I respect the lack of DRM.
That being said, when you're a poor high school/college student it doesn't really matter what has DRM or not, you're just plain broke as shit and get everything you can that is free.
When you loop every gamer who downloads games into the category of "pirating gamers", you're missing a lot of subtlety among the individuals you're blasting.
If you can convince even a small percentage of these customers to pay, you win big. Especially in the game of software development.
If you can convince even a small percentage of these customers to pay, you win big. Especially in the game of software development."
It's human nature. If someone can get something for free, most will. People don't like parting with their money. This is why you can't make a business out of donation-ware.
However, it's a problem when the torrent and other illegal sites get keywords in the major search engines for legitimate businesses. Many users will go to those sites first and not end up purchasing the legitimate version. You can't tell me that this doesn't effect sales (The actual amount of sales is up for debate).
There also aren't any real stats on how many people that download illegal software actually end up purchasing something from that company in the future.
In my experience, the only reason these people actually purchase software is because the cracks are too difficult to obtain/too much of a pain in the ass or the company they are working for requires it.
Eventually, I think most software will eventually become services. This way, there is no code to share.
It seems that every few years, the reasons why people decide it is their right to other people's work changes (and it keeps moving to more and more industries).
I think you also forget that games are usually not essential for survival. So it is not just a choice between pirate it or buy it, people can also just ignore it. That quite changes the subjective value, and in turn you better make people like you. They will probably buy bread from a baker they hate if it is the only baker in town, but why should they buy games from somebody they hate?
What about Red Ryder, way back when, or Toady, of Dwarf Fortress, or the relative legions of successful webcomic artists that live on donations?
I could be wrong, but those people probably have other sources of income.
Randy Mulholland of the webcomic Something Positive quit his job when he received in a month donations that exceeded his yearly salary.
Most webcomics that are 'full time jobs' for the artist also sell t-shirts, taking them a slight step outside of 'pure' donationware, but including these artists, the numbers of successful donationware vendors go up.
Interesting. Thanks for the link.
"Randy Mulholland of the webcomic Something Positive quit his job when he received in a month donations that exceeded his yearly salary."
This is nice for now, but will this continue in the long-term? I know nothing is definite, even when you sell a product, but I just don't see pure donationware working in the long-term (without some other way of supplementing income).
If you adamantly eschew the respect of "pirating gamers," you're cutting off an enormous chunk of your potential market share.
they expect us to enter a store here and pay US$200 for a title. and that's for wii. PS3 are double or more then that.
wiiware? Nintendo wouldn't take my money no matter what. ...in fact, let me try today... yep. amazon still can't ship a 10gram card overseas. "Wii 2000 Points Card cannot be shipped to the selected address."
so, yeah, I pirate most games I play. And dare you to buy world of goo for 200 bucks.
And they have thus earned this niche's respect and attention, and more importantly, their money. That's quite difficult to earn from an ordinarily pirating gamer.