6 ms·

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact. There are many factors contribut

> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business. This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact. There are many factors contributing to the ongoing success of steam. Ease of access, a strong network effect, word of mouth from satisfied customers, a strong ecosystem of tools and a modding platform, willingness to work across many platforms and a variety of vendors including competitors, and more. Boiling this down to one factor of “too many people pirate” is dramatic oversimplification.

cogogo 10mo ago
I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.
- ekianjo 10mo ago
  Piracy is much less endemic nowadays.
  - Ygg2 10mo ago
    Yeah, because rather than pirating from cracxxxed.warez I can buy the game on Steam/GoG sale for $1.4.
    - t-3 10mo ago
      Exactly. Games are just software, there's no real unit cost to factor in when setting minimum prices, just market strategy. Running sales with different levels of discounts is as close to optimal as possible $/customer without doing stuff like individualized pricing (which surely requires a vast amount of computing power and human effort to do at scale). Only the truly penniless or retro-game fans need to pirate nowadays.
      - kevml 10mo ago
        The real unit cost is worker development cost. Like any other tech company, this cost gets muddied in the platform/framework development costs versus more product focused costs.
- CDRdude 10mo ago
  “Many people pirate” is a different statement than “too many people pirate games to make that a viable business”.
  - chii 10mo ago
    It's because the poster assume that each pirated copy ought to have been paid for - which if they had been, then a previously failing game would've been viable. But this doesn't make the statement true - because the assumption that each pirated copy would've been paid for had there been no piracy. This is the same incorrect logic that music/movie copyright holders use to count pirated works' financial "damages".
- dmantis 10mo ago
  It doesn't prove that DRM free is not a viable business. I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating games for more than 10 years now. A few bucks costs much less to me these days than a headache with finding a cracked version and installing potential malware on my computer. Not even talking about supporting the artists and developers. Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you have proper easy installers, easy buying, easy refunds and you are from a middle class and higher - it doesn't make sense to download random executables from the internet. And if you have low-income, you won't buy stuff regardless of DRM and just wait someone to crack it.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - djtango 10mo ago
    Yeah this - people who grew up gaming in the 80s and 90s now have significant disposable income and are time poor. A game that offers tens or hundreds of hours of entertainment is seriously cost effective when a movie ticket costs half a videogame or a round of drinks. Malware is potentially very expensive if you have any capital (tradfi or defi) that is anywhere near your gaming rig. Even a brokerage of 5 figures isn't worth touching something that could have malware. Most the games young players play are all service oriented games anyway
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 10mo ago
    This is a valuable lesson I learned when I worked with someone, not at Elastic, but who had previously worked at Elastic. Elastic was one of the original companies who made FOSS but with enterprise licensing work well. We were discussing in a meeting at this place we worked how to design license checking into the product. What the guy said I found very insightful: he said that you don’t really need to spend a bunch of time and effort creating sophisticated license checks, you just need perhaps a single phone call to a server or something else that can be trivially defeated for anyone with a reasonable amount of technical knowledge. Why? Because the people who would defeat it are the kind of people who make horrible enterprise customers anyway. So in a way it’s just like a cheap lock. Won’t defeat anyone determined, because it’s not designed to. It’s designed to keep already honest people honest
- Sayrus 10mo ago
  People pirate Steam Games anyway. Stating that people pirate too much to make it viable is purely opinion and not based on numbers. Sure, for AAA games you get 2 to 3 months without a cracked version, but this stops afterward. For non-AAA games, the steam version is usually crackable from day-1.
  - dark-star 10mo ago
    Seriously, for cracking steam games, all it takes is to drop a single DLL inside the game's folder. It can't get simpler than that. Yes, that obviously only works for offline games, but yeah, cracking Steaam games is as easy as cracking any other game, maybe even easier
    - tommica 10mo ago
      That is cracking, but one still has to download the files from somewhere before they can crack it. Finding legitimate files is still time consuming.
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      - dark-star 10mo ago
        Yeah, but you just need anyone who bought the game on Steam, a friend or co-worker for example, not some shady website. You want to avoid shady websites for the game download, and shady websites for the crack download. You can do both of this with Steam
- nalekberov 10mo ago
  Games are cracked at day one, sometimes hours after. Apparently DRM is not a solution here. If pirates know that, people at Valve certainly do.
- croes 10mo ago
  >The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion. That's not the opinon part. That pirating is the reason a game business isn't viable is. Would you have bought every game you pirated? How much money did you spend on gaming because you got hooked because you could play more games than you could afford otherwise?
- trinsic2 10mo ago
  It's an opinion that "Most" people pirate games and it's also an opinion that pirating games translates directly to lost sales. As Gabe said and I agree with him piracy, if it's anything a service related problem. You don't need DRM to overcome that. You just need to make a good product and respect you audience. The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies.
  - georgeecollins 10mo ago
    >> The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies. That is also an opinion. Also-- as an aside-- I am curious what you think the "right" reason is for piracy. DRM free games is not a new idea. They have always existed and people have tried different models with them like including advertising. Do you remember the Ford driving simulator? The skittles game. there have been other models and there is a huge universe of DRM free games for decades. If you don't gain much from restricting copies, please explain to me why it is so common in the best games?
    - jaapz 10mo ago
      Have they actually tried releasing those same games DRM free? Just because everybody does it is not really a convincing reason Also many DRM games are cracked quite quickly after release. How does that help sell more copies?
    - nottorp 10mo ago
      Are you confusing the absence or presence of copy protection with how a game is supposed to make money? > why it is so common in the best games? What best games? It's common in design by commitee predatory crap like EA/Ubisoft titles. Thing is, a pirated copy isn't a lost sale. It's more like free marketing. It's possible that the above assholes would make more profit if they stopped spending on copy protection and advertising and just made and sold games. In a world where it would be impossible to pirate software, I bet they would have at best 25% more sales. No one can afford to pay for every game, especially at launch price, so they'll just make do with fewer of them. Linky about marketing costs: https://www.trueachievements.com/n53671/aaa-game-development-costs# https://www.trueachievements.com/n53671/aaa-game-development... Juicy quote: the CMA says that "this publisher also submitted that for one of its major franchise’s development costs reached $660 million and marketing costs peaked at almost $550 million."
- jandrese 10mo ago
  If the Apple II had something similar to Steam do you think you would have pirated as much? Ignore the fact that the tech wasn't ready yet and imagine a world where buying Apple II software was as frictionless as buying a Steam game. Also imagine that the software went on deep discounts regularly that allowed you to build up a big backlog of games to play. Do you think you would have been motivated to seek out the seedy underbelly of the software world looking for illicit copies to add to your backlog? Certainly there are some people like that, but they might be a fairly small minority. And then suddenly DRM isn't really helpful because even if it might stop a minority of people who weren't going to buy your game in the first place it always costs you in frustration for paying customers.
georgeecollins 10mo ago
True, this is an opinion but I am guessing you don't know my background. And having some expertese doesn't guarantee my opinion is correct. But I guess I can say I am considered enough of an expert to be asked to speak on panels about the game industry or serve on juries for awards. And you are right it is a complicated question.
- zx8080 10mo ago
  > I am guessing you don't know my background. Don't be shy, share it.
  - straygar 10mo ago
    Maybe it's this George Collins: https://www.mobygames.com/person/2294/george-collins/credits/ https://www.mobygames.com/person/2294/george-collins/credits... And this being one of the panels mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPSAb1BDHgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPSAb1BDHgI
    - georgeecollins 10mo ago
      Since I am completely embarrassing myself: - Review of a DRM free game I sold in 1980 https://archive.org/details/BallyArcadeAstrocadeArcadianAltScans/Arcadian_vol_2_no_04_%28Feb_25_1980%29_027-036_Color_Alt_Scan_02/page/n9/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/BallyArcadeAstrocadeArcadianAltS... - That you tube link is pretty old, I was on a panel at Games Beat this year, I think because a more interesting person got sick.
- nopurpose 10mo ago
  can we have another battlezone, please?
jirf_dev 10mo ago
All the factors you listed are a huge component of Steam’s success but are mainly for the benefit of consumers. Lack of offline installers is something that makes the vast majority of suppliers comfortable with putting their game on Steam. A platform ideally wants to capture as many consumers as possible but also needs to capture as many suppliers as possible to create a rich marketplace. Negotiating the balance of consumer vs supplier demands is what makes Steam successful as a platform.
- gregates 10mo ago
  Indeed — the only reason I personally still use steam is that a few of the games I want to play are not available in any other (legal) way.
Aurornis 10mo ago
I’ve followed a couple indie game developers over the years who started with lofty ideas about selling DRM free games. As soon as they add an online component of any type (e.g. a leaderboard for ranks or high scores) they’re blown away by the number of connections coming in because the number of people playing the game is so much higher than they would have expected from sales alone. If you’re the kind of person who actually pays for games even when you could pirate them with a few minutes of searching, you probably don’t fully understand how widespread the problem is. Many people will simply not pay for something if there is an option to get it without paying by default. The only developers who can afford to do DRM-free games are those with such a high volume of users that they’ve passed their target threshold for income and are okay with leaving money on the table. For every 1 person you see claiming they will only spend money on DRM-free games in comments on HN or Reddit, there are probably 100 to 1000 more who don’t care about the DRM status of the game, they just want to buy it and play for a while.
- freehorse 10mo ago
  The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option? How many of the people who would try a new game by downloading a pirated copy will actually continue playing it, instead of just trying a bunch of different games, in which case they would prob have refunded anyway? The mere fact that X number of pirated copies are downloaded and executed does not mean that X number of sales would have happened. Moreover, for offline games, there have always been ways to crack DRMs. I do not have data on that, but I have seen pirated versions of all these DRMed games and I doubt that DRM on its own actually inhibits pirating. Let's not forget that DRM precedes steam, and before it was usually about having to put the cd in order to launch the game. I have used cracks for games I actually owned because I did not want to use the cd, and often a damaged cd could mean being unable to play the game otherwise, even if all assets and files were installed on the hard drive. When a new kind of DRM came out, the only question was how long it would take for it to get cracked. Pirating software comes with its own price/risks. The people who have less to lose are probably the ones that do not have the money to spend on all these games in the first place. In general going from number of pirated downloads to sales lost is far from straightforward. There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.

cogogo 10mo ago

I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.

ekianjo 10mo ago
Piracy is much less endemic nowadays.
- Ygg2 10mo ago
  Yeah, because rather than pirating from cracxxxed.warez I can buy the game on Steam/GoG sale for $1.4.
  - t-3 10mo ago
    Exactly. Games are just software, there's no real unit cost to factor in when setting minimum prices, just market strategy. Running sales with different levels of discounts is as close to optimal as possible $/customer without doing stuff like individualized pricing (which surely requires a vast amount of computing power and human effort to do at scale). Only the truly penniless or retro-game fans need to pirate nowadays.
    - kevml 10mo ago
      The real unit cost is worker development cost. Like any other tech company, this cost gets muddied in the platform/framework development costs versus more product focused costs.
CDRdude 10mo ago
“Many people pirate” is a different statement than “too many people pirate games to make that a viable business”.
- chii 10mo ago
  It's because the poster assume that each pirated copy ought to have been paid for - which if they had been, then a previously failing game would've been viable. But this doesn't make the statement true - because the assumption that each pirated copy would've been paid for had there been no piracy. This is the same incorrect logic that music/movie copyright holders use to count pirated works' financial "damages".
dmantis 10mo ago
It doesn't prove that DRM free is not a viable business. I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating games for more than 10 years now. A few bucks costs much less to me these days than a headache with finding a cracked version and installing potential malware on my computer. Not even talking about supporting the artists and developers. Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you have proper easy installers, easy buying, easy refunds and you are from a middle class and higher - it doesn't make sense to download random executables from the internet. And if you have low-income, you won't buy stuff regardless of DRM and just wait someone to crack it.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- djtango 10mo ago
  Yeah this - people who grew up gaming in the 80s and 90s now have significant disposable income and are time poor. A game that offers tens or hundreds of hours of entertainment is seriously cost effective when a movie ticket costs half a videogame or a round of drinks. Malware is potentially very expensive if you have any capital (tradfi or defi) that is anywhere near your gaming rig. Even a brokerage of 5 figures isn't worth touching something that could have malware. Most the games young players play are all service oriented games anyway
- SOLAR_FIELDS 10mo ago
  This is a valuable lesson I learned when I worked with someone, not at Elastic, but who had previously worked at Elastic. Elastic was one of the original companies who made FOSS but with enterprise licensing work well. We were discussing in a meeting at this place we worked how to design license checking into the product. What the guy said I found very insightful: he said that you don’t really need to spend a bunch of time and effort creating sophisticated license checks, you just need perhaps a single phone call to a server or something else that can be trivially defeated for anyone with a reasonable amount of technical knowledge. Why? Because the people who would defeat it are the kind of people who make horrible enterprise customers anyway. So in a way it’s just like a cheap lock. Won’t defeat anyone determined, because it’s not designed to. It’s designed to keep already honest people honest
Sayrus 10mo ago
People pirate Steam Games anyway. Stating that people pirate too much to make it viable is purely opinion and not based on numbers. Sure, for AAA games you get 2 to 3 months without a cracked version, but this stops afterward. For non-AAA games, the steam version is usually crackable from day-1.
- dark-star 10mo ago
  Seriously, for cracking steam games, all it takes is to drop a single DLL inside the game's folder. It can't get simpler than that. Yes, that obviously only works for offline games, but yeah, cracking Steaam games is as easy as cracking any other game, maybe even easier
  - tommica 10mo ago
    That is cracking, but one still has to download the files from somewhere before they can crack it. Finding legitimate files is still time consuming.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - dark-star 10mo ago
      Yeah, but you just need anyone who bought the game on Steam, a friend or co-worker for example, not some shady website. You want to avoid shady websites for the game download, and shady websites for the crack download. You can do both of this with Steam
nalekberov 10mo ago
Games are cracked at day one, sometimes hours after. Apparently DRM is not a solution here. If pirates know that, people at Valve certainly do.
croes 10mo ago
>The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion. That's not the opinon part. That pirating is the reason a game business isn't viable is. Would you have bought every game you pirated? How much money did you spend on gaming because you got hooked because you could play more games than you could afford otherwise?
trinsic2 10mo ago
It's an opinion that "Most" people pirate games and it's also an opinion that pirating games translates directly to lost sales. As Gabe said and I agree with him piracy, if it's anything a service related problem. You don't need DRM to overcome that. You just need to make a good product and respect you audience. The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies.
- georgeecollins 10mo ago
  >> The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies. That is also an opinion. Also-- as an aside-- I am curious what you think the "right" reason is for piracy. DRM free games is not a new idea. They have always existed and people have tried different models with them like including advertising. Do you remember the Ford driving simulator? The skittles game. there have been other models and there is a huge universe of DRM free games for decades. If you don't gain much from restricting copies, please explain to me why it is so common in the best games?
  - jaapz 10mo ago
    Have they actually tried releasing those same games DRM free? Just because everybody does it is not really a convincing reason Also many DRM games are cracked quite quickly after release. How does that help sell more copies?
  - nottorp 10mo ago
    Are you confusing the absence or presence of copy protection with how a game is supposed to make money? > why it is so common in the best games? What best games? It's common in design by commitee predatory crap like EA/Ubisoft titles. Thing is, a pirated copy isn't a lost sale. It's more like free marketing. It's possible that the above assholes would make more profit if they stopped spending on copy protection and advertising and just made and sold games. In a world where it would be impossible to pirate software, I bet they would have at best 25% more sales. No one can afford to pay for every game, especially at launch price, so they'll just make do with fewer of them. Linky about marketing costs: https://www.trueachievements.com/n53671/aaa-game-development-costs# https://www.trueachievements.com/n53671/aaa-game-development... Juicy quote: the CMA says that "this publisher also submitted that for one of its major franchise’s development costs reached $660 million and marketing costs peaked at almost $550 million."
jandrese 10mo ago
If the Apple II had something similar to Steam do you think you would have pirated as much? Ignore the fact that the tech wasn't ready yet and imagine a world where buying Apple II software was as frictionless as buying a Steam game. Also imagine that the software went on deep discounts regularly that allowed you to build up a big backlog of games to play. Do you think you would have been motivated to seek out the seedy underbelly of the software world looking for illicit copies to add to your backlog? Certainly there are some people like that, but they might be a fairly small minority. And then suddenly DRM isn't really helpful because even if it might stop a minority of people who weren't going to buy your game in the first place it always costs you in frustration for paying customers.

georgeecollins 10mo ago

True, this is an opinion but I am guessing you don't know my background. And having some expertese doesn't guarantee my opinion is correct. But I guess I can say I am considered enough of an expert to be asked to speak on panels about the game industry or serve on juries for awards. And you are right it is a complicated question.

zx8080 10mo ago
> I am guessing you don't know my background. Don't be shy, share it.
- straygar 10mo ago
  Maybe it's this George Collins: https://www.mobygames.com/person/2294/george-collins/credits/ https://www.mobygames.com/person/2294/george-collins/credits... And this being one of the panels mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPSAb1BDHgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPSAb1BDHgI
  - georgeecollins 10mo ago
    Since I am completely embarrassing myself: - Review of a DRM free game I sold in 1980 https://archive.org/details/BallyArcadeAstrocadeArcadianAltScans/Arcadian_vol_2_no_04_%28Feb_25_1980%29_027-036_Color_Alt_Scan_02/page/n9/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/BallyArcadeAstrocadeArcadianAltS... - That you tube link is pretty old, I was on a panel at Games Beat this year, I think because a more interesting person got sick.
nopurpose 10mo ago
can we have another battlezone, please?

jirf_dev 10mo ago

All the factors you listed are a huge component of Steam’s success but are mainly for the benefit of consumers. Lack of offline installers is something that makes the vast majority of suppliers comfortable with putting their game on Steam. A platform ideally wants to capture as many consumers as possible but also needs to capture as many suppliers as possible to create a rich marketplace. Negotiating the balance of consumer vs supplier demands is what makes Steam successful as a platform.

gregates 10mo ago
Indeed — the only reason I personally still use steam is that a few of the games I want to play are not available in any other (legal) way.

Aurornis 10mo ago

I’ve followed a couple indie game developers over the years who started with lofty ideas about selling DRM free games. As soon as they add an online component of any type (e.g. a leaderboard for ranks or high scores) they’re blown away by the number of connections coming in because the number of people playing the game is so much higher than they would have expected from sales alone. If you’re the kind of person who actually pays for games even when you could pirate them with a few minutes of searching, you probably don’t fully understand how widespread the problem is. Many people will simply not pay for something if there is an option to get it without paying by default. The only developers who can afford to do DRM-free games are those with such a high volume of users that they’ve passed their target threshold for income and are okay with leaving money on the table. For every 1 person you see claiming they will only spend money on DRM-free games in comments on HN or Reddit, there are probably 100 to 1000 more who don’t care about the DRM status of the game, they just want to buy it and play for a while.

freehorse 10mo ago
The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option? How many of the people who would try a new game by downloading a pirated copy will actually continue playing it, instead of just trying a bunch of different games, in which case they would prob have refunded anyway? The mere fact that X number of pirated copies are downloaded and executed does not mean that X number of sales would have happened. Moreover, for offline games, there have always been ways to crack DRMs. I do not have data on that, but I have seen pirated versions of all these DRMed games and I doubt that DRM on its own actually inhibits pirating. Let's not forget that DRM precedes steam, and before it was usually about having to put the cd in order to launch the game. I have used cracks for games I actually owned because I did not want to use the cd, and often a damaged cd could mean being unable to play the game otherwise, even if all assets and files were installed on the hard drive. When a new kind of DRM came out, the only question was how long it would take for it to get cracked. Pirating software comes with its own price/risks. The people who have less to lose are probably the ones that do not have the money to spend on all these games in the first place. In general going from number of pirated downloads to sales lost is far from straightforward. There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.