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Humble Bundle gives pirates what they want, gets ripped off

mindcycle

mindcycle

Golden Member
The Humble Bundle is a great deal for gamers for a number of reasons. The games work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. You can pay as little or as much as you want, and you can donate some or all of the money to the included charities. There is absolutely no DRM on any of the games. So why does it look like one quarter of the people enjoying the games have pirated them?
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Rosen came up with a few reasons people feel the need to pirate games. Laziness is a big one: it's simply easier to click a link than to fill out the fields needed to donate even a single cent. There may be customers who live in an area where PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon are not supported, leaving them with no way to pay. Some people may have made a single large donation for multiple bundles. Others may simply like the feeling of getting something for nothing.
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"When considering any kind of DRM, we have to ask ourselves, 'How many legitimate users is it OK to inconvenience in order to reduce piracy?' The answer should be none."

This is why the DRM debate is so destructive. There is no technology that can't be cracked, and invasive strategies only make the companies targets for the more aggressive hackers and crackers. If you give gamers everything they say they want, there will still be a significant number of people who will grab the game without paying.
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While piracy may be frustrating, the bundle has been quite the success: as of this writing almost 84,000 people have paid $716,944 in total for the games.
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Read the entire article here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/...es-pirates-what-they-want-gets-ripped-off.ars

It's worth reading through the rest IMO. I especially agree with the part about Wolfire deciding not to inconvenience legit customers in order to reduce piracy. Also read the blog post that inspired the Ars article here: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle

If you are interested in the Humble Indie bundle you can still get it by contributing here: http://www.wolfire.com/humble

It's still available for the next day (at the time this was posted), so grab it while you can!
 
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thedosbox said:
Considering the PC version of World of Goo has a metacritic score of 90 (and a user score of 9.1), I think we can safely ignore your "opinion".
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There's plenty of games rated at so called near perfect scores that I don't like. With that said, in the specific case of World of Goo it shouldn't be so, WoG is absolutely brilliant, the music is very atmospheric, it's refreshing, relaxing, fun, it's just a great game, I completely agree with its score. But again, I repeat myself, the point is that scores aren't always applying to everyone, metacritic or not, and an opinion still remains an opinion, if BD231 played and didn't liked WoG that's his opinion, score of 90%+ or not.
 
Zenoth said:
But again, I repeat myself, the point is that scores aren't always applying to everyone, metacritic or not, and an opinion still remains an opinion, if BD231 played and didn't liked WoG that's his opinion, score of 90%+ or not.
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BD231 didn't state it as an opinion. He stated it as a fact. These are "worst games ever." Which I think general consensus is they are not. No need to defend the trollers.

WoG is spectacular. Penumbra is also great, haven't played the others yet. I picked this up and am not regretting it in the least. This is what the PC gaming scene should look like.
 
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Firsttime said:
BD231 didn't state it as an opinion. He stated it as a fact. These are "worst games ever." Which I think general consensus is they are not. No need to defend the trollers.
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Exactly. I can understand someone not liking these games, but claiming they're the "worst games ever" is nonsense.
 
Dumac said:
DRM free = pirate's joy, despite what many pirates say
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Whether it comes DRM free from the developer or it's stripped out later by crackers doesn't make a difference to the pirates.

I'd get this, if only I were interested in the games. Also, to be honest, I prefer convenience, and steam has already reached critical acceptance for me (and my friends). It is simply easier to have a single store to buy everything from, though it'd be better if it was something more independent and allowed developers to more easily set and adjust their own pricing. To do otherwise, it'd have to be an amazing deal. (impulse and d2d can occasionally get me to buy games if the pricing is good enough or steam doesn't carry the game)
 
I've been intending to buy Aquaria ever since trying the demo, and this bundle deal was the necessary kick in the pants to get it to happen. Beautiful and relaxing game.

It's not just skipping DRM that is completely right here. When a game is low-tech in graphics, and it's more than a little hobby project, there is no reason not to use cross-platform libraries and release for all platforms.
 
The only truly successful piracy deterrent is subscription based games. Which is why whenever you mention an MMO you get a few pirates who bring up the cost like they just got mugged.
 
AyashiKaibutsu said:
You think pirates care whether they copy paste a file or not to get their game?
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Actually, they do. If it's a game that is patched often then every patch has to be cracked in some scenarios. If your game is DRM free then they can get every patch without issue making it so much easier to keep a cracked version of the game up to date and bug free.
 
skace said:
Actually, they do. If it's a game that is patched often then every patch has to be cracked in some scenarios. If your game is DRM free then they can get every patch without issue making it so much easier to keep a cracked version of the game up to date and bug free.
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So some rare occasions they'll have to copy files a couple of times over the course of several months?

skace said:
The only truly successful piracy deterrent is subscription based games. Which is why whenever you mention an MMO you get a few pirates who bring up the cost like they just got mugged.
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CD-Keyed games with a multiplayer element work too generally. Just making plan old good games although no detering piracy leads to profits.
 
The bottom line is:
While piracy may be frustrating, the bundle has been quite the success: as of this writing almost 84,000 people have paid $716,944 in total for the games.
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According to their number approximately 25% of people still pirate even without DRM. But don't the companies who use DRM claim that 90% of the copies are pirated? So by removing DRM and setting the price to what the consumer thinks it's worth there has been a huge decrease in piracy rates.

Going from 9 out of 10 copies being pirated to 1 out of 4, should be considered an epic victory.
 
BladeVenom said:
According to their number approximately 25% of people still pirate even without DRM. But don't the companies who use DRM claim that 90% of the copies are pirated? So by removing DRM and setting the price to what the consumer thinks it's worth there has been a huge decrease in piracy rates.

Going from 9 out of 10 copies being pirated to 1 out of 4, should be considered an epic victory.
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Yes, this is absolutely a victory IMO. I think the title of that article was more meant for it's shock value to get you to read, but the content is clearly about how they are doing well and the reasons behind that. The Wolfire guy also posted a blog a week or so ago with some analysis of piracy that addresses the 90% piracy rate some publishers are claiming.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy

According to his analysis, the 90% piracy rate comes from only around 20% of gamers worldwide. And that's a generous estimate of the total number of pirates on the PC platform. When you're looking at piracy, where you get something for nothing, it makes sense that people will take way more than they need (or will ever play for that matter). So while 90% may seem high when you just throw that number out there, in reality it's being generated by only a small group of people. People who probably download every game out there just because they can since there is essentially no cost involved in doing so for them.

Given the 20% of PC pirates worldwide estimate, if you were to eliminate piracy completely you would gain, at most, 20% more sales. To reach 20% more sales assumes that every person who pirated the game would have bought it instead if piracy wasn't an option. Which is highly unrealistic given the nature of pirating where a large number of pirates simply download games because the can, not necessarily because they are very interested in the game.

So the question then becomes.. is DRM really necessary? And he answers that one quite nicely IMO.

"When considering any kind of DRM, we have to ask ourselves, 'How many legitimate users is it OK to inconvenience in order to reduce piracy?' The answer should be none."
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