Recently
I was reading a very funny article about an independent game developer who managed to pull one over on the people who pirated his game. To summarize briefly, the company Greenheart
Games released a game called Game Dev Tycoon, where players simulate running a
company that releases video games. You start out in a garage, and can research
technologies to improve your games and hire more staff, and the objective is to
create the best-selling video games. Concerned about piracy, Greenheart Games created a trap - they released a cracked version of Game Dev Tycoon on a torrent site that was
identical to the non-pirated version of the game in every way except for one thing:
players of the pirated game had a much higher chance to have their virtual
games pirated, eventually running their companies out of business. Essentially, this was a trap to get people to
pirate Game Dev Tycoon and have them be doomed to lose in the most ironic fashion. To get an idea of the reactions from some of
the pirates, here is an example forum post from someone who illegally downloaded the
cracked copy and (unsurprisingly) became frustrated:
I thought that this
experiment was brilliant on the part of the developer, and it brings up an
interesting discussion about piracy. The
debate on privacy is heavily divided – the industries want the government and
ISPs to come down hard on people who copy software without paying for it, while
some individuals push back and want an unregulated internet that they can
continue to torrent on, either legitimately or illegitimately. Some even argue that piracy is good for
business, because it is “free marketing” in a sense and helps people spread
word about the game. Although that may
be true for games that come from big companies that can afford to take a hit in
profits due to piracy, I think that it can be devastating for independent
developers, such as Greenheart Games. Here are Greenheart’s statistics on users of
the game after a day of release:
Only 6.4% of people playing the game actually paid
for it, which is heartbreaking.
Be careful when looking
at that graph – although there are indeed 3104 people playing who did not pay
for it, that is not representative of lost profit, because many of those people
would not have bought the game if that was their only option – they are only
playing because they have a free option, and would rather not play at all if
they had to pay for it. Some people think
that because this is true, piracy is fine – what is the difference if people
play it for free, if they were not going to pay for it anyway? In my opinion, that is a terrible
justification for piracy. I believe that
the content creator should be able to choose who can and cannot use their
content, and that they have the right to say that the only people who can use
their game are those who will pay for it.
For instance, if I was a game developer, I would not care if the people
who pirated my game would not pay for it anyway – I do not want them playing my
game if they did not pay for it, period.
The
obvious question then becomes, how do you stop people from pirating? Unfortunately we have no good answer for the
moment. Many developers use Digital
Rights Management (DRM) software that tries to block people from using the game
who pirated it, but this software is often bulky and intrusive, and is usually
cracked in a short amount of time anyway.
Other games stirred up controversy by requiring users to connect to the
internet in order to play, even if it is a single player game that requires no connectivity
by default, purely for the purpose of ensuring that the user bought the game
legitimately. This causes problems for
players who do not have reliable internet connections. Hopefully, game
developers will find a way to prevent piracy in a way that is non-intrusive and
preferably does not require a persistent internet connection. Until then, we should buy the games that we
enjoy in order to support the game developers that we like, so that they can
continue doing what they do best.
Sources:
For the article and the pictures.
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