All the way back to cassette tapes and floppy disks people have been pirating stuff. Games, movies, music, nothing is sacred. If it exists people will steal it. Some publishers in recent years have avoided the route of denying people who bought the game features and have instead decided to get creative with piracy deterrence. Here’s just a few ways modern publishers have tried to stop piracy.
Guilt. I admit it. I used to pirate games, and often. When Fallout 3 was nearing release in 2008 I thought about pirating it, and was on the fence between buying and stealing it. My logic was thus: stealing is free and I didn’t have the money to buy any games. It wasn’t until I read a story that Bethesda was putting faith in their customers by including only the most minor of DRM measures in the form of a disk check. As a man who was raised Catholic, guilt can push me to do most things.
Good faith without guilt. A Great War has been raging in recent years; the war between publishers and their customers. The cycle is as follows: a publisher releases a new anti-piracy measure that restricts consumer freedom, like Ubisoft’s recent system of forcing a constant internet connection, and scene groups crack the protection wide open. The publisher raises the stakes with an even more restrictive and powerful DRM measure, and it’s cracked soon after. This reached a boiling point in 2008 when Spore, from the team behind Sims, contained DRM that limited the number of times you could install the game to three. Not three on one machine, but three… ever. This prevented those who had bought Spore from using it how they wished, and set it up so those who stole the game were freer than those who bought it. In this war of attrition between people and companies, I was surprised to hear Stardock come out and say their games will forever have no DRM. Stardock knows the PC, and they know how fatigued people have become with being restricted in what they’ve bought. By including no restrictions on their games they put forth the ultimate show of good faith. In the DRM war, they were one of the earliest who refused to fight.
Incentive to buy, not deterrent from stealing. I know some people loath having a different ID and login for each major publisher, but if nothing else it acts as a reasonable incentive to buy instead of steal. For example, when popping Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit into my Xbox 360 I was told I’d been rewarded for having played another EA racing game. Sure, it’s a small measure, but it’s a means of positive reinforcement. Even Ubisoft is putting in a sort of proprietary second-layer of rewards, on top of XBLA and PSN, with their uPlay system. You play games, earn points, and use those points to buy stuff to unlock in the games. It’s almost like you’re spending achievements or trophies on real content.
If I decide to go legitimate with my games, I get access to multiplayer, leaderboards, and the ability to use some sort of persistent rewards program, be it PSN, XBLA, or a publisher-exclusive system. This clashes with many publsiher’s decision to include a redeemable code for online access; instead of opening access, they’re restricting it. Be it “EA’s “Project $10”, THQ’s Online Pass, Codemaster’s VIP Pass, or the rumored PSN Pass, they’re all efforts to curb piracy (and used game sales).
This all adds up to the sellers of games making it harder for legitimate players to get online, whereas pirates will always find a way to play together anyways. Granted, it’s not exactly a high hurdle to getting online, but it’s still annoying for each new game having to enter a code, especially on consoles. Hell, with Steam managing everything I haven’t had to type a code into my PC for years. The PC, which used to required a code for EVERY new game now rarely does, and console games which used to never require a code now do more often than not.
Going the extra mile. High-quality promotions surrounding the game are great ways to get people to buy. If I can pre-order a game on Amazon and get $10-$20 credit towards any other game, I’m much more likely to buy over renting. With one promotion I can support the creators and get some cash for the next game. This same logic can be used to encourage platform loyalty, and can be seen in Batman: Arkham Asylum making The Joker exclusive to the PS3 version and Valve’s decision to give a 100% free copy of Portal 2 to those who bought it for the PS3. Sure, if you only own one platform you’ll feel ignored, but when the right mix of publisher and console comes your way it feels great. Valve and Eidos didn’t need to do give free content, but I’d wager giving stuff away for free keeps people from stealing.
Reasonable pricing. Say I want to take my first dip into the Xbox 360’s library. Microsoft (and Sony and Nintendo) have smartly lowered the price of older, bestselling games to the $19.99 range. For games that weren’t popular enough to quite hit Greatest/Platinum Hits range and are now rare, what incentive do I have to pay what they were four years ago? Why shouldn’t I just pirate it? Not only is it free, but it’s guaranteed to work, and I won’t have to buy second hand. After many months post-release, sometimes the only available copies are used, and the publisher gets nothing of that. The game is more expensive than it should be, and isn’t even new, so why not pirate? Well, it’s illegal and morally wrong, but that’s not a code that everypony subscribes to. The best way to curb piracy of older games is to price a game lower relative to the release date and make sure it’s available. Just look at the PS2 HD collections hitting the PS3: these collections contain the incentive of higher quality visuals, very reasonable pricing, and supporting the people who made it. Also, trophies.
Twisted Pixel recently lowered the price permanently of their latest game, Comic Jumper, from $15 to $10 I was a little shocked. You see, I have a fear that as the digital age approaches the lack of physical scarcity will keep the price of everything artificially high. If there is no physical stock and no reason to clear space for new merchandise, why have a sale? Twisted Pixel permanently lowering the price falls into the categories of good faith, persistence (leaderboards, XBLA’s achievements), and reasonable pricing, so good on them.
There’s really no way to stop piracy. A wise man once said, “If you outlaw something, it doesn’t mean people will stop doing it. All that will do is make the people who do it into outlaws.” When you break it down piracy is stealing, and stealing is the idea that you can take something without paying for it. If we lived in the world Star Trek’s matter-replicating replicators we’d have people stealing intellectual property instead of products and money. As long as there is anything one person has that everybody else doesn’t have, there will be some form of stealing. All these laws being passed against piracy are meaningless, and a formality at best. The best insurance to get consumers buying someone is to be nice to them and give them free shit.
