Jonathan Blow on Piracy and DRM

[@osrevad]

Thanks for putting the video sources in the description

[@AshnSilvercorp]

A developer actually talking about how DRM can break their own game for normal people is a dang godsend in the AAA titles we have of today. truth be told, the moment you set foot into the digital realm with ANYTHING tangible as a file, the pirates already have the booty. All you can do is be louder than them, and entrance some of them with quality to give you the doubloons anyways. If anything, they are the greatest unintentional quality check in the industry next to people just not buying your game.

[@nickeshchauhan5661]

If someone made something you like, pay for it, even if you have to wait for it to go on sale to be affordable

[@nicholasbailey6622]

What if you don’t know if you like it until you try it?

[@danielgrizzlus3950]

The way it is with me, I pirate all the time. And yet, when I find the opportunity to buy a game I know is good and have played before (because I pirated it), I buy it. I wouldn't care to do that if I never played it before.

[@franciscofarias6385]

@@nicholasbailey6622 Dude, just pirate it. Pirating doesn't make anyone lose money. What makes people lose money is not buying.

[@nicholasbailey6622]

@@franciscofarias6385 If I pirated something what would be the point of buying it afterwards? Charity to the creator? I actually would be fine with that, you get to see if you like something and then pay the person after. But that's just me, pretty sure for most people the entire point of pirating is so you don't have to buy something at all.

[@xaf15001]

@@franciscofarias6385 It's kinda like supporting a band you like, or buying merch for your football team, or donating to your favorite streamer. Your contribution is a drop in a bucket, but it does help and it feels nice.

[@theohallenius8882]

Haven't pirated any game or software in like 8 years, and those that I did I either have a license for already or did it to try before buying. I think there are at least 2 working solutions out there to combat piracy: crowdfunding which is a nice middleground (developers get funded to complete the project, any purchase after that is just a bonus) and rent to own business model that Allegorithmic did with their line of products (where you can pay small amounts that go towards owning a full copy at the end of it). For example normally one can play 10 AAA titles / month on average, that would be 600$ / month. Some of the games you may not even like and never play again, but paying 5$ / game / month is a little more reasonable, and you can keep playing that Fallout 76 garbage for a year if you really think it's worth the money and before you know it you suddenly own a copy. Other people instead of paying remaining 55$ for Fallout 76 can just spend it on some other game they like playing more.

[@RizaBochiza]

I really like the idea of that Allegorithmic model. I miss the days of being able to rent games.

[@comicsans1689]

How about developers putting out demos of their games like they used to? Demos were really nice because I was able to find some pretty good games that I wanted to buy. If it wasn't for demos, I would have never gotten into Fire Emblem because the Fire Emblem Awakening demo got me hooked.

The panning level is kinda painful on headphones.

[@BrunoB78]

it's about 333,333 hours

[@jonaskoelker]

Which is 13888.888 days, or 38 years, i.e. ~half a lifetime.

[@oberguga]

Piracy happens also because many programms is shit and you have no other way to check it. If for any game I have 20-60 minute demo, most of 'pirated' game i never download, because i del it after one-two hours of gameplay. Refund not he same. And also small almost flash quality game with one gameplay feature cannot be priced as factorio, satisfactory or other well done project. But it is.

[@gtgunar]

don't forget the "base game as honeytrap for DLC-s" mentality. I'd say it' s fine in that case.

[@bloody_albatross]

Really? That many people pirate games? Who are those people? I don't know any (excluding people that pirate very old NES/SNES games which you can't get anymore anyway). The people I know buy games on steam and never get to play them.

[@chyza2012]

Poor countries. In places like eastern Europe its unusual to buy games when you can just pirate them, people only do it occasionally. That's also why you can't count piracy as lost sales, if someone pirates a game because they can't afford it, and you somehow removed the ability to pirate, they just wouldn't play it.

[@bloody_albatross]

@Gregory Reshetniak I.e. people who wouldn't be able to afford that many games? You really can't include them in your calculations for potential customers.

[@xaf15001]

@@bloody_albatross Yeah that's the biggest problem with piracy. Loss from piracy is opportunity cost, not actual cost, so you don't know for certain how worthwhile it is to fix.

[@martinkunev9911]

1:46 This issue is not that clear cut. It could very well be the case that not "pirating" decreases overall sales. It depends a lot on network effect. Also not sure where these statistics are from, but they have very little credibility without any source or evidence. 7:08 One option worth mentioning is to crowdfund the development of a game.

[@chaotic_intent]

Old video, but I'll comment anyway lol. Honestly I'd only pirate games that I already bought since there are so many games that you need to be online (whether on steam or origin, or Uplay, etc) to play and I like being able to have a backup that I can install on any pc or in case for any reason the game gets taken down (or the even less likely reason that any of these places just shut down their servers out of nowhere which would basically make you lose your entire library with them). I'm sure that there are other people who think the same way, so even if say 85% of people pirate the game, I'd be willing to bet that at least 5%-10% probably also bought the game. If people would just pirate any game that has no DRM then people who sell their games on GOG would never make any money (which is obviously not true I mean look at the Witcher 3). I personally dislike DRM very much, but I understand why people put it in their games (people deserve to be paid for their products, especially if it's a really good product) but I feel like DRM kinda incentives people to pirate more games since it basically makes it feel like you don't even own a game that you bought, you're just renting it but for full price. Alot of DRM's don't even seem to work that well since most games get cracked anyways so it's like Mr. Blow says, you would just be punishing the people who actually bought your game. Anyway that's my 2 cents. Good vid

[@Argoon1981]

Want people to buy games, give them the ability to mod your games, some will not care but others will try and will start to appreciate the immense job that it is to make games, second be a friendly team, open to the community, make your users like you, that will make them buy all your games just because they want to support you, third don't put obnoxious DRM in your games, they will never stop pirates and will only make the life harder for legitimate buyers, this will make them hate you and that only makes piracy seem like a better option.

[@buoyancydabl]

Once I was playing the game without internet (because of the network upgrade) and game thought "well yeah, he isnt connected to steam, he is probably pirate, let me corrupt the savefile for him". That was the last time I play that game.

[@s4uss]

Sales of games are already higher because of piracy, because people pirate first, to try game out, and if they like it, they often buy it, at least on sale. There is so many games to buy that no, you can't expect even 10% of those pirates to buy your game if piracy wasn't a thing, they just can't afford buying all the new games that come out every day.

[@t.b.m.5718]

Maybe don't market your game at $40 worldwide because that's like $230 in brazil. You could buy a year's worth of apples with that.

[@SiisKolkytEuroo]

If your game gets pirated, more people play it, talk to their friends about it, know about its existence, and buy it.

[@martinkunev9911]

this is called network effect by the way

[@YASxYT]

Or they just pirate it as well lol

[@xaf15001]

Biggest issue about this is 1) that's kinda vague and is essentially paying by exposure, which isn't really paying, and 2) I doubt anyone would pirate something and then turn to their friends saying they should buy it. But at the same time, games do live in communities like that. One of the biggest reason I play the games I do is because a streamer played it and I thought it was cool or because my friend recommended it. It's easier to find games by people then by algorithms. I think it's just the fate of games being entertainment. Software could do fine with a simple buying model, but for games paying full price for an entertainment you might not enjoy is kinda finnicky.

[@stephenkamenar]

the only reason i spend money on any single player games is because i pirated them first and liked them. i wish i could donate directly to the dev though, steam takes a big cut. i don't like paying steam

[@PHeMoX]

85% to 95% of people allegedly pirate our games on PC?? Nah, I don't believe that for a second. Any numbers for PC must be fairly inaccurate anyway, as it isn't even really that obvious how many PCs out there are actually used by gamers, versus non-gamers. Obviously the amount of office PCs in use must be unimaginably large. Those don't count as 'lost sales'. I do agree that DRM really mostly just hurts the people who do buy your game. A lot of pirated copies literally have the DRM (mostly) removed, meaning those people *might* very well have a better experience playing the game. What kind of upside-down inside-out kind of world really is it to have paying customers have the inferior experience of your games, right? As much as I understand where Blow is coming from, didn't the Witness sell great with a gross revenue of +$5 million (before stores take their cut, but only weeks after release), more than 100k units, did much better than Braid (in terms of revenue / profit) and so on? Honestly, the Witness's biggest problem in my mind was it's non-indie price tag. Not the piracy. As I'm fairly sure those people would not have ever bought the game legally anyway. Maybe a small percentage would, but developers shouldn't assume they are really 'competing with free stuff'. Especially when it comes to indie game developers, there are plenty of people out there who would rather support a good developer like Jonathan Blow, than pirate a copy just to save a few dozen bucks. I think a lot of developers, regardless of indie or triple A fail at making good games. A few companies do manage to make interesting enough games to be able to make more games in the future. It may very well have nothing to do with piracy at all, assuming 85% to 95% of all pirate copy users may never translate to any sales anyway.

[@justteathankyou]

> Any numbers for PC must be fairly inaccurate anyway, as it isn't even really that obvious how many PCs out there are actually used by gamers, versus non-gamers. Obviously the amount of office PCs in use must be unimaginably large. I don't see how that's relevant? When people say 90% piracy rates what they mean e.g. a game sold 1000 copies and got 9000 downloads on torrent sites. It has nothing to do with how many computers exist in the world. That's not to say that each torrent download equates to exactly one person playing, which equates to exactly one person who could have bought, but as Blow points out the ratio is so crazy high (90%) that even if the numbers are wildly wrong and the vast majority of pirates would convert to sales even really negative estimates are proportionally very high.

[@stunthumb]

Yeah, that statistic is an absolute horse shit excuse for the price of a game. I haven't downloaded a pirate game in about a decade. It's not really worthwhile to pirate PC games, we'd rather just pay a fair price and get on with it. It's kinda rich for JB to say this though... I mean how many people bought his games and played 1/5th of them before getting bored.

[@lardshank]

it may have been accurate in the 2000s. for modern games its probably not even close.

[@martinkunev9911]

@@justteathankyou When people say 90% piracy rates, they're probably making it up. I don't mean that it's false, but that it's almost impossible to measure. It's quite possible that without the "piracy", a large number of the people who paid wouldn't know the game exists.

[@zhulikkulik]

Piracy will never go away while capitalism exists. Ways to minimize impact of it - a good demo of the game and reasonable regional prices, a.k.a. “don't sell your game for 1/4th of local average salary”.