![\"pirate51.gif\"](\"http:\/\/www.gamingwithchildren.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/pirate51.thumbnail.gif\")
Part of the recent closing of Iron Lore studios was an estimate that 90% of people playing the studio’s Titan Quest games were on pirated copies. This isn’t the first time that number has been tossed around – there have been other claims of ~10% purchased copies, and the fact that the PC versions of some high-profile shooters were being outsold 5:1 or 10:1 last year by XBOX versions raises the question of just what the numbers of actual players looked like.<\/p>\n
Shamus Young, whose Twenty Sided blog became famous for his incredible ‘DM of the Rings’ comic series, has a two part look at PC game Piracy. Part 1 is here<\/a>, and part 2 is here<\/a>. While he discusses Piracy in part one as reaction to another article, it is Part 2 that is more interesting as he gets into solutions that will help publishers and developers.<\/p>\n My favorite quotes from Part 1:<\/p>\n I think the main problem is that piracy is a social problem, and publishers are treating it like a technological one.<\/p>\n I\u2019m the one who pays for games, and I wish you\u2019d stop treating me as collateral damage in the war on piracy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But it is in part 2 that things get serious. Shamus lists out five ways of “converting as many of those pirates into customers”.<\/p>\n 1. Make sure the pirates can\u2019t offer a superior product<\/p>\n 2. Get closer to the community<\/p>\n 3. Offer a demo<\/p>\n 4. Entice them with valuable updates<\/p>\n 5. Clean House<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n These seemingly simple ideas are really brilliant, and inherently superior to *every* attempt that publishers have ever used. Why? It is simple Project Management – it will cost you $1 to design for quality and $100 to fix it later. They are paying big bugs for these DRM schemes, payign support because they make PC compatibility even more dicey, and then ending up with people who are annoyed because they have been treated like potential criminals as they payed for a product.<\/p>\n More cool quotes:<\/p>\n People might steal from strangers without regrets, but only a sociopath would steal from a friend. Be their friend, and they will line up buy your game. Some will even flame and shun the pirates on your behalf. These people want<\/em> to love you. Stop treating them like lepers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n People treat Thomas Riegsecker of Basilisk Games like a friend, and his game Eschalon Book One is getting great press everywhere. Everyone *wants* to say nice things and pay him $25 for the game! Why? Because he did an awesome job of creating a community before he put out the game, and making folks feel like part of the process. It just plain works.<\/p>\n Improve the game over time. If you make it so that registered users can just get the goods via an easy 1-click update, and pirates have to wade around for the right BitTorrent for the right language \/ release version, you\u2019ve gone a long way towards rewarding customers and punishing pirates, instead of the other way around.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Think about what Ascaron did with Sacred … if only it wasn’t an unplayable buggy mess to begin with. But now, they have<\/p>\n You should at least be able to make it so that the hackers have to buy one<\/em> copy of your game before they can put it on the net.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That is hilarious but sad – where DO those copies come from when there are pirated versions released a couple of weeks before the game comes out?<\/p>\n Don\u2019t turn curious customers into pirates by denying them a way to try the game before putting their money at risk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is again so true – I wish I had a dollar for every time I bought a game that turned out to be a disappointment but that had no demo. Actually I wish I had the full price back. But I would be happy to have more demos and more power over my decision-making process.<\/p>\n I think that all of those suggestions are actually reasonable, but they require a fundamental change in the way publishers treat customers: rather than trying to pound pirates into not pirating, they need to romance them into becoming paying customers by doing things right. No one thought Apple could succeed with iTunes – why pay $1 for something that Napster (or Limewire) could give you for free in the same time? Yet billions and billions of songs have been sold, and Apple is now the #2 music retailer – bigger than Target, Best Buy, or any record store anywhere. It can work. Do something *for* people, and they will reward you. Make them feel screwed over and they will return the favor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Part of the recent closing of Iron Lore studios was an estimate that 90% of people playing the studio’s Titan Quest games were on pirated copies. This isn’t the first time that number has been tossed around – there have been other claims of ~10% purchased copies, and the fact that the PC versions of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n