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By Chris Meadows

There has been a lot of rhetoric flung back and forth between providers of content (be it books, games, music, or movies) and those who “pirate” them, but not a lot of dialogue.

Recently, Cliff Harris, an independent game developer decided to change that. He asked for e-mails that would answer the fundamental question: “Why do you pirate my games?”

What he got back was partly what he had asked for, but more of the answers seemed to address the broader issues of game piracy in general.

Remarkably, only a small portion of the answers fell into the “I don’t believe in intellectual property” crowd, or the “I like free stuff and am not likely to get caught” crowd. Even though these two groups tend to be among the loudest (or the loudest denounced) in the public Internet discussions on the matter, they apparently make up the small ends of the bell curve. (Though, granted, this is assuming the respondents were completely honest.)

The majority of the complaints fell into four areas that gave me a strong feeling of deja vu, as they are all complaints (or, in one case, an advantage) I have also heard voiced about e-books (and, for that matter, music and movies): price, quality, DRM, and convenience.


Price

Some of the pirates said they pirated because they could not afford the high price of games, which can often cost $60 or more new. Likewise, many people complain about e-books that are priced equivalent to hard covers when they do not have the same printing and distribution costs hardcover books do.

This has also been a common complaint about music CDs, which often cost almost as much as DVDs. I have heard more than one person ask, “Why should I pay almost as much for a soundtrack as for the movie it came from?”

Quality

It seems that many gamers end up feeling ripped off by the games they buy, because they do not have the quality they expected when they plunked down their cash. And, of course, there is no way to return a game once you have opened it the way you can a book. (That this near-universal store policy is itself due to piracy is not something Harris mentions, but is something I find ironic.)

If you buy an e-book and it turns out to be lousy, you are likewise unable to return it. Even if you buy a paper book and don’t like it, you still have to spend the gas and time to take it back to the store (or ship it back to Amazon).

It is not surprising that, as Eric Flint indicates in his Prime Palaver and Salvos Against Big Brother columns, many people illicitly download books in order to try them before they buy. It is not surprising that they might do the same for games or movies, either. (But music, since it can be downloaded illicitly in as high or higher quality than the iTunes store downloads, may be another matter.)

DRM

Harris writes, “This was expected, but whereas many pirates who debate the issue online are often abusive and aggressive on the topic, most of the DRM complaints were reasonable and well put.” Expected indeed, and a complaint common to games, ebooks, movies, and digital music.

As Harris says, no one likes DRM, but the gaming industry may have it worse than most—witness the SecuROM debacle, where the DRM system as first proposed would have to call back in every few days to verify that the installation was still legit.

At least MobiPocket and eReader ebooks will stay unlocked without periodically checking in (though there have been similar ebook schemes in the past—such as Sony’s infamous “expiring magazines” for the Librié).

Convenience

Some pirates said that obtaining games on-line was more convenient than going to the store. Interestingly enough, they praised the Steam distribution system, whose games they did not tend to pirate. This one, at least, is an area where e-books actually have the advantage—especially the Kindle and the iPhone’s eReader, which can go online to buy the books directly from the appliance itself.

Likewise, the iTunes music store has become the biggest retailer of music in America, and is rapidly getting there in the UK. On the video side, Netflix, iTunes, and others are pioneering video rental by Internet services that can counter the inconvenience of going to the store for the DVD.

Conclusion

Many of the articles covering this dialogue are talking about how great it would be if the game industry could take a lesson from the answers Harris got. I am going to go further and say that the content industry as a whole should listen and learn. The best way to sell content is not to lock it down so tightly that people have to buy it to experience it—it is to make people want to buy it by making it convenient to purchase and use.

(Additional coverage: Ars Technica, Slashdot, Wired.)

 
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