The One With Aldacron

Hardcore pirates I don’t care about. They are never going to buy my game anyway. Some of them are the people who crack software in the first place. I doubt they are even interested in the game at all. The other type of hardcore pirate is the one who just doesn’t want to fork out the cash for software. Ever. Often they have wildly extreme (and distorted) philosophical views. I’m losing nothing from these guys. I do feel that they are scum for wanting to steal the hard work of others, but that’s a different blog entry for another day.

I had a couple of very eye opening converations with two members of my DAOC guild once. One guy is what I call an anti-copyright hippy. He holds the noble belief that all information should be free and that the purpose of copyright law is to grease the wheels of the corporate machine (in the face of idiocy like the Mickey Mouse Protection Act I can almost agree with him). His definition of ‘information’ includes music and software. In his words, they are ‘cultural information’. When I asked him how musicians or software developers were supposed to continue making a living creating music and software when they can’t prevent other people from copying it, his answer was that they should give it away for free and live off of donations. How utopian. He is an example of what I mean by ‘hardcore pirate’. He’ll never buy my game so I lose nothing when he steals it.The other person, a really good hearted woman whom I enjoyed talking and playing the game with, fits the description of the ‘casual pirate’. She and I had a conversation about file sharing. She explained that she saw nothing wrong with it and that she did it all the time. She didn’t have to go out and buy CDs because she could find the songs she really wanted to hear through P2P. When I asked her if she realized that she was breaking the law, her answer made my jaw drop. She said, “If they didn’t want us to copy and share music, they would make it so that we can’t. Since we can, there’s nothing wrong with it.” I would have assumed that a 30+ year-old woman would understand at least the basics of copyright law. Looks like I assumed wrongly.

Depending upon your definition of ‘independent game developer’, you may be questioning my assertion that casual pirates like Joe Bob, Jack, Jill and my well-intentioned former guildmate are threats at all. When looking at independent studios (i.e. self-funded) like id or Valve, casual pirates probably aren’t much more than a mosquito bite. But when you look at indies who distribute downloadable games online and have low budgets and limited resources, they can feel the pain. Many of those developers are one- or two-man operations. Often, it’s a part time job that they hope to take full time one day. When a potential customer pirates a copy of a game from that sort of studio, they do more than just financial damage. And no matter how many positive spins you put on it (it’s good publicity, your game is popular, some pirates actually buy games they enjoy), there’s an emotional side to it as well. It’s very tempting for the developer to sit down and give up. There are other fields that are more profitable, where people don’t steal from you on a daily basis. What keeps most them going, though, is their love of what they do. Making games is a craft that requires passion, especially so when you are doing it all on your own without any corporate muscle behind you. It’s a labor of love. Casual pirates can take that away.

How to stop casual pirates is another thing. Going to the extremes that Sony went to last year with some music CDs, or that some companies, such as Activision, go to by using anti-pirate tools like SafeDisc on some game cds is no solution at all. The last thing you should want to do is to incovenience your legitimate customers. That’s all such solutions accomplish. Call of Duty 2 is a SafeDisc-protected game that Activision publishes. I’ve heard more than once of people being unable to install the game at all on their computers because of something SafeDisc didn’t like. Of course, SafeDisc’s ‘Advanced Hack Protection’ (how’s that for abuse of terminology) was circumvented the day the game was released and cracks were available for download. People who couldn’t install the game ultimately turned to the cracks just to be able to play. Rather than preventing piracy, Activision actually encouraged it while managing to upset legitimate customers. Score one for the pirates.

Since I haven’t yet released my first title, I’m still up in the air on how to handle the issue. oddlabs and Puppy Games share a nice internet-based solution that seems to work well for them. For games which require an internet connection, that’s a viable solution. For games that don’t, it becomes a customer inconvenience. For now, I’m leaning toward the ‘do nothing’ solution even though I really want to do something. I know people aren’t going to stop pirating any time soon. Considering my target market though, I might as well just not worry about it. I’m not going after soccer moms with my current game - it’s very niche. Then again, there are methods of discouraging casual piracy that aren’t too invasive. Lots of thinking to do on this subject yet.

My overrding reason for posting this here and not in my development blog is that I want to get the message out to any casual readers who stumble across this: please don’t pirate the hard work of others! Have a nice day.