[MUD-Dev2] [Design] "Why Pirate Games" Article

[Tess Snider]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 10:45 AM, Nick Koranda <nkk at eml.cc> wrote:
> People in Australia were especially annoyed about higher prices there.

Heh, I was one of the people ranting about the Aussie game prices.
Let me put things in perspective:  The upcoming PC title, "Spore,"
will be retailing for $49.95 at EB in the US.  It will, in contrast,
be retailing for $99.95 at EB in Australia.  At current exchange
rates, that's $87.01 US dollars.  BUH?  I'm sorry, but it does not
cost $37.06 to ship a game internationally.  I know.  I shipped quite
a few games from the US, when I lived in Australia. ;-)

> DRM
>
> This was expected, but whereas many pirates who debate the issue online are
> often abusive and aggressive on the topic, most of the DRM complaints were
> reasonable and well put. People don't like DRM, we knew that, but the extent
> to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly
> misunderstood. If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy
> games, scrapping DRM is it. These gamers are the low hanging fruit of this
> whole debate.

Any DRM that causes an uncomfortable level of inconvenience to the
user will cause some users to seek pirated copies of programs -- even
programs they have already paid for.  This will, in turn, raise their
awareness and comfort level with the channels by which pirated
software is available, and potentially lead them to acquire other
things by those means, in the future.

What constitutes an "uncomfortable level of inconvenience"?  Well,
I've seen people download CD-less cracked versions of games they've
purchased, just so they can run those games on their laptops, without
carting a dozen CDs around.  I think that the CD-in-drive model of DRM
is *terrible* for laptops.  At the same time, phone-home DRM (e.g.
Steam) is also poor for laptops that are off-the-net for long periods
of time (e.g. on airplanes, or what have you), unless it is willing to
wait a while between checks.  The DRM that was used on the CDs for Civ
IV has always made that game start up really slowly on some of my
machines, and sometimes, it fails to start up at all.  I have a lot of
expensive tools on one of my machines, and I'm afraid to wipe it and
upgrade to a 64-bit OS, even though I have extra memory that is going
to waste, because of the sheer hell of getting all of my software
re-activated, and my fear that I might be missing one of my 2936
license keys.  That's just stupid.

> Digital Distribution
>
> Lots of people claimed to pirate because it was easier than going to shops.
> Many of them said they pirate everything that's not on Steam. Steam got a
> pretty universal thumbs up from everyone. I still don't get how buying from
> steam is any different to buying from me, other than you may already have an
> account on steam. For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish
> it was that easy.

One thing to look for in digital distribution is good international
payment options.  When I was in Australia, I was able to download a
number of things that my Aussie friends couldn't.

As a side-note, I played Kudos a while back.  1.) I think I found it
on Manifesto, and 2.) The demo worked. :-)

Tess