrant from a sanctioned country). Alternatively, the card is rejected because "fraud prevention", see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424584 Or the game is not available in my "account's region", which is chosen arbitrarily based on God knows what.
9mo ago

abustamam 9mo ago

I think a lot of people pirate for a lot of different reasons. I don't pirate games anymore because I just play PS5. But I definitely did so as a teenager because I was broke, not because the experience of buying games was bad. Now I'll pirate if providers make it hard to do things right. I know I never "have" to pirate, but my wife once "bought" a movie on Amazon. A few years later, she was no longer able to access it. And she didn't get refunded for her purchase. So guess what? Screw you Amazon, I downloaded that movie and saved it on my home media server. Another example, I was playing a mobile game that allowed me to watch ads to get a bonus. I'd always say no because they use one of the shittiest ad provider in existence. Then they started showing me ads even if I elected not to get the bonus, with a fun "pay $20 for ad free forever!" Well screw you game dev, I'm pirating the ad-free version of your game. > Consumers are pissed at the lack of value. I think this is true, but I don't think this is necessarily causing piracy. Why would people want to pirate a shitty game?

qubitcoder 9mo ago
Or, just don’t play the game. I don’t mean to be flippant, but why waste time on software employing shoddy practices? Wordle and Apple’s mini crossword-minis are sufficiently stimulating and quick. My tolerance for software like that is very limited. It’s almost an immediate long-press and uninstall.
- nottorp 9mo ago
  Why do you people even look at mobile games? They're all free to play and their design is fundamentally affected by this. You end up either paying with time or with money.
- abustamam 9mo ago
  It's a good question. My only response is that it's genuinely fun.