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%.
Or even never play them. There are a small[1] of people who collect all ROMs of some (or all) console systems, with no intention of playing them.
[1] I agree that in terms of overall piracy this is a tiny number.
Those who pirate for other reasons, while they may be a small proportion of pirates overall, can be a large proportion of potential customers. These are the people who don't buy your game because the pirated version actually works better. If you can provide a better experience through legitimate channels then you can get their money.
In short: piracy really is two separate and mostly unrelated phenomena when it comes to this question. People who pirate purely to avoid paying don't care about this stuff, but neither should software publishers care about them.
The bundle is (was?) accessible from http://sos.gd/bundle/
The transaction takes place in 3 steps:
1. download
2. purchase - this step is optional
3. play
unspecified 4: purchase if you haven't, still optional
4207 downloads and $276 earnings within a single day. 6.5% of the downloaders purchased the product, regardless of whether they liked what they saw.
This depends on the DRM and the software. Software which has high international demand but is region-locked to specific countries will be pirated because of the DRM at rates that sometimes dwarf "freeloading" pirates.
I agree that Gabe is pretty much just pandering, but in the end, DRM doesn't really help piracy rates. Maybe for an immediate period after release, which is desirable in some circumstances as a matter of convenience, but that's it.
The real question is whether the piracy rate is indicative of the loss of sales due to piracy, which is clearly contested in some situations. Would Mojang profit more if Minecraft piracy was -- hypothetically speaking -- impossible? Probably a little bit, but a lot of users will look for something else to pirate, not roll their eyes and say "ugh well I guess I have to buy it now".
I suspect it's true in the NH bubble, but I strongly suspect that very few pirates then go on to buy the product.
When I've wanted to give some money to the author of a book I've downloaded it's really easy; I just go to a store (or Amazon, where buying stuff is really easy) and buy any book from that author on the same publisher. But for digital stuff it's often harder, with annoying websites, weird cart checkout systems, a stupid bit of credit card security theatre thrown in, some spammy email checkboxes to remember to click (or not click), etc. And this is when you want to buy it - that's too much friction for most pirates.
I'd love to see some decent research.
I think that in other conditions where pirates never go on to buy something they've pirated (gawd, "pirate" is such an awful term for this -- there are no eyepatches and cutlasses involved), they just wouldn't fucking buy it in the first place if they couldn't pirate it.
> But for digital stuff it's often harder, with annoying websites, weird cart checkout systems, a stupid bit of credit card security theatre thrown in, some spammy email checkboxes to remember to click (or not click), etc. And this is when you want to buy it - that's too much friction for most pirates.
That's a bad business model, and in no way contradicts the notion that people who pirate would like to buy later a lot of the time. Reduce the friction in the purchase process, and you'll make more money. It's almost tautological. Keeping the hurdles to purchase high then blaming the results on piracy is completely asinine.
"First is Monthy Python. A while back, the Monty Python team made a shedload of their sketches freely available in high quality on their own YouTube channel, hoping that as a result people would buy more DVDs. According to this widely linked story, the experiment has been not just successful, but wildly, crazily so. They’re reporting that sales of Monty Python DVDs at Amazon have increased by 23,000% — that’s 231-fold — since they made all that material available on Youtube."
(Neil Gaiman on books he published for free) "Then I started to notice that two things that seemed much more significant. One of which was that places where I was being pirated -- particularly Russia (where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading it out into the world) I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. And then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies.
"That's really all this is. It's people lending books. And you can't look on that as a lost sale.... What you're actually doing is advertising. You're reaching more people. You're raising awareness. And understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web was doing is allowing people to hear things, allowing people to read things, allowing people to see things they might never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that's an incredibly good thing." "
Source: http://reprog.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/everyone-wins/
But anyways, I generally think it's pretty nonsensical to imply that piracy is a question of a maturity. Young people might simply have other reasons to pirate.
Minecraft may of had huge piracy rates, but it still made a huge profit. You won't ever get rid of piracy but you can still make a nice profit.
r/gaming has about 850,000 users on it as well. The communities that pirate because of DRM may not be huge, but they are of a decent size.
The reason I don't is that I have seen how easy it is to trigger these kinds of errors by mistake (or from my personal philosophy of assuming malicious intent until proven wrong) and how beneficial it is to the creators of the programs.
How many people do you think have a credit card? I know a LOT of pirates (here in South America), and most of them fit this profile:
- very low or no income - no credit card - lots of spare time - cheap internet connection
Would they pirate World of Goo? Yes. Have they paid for a game? Rarely, they buy CDs or DVDs or game cartridges on cash, but the originals are outrageously expensive for the average consumer here.
Is it an excuse? No. Would they start purchasing once they archieve a decent income level? It's hard to say, but I'm inclined to think they won't.
In my case, I now have a decent income level, but I don't have any spare time to speak of, so I don't purchase videogames (anything past a U$ 2 app on Android).
The cry of this age is 'me, me ,me.'
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...