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There's been so much mention of piracy in the game industry lately, and really, it's for good reason. However, there are a few people who look at the matter in an entirely different way than most, and it makes perfect sense to me. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a quick article that discusses why it's best to avoid piracy and focus on more important matters, such as making sure your game is the best it can be.
"Because the Pirates don't count. They have no direct financial impact. There's a second side of this too, however."
Pirates don't count, so why worry about them? The fact of life is that people will always be there to steal a game, but it's more important to focus on games that people who legally buy the them, will buy. It's become brutally obvious over the past few years that copy protection and other piracy-fighting measures have done nothing, and it's amazing to me that game companies are still so clueless about this. I've said it a hundred times... these protections affect legal customers only. Sometimes, even the crackers themselves are not too inconvenienced. Some titles are now cracked before they are even released!
Stardock's Brad Wardell has the same thoughts with his Windows-customization software, where he mentions that people who buy WindowsBlinds probably have a different taste in what they are looking for than the pirates who have the software. He raises this point because it seems to be the pirates who are deciding what kind of games are being made. I could go on for a while about this, but to save writing a novel, I recommend reading the article.
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Websites earn money from people who have no interest in paying for the game. If there’s several million pirate-only FPS fans, they’ll swell the page-impression count too. If there’s four million people who want to read about Call of Duty 4, even if only 400,000 want to pay for it, a website will earn more money by writing about it, rather than trying to do something for the 400,000 people who actually want to read about Sins of the Solar Empire, even if every single one of them buy the game.
Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun
"Because the Pirates don't count. They have no direct financial impact. There's a second side of this too, however."
Pirates don't count, so why worry about them? The fact of life is that people will always be there to steal a game, but it's more important to focus on games that people who legally buy the them, will buy. It's become brutally obvious over the past few years that copy protection and other piracy-fighting measures have done nothing, and it's amazing to me that game companies are still so clueless about this. I've said it a hundred times... these protections affect legal customers only. Sometimes, even the crackers themselves are not too inconvenienced. Some titles are now cracked before they are even released!
Stardock's Brad Wardell has the same thoughts with his Windows-customization software, where he mentions that people who buy WindowsBlinds probably have a different taste in what they are looking for than the pirates who have the software. He raises this point because it seems to be the pirates who are deciding what kind of games are being made. I could go on for a while about this, but to save writing a novel, I recommend reading the article.
<table align="center"><tbody><tr><td>
</td></tr></tbody></table>
Websites earn money from people who have no interest in paying for the game. If there’s several million pirate-only FPS fans, they’ll swell the page-impression count too. If there’s four million people who want to read about Call of Duty 4, even if only 400,000 want to pay for it, a website will earn more money by writing about it, rather than trying to do something for the 400,000 people who actually want to read about Sins of the Solar Empire, even if every single one of them buy the game.
Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun