[TazeTSchnitzel]

I've often heard people say that piracy isn't harmful, but looking at what it does to video game developers, I'm not sure it always isn't. Day 1 cracks are obviously a serious concern if developers like this one would go to so much effort to prevent them. And I remember Nintendo saying piracy had hurt DS software sales in Europe (understandably: instead of buying several full titles, people would buy a cheap "R4" or similar flash cart and play hundreds of games for free - I recall having friends who did this).

[squeaky-clean]

I'm not going to argue that piracy isn't harmful, but does fighting it really help? People claim that just preventing cracks for a few weeks is enough to make a difference. Sure, the majority of sales happen in this timespan, but that doesn't mean someone intent on pirating the game will give up and pay just because it isn't available now. That's why I don't like statements like these, from the article

>those two to three months when pirated versions were unavailable must have reduced the overall level and impact of piracy.

Sure, it probably reduced the amount of piracy, but does it reduce the impact? Is there any proof that the pirates bought the game instead of waiting a few months for a crack, or that they didn't ignore it altogether? "Less people pirated the game" doesn't necessarily cause "More people bought the game". And "More people bought the game" is caused by a lot more than just piracy, so you can never be sure.

For comparison, look at The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, a game that launched with practically no copy protection at all (just an offline CD key check), which was a huge commercial success. And Spore, a game released about a year later, was a flop and actually one of the most pirated games ever, partly out of pure spite against the extremely restrictive SecuRom DRM included with the game.

To me, fighting piracy seems like wasted effort. You can usually only delay it, there's no proof that those efforts will actually earn you sales, and you risk damaging your relationship with legitimate, paying customers in the process. That time and work can be spent making the game better. You hear about games reaching record sales because of good gameplay, good graphics, intense multiplayer, good marketing, whatever. You don't read "GTA V becomes fastest-selling entertainment product in history because of anti-piracy measures."

[exDM69]

This is a very valid point and I would like to see it backed or refuted by sales data. Of course, it's very difficult to speculate how much sales were lost due to piracy or how much was gained due to the countermeasures. But comparing several games with roughly similar total sales over a long period vs. the sales by the time a crack to come out could give a nice data point to start with. If there's a strong decline in sales per day when the crack comes out, that should be a clear indicator that piracy is hurting sales (but I find that hard to believe).

Judging by the article, there was a lot of serious software engineering resources put to this crack protection system. It takes thousands or tens of thousands of sales to pay back the time spent. This money and effort could have been spent on making the product better in a way that is directly visible to the customer. How many sales could have that bought?

But things have changed since the days this game (and article) came out. Ubiquitous Internet connectivity is now on consoles too. Games get (more) patches after they are released (well they are also more buggy on release day). The downside is not being able to play when your connection goes down (or the servers go down) but this has become somewhat acceptable (albeit it's a nuisance).

It has become a lot easier to buy games online and a lot more difficult to pirate them. This is what ultimately made me stop pirating games.

[rhino369]

>Sure, the majority of sales happen in this timespan, but that doesn't mean someone intent on pirating the game will give up and pay just because it isn't available now.

Sure not all will, but a lot of pirates aren't intent on pirating. They just do it when they can. For example, I want to see American Sniper at the theater. But if a DVD quality rip is out on launch day, fuck it, I'll take it free.

Most PC games go on sale a few weeks after launch and yet people are still paying a premium at launch.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> cracks are obviously a serious concern if developers like this one would go to so much effort to prevent them.

If your crazy uncle wears tinfoil hats to combat CIA mind-rays, this doesn't mean CIA mind control technology is a concern.

It just means your uncle is mentally ill.

> And I remember Nintendo saying piracy had hurt DS software sales in Europe (understandably: instead of buying several full titles, people would buy a cheap "R4" or similar flash cart and play hundreds of games for free

This is no proof that sales were hurt. It could be true (and almost certainly is) that people who did this would not have bought extra games even if the flash carts had been unavailable. If the 12 yr old pirates $17,000 (retail price) of music, this does not mean the record companies are out $17,000... 12 yr olds don't have $17,000 to spend even if they are prevented from pirating.

You're not being logical, you're just parroting anti-copying propaganda. It's more than a little sick.

[phpnode]

You're not being logical, you're just parroting anti-anti-copying propaganda.

> If the 12 yr old pirates $17,000 (retail price) of music, this does not mean the record companies are out $17,000... 12 yr olds don't have $17,000 to spend even if they are prevented from pirating.

Right, but it does not mean that the record companies are out $0 either. They are probably missing out on at least several hundred dollars worth of revenue for that particular person.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> Right, but it does not mean that the record companies are out $0 either.

I might concede that this is the case, but only if we first agree that this doesn't mean you get to choose some arbitrary number in the middle and pretend that this is the "average loss".

I know of no economic science that can provide a reasonable number, either. You'd be lying if you claimed you knew of one.

> They are probably missing out on at least several hundred dollars worth of revenue

This would be the very extreme edge of the maximum. They're probably missing out on several tens of dollars.

And for this, they've hijacked the criminal justice system with bribes to congresses and parliaments, extended copyright protection so much that it now lasts a duration best measured in centuries, bankrupted innocent people with million dollar judgements, and sent people to prison for what shouldn't even be misdemeanors.

They want us to all pay, through our tax funding of the criminal justice system, for these minor theoretical losses. Why should I have sympathy for that?

Games companies specifically have broken their own works so thoroughly that it's difficult or impossible to get games just a few decades old to run. This is stealing from the public domain. It'd be like burning down your apartment just before the lease runs out, to make sure the landlord doesn't get it back.

Fuck them.

[CJefferson]

As you say, it's very hard to know how much companies are out.

I would guess it was at least $40, else why pay $40 for a flashcart? A new gateway (the only 3DS card I'm aware of) costs $80.

People who buy 3DS flash carts never buy a game again (in my experience), mainly because new non-pirated games require upgrading the firmware, which they can't do if they want their flash carts to keep working (this may have been improved, I haven't looked in a while). Also because they 'paid for piracy' (unlike on PC), they (I believe) feel happier not paying for games in future.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> I would guess it was at least $40, else why pay $40 for a flashcart?

I will concede that this is reasonable for a lower boundary.

However, it's not that simple. Human psychology being what it is, if he couldn't buy the $40 flashcart it's not certain that he would buy say, two $20 games that he ended up putting on that flash cart. Maybe instead he orders pizza. Being blocked from the flashcart alters decision paths that don't always lead back to video games or even entertainment in general. But with that said, again, I'll accept $40 as a rough lower boundary.

> People who buy 3DS flash carts never buy a game again (in my experience),

Anecdotal, of course, but this seems reasonable. I don't dispute it.

In my own personal experience, people who start downloading movies never buy DVDs again. So not only do I agree, I think we can generalize it either to most entertainment, or all entertainment.

> Also because they 'paid for piracy' (unlike on PC), they (I believe) feel happier not paying for games in future.

Morally, they bought physical goods that employed other people and let those people earn a living. Additionally, those claiming to have been wronged here still earned millions and billions in profit.

Who can fault them for feeling as if no bad outcomes occurred?

[gambiting]

As someone who actually works in the game industry - I feel like making an emotional argument. If I write a game, it's released in stores, and then I see someone playing a pirated copy, how should I feel? Elated that they are playing it? Or am I allowed to be upset that they are playing my game without paying for it?

And how is being unable to run games designed for a different system and different time stealing from public domain? Just because tape players are not common today doesn't mean that people who made tapes 20 years ago have somehow stolen from a public domain - you just have to get a tape player. If a game was written for Dos, then well, you have to get a dos system or an emulator. If a game was written for DirectX 7, how can you blame developers that it doesn't run on the latest DirectX 11 system, with the operating system 5 generations ahead? If you are a software developer - how could you predict and counteract this?

[sosborn]

"They're probably missing out on several tens of dollars." * "The large number of people pirating songs"

Yes, they went too far, but for fucks sake, it is really hard to imagine that these acts hurt a company?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I sell doodads.

You've never bought one from me.

Can I claim that you've hurt me? After all, you've never bought any. (I can show you my bank account balance, I really am hurting).

The sticking point, the part that will make it feel to you as if my statement above is non-sensical, is somehow you've managed to attach the idea that they're selling something to the idea that other people have a (very) similar something but haven't paid. So to you that feels like "theft". But it wasn't always this way.

The way you feel has been cultivated, just in the last few decades. And though they've cultivated it for music and movies and video games, I haven't (bothered, been able to, had enough influence) to cultivate the idea that if you haven't bought doodads from me that you've stolen from me.

[mikeash]

Let's say I stand in front of your doodad store (imagining you only sell it in a store, for whatever reason) with a megaphone, repeatedly giving an extremely convincing speech about why people shouldn't buy your doodads. Can you claim that I've hurt you then?

Many of the people I talk to would never buy a doodad anyway. Those result in zero harm. Some of them were going to buy a doodad, were non convinced, and bought anyway. Those also result in zero harm. But some were going to buy a doodad and then decided not to. That's harm.

Piracy is the same. Many pirates were never going to buy the thing anyway. Many people purchase anyway. But some non-zero number of people would have purchased but now don't.

[throwawaykf05]

Strawman: by not buying doodads from you, I'm not getting the value provided by the doodads either. That is not the case with digital goods.

Say you created those doodads using your time, efforts and resources. Your doodads provide people some value. People usually buy doodads as recompense for that value. But if someone "pirates" your doodads, it means they acquired the value without fairly compensating you.

So you: invested time, effort and resources to provide value to others. The pirates: benefited from that value and gave nothing back. Is that not unfair?

What if those pirates further shared your doodads with their friends (or, you know, random people on the Internet) further depriving you of people who should be paying you for the value your doodads provided. Now can you not claim that the pirates are hurting you?

You may focus on the zero marginal cost of copying digital music and movies and video games. However, observe that the value is not in the bits you copy but the experiences they provide to your mind. If they are truly worth zero to you, I don't see why you should be wasting your time experiencing them in the first place.

If I were to guess, you have not "cultivated that idea" because you've never created something that people found useful, something which you'd think you deserved compensation for, but which was taken without giving anything in return.

[sosborn]

If I really want or need to acquire your doodad then I am a potential customer and I have three choices. 1) buy your doodad. 2) acquire it without paying money. 3) go without using your doodad.

As a business owner, which would you prefer I do? Would option 2 not result in a loss of potential revenue? Would it not be super-harmful if everyone who wanted to use your product chose option 2?

[ddingus]

Actually, it's more subtle than that.

For the vast majority of ordinary people, entertainment dollars are fixed. People have what they have to spend on entertainment, and when it's gone that month, it's gone.

What happens is the various content producers compete for their share of those dollars.

There just aren't billions out there for entertainment purposes. Wages being flat in the US speaks right to that. People don't have it.

In a perfect no piracy world, people would just consume much less, not spend billions more. Again, because they just don't have it. The money doesn't exist.

So that person pirating a lot of music might spend real dollars on video games instead, much more than they would just spend more on the music.

[rhino369]

I don't think it's accurate to say that the vast majority have a fixed entertainment budget.

But even assuming it's true, piracy would still hurt individual companies or even entire industries. Industries you can't pirate so easily would see a disproportionate share of the spending.

DRM would still be very important. People would pirate the stuff that is easy to pirate, and buy the DRM stuff.

[ddingus]

You probably should think again.

This varies some, but most people are locked in for most of their dollars. They may have savings, and can vary that budget some, but there just aren't the billions of dollars out there often cited.

There is a delta from what is being sold now. But it's not multiples. Perhaps additional fractions.

As for the hard to pirate industries, who says?

They must compete with easier, more flexible options. They might actually get less spending than they would otherwise with a more flexible and accessible scheme.

Apple showed this with iTunes and the removal of DRM actually drove more sales. Why? Sharing.

[mikeash]

I doubt there's a fixed entertainment budget. I could see a fixed maximum, but past a certain threshold of being able to obtain things for free, people will spend less.

Even if it was a completely fixed budget, "entertainment" is a diverse category. Movies aren't just competing with other movies, or even just with TV and books and music, but also with things like cake and vodka. Even if the pie is fixed, is it unreasonable for a movie company to try to take some of vodka's pie?

The idea that piracy causes zero lost sales as is ridiculous as the idea that every act of piracy is a lost sale. At best you could make the argument that piracy is a net zero (or gain) because the advertising aspects of piracy match (or outweigh) the losses. But to just declare that piracy does nothing at all is crazy. It may be small, it may be negligible, but it's not zero unless your product is so unpopular that nobody was going to buy it anyway.

[ddingus]

Those dollars do vary, and yes a movie company will absolutely compete with vodka and cake.

But there aren't the billions of dollars out there claimed as losses.

And yes, fixed maximum, though there are a lot of options, so people do hit that maximum fairly often.

A quick look through the majority of my peers shows this. They make trade-offs each month. The ones who are better off can flex their entertainment budget considerably. Those who are not, center in on a fairly modest amount, and when it's spent, it's spent. They do other things.

I agree with you about it being equally wrong. It's not zero lost sales, and it's not all lost sales.

However, one must also factor in the network effects of sharing. Mindshare is worth something, and those who have it sell more, and getting it happens through sharing and piracy as much as it does other efforts.

And the opportunity to sell continues to exist despite the piracy too. A few are out there working on that premise.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> If your crazy uncle wears tinfoil hats to combat CIA mind-rays, this doesn't mean CIA mind control technology is a concern.

Why do you assume they have no evidence?

> This is no proof that sales were hurt. It could be true (and almost certainly is) that people who did this would not have bought extra games even if the flash carts had been unavailable.

What makes you think kids with flashcarts wouldn't buy games? Their parents buy them a DS and a game or two for Christmas/Birthday. Their parents would probably buy them future games, too. Or the kid has pocket money. But the kid has a flashcart now, they need not buy more games.

This isn't like computer software piracy. They already had to spend money on a DS and flashcart, assuming they wouldn't buy additional games is nonsensical. Who buys a DS and doesn't play games on it?

It is anecdotal, but the people I know who bought DS flashcarts definitely would have bought games. And, although it is just my reasoning, I think it's fair to say people who owned the Nintendo DS would have bought games for it.

[api]

I agree. I posted this a while back around here talking about music piracy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8743310

In short: what's rebellious when you're a young kid operating at the margins becomes tyrannical and oppressive when performed at massive scale by an elite upper class (hackers today). Piracy is no longer a "countercultural" act. It's more akin to labor union busting -- helping beggar content creators so content distribution mills can "monetize" their stuff for free.

[zak_mc_kracken]

It's a bit puzzling to hear this coming from Nintendo since it's pretty clear that piracy hurts the Windows platform infinitely more than the console industry.

Very, very few console owners run unlocked consoles, so they don't even have the option of running cracked games.

On the other hand, every PC owner can run cracked copies, and it only takes a few minutes of reading for even the most non tech savvy Windows user to find out about bittorrent and how to procure cracked games.

[joosters]

Very, very few console owners run unlocked consoles

If that were true, these console developers wouldn't need to worry about their games being cracked. And yet, as the article discusses, there really is a piracy problem.

[emodendroket]

I assume he means in comparison to PCs, where 100% of users already have a "jailbroken" platform.

[sosborn]

> It's a bit puzzling to hear this coming from Nintendo

Those R4 carts were all over the place. I was living in Japan at the time and everyone and their mother had one. There is no doubt it cost them a lot of money.

[gambiting]

Every single person I knew who had a PSP ran only pirated games. My cousin had a single legit copy and even then he would run a downloadad ISO because it was faster to load than the UMD. Apparently PSP sold really really well, but no games matched those sales, which suggests that PSP piracy was fairly widespread too.

[logfromblammo]

I had an Evo, and I must admit that it had more ROMs loaded onto it than those matching the cartridges I actually owned. But about 20% of those dozens of cartridges that I did still buy were for games that I might not have even tried otherwise. There were plenty that were played 0 or 1 times, then deleted forever.

I bought the device primarily so that I would have full access to my complete library without having to tote around physical security tokens everywhere.

And that is the same reason I have hard drives and alternative loaders for my PS2 and Wii. I can play any game that I buy without getting off the couch to switch discs. And with the Wii, there is the added benefit that I probably won't have to open it up and replace the optical disc drive for a third time. This has the unfortunate (for them) side effect that it is dead simple for me to pirate games on those platforms if I had the inclination.

So in my particular case, it would seem that the most effective anti-piracy measure would be to remove the requirement that paying customers have to continually juggle physical tokens to enjoy the content that they paid for.

If I have to break the security features in order to add the convenience features that I want most, the psychological barrier for piracy is lowered. If everything that I want is already on this side of the fence, I am far less inclined to jump over it.

It just so happens that Steam provides the feature I like, which is easy access to a whole library. As a result, I have on a few occasions preferred to re-license a game I already own on disc through Steam, just so I won't have to dig up the physical disc, configure a DOSBox or WinXP VM, install drivers, make tweaks, download the official and unofficial patches, and such.

I already have more games than I have time to play games. If I go to pirate something, it won't be because I don't want to pay, but because I don't want to be hassled every time I want to play.

So the number one anti-piracy measure from my perspective is DON'T WASTE YOUR PAYING CUSTOMERS' TIME. That applies equally to unskippable DVD scenes, physical disc checks, and connection-always-required schemes. Don't waste my time, and I won't go looking for ways to stop you from wasting my time. It is impossible for you to irritate me into giving you more of my money.

[emodendroket]

On the other hand, if you download a console game and play it on your console you don't have to worry that it's bundled with keyloggers or enrolling you in a botnet or whatever.