Why people pirate games

Here's an interesting article I came across at Sitepoint.com.

Cliff Harris, a game developer with a one-man game company called Positech, wondered why people pirated his games. To find out the answer, he asked the readers of his blog to fess up and tell him their reasons for pirating. The article below lists some of the reasons given.

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/08/15/why-people-pirate-software/

Without looking, I'm guessing they said "Because we can get something for free which we'd otherwise have to pay for". :P

I read this article a few days ago when it appeared on Indiegamer.

It came as no surprise that the cost of casual games was the primary reason. $20 is a lot of money to a lot of people and when you're only getting a couple of hours of gameplay out of that... you'd get a better deal if you went bowling. Go to somewhere like Reflexive and read user reviews - on an increasing frequency, people are saying that they played the demo but won't buy the game because they completed it in the free hour.

This isn't good enough. Developers need to try much harder to ensure that customers are given their money's worth.

What did surprise me, was that "because I can" only accounted for 5% of the answers. I expected that to be much, much higher. And I can't help thinking that it probably would be higher if all the surveyed people had answered 100% truthfully. But that's not to say any/all of the other reasons are invalid.

Yeah, plus these polls could completely miss people who just download games for free. They aren't probably interested in taking part in a poll.

I agree with the high price too. I bought Rome: Civ game from morrisons for like £4. Ok, it's been out for a while, but it's still a good game to me. I could buy that, or, buy a match 3 gem game (no offense to match 3 game makers, just using this as a comparison). I think i'd choose the £3 title any day. Assuming it was decent of course.

I completely agree with the DRM reason. I also think the vast majority of people who play pirate games would never have bought them in the first place so as far as actual money goes, they(the authors) are no better or worse off. At least if people are playing a pirate copy of your game you get the word-of-mouth that "everyone is playing it" and traffic boosts to your site, which would inevitably lead to more sales.

Times are changing and its time the media industry accepted it. Games need to somehow offer more for those who have paid and pariah those that have not (like the way BRL sells its products). Or in the case of NWN where the key may hack a copy of the game but is useless online if their bots (i assume) have seen it out there on the net.

I gave up computer software piracy in 1992 (I was 15 at the time and had become a Christian which lead me to believe it was one of many activities that I wanted to change about myself) and the prime reason for me to pirate PC games before then were quite simple:

It was far easier to just take some blank 5.25" disks around to a mate's place and copy his collection of games, (which also were copies) at a significant difference in cost (obviously). No such thing as pocket money when I was a kid (what would I need it for I guess - kicking a footy or throwing a ball around didn't require money and there were nowhere near the amount of electronic gadgets of today).

Not only that - I never had any inkling that it was wrong, illegal in any way as a kid. Obviously if I went into a store and walked out with a box of games without paying I could see that as being wrong but it didn't seem the same. Along with the knowledge that 'everyone else did it' it seemed harmless enough.

None of this was hidden from my friends' parents or my own, it was just seen as acceptable.

Releasing games on consoles prior to PC must be a contibuting factor.

Many people will have bought GTAIV for a console and yet still would like to play it on the PC when it comes out. They possibly would have bought the PC version rather than the console version if it were released at the same time. This game will probably be better looking and play better on the PC (especially the controls). Some of the console purchasers, who have PCs, may not wish to pay for the game again.

The PC market was being killed by the fact that many games were being release on console first. Many PC owners have consoles, thus PC game sales are effected.

Puki,
From the vendor's point of view why would they care wether the end user buys the Xbox or PC version? As long as they buy A version isn't that enough? IMHO it would be a good marketing tool if there was a discount available for the PC version for people who already own the console version, it would make me consider buying PC games again.

Darkheart

I don't think the $20 price tag is too much for good casual games. Many take 5 hours to complete, so that's $4 per hour. I also don't think you can finish many casual games in the first hour as they are often carefully worked out to let you complete say the first chapter and get onto the second chapter and then the demo ends. The only games I've come close to completing in an hour are some shoot em ups I've played from Reflexive and GameGiveAway.

Perhaps a few casual games ARE bad value, so don't buy them, just buy the best ones, there's plenty. I tested all my match-3 games to make sure that it would take a really good player 5-6 hours to complete them. Fairway actually took people 30+ hours and many people said it was exceptional value (even hardcore gamers).

For the target market $20 isn't much. The time involved in getting your wallet out and entering credit card details often means you don't care if it was $10 or $20 because you just want the game. That's what I feel like anyway. However, the BFG gameclub is extremely successful. I guess BFG must have worked out that people will spend more when buying games at $6.99 than at $20 i.e. they'll buy 3-4 or more games in the same time period that they would have only bought one $20 in. Plus it expands the market to people who maybe have less money like kids/teenagers, and to people who think "for $6.99, it's not even worth the hassle of pirating it".

I've never played a casual game worth $20 and would be hard pressed to find one worth $10. I did buy that moonpod game starsiege? some years ago and that was good.

So far I've resisted the temptation to buy a console too. I just won't pay more than $40+tax for a game so usually if its cross platform and released on consoles first I wait for the often enhanced PC versions. Usualy first week of release most of the much have new releases for PC are $35 at fry's electronics.

So far I've bought an average of 3 games every 12 months. With casual games the demo is usually enough of the game that I'm ever going to want to play. Especially if it has a 1 hour trial. They usually are simple enough, or focus on one gameplay gimmick and don't take the concept far enough to hold my interest longer. I guess thats the downside of having a tiny team and limited budget.

Having said that, 95a5 of commercial game demos don't have enough to carry them past a single 20 minute gaming session.

Fairway Solitaire is worth the moneys that I bought and still got another 50 course to finished!

I think when GTA come to game console...loads of people bought them. When come out for PC, I think some people want to pirate games because they dont want buy the same game again which like puki say....it does affect pc gaming sales.

Everything is worth what its purchaser is willing to pay for it.

If there aren't enough purchasers.....

First, i buy the games i really like and play if they do cost money and if the paying method works for me. When i'm thinking of the games i've bought i would also say that i didn't buy a lot of casual/indie games, maybe four if i remember correctly and only two of them were really worth the money.

A few things which come up to my mind regarding casual/indie games:

Price: €/$20 aren't much for a good game but they are definately too much for an impulse buy. In my opinion the border for this is €/$10. Most casual games just don't give me a reason to use my credit card.

Paying Method: Only one of the games was easy to get, most of them were a pain in the ass as i don't want to create an paypal account due to the usa laws or i don't want to provide were i'm living, my telephone number and such personal data (take the data which you need for accessing my credit card, the rest is none of your business). I for instance really wanted to buy Eschalon but this was such a stopper for me until i found a way around.

Design&Depth: I would welcome a gamedepth/gamedesign which is between casual games and full blown games again.

Platform availability: I somehow prefer buying casual/indie games for my Mac due the the lower hardware capabilities and the lack of games there generally. Secondly i feel ripped off, if there also exists a windows version and you have to pay the full price to get it too then. If your dev tool supports a crossplatform release then you also should give this advantage to the customer for free.

Competition: There are so many good games around already, especially in the casual sector from the emulators, free stuff from indies or what's available on the net. It really has to be something special, otherwise it's not worth the money and more important the time to invest into.

Additional value: On the C64 and Amiga it often was cooler having a cracked version of a game due to that it either came with a faster loader mechanism/compression, was compacted on a disk with other games, no annoying copy protection, a trainer, a nice cracktro in front of the game. It was worth buying each single LucasArts adventure but there were quite a lot of games were it simply was the other way around.

My sig has a link to my small site that offers answers from a pirate..

I guess the nice thing about console games is you can rent the games for under $10 a week, sometimes as low as $3 at some independent vid libs. If a games any good you can finish them easily within a week since most games are quite short these days.

So you might never have to actually buy a game. Why you would want to buy a game for PC you already have on console I don't know. Especially if you like story based games like I do. I never play those games more than once even if it has multiple endings. The prospect of playing through a very similar plot for all those hours seems nauseatingly boring.

Adrian this is exactly why I rent games these days, replay value is almost never worth it and the low cost of renting via post makes doing anything else seems stupidly indulgent for most games.

Darkheart

I don't think it's lack of content or depth which is devaluing casual games. Casual game developers devalue their own games by letting them be sold for $7 on a gameclub, or even given away on MostFun or similar sites. So of course people are going to complain about being asked to pay $20 when they're used to getting them for much less. It's not about value or even the perception of value, it's simply learned behaviour.

Quite simply, why should I pay $20 for your hidden object game with pretty graphics that pretends to be an episode of Murder She Wrote when I can buy an almost identical game for $7.

Wow. This somewhat empirical (if by accident, rather than intention) study, contradicts my imagined reasons for why people pirate games so it must be wrong.

The idea that a game I've worked on for 6 months, isn't worth half the price of a game 60 people at Bioware worked on for 3 years is completely absurd!

Yeah. I think I see the problem.

$4 per hour sounds too high to me, a game should have much greater longevity and replay factor. If a game would only last 5 hours I would be quite disappointed if I'd spent $20 on it. If a casual game is only going to last that long I would probably not give it more than a $10 value at most.

@Gabriel

Well, i was speaking for myself. I might be the minority with such a thinking but that's how i see it. Most of the casual games just don't interest me due to the reasons i've written above. If i want to play a Sokoban clone then there are tons of options already around, why should i buy one then?! On the other side i would have bought GammaBros for instance.

Sam&Max due to it's episodic nature maybe more felt like a casual game (obviously it's none) but it was really worth buying it and i wouldn't have had a problem paying even more for it but when i'm browsing through the portals i really don't see a reaon why i should spend money there. Whilst games are polished the gamedesigns are often too flat, stereotype, and they're riding an idea till it's dead.

This leaves the option for me not buying these kind of games or buying them more out of an impulse whilst knowing that i only will enjoy going through maybe 20 of the provided 50 levels which again sounds okay for a €$10 not for a €$20. Of course i also don't pirate those games, i just don't touch them.

I never do pirazy.

i usaly crach my games cause i dont like to spoil my CD drive.
only games i havent cracked is WOW and HalfLife2..

Wow is no CD dependet.
Half Life 2 comes with steam.


Elder scroll i had to crack- as it reque cd for strange reason.

in earlyer life i spoiled maby cd bays. but on laptop one has to be carfull. these big companys is getting perls and giving the big S... to children.

Oh my GameCube, PS3 i do not crack as they dont have big hardrive. Xbox is offcurse moded so one can store the image file do hardrive.. its sweet just to bring the box. every company shold let people store games on device. not having to activate the junk.

I agree with taumel about the value of indie and casual games. On protection, I was pleased with Mass Effect which had some non obtrusive protection. Didn't need the DVD to play.

I heard that it calls home and requests the DVD after a couple of weeks but by then I had finished with the game. Unfortunately I did one of the main quests in the wrong order prematurely and lost interest in the game half way though.

When I was a kid/teenager I pirated music and games, like just about everyone else it seemed, but that was in the 8-bit/16-bit era. When I got a job I paid for stuff because stealing when you are an adult is a bit pathetic imho. Now that my career is making games, pirating games would be totally dumb (and insulting to other developers).

Well then you don't sound like a casual game player. Neither am I. Would you buy those games that don't interest you if they were $15? Or $10? $5? I wouldn't. If they don't interest me, they don't interest me.

Personally, I think the portals are far too desperate to get sales at any cost. They'd rather sell a game for less than the customer would have paid twenty times than let even one person slip away without buying it. And why not? Casual games are a commodity, and they're available in large numbers at low prices. Yes, the portals develop their own games, but most of the games they sell are not developed in-house, so it's really no loss to them if they underprice them. Particularly if that same person spends the difference on other games. The portals are still getting the money, but the developers aren't.

Generally, the developer rationalizes this by saying that the numbers the portals can shift are worth the loss per unit, but that still leaves us in a situation where the games are being devalued. Was it Azada I saw the other day on sale at 99 cents? In the long run, where is this leading? Are we going to have users complaining that $7 is too damn expensive? Shouldn't all these games be 99 cents? Or free?

Exactly the reason i want out of the windows platform.. well, not -out- exactly, but i want to also step onto the platforms that have much less stagnation.

The Azada for $0.99 is a marketing push for the launch of Azada 2 due out on th 28th August, and it'll work (it worked before for Hidden Expedition: Amazon big time). I don't think I've seen any other games at $0.99 and they'd be shooting themselves in the foot if they did it for other games, but those $0.99 cent games were developed in house and didn't have much more sales potential due to being old, so using them as leverage for the new title is a good move.

I think it's just an issue of, if you have the money, why not just support the damn thing.

There should also be incentives to buying software, games, and music legit, instead of feeling stupid that your neighbour just downloaded it before you got back home from the store, and he even gets a no-cd hack included!

@Gabriel

I wouldn't say that i'm not a casual gamer because i also enjoy playing Tetris and such puzzle games beside of adventures or a few other full price games. Obviously i wouldn't buy games that don't interest me at all but sometimes there are games which could interest you in a casual way from time to time. I could imagine myself buying such games for a lower pricetag which also takes into account that you also don't play 100% of the game. Bottomline is if a game just strifes my interest $10 is appropriate but not $20.

Beside of that i think you also have to compare it to offerings they are doing in stores for instance were you can choose out from a collection of maybe 30-50 full price games which are a few years old and they sell for €10. Often the much better bang for the buck. The impulse buy works here.

Another example, any episode from TTG's store is sold for $9 (if you're buying the whole season even for $7) and there you get a lot of entertainment and quality which you won't find in most other casual games.

Then you're having those portals which also sell older full price games or offer a pack of games for a subscription fee, collections there... There are so many games available these days. If you want to do something reasonable then i don't know you better grow some trees unless you really having a great game idea, doing a perfect job in an already existing genre or doing it just for your own enjoyment.

I really don't believe that fiscal concerns make up the majority of pirating, in fact I really doubt it does.

There has been pirating as long as there has been entertainment software, and yet despite that the entertainment software industry has steadily grown, it is now quite literally rivaling the film industry for your entertainment dollars.

Pirates are not really a problem at all, the biggest problems are Patents, DRM, and cross platform incompatibilities. Those things are doing far more to slow down the advance and growth of the software industry than any group of 15year old pimple-faced pirates.

A foe even greater than those mentioned above is the plain old inefficiency of creating games, nearly every game made is made with technology that is unique to it, hardware advances cause a never ending cycle of reinventing the wheel. 10,000 games released in a year and nearly every one of them will have unique resources, unique art, music, models, interfaces, and in most cases engines.

Besides, I don't think most pirates even consider themselves "gamers", they DL games as a one off or a dalliance, nothing they really consider as being something of value.

-Gooney

i dont think i did much tape to tape on the speccy but our ST/Amiga collection was mostly on cracked floppies
part of it was probably going from £2.99 a game to damn near £30 in some cases (and when i was working in an independant pc shop on YTS wages i couldnt even afford games with the staff discount once i paid out for the bus and keep to my mum)

but it would be nice if they could make a cross platform game
one DVD with media levels etc that can be accessed across the pc 360 ps3 and a tripple boot loader that loaded the correct program for your machine
(but they wouldnt do that now would they)
oh and a mac/linux version too seeing as im pipe dreaming here

alot of the issues about wanting/having the pc version after getting and perhaps finishing the console version is the modding scene

Do a lot of people actually mod and play with mods? Sure there's a lot of people online, but I haven't met many people in real life (mostly interested in game dev) so the numbers are probably not that significant.

In my experience people pirate games for the following reasons:

They genuninely can't afford the games.
They can afford them but they don't have much money and would rather steal them and buy other things they can't easily steal.
The provider penalises people who do buy for buying legally e.g. DRM, Sony BMG (rootkit), disk-Locks etc.
The provider does not make the product easily available to legitimate purchasers AND it is easily available via non-legal channels. e.g. Digital Music from '98-2005.
The provider delays or removes availability from the market. e.g. Region Locking or Movies/Games delayed for 6 months in Europe creates a demand for new titles before they are legally available.

Darkheart

People pirate games because:

They get the games for free.

Foppy, well said. It really is as simple as that.

Except it's not, because if it was, nobody would ever be able to sell software.

Yes they would, there are also people who pay for games, the reason for that is they'd feel guilty if they didn't.

Rubbish. Who the hell feels guilty for not paying for free software?

I meant software that is not free in principal.

If you're living in a black and white world then this might work...

There may be some small details but I was trying to get to the heart of the matter. ;)

Well you could look at it a different way, "Why doesn't everyone pirate games?":

Pirate Games can have viruses/trojans incorporated in the package or on the sites used to obtain the package.
Pirate Games usually have large sections which are ripped to make them more portable, this does detract from the gameplay.
If you have a problem with Pirate Game you can't get support.
Pirate Games can take a long time to download.
Pirate Games can use up a lot of your "allocation" on your download connection.
You can be prosecuted for downloading/sharing pirate games (mostly only if you are particularly stupid or unlucky).
Pirate Games give nothing back to the content provider making more similar or quality games less likely.
Pirate Games often cannot be played online (or at least not for long), if the game has any kind of ongoing longevity, this is a problem.
Pirating Games is morally wrong, this is an issue particularly if you have kids, using pirate software is rather like saying to them, "it's ok to steal".
Pirate Games don't always get content additions/patches.

Darkheart

Yep, good points -=Darkheart=-

Yeah good points. Are pirate games ever hard to get hold of for the less tech savy, maybe the more obscure ones?

Let me play devil's advocate here for a minute and get into a pirate mentality:


"Who cares? I have a virus checker. I use well established torrent sites. I read the comments."


"Most games are available as complete ISOs. I don't waste my time with dodgy rips."


"Who cares? The game was free. I'll delete it if it doesn't work and download something else."


*shrug* "I run Bittorrent in the background while I do other things."


"What else would I use my "allocation" for? Reading email and browsing webpages? I'd rather put it to good use!"


"It's never happened to me or anyone I've ever met."


"This is only true for small developers. I like AAA FPSs, such as Unreal or Quake. Those guys make their money. And even if they didn't, there'd be other FPSs by other companies. Besides, everyone knows that licensing and sequels are where the money is."


"Them's the breaks. Either someone will figure out a work around or they won't. But, hey, I didn't pay money for the game so who cares?"


"Nah, morality is subjective. I'm not stealing anything. The worst I'm doing is duplicating something. So, since my morality is different to yours, I really don't care."


"I can't think of any free content additions that are worth the full price of a game."

Fuel for the fire (people being prosecuted for sharing games):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7568642.stm

Yay this is fun...


Actually i think some copy protection mechanisms cause a lot more problems on your system than "maybe" providing a virus with a pirated version. I also would put this more into the area of the industries propaganda in order to stoke some fear. As with everything it simply depends on were you're getting your stuff from. As for downloading times beside of what JustLuke said, who says that you have to download them at all?!


Nope, they mostly provide full versions and sometimes there are also stripped down versions.


I don't need even one hand to count the times i needed support for one of the many games i've bought. And when i would have needed one i for sure didn't find it on the official site. There are gaming sites, magazines, communities...


Answered already above.


Answered by JustLuke and above and quite some poeple download stuff via universities or dedicated machines.


Yep this is true but there are sites, mostly ony available to a smaller audience, which are a lot more secure than the usual check google for a torrent site.


Also true but i always found people buying something afterwards they pirated and really enjoyed it but this might be the minority.


Yup but who cares about online gaming?!


This is a more complex subject which can't be discussed just in one sentence.


Nope, did you ever use gamecopyworld?!

A few additonal points:

Your virus check won't find all the viruses, I gaurantee it, I see viruses go sailing through our extremely complex antivirus system at work all the time. I've seen some viruses not identified until YEARS after they've been released. From this year acquriing viruses from websites is not the #1 source of infection. Everyone I know who uses pirate software regularly has problems with their PC which are usually to do with viruses, worms, spyware.

Pirates may issue updates but only for very popular games, for many games releases they won't both cracking the patches too.

Depending on the game Online play can be a big deal, for a game like "Braid" online is not an issue, for UT3 it could be.

Darkheart

In the end i would say that you should care about if something causes problems on your system or not. And as i said some copy protections cause a lot more obvious problems then maybe a virus which you also could get in another way ot two. Beside of that depending on were you get your pirated version from this releases are virusfree. Actually i remember a few articles about games which shipped with a virus.

You somehow get an ISO of the game. You now have the same as someone who bought the game. Then you apply the provided crack or download it from a site. When there comes out a patch you just restore the original, install the patch and perform the crack for the new version, repeate as needed. This is the standard procedure for everyone who buys originals and is sick of DVD-in-bay-copy protections since quite some years.

Personally i haven't found a single online game which interests me, so this would be a subzero issue for me.

My reason to use pirated games in the past was mostly because there was no other way to get those games from a store near me, like MSX, C64 and Amiga games. And I hated it that I couldn't make a backup of those delicate floppies because of copy protections.

When the Amiga CD32 came out I started buying my games on CD because those were better available, and CD could contain tons of ingame videos and it doesn't lose data as quickly as floppies do.

On the PC I only bought the games worth the money. But with some games the copy protection was so bad that I rather choose to play the illegal version.

Now I mostly buy every game, on Steam (The only company which makes buying an original game fun without any downsides I could notice) most of the time or free games online. I don't wanna search for a CD/DVD just to play a game, and I don't wanna lookup for a no cdpatch no more or search hours for a patch for an older game. Nowadays I think PC games should be fully playable from the harddrive without any CD needed with a check build in to look for the latest update automaticly.

The only pirated stuff I still download is Music, and Roms for emulators.
Reason for that is I don't want DRM in any of my files and there are no sites available that I know of where you could buy most old Nintendo/Mame/Sega roms for a good price.

So in short software should be :
- better available for everyone when they want to buy it.
- without a CD/DVD check so you don't need to swap everytime you want to play something else.
- easier to patch, not searching for hours and download 10 loose patchfiles for 1 game which needs to be installed in a specific order.
- with the option to create a backup/redownload anytime if bought online.
- having a demo version to see if you can really run the game and try before you buy.
- a normal price so everyone can affort it, not like most new console games for 70 Euro's each, that is just too much for any game.

But I thought your argument was that pirated software is free as a matter of principal? So who are these people who only buy things out of guilt and/or fear of getting caught?

In which case you're no better off than people who bought the damn game. My favorite case study on this issue is currently KOTOR2. If you have the original (like I do) and you patch it up to the most recent version, it is impossible to play through the campaign as a "light side" jedi. But it's not all bad news. A group of hackers, have taken it upon themselves to fix the product that Lucas Arts and Obsidian decided to screw everyone else over with.

Another game that suffered a similar fate is Activisions "Vampire: The Masqurade - Bloodlines". Again a product that flat out didn't work was shipped, and nobody cared except the people who had been throughly ripped off when they bought the game. Again it fell to the "community" to provide support for a product.

I'm sure there are more stories along these lines, but these are just the ones in my personal collection. I mean if you get ripped off like that fairly often, can you really blame someone for thinking Lucas Arts or Activision can go to hell?

Sorry there is some confusion here, what I was saying in my first post is that people pirate software (that is normally paid for) because they want it for free.