Unfettered Blather

Complaining about piracy is all the rage these days, but in all honesty pirating of PC games is not anything new. The dance between pirates and copy protection schemes has been going on since I was in elementary school. For those keeping score at home that’s somewhere around a quarter of a century. So far I’d say the pirates are winning, as copy protection schemes continue to hurt customers while pirates easily avoid them. Why do companies insist on punishing the paying customers?

The rationalization for these efforts always comes down to “If we could just convert [insert your percentage here] pirates to paying customers we’d make millions more”. Over a decade ago the standard number was something like 20%, a little less than a decade ago it was 10%. Now the number bandied about most frequently seems to be 5%. You could put whatever number you like, but my prediction is that if you could eliminate all PC gaming piracy you’d convert less than 1% of them to paying customers. Actually, if you could convert 0.5% to paying customers I’d be surprised.

The idea of converting pirates to customers ignores basic math. Piracy is not like poker, pirates do not hold $50 for everything they pirate in case they want to pay for it. Someone who pirates, conservatively, a game every week is effectively stealing $2600 worth of software a year. Without disclosing exact salary information, I am in the top 10% of wage earners in the USA and that would be a lot of money even for me to spend on games alone. Imagine if you only made $50k, $30k, or $20k a year? Will you actually spend that much on games if you suddenly had to pay for everything?

People pirate games for many different reasons, but they can all be attributed to one root cause, they were unwilling to spend money for the product they stole. The justification for that theft varies but the end result is the same. Stopping piracy will not suddenly make a game worth $50 to the person who steals it. Speaking as someone who does not pirate games, even I don’t spend $50 on something that is not worth it to me. I’ll wait for a price drop or perhaps never buy it, but I won’t pay $50 for something I’m unwilling to spend the money on no longer how long that price tag sticks.

I would theorize that the customers you lose to draconian copy protection schemes is far greater than the customers you will gain from stopping piracy. Not only that, but you can’t stop piracy, at least not with current methods and thinking. So PC piracy remains rampant while consumers increasingly turn to consoles. I keep hearing about how PC games are going to re-emerge as a platform, but under the current business practices it will not happen. Hardware compabtibility issues, forced upgrade paths, and punishing copy protection measures continue to hurt the adoption of the PC as a platform. Flagging sales are likely not the result of piracy, but instead of the PC gaming industry’s insistence on adopting business practices that encourage customers to look elsewhere for their hobby. Instead of focusing on converting pirates into paying customers, an effort that continues to fail, they need to start asking what they can do to interest those of us who are willing to spend actual money on their products. Not being treated like a criminal would be a good start.

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