Bill Harris Writes about Piracy in PC Gaming

I’ve been reading Bill Harris’ blog, DubiousQuality, for years now. He focuses mostly on consoles, but he’s also on the cutting edge of independent game development for the PC. In fact, Games for Windows mentioned him and his site when they featured Armageddon Empire a few months back (It might have been Dwarf Fortress, I forget). I actually modeled this blog on Bill’s, so as you can see, I’m a fan.

Today, Bill posted a great article about piracy in PC gaming. Click on the link above and read it. I’m usually in total agreement with Bill and his take on the gaming industry, but not today. I even felt motivated to write to him. The following is the text of that email:

Hey Bill, great post on PC piracy today.

I have to say, I really see Michael Fitch’s point about pirates not counting. I can see why his development team coded the security features in Titan Quest the way they did. If I were making a PC game, I’d do the same thing.

Why? Because I don’t see many pirates getting on the Titan Quest boards praising the game for being so good. People tend to bitch and complain on the forums because they have a problem. If things are going swell, they’re usually busy playing the game, not posting about how much fun they’re having or how awesome the game is. Or writing, “I cracked this game, but it’s so awesome and uber, I recommend you run out and buy it.” How about when their cracked version doesn’t work? They howl loudest and longest on the boards, of course never admitting their copy of the game is stolen.

I see PC game piracy as a line in the sand. If it’s crossed, then it’s on like Donkey Kong. If developers start factoring pirates into the larger scheme of their marketing campaign, they’re gambling they’re going to get some kind of word-of-mouth payoff from a group of people that are, in effect, stealing. And that’s assuming they can swallow their indignation and try to “work” with an anonymous group of thieves. I don’t think it’s idiotic that some game developers would rather not make a game at all then make one and have it rampantly stolen so blatantly and being powerless to stop it.

Short-term, it would make sense to try and minimize piracy by treating them as part of your user base. But long-term, I think the economics of it make that deal-with-the-devil untenable, unappetizing, and totally contrary to the entrepreneurial spirit of the average game developer.

Regards,

James

Wherever you stand on piracy issue, it's clear that it's contributing to the economic downfall of the PC gaming industry as a whole. I can't tell you how pissed I'm going to be when I have to play Mario Kart instead of WoW.