Pirates! Stealing Money, Affecting You

From Captain Richard Phillips, to Captain Fatbeard, pirates seem to have been in the news a lot lately. The pirates I’m thinking of though are not the dangerous and deadly ones prowling the Somalian coasts. No, I speak of course about e-pirates. While unlikely to kill or kidnap you, they do their fair share of financial plundering and are actually more likely to have a direct impact on you, the honest consumers.

When news broke out over the startling numbers surrounding the release of Demigod, companies and developers were given yet another reason to step up their efforts to combat piracy. While the game only sold 18,000 copies, over 120,000 attempted to log online.

Unlike the music industry, video games can not hold concert-like events to rake in large amounts of revenue. They depend a lot more on the sale of their software and products. Statistics (2007) show that the software piracy rate in developed areas of the world were relatively low.

North America, for example, has about a 20% piracy rate. However, in developing areas of the world, the rate grows as high as 93% in Armenia and 82% in China. There are exceptions to both rules of course, but generally speaking, this is the pattern. In total, these percentages amount to a loss of billions (Nintendo alone lost nearly $1 billion).

With software being leeched around the globe at increasingly higher rates and costs, what are companies to do? They are definitely not going to be able to stop piracy. If they continue to develop countermeasures it will only be a matter of time before those obstacles are cracked.

The fact is that it is simply easier for companies to just assume and approach everyone as a pirate. Unfortunately for loyal consumers, this means having to deal with programs and policies that often do more harm than good.

Two of the largest companies involved in the industry, Microsoft and Electronic Arts, have already taken this controversial stance. Seeking to aggressively confront pirates, both have opted to implement annoying SecuROM into all their software, but what initially was supposed to address pirates, instead spawned more problems.

Many legitimate users were left to deal with constant errors and some were unable to play the games. In addition, the program remained on the computer even after uninstalling the accompanying game.

Now, it is understandable for companies to take these measures, especially with Demigod as an example, but at what point is a line drawn? How affective can their measures really be in battling piracy?

As of 2008, two the most pirated pirated titles were EA’s Spore, which contained SecuROM, and The Sims 2. Both had over a million downloads each. So much for SecuROM.

If combating piracy with software won’t work what will? Authentication processes offer a better alternative to SecuROM and similar programs, although this too has its problems. By having users verify their copies through registrations, it immediately weeds out those with actual copies of the games and those without.

The major drawback here is that developers usually limit the number of times you can register one key. In most cases this is not a problem, but for those who own and regularly operate multiple computers it can be a hassle.

The best method though, is to simply make games more interesting. One way developers can and have discouraged piracy is to emphasize online play. Most games limit one user with one unique key to be online at any given time. Any other user attempting to log in with the same key will simply be blocked from logging in.

This is critical because multi-player adds new possibilities to game play as well as adding an immense amount of playability to any game. It just isn’t fun to play against computers all the time. Many pirates doomed to a Sisyphus-like eternity of completing single player tasks, can be drawn to purchase the actual game, assuming it is a good game, if its online play offers a good enough incentive.

On the extreme side of this, there are subscription based games, which are entirely online based and have been very successful at mitigating piracy.

By turning games entirely into online worlds, games like World of Warcraft indirectly battle piracy by attempting to lure them into a purchase.

WoW, which has over 11 million subscribers, force players to band together to complete tasks that would have been otherwise impossible. This makes the social aspect to the game as important and entertaining as the actual content. Something completely devoid from single player.

Furthermore, strong online communities form where interaction between one another is highly stressed. The stronger the community is, the more important it is for players to play online.

Games do not have to become entirely online or subscription based to be successful. I just stress the idea of online play as an effective way to prevent pirates from fully enjoying a game. Several developers have taken this route through Steam, and for the most part, it has paid off.

The overall point though, is that complex and entertaining games with depth can attract people to actually purchase a product. Despite this, piracy will still be around, it’s not a matter of defeating it, it’s a matter of limiting it.