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Most people would agree at this point, that piracy doesn't equal stealing. We also know, that packaging your game up with DRM doesn't really stop piracy. What serves far better, is reminding gamers that by not paying for a game you make it harder for the developers (especially the smaller indie ones) to continue working on new games. That's what Greenheart Games did with its new Game Dev Tycoon, uploading a version of the game to popular torrent sites at the time of release, that makes it very difficult for players to progress past a certain point, because the games they make in-game, are pirated far too much to turn a profit.
There's good and bad news to this story. The latter (let's get it out of the way shall we?) is that most of the copies being played right now are pirated: 3104 out of 3318. Of course it's unlikely that all of these or even a majority would have bought the game had there not been a pirated copy available. Some people simply can't afford even the £5 price tag and for others downloading illegally is still far easier.
But for some, come on, it's £5. They're the same kind of people that pay a dollar for HumbleBundles. The fact that the average for each one of those is around $5 is embarrassing to Windows PC users.
The demoralising results of piracy one day after launch
Anyhow, I also promised some good news didn't I? Well the best part of this whole thing, is that some of the pirates have been complaining that in-game piracy is ruining their game. You know, the one they pirated.
“I can't progress further… HELP!” one user wrote. “Guys I reached some point where if I make a decent game with score 9-10 it gets pirated and I can't make any profit,” quotes Eurogamer. “It says blah blah our game got pirated stuff like that. Is there some way to avoid that? I mean can I research a DRM or something?”KitGuru Says: Oh the irony. If you want to show your financial or moral support for Greenheart Games, they have a full rundown of the piracy event here. And of course you can buy the game from their site too.
I love these guys, this is a genius was to help people see it from their point of view.
Personally, I think pirating is only necessary, or acceptable on larger games, that try to rip you off, or force you to play more and more money. Games like CoD, that charge £40 – 50 for it, that hardly anyone can afford. Indie games, or games that don’t thrive to rip every penny from your pocket, I will always buy, because I can afford them, and I can see greenhearts point that if we keep copying games that we can easily afford, the games industry will most certainly go down a pay-to-play, or pay-to-win trend. (fyi, I managed to buy CoD on steam sale for only £20 which I think is a perfectly reasonable cost). Anyway, although I will probably not buy (or pirate) greenhearts game in the near future, (because its not my type of game), Kudos to them for the idea, and I hope it works. 🙂
F*** it, I just wait 5 years for that $60 game to cost me $5 on Steam.