On Pirates

As you might expect, I think a fair amount about piracy. This comes up more in my life than in many people's life, because I'm touching on many different kinds of piracy due to my diverse (IE, random) interests.

Most geeks just think about software, music, and movie piracy, but there's a lot of other kinds of piracy that don't usually get mentioned because this crowd doesn't really encounter them much. For example, if you're an artist with a web presence, you've probably had your artwork pirated. Sometimes this is just by someone who wants a cool-looking picture for their homepage, but sometimes it's by a corporation who puts it on shirts or mugs or whatever.

This kind of piracy feels a lot more "bad", because these people are copying something directly owned by a particular creator. But I'm not sure that it is bad. Or, rather, I think that this is a lumpy situation where we've put dozens of different things in with the same label, just to make things as mind-bogglingly inconvenient as possible.

Here's another example: there are now no less than two web sites actively republishing this blog. I post, they clone the post and put it on their site. With ads and, in one case, malware. Not an RSS feed: a full republication. Since one of my cloners has a higher Google rank than me, you may even be reading this on their system: if it's not on my ProjectPerko stationary, you're reading an illegal copy.

My blog isn't very popular, so I can only imagine that bigger names have a lot more cloners.

It seems to me we have several different kinds of things going on, and that it's not just law that hasn't caught up: it's us. We haven't caught up. Our language is not keeping up.

Someone who clones all your content instantly and uses it to make money/spread malware for their own benefit is one kind of thing. Someone who uses something you made for personal use - such as on their personal web page or for their chat avatar - is another kind of thing. And someone who copies content with the intention to enjoy it without paying you what you requested is a third category entirely. There are probably other categories, but these are the three I can see.

They exist for three different reasons. I call these three things "resale", "use", and "blockade" piracy. I keep using the word piracy because I like the word piracy, but some things covered in fair use are so close to these that they are almost identical. Only the vagaries of law and corporate meddling have made us view some of these as piracy and others as legal. For example, reselling video games is not legal by EULA and clearly fits as "resale piracy", but it's legal.

Resale piracy is, in my mind, the worst. These are people using your content to make a profit and they never negotiated with you to cut you in on it. These people are outright thieves: they are literally taking something of value away from you, unlike most "piracy", which is just copying data that they wouldn't have bought anyway. Resale piracy is complex, and we need to think about it some more: once someone has obtained your product, what are their rights? Can they resell it to someone for a profit? Can they clone it and sell the clones? Can they display it publicly? Can they use it to increase traffic to their site? These questions are hard because the types of uses we normally accept vary so widely by type of medium.

On the other hand, use piracy is probably the most forgivable kind of piracy, to the point where when I see someone getting upset about it, I dismiss them as a control freak. If someone uses your art in a music video, or as a chat avatar, or whatever, I have a hard time getting upset about it. They aren't making any money out of it, they aren't stealing any money from you, at worst they do nothing, at best you get some people interested in your art. A lot of these people either do not give credit to the original artist, or actively claim that they are the original artist. This is kind of an asshole thing to do, but I still don't see it as much of a problem. If they do give credit, I have a very hard time taking your offense seriously. There are some situations where this might be bad - for example, if someone co-opts your art, adds a swastika, and makes it their neo-Nazi homepage. But, in general, that's vanishingly rare.

The most common kind of piracy, at least as far as I can tell, is "blockade piracy". This is when you've attempted to gate your content, to control its spread, and people decide they'd prefer to have it without the interference. This brings us to the touchiest part of the situation.

I think most people would agree that resale piracy is bad and use piracy is not very bad. But very few people think that blockade piracy is halfway between them: I think most people either view blockade piracy as bad, or as not very bad.

That's another article on its own. I just wanted to post about how we keep lumping different things together under the mantle of "piracy".

Casual vs Retail Piracy

Last post, I noted that many casual games are being pirated - occasionally as much as retail computer games, often as much as half as much. Obviously, there's a lot of details which may screw this up. For example, I might be checking networks which tend to cater specifically to casual gamers, or some other unknown might be skewing the numbers.

However, with the numbers as they stand, it raises an important question:

How much is piracy affecting ANYONE?

If casual games are being pirated on a scale comparable to retail games, what does that mean? It means that retail games are not suffering piracy significantly worse than casual games.

There are a few possibilities:

The first is that piracy isn't really all that bad for either of them. After all, popular casual games are certainly raking in the cash. (Unpopular ones don't make anything, but that isn't piracy's fault...)

The second possibility is that both casual and retail games suffer hideously from piracy. This seems unlikely because my admittedly-handwaved numbers strongly imply that piracy is only eating a small portion of casual game profits. Retail games are suffering only slightly worse.

The third possibility is that retail games aren't selling very many copies at all, and their piracy levels are significantly higher, percentage-wise. This seems kind of unlikely to me, but I've been wrong before. And I'm probably wrong now.

The fourth possibility is that there is a huge "invisible market" of pirated retail games that isn't included in my study. For example, how much are Chinese clones costing you? I don't know a lot of Americans who get Chinese clones, so it probably doesn't terribly harm the Western sales. There may be other such markets that weren't in this study.

Which of the four possibilities is right?

All told, my opinion is that piracy is not affecting retail games in Western nations any more than casual games in Western nations. Now, that means that either both are suffering horribly from piracy, or neither is suffering much.

How much effect you believe piracy to have is probably largely determined by whether or not you pirate things. I honestly have no idea.

But I can tell you a few things about which casual games are pirated.

It appears that a certain kind of casual game is only rarely pirated: any casual game with a story. By that I don't mean "saving the cake factory". I mean a character-heavy story which progresses, however minimally.

There are absurdly few pirated copies of games like Outpost Kaloki and Aveyond. You could presume these games didn't sell very many copies, but Aveyond is holding in the top ten at Yahoo! Games, so it's sold a hell of a lot of valid copies.

Games like Zuma and Cake Mania are pirated a LOT. The only link I can see is that they don't have a story.

They "feel" "easier to program". "It's just a bunch of people walking in with bubbles over their heads" "it's just a random bunch of exploding gems". High replay value, but not much "personality".

That's just weak theory, though. I don't know why it's true, and I'm not even 100% it is true. But it's the only connection I can see. Games where you have a character that interacts with other characters seem to have less piracy.

Do they sell as well?

Well, out of the top ten Yahoo! Games, two or three are games with a narrative. Given that more non-story games are produced than story games, this seems about right.

However, Popcap features precisely ZERO narrative games in its top ten.

A difference in the audience of the portal, perhaps?

Anyhow, that's all that I could dig up. :)

Opinions? Comments? Fun things you can do with chicken feathers?

Casual Piracy

I've read a post that seems to imply that piracy is a big deal for casual developers.

Now, no lie, pirating a casual game is skanky. It would be evil in a way that bilking a giant evil corporation isn't. Don't argue about that last bit, it really isn't the point of this essay either way.

But is it actually a problem? Do people actually pirate casual games?

I thought, "That's absurd. People don't pirate casual games. First, they're not popular enough, second blah blah blah blah blah. Here, I'll just prove it by going and looking..."

Cake Mania, a popular Yahoo! game: more than 250 sources on the immediate net - roughly half to a quarter that of major titles such as Playboy: Mansion. (Playboy: Mansion is my yardstick. People love to pirate that game, and the numbers don't seem to go up or down much over time.)

Diner Dash, another popular Yahoo! game: 300-400 sources, although some smell like spam.

Virtual Villagers: ~175 sources.

Aveyond: ~40 sources.

Talismania, switching to popcap: ~125

Bejeweled 2: Motherlode of about 900 sources - more than many AAA games. Moreover, these are "package pirates", featuring dozens of popcap games...

Zuma reveals the same, mostly because it's in the same packages.

I'm kind of shocked. Actually, I'm just flat-out shocked, there's really no "kind of". Some of these games are pirated at rates comparable to Halo 2.

Now, if there are 250 sources for a pirated version of your game, that means that there are 250 computers actively sharing it. The net is vaster than this little region, but we'll be conservative and say that there are only 2500 sources in all the various P2P networks. Chances are, that's an order of magnitude low, because I think this P2P system stops looking at 200 sources.

These are people who keep it actively shared. For every person who keeps it actively shared, there are at least eight who download it and shlep it off to their desktop instead of their shared folders, or delete it when done. So, say, 20,000 downloads.

Now, we can argue about the validity of calling these lost sales until our faces turn blue. But many of the reasons people argue that pirates wouldn't buy are invalid here. There's no faceless corporation: at least a quarter of your payment goes straight to the devs. There's no excessive cost: these games cost, at most, $20. So lets presume that SOME of these pirates would have made legitimate purchases.

If we get standard solid conversion rates, that would be 2%. 400 copies, at $5 kickback to the developer, is $2000. That's a pretty chunk of change, and probably less than a quarter the actual loss... but how much is it, percentage-wise?

Well, Pharaoh's Curse sells about $2000 a year. However, there are NO sources for it. This implies that piracy is not a huge chunk of the profit, or there would be a few dozen sources. It could be that piracy needs a "critical mass", but that critical mass is obviously significantly more than $2000.

Galactic Civilizations 2 is NOT copy protected. How many copies of IT are there floating around?

Checking multiple spellings, there are less than a hundred (most of which claim to be "cracked". Ha!)

If I knew how much Galciv 2 sold, I could use this to frame a likely answer. It could be that Galciv is in a "middle band", not selling as much as a top ten on a major portal, but selling much more than $2000 a year. If it does sell closer to $2000 than $20,000, their unprotection may actually have brought them into a higher piracy bracket than protected games... but is that something which has affected sales, or not?

To end on a standard mainstream media note: the only thing we know for sure is that people pirate casual games.

A lot.