
Gabe Newell: Game "Piracy Isn't About Price" - zdw
http://games.ign.com/articles/121/1213357p1.html
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sudonim
Gabe Newell makes good points. Piracy is about price, but it's not just price.
Piracy for me has been about cost / value decisions:

    
    
      Useful software for < $50 on the App store? Buy.
      Useful iPhone app for < $10? buy
      Useful software I use rarely for $800 (Adobe CS5.5)? Pirate
      Drm free music album for $10? buy
      Movie rental I can't find on iTunes for < $5? Pirate
      TV Show season on-demand without commercials? Netflix, or Pirate
    

Any time it's easier and relatively inexpensive to buy, I'll do that. Any time
it's a pain to buy, obscenely expensive or a worse experience, I'll pirate.

I don't justify that behavior, but I've noticed I buy when it's easier, and I
pirate when it's easier.

~~~
rdl
I'm pro pirating RIAA artist music, even if it's more difficult than buying
through iTunes, since money paid to RIAA artists funds the RIAA (and corrupt
artists like Lars).

I sort of feel the same way about the MPAA, but they were less obnoxious in
the late 1990s/early 2000s (mainly due to technology not allowing video piracy
to the same extent).

I also think all Disney content should be pirated as much as possible, due to
the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.

~~~
teh
Why pirate though instead of simply not buying?

~~~
shinratdr
Why not buy instead of simply pirating? If you don't care about the industry
and would prefer in the long run to see it die always, what's the difference?

~~~
apotheon
Pirating still serves as free advertising for the labels, and gets people
angry at you.

------
citricsquid
Except this isn't true either and I would suggest it's nothing but pandering.

People pirate because they're cheap, the amount of people that pirate because
of DRM is _tiny_ and anyone who takes part in these online communities
(gaming.reddit for example) will be part of the small small group that pirates
for "moral" reasons.

2DBoy, creators of World of Goo, a game that had 0 DRM and was available, as
Gabe says, to EVERYONE without any conceivable inconvenience (beyond the need
to purchase) reported over 90% piracy rate: <http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/>

Steam have very high purchase rates because it's a convenience, most
definitely, Steam is a fantastic convenience and encourages me to purchase
some games much like it encourages others, what it does not do is encourage
pirates to purchase instead. It seems most people that share Gabes view are
just hoping if they say it's true enough then bad DRM will go away...

Minecraft for example has huge piracy rates, yet it's available to anyone
(same purchase requirements as Steam) and there's no real DRM, there's no
conceivable justification for pirating Minecraft beyond "I don't want to pay"
yet people do it...

~~~
_delirium
Piracy rate is a bit of an odd number, because of how easy it is to pirate
literally thousands of games and play them each for a small amount of time,
when there is zero chance those people would've/could've bought all the games
they pirated.

The Wolfire team suggests (<http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-
game-piracy>) that a better metric would be proportion of the gaming audience
that pirates. For example, if 5% of the gaming audience pirates, but pirates
download 50x as many games on average as legitimate users purchase, then it'll
look like >70% of users pirate games, when the real number is 5%.

~~~
cookiecaper
Don't forget that many people with licenses eventually end up "pirating" the
software they use. It is usually just much easier to download an ISO than to
attempt to rummage around and find your CDs and then rummage around and find
your manual for the key. Also, the pure version of the software usually
installs crap and/or bloatware. Additionally, I will sometimes be at a
different location where the CDs are not available but where I need to use the
software. This even holds true with many digital download platforms (but not
Steam) -- they will make you create a username and password, they will make
you jump through a bunch of hoops to download something you've already bought,
which is complete BS and in that case I just download a torrent and end up
using the "pirated" version even though I paid for the software. I have a
license for WOG and have downloaded it from a torrent at least twice, for
instance.

------
1010011010
Piracy is also about bullshit DRM. I apply "nocd" cracks to software I own,
for the convenience of not needing a flat, round dongle to use it.

~~~
freedompeace
This is especially for me because I have 3 computers which don't have an
optical drive, things that are becoming increasingly irrelevant thanks to the
internet. I share a single USB DVD drive amongst the three computers; it's a
pain in the ass to move the drive and find the disc.

Even worse is when the DRM software tells me to _uninstall my virtual disc
drive_ which isn't related to the game at all. I use it to make a copy and
store it on my HDD so I can use the image rather than the physical thing.

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patio11
I think it's probably closer to "Pirates have heterogenous preferences", in a
way where motivating X% of pirates who could be convinced by either a)
convenient purchasing or b) risk of discovery or c) stick-it-to-the-man
rhetoric or d) tribal loyalty or e) exclusivity of desired content or f)
feature enhancements like online play... could all be viable strategies at
making money.

Of course, sooner or later all the important code will be on the server
(again!) and we'll chuckle that this was ever an issue.

------
philk
If there's one thing that makes me want to pirate steam games it's being
charged a large premium because I'm not in the US.

The money is immaterial, it's the feeling that I'm being taken advantage of.

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pawn
Valve does a lot of things that gamers love. They make universally acclaimed
games, and they often offer them for absurdly good prices. They also managed
to defeat piracy of their games with a platform that has proven surprisingly
tough to crack. I remember when Steam used to garner almost as much hate as
others' DRM, but its been several years. My friends used to be very vocal
about hating how much memory it used and that you couldn't move it from one
harddrive to another or back it up. Those things were eventually solved
though. I wonder if popular opinion favoring valve is more due to these being
solved, the fact that steam has been around so long and we got used to it, or
the goodwill garnered from good games and/or good offers on games.

~~~
pkamb
Steam used to be an additional thing you had to install/run in order to play
the game you already bought on DVD from the local game store. Now it's a
service you use to buy games (often at ridiculously low prices) and
automatically download them. That's what changed popular opinion of Steam.

~~~
J_Darnley
Sorry, but it still is an additional thing you have to use/run/install when
you buy a boxed game from a B&M store. I found this out only after buying one
such game. This is the reason I cracked it and then vowed to never buy another
one that does.

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j_baker
When I pirate content, it's for one of a few reasons:

* The content isn't available in the US yet. Being a big fan of British television, this is probably the biggest reason.

* I want to watch a TV show and the full series isn't available instantly on Netflix or Hulu. I don't bother with the hassle of mailing back DVDs anymore. I suspect this is really a ploy to get me to _buy_ the DVDs. Sorry, but I'm not buying all 7 seasons of House for $15-$30 a season.

* My options are: 1) Pay and get something later, or 2) don't pay and get something now. This is why I don't buy shows off of iTunes.

Ultimately, I doubt my motivations are much different from most people who
pirate that would otherwise be paying customers.

------
idspispopd
Part of the problem is ignoring why consumers download digital content through
unofficial channels, and instead call any such download a case piracy. Rather
these are holes in the business models of media providers, as such they're
only losing money because they're not offering a product that suits the
consumer. (Thus falsely claiming that they have lost a sale.)

For example a consumer may be downloading the content for the following
reasons:

\- Trialing

\- Replacing lost/broken content

\- Replacing content that is outdated VHS/DVD/Bluray/HDDVD/Cassette/Vinyl, you
name it.

\- Countering simulated geographical boundaries

\- Getting around censorship or getting the uncensored version

\- The media is simply not available (e.g. special editions, or event
recordings.)

\- Dealing with maligned DRM schemes

\- Updating to a version of the software which isn't buggy as hell (adobe)

\- Acquiring media that is no longer in distribution/supported by the author.

\- Dongle keys are either incompatible, broken or taking up a free port on the
computer.

In many examples here the consumer was never likely to buy or repurchase
content, it's no money lost, and often saving the company needless harassment.

Here are reasons why people circumvent paying:

\- They don't have the money to begin with

\- The price is unreasonably high (microsoft learned this with office, when
will adobe follow)

\- The content is DRM'd, or locked to a particular system. (e.g. streaming
services.)

\- There is no way to purchase the content legally (regional or otherwise)

\- The company has a monopoly on a file format or operating system. (many feel
if they're forced to use something they shouldn't have to pay for it too.)

\- The media does not present a value offering (differing to a high price,
i.e. software that is known to be buggy, or is purposefully single use.)

\- Exploitation of consumers (buy our product and we'll spam you forever or
require your software to check with our servers every time you use it.)

As you can see there is a gamut of reasons why people turn to non-official
channels, and the motive is not always greed or theft, often these are
replacing other legal methods of acquiring the media.

What Steam, the iTunes music/app/book stores, amazon and Google(heck even
allofmp3 knew it) have all realised is that removing artificial limitations on
digital content allows consumers to buy digital content to satisfy their
various requirements before even looking up a torrents site. It's not only
easier and less risky (malware/getting sued), but it's usually faster,
supported and reasonable.

~~~
extension
One _huge_ source of piracy, I suspect, is children who have no income and no
way to buy anything without negotiating with their parents. For them, piracy
is about _independence_.

~~~
GFischer
When I was researching for my micropayments startup, I found out that not only
children, but young women as well, don't like asking their parents or couples
for the credit card / paypal account for online purchases.

------
lowglow
Piracy is and always will be about convenience.

------
jsz0
That may be true to some degree but I think for younger people especially
piracy is a simple act of frugality. A crime with no perceivable victim that
saves you a fair amount of money. Kind of a twisted over entertained version
of stealing bread to feed your family. It's not so much that they don't want
to pay. They simply don't have the money for all the things they want so they
prioritize. The old MPAA tagline of 'Would you download a car?' always made me
think about having a free downloaded car and a wallet full of non-car-payment
money to go with it. Put into that context it's very alluring. For some people
who really likes music, movies and games the money saved via piracy could
actually be most of a monthly car-payment. In that sense you _can_ indirectly
download a car by saving money.

------
apotheon
> Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been
> successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our
> company.

I think there's an impedance mismatch between this guy's definition of success
and that of a lot of other people engaged in business models involving
materials covered by copyright. Most of the idiots in these industries think
of "success" as "having the most" -- having more of the market than a
competitor, having money from as many people as possible, and so on. They are
so focused on a comparative measure of "success" that they are probably more
willing to operate at a loss than to let anyone "get away" with enjoying what
they make without paying for it or to let a competitor operate at less of a
loss than them. Gabe Newell, on the other hand, seems to measure success by
making enough profits for everyone to benefit, getting people involved in the
industry as customers, and having a sustainable business model that is not
dependent on the forebearance of the vagaries of momentary changes in
circumstance. His company is working on developing a business model that is
largely independent of copyright, and is enjoying great success as a result;
everyone else is trying to use copyright to punish anyone who isn't buying a
product through official channels, including those who are buying a different
product instead, and some people who are buying the product, because to them
"success" is more about who's prevented from doing what they don't want than
about providing value in exchange for a comfortable level of revenue
generation that isn't likely to dry up tomorrow.

I think saying that piracy isn't about price is overly simplistic. Computer
performance is about CPU and RAM and efficient code and storage media seek
time and a lot of other things, but in a given circumstance seek time might e
the bottleneck; I think that in this case what he has identified is the fact
that service and delivered value constitute the _bottleneck_ that creates a
piracy "problem" for vendors, and that price is not the major bottleneck in
most cases. That's different from price not being "the problem", but it's
close enough for government (or journalistic) work.

------
darasen
Some people pirate simply because they can. Most people will never use 75% of
what Photoshop can do yet they will pirate it when Gimp could serve their
needs just as well. They simply collect software because it is there.

Others, I feel, pirate from a sense of entitlement. You do not have to look
very far to find people complaining about people making profits while talking
on their iPhone while carrying a laptop. Where "World of Goo" is concerned
some Linux users think all software should be free.

Side note: Notice how most media outlets will tell you pirated software is
always full of viruses? In my experience most distributors/hacker groups take
great offense to saying their releases contain viri.

~~~
luriel
Some people just don't believe in so called "Intellectual Property", or don't
believe that the current IP regime fulfills its supposed goal of "promoting
the development of the arts and sciences".

------
Derbasti
"""Russia is now about to become our biggest market in Europe"""

I have read things like that a few times recently. Since when is Russia
considered a part of Europe? They have this small Exclave in Europe, but
really the bulk of Russia is Asian. I mean, you could probably hide Europe
somewhere in Siberia and no one would notice!

Saying that Russia is about to become the biggest market in Europe is like
saying that the US is about to become the biggest market in Ohio. It just
doesn't make sense.

~~~
guard-of-terra
The legal boundaries of Europe is mountains of Ural.

Five Russian federal districts are located before the Urals: Northwestern,
Central, Southern, North Caucasus, Volga.

Only two are located beyond.

European ones total for 105 mln of population, so even if we could only count
those the picture would not be dramatically different.

~~~
eCa
Exactly. Almost 80% of the Russian population lives in Europe [1].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Russia>

