Piracy rate is a bit of an odd number, because of how easy it is to pirate literally thousands of games and play them each for a small amount of time, when there is zero chance those people would've/could've bought all the games they pirated.

The Wolfire team suggests (http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy) that a better metric would be proportion of the gaming audience that pirates. For example, if 5% of the gaming audience pirates, but pirates download 50x as many games on average as legitimate users purchase, then it'll look like >70% of users pirate games, when the real number is 5%.

Don't forget that many people with licenses eventually end up "pirating" the software they use. It is usually just much easier to download an ISO than to attempt to rummage around and find your CDs and then rummage around and find your manual for the key. Also, the pure version of the software usually installs crap and/or bloatware. Additionally, I will sometimes be at a different location where the CDs are not available but where I need to use the software. This even holds true with many digital download platforms (but not Steam) -- they will make you create a username and password, they will make you jump through a bunch of hoops to download something you've already bought, which is complete BS and in that case I just download a torrent and end up using the "pirated" version even though I paid for the software. I have a license for WOG and have downloaded it from a torrent at least twice, for instance.

> [. . .] and play them each for a small amount of time

Or even never play them. There are a small[1] of people who collect all ROMs of some (or all) console systems, with no intention of playing them.

[1] I agree that in terms of overall piracy this is a tiny number.

Really, there are two kinds of pirates: those who pirate because they're cheap, and those who pirate for these other reasons. I agree that the former category well outweighs the latter, but they're also completely ignorable when it comes to figuring out how to sell your software. The "cheap" contingent will never pay for your software.

Those who pirate for other reasons, while they may be a small proportion of pirates overall, can be a large proportion of potential customers. These are the people who don't buy your game because the pirated version actually works better. If you can provide a better experience through legitimate channels then you can get their money.

In short: piracy really is two separate and mostly unrelated phenomena when it comes to this question. People who pirate purely to avoid paying don't care about this stuff, but neither should software publishers care about them.

Here's an interesting experiment done by indie game developer SoS for Black Friday: he released a bundle of 13 indie games for 1$, available for just one day. He got some traction thanks to Notch, who tweeted that the games were interesting and easily worth 1/13th of a dollar each.

The bundle is (was?) accessible from http://sos.gd/bundle/

The transaction takes place in 3 steps:

  1. download
  2. purchase - this step is optional
  3. play
  unspecified 4: purchase if you haven't, still optional

I personally didn't even download them so I can't say anything about the quality of the product, I just thought it was somewhat relevant to the discussion, since SoS published real time stats during the operation. That's pretty much ideal conditions in my book for indie publishing, so the stats are actually worth something:

4207 downloads and $276 earnings within a single day. 6.5% of the downloaders purchased the product, regardless of whether they liked what they saw.

I'm not sure what to make of that. On one hand, having 90+% of people download but not buy seems awful. On the other hand, this process is essentially the shareware model even if it doesn't use that word, in which case a 6.5% conversion rate is extremely good.

If you get fifteen times as many people downloading as otherwise would have, and 90% of the people who download haven't paid for it (yet), you still come out ahead. There's nothing awful about a business model like that, period. Never judge a business model by a single metric without context like "90+% of people download but not buy".

> the amount of people that pirate because of DRM is tiny

This depends on the DRM and the software. Software which has high international demand but is region-locked to specific countries will be pirated because of the DRM at rates that sometimes dwarf "freeloading" pirates.

I agree that Gabe is pretty much just pandering, but in the end, DRM doesn't really help piracy rates. Maybe for an immediate period after release, which is desirable in some circumstances as a matter of convenience, but that's it.

The real question is whether the piracy rate is indicative of the loss of sales due to piracy, which is clearly contested in some situations. Would Mojang profit more if Minecraft piracy was -- hypothetically speaking -- impossible? Probably a little bit, but a lot of users will look for something else to pirate, not roll their eyes and say "ugh well I guess I have to buy it now".

Many Minecraft license holders started out as Minecraft pirates. It's somewhat common to "try before buy" via piracy and I don't know if I am really opposed to it -- yes, it opens the door to freeloaders, but even in the case of freeloaders you generally get at least free word-of-mouth publicity out of it. Digital piracy comes at no real cost to anyone; you're not taking stock out of the hands of one who bought it wholesale, you're not removing the copy of one who purchased retail, you're not even using the developer's bandwidth. The only adverse effect comes on the pysches of the money-minded MBAs that falsely correlate each download with a lost sale when in fact many are convenience downloads from persons already entitled to a copy of the software or pre-purchase "trials". This is not true in every case, of course, but it is true in many cases.

> but it is true in many cases.

I suspect it's true in the NH bubble, but I strongly suspect that very few pirates then go on to buy the product.

When I've wanted to give some money to the author of a book I've downloaded it's really easy; I just go to a store (or Amazon, where buying stuff is really easy) and buy any book from that author on the same publisher. But for digital stuff it's often harder, with annoying websites, weird cart checkout systems, a stupid bit of credit card security theatre thrown in, some spammy email checkboxes to remember to click (or not click), etc. And this is when you want to buy it - that's too much friction for most pirates.

I'd love to see some decent research.

> I suspect it's true in the NH bubble, but I strongly suspect that very few pirates then go on to buy the product.

I think that in other conditions where pirates never go on to buy something they've pirated (gawd, "pirate" is such an awful term for this -- there are no eyepatches and cutlasses involved), they just wouldn't fucking buy it in the first place if they couldn't pirate it.

> But for digital stuff it's often harder, with annoying websites, weird cart checkout systems, a stupid bit of credit card security theatre thrown in, some spammy email checkboxes to remember to click (or not click), etc. And this is when you want to buy it - that's too much friction for most pirates.

That's a bad business model, and in no way contradicts the notion that people who pirate would like to buy later a lot of the time. Reduce the friction in the purchase process, and you'll make more money. It's almost tautological. Keeping the hurdles to purchase high then blaming the results on piracy is completely asinine.

I'd like to address your WoG example. Firstly there are two types of pirates. Those that don't have the money to ever buy, those that have money. The first (and arguably largest group) will NEVER be your customer. These are people that can barely afford their internet. If there was no piracy these people would never get your game. Second group consists of two subgroups - those that might pay and those that wont. I'd argue that the first group is larger based on examples below. Also there are some transitions from people that can't pay into a group that might pay (e.g. a student gets a high paying job and can afford books/software that he pirated before). However they are not a crux of my concerns. I think the value of piracy is a "word of mouth" advertisements. Even if only people that can't afford your game and pirate it there is going to be boon for your business (e.g. poor kid might have someone who is a bit richer and will buy the game to show off) if they spread good word about it.

"First is Monthy Python. A while back, the Monty Python team made a shedload of their sketches freely available in high quality on their own YouTube channel, hoping that as a result people would buy more DVDs. According to this widely linked story, the experiment has been not just successful, but wildly, crazily so. They’re reporting that sales of Monty Python DVDs at Amazon have increased by 23,000% — that’s 231-fold — since they made all that material available on Youtube."

(Neil Gaiman on books he published for free) "Then I started to notice that two things that seemed much more significant. One of which was that places where I was being pirated -- particularly Russia (where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading it out into the world) I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. And then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies.

"That's really all this is. It's people lending books. And you can't look on that as a lost sale.... What you're actually doing is advertising. You're reaching more people. You're raising awareness. And understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web was doing is allowing people to hear things, allowing people to read things, allowing people to see things they might never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that's an incredibly good thing." "

Source: http://reprog.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/everyone-wins/

With Minecraft in particular, I'd hypothesis that much of the piracy is done by under 18s who don't want to try and justify the use of a parent's credit card or paypal.

I'm not under 18, but personally refuse to use Paypal on the grounds of not wanting to support criminal activity (see Wikileaks blockade for the beast example), and really it's the same for CC. I'd probably have bought Minecraft ages ago if they'd support payment through other means, for example, PaySafeCard.

But anyways, I generally think it's pretty nonsensical to imply that piracy is a question of a maturity. Young people might simply have other reasons to pirate.

They redid their calculations and reported an estimated piracy rate of 82%, instead of 90%.

Minecraft may of had huge piracy rates, but it still made a huge profit. You won't ever get rid of piracy but you can still make a nice profit.

r/gaming has about 850,000 users on it as well. The communities that pirate because of DRM may not be huge, but they are of a decent size.

I don't believe for a second any of the published piracy rates for any app/game.

The reason I don't is that I have seen how easy it is to trigger these kinds of errors by mistake (or from my personal philosophy of assuming malicious intent until proven wrong) and how beneficial it is to the creators of the programs.

"EVERYONE without any conceivable inconvenience"

How many people do you think have a credit card? I know a LOT of pirates (here in South America), and most of them fit this profile:

- very low or no income - no credit card - lots of spare time - cheap internet connection

Would they pirate World of Goo? Yes. Have they paid for a game? Rarely, they buy CDs or DVDs or game cartridges on cash, but the originals are outrageously expensive for the average consumer here.

Is it an excuse? No. Would they start purchasing once they archieve a decent income level? It's hard to say, but I'm inclined to think they won't.

In my case, I now have a decent income level, but I don't have any spare time to speak of, so I don't purchase videogames (anything past a U$ 2 app on Android).

Same thing happened with Sins of the Solar Empire, no DRM, tons of piracy, so much so that they had to block out pirated copies from their online servers, the load was totally disproportionate to sold copies.

Exactly, people are forever finding excuses for their behaviour AND most people want something for [near] nothing which is a flawed and lazy idea (GET RICH NOW! GET FIT NOW!) or they want to do something without having to deal with the consequences/results/effects.

The cry of this age is 'me, me ,me.'