The Real Reasons People Pirate Games

Game companies would have you believe that those who “pirate” their games (as its come to be known, though of course the definition is hardly a good fit) are evil, unethical beings who seek to destroy the gaming industry. In reality of course pirates are no different than you and me (they may even be you and me, who’s to say?) – average gamers who for one reason or another elect to download a game rather than purchase it. Here are some of the most common reasons:

Cost ($) – Games are too Expensive

With so many games being produced across so many platforms, more games are offered to gamers than ever before and one would have expected the cost of games would be driven way down – it’s basic economics, I won’t go into too much detail here. In reality, game prices tend to hover around a static $59.99 despite a massive variation in production cost or how in demand they are. Even download only versions of games tend to not reduce that price tag at all, despite lacking any physical offering and let’s not speak about luxury goods in a recession.

The simple fact is that games are too expensive. There are very few wealthy enough to afford the cost of purchasing every game out there, and among those none would have the time to play them all. Gamers must carefully choose but a handful of games to purchase, with the cost of games, systems, and peripherals rapidly adding up to real money.

With increasingly frequency there is hope. More and more titles are becoming widely successful when offered in the $10-$20 range. This lower price point is far easier to digest and has so far been off the radar of the “big” developers, encouraging real competition and allowing market factors to operate. Big developer titles will eventually have to compete in this range or be wiped out altogether.

On the other side of the spectrum come collector’s editions, generally priced well above the standard issue $59.99 price. The success of these packages show that gamers will indeed pay even higher prices when they feel they are getting something out of it. Cheap trinkets, special codes to redeem in-game, printed artwork or maps, it doesn’t take much to entice a gamer to purchasing a game, developers just need to give him something he can’t download. It’s really quite simple to think about, non?

My advice to developers in regards to pricing their games is of course to bring the price way down so more people can actually afford to pay it and not be limited to one game out of one hundred. If looking to cut costs, the marketing budget would be a good place to start since it consumes more than any other segment. Of course let’s not forget about all the money that can be saved on those expensive DRM “solutions” that don’t in fact solve anything beyond how to send the vendor’s kids to college.

How the industry sees it’s customers (gamers).

Quality: Make Good Games People Want (A Rather Novel Idea) – Also, Demos

If you are like me then you may have noticed that new games actually seem to get worse every year. Sure, the graphics and appearance get flashier as the games hog more system resources, but the gameplay and game design seem to lose ground with every release.

The truth is that there have not been many additions to the basic set of game mechanics since twenty years ago. The vast majority (99%+) of games are just derivative works of earlier games, and offer little new beyond the graphics. While games may boast of featuring X hours of content (X – some big number), having A LOT of garbage is just that – it doesn’t add up to anything good. It’s great that they continue to sell us ____ 3, 4 or 5 every year or two but something we haven’t seen before would sure be nice.

How many crap games have been overhyped and left us disappointed? Games where more was spent on marketing than actually developing the game? Game devs, if your design document describes or could describe the game as “like (game_name) but with (feature)” then maybe it’s time to rethink things. The short is that gamers have been losing confidence in the industry to produce products that wow them. [Wasn't referring to WoW specifically, but on that note how many "WoW-killers" have been thrown out?]

It’s hard to buy with confidence anymore. Even the brand of a big company means little given how hit and miss their titles can be. We certainly can’t trust the trailers and videos, especially since most of the time they show a 3D rendered cinematic that is supposed to represent the idea of the game rather than show the game itself!

With so many offerings from so many companies, many of which we’ve never heard of before, how are gamers expected to judge whether a game is worth purchasing or not? Traditionally this is where the demo would come in but alas, many games don’t even bother to produce these and even when they do they are often too short and don’t give an accurate feel for how the full game will be.

Some people pirate games simply because there is no other way to get a good indication as whether or not the game might be right for them. The trouble here is that in doing so they already have the full version and it’s easier to finish it than to go out and purchase the retail counterpart only to start from the beginning once more.

What you get: Pirate vs. Paying – click to see the whole thing.

Pirated Versions Work Better and are Less Troublesome

The above illustration pertains to movies but the concept is essentially the same. With gaming it tends to be DRM coming between the user and the game (I wrote a little about it here) rather than a bunch of FBI warnings or previews.

Pirated versions often strip out all of the annoyances that people simply do not want in their games. This includes pesky DRM systems down to simple things like unskippable splash screens of the developer’s logo. The end result is that the pirated version runs better and offers the user more of what they want than the retail version.

Just as a quick example of offering more, C&C Red Alert 3 did not feature a LAN option and instead demanded players connect to an online service with their accounts in order to connect and play the campaign in coop. A pirated version of the game included a patch (also downloadable separately) to introduce this functionality into the game. It should have been there in the start but the developer foolishly thought that including the feature would make it easier for pirates to emulate the multiplayer features, therefore penalizing the paying customer.

The Other 1%

There is of course a small faction of pirates out there who lack any justification and do it simply because they can. This group gives the other 99% of those who pirate a bad reputation, yet seems to be the face applied to all pirates when seen through the developer’s eyes.