Tag Archive for: pirates
Game Developer Decides Best Way To Get Back At Pirates Is To Pirate Them Back
There are lots of ways a video game developer can choose to react to finding its game being pirated on the internet. The game maker can elect to get understandably angry and go the legal route for retribution. The company can instead see piracy as not that big a deal and ignore it. Or they can try to add more value than pirated versions of their games. The developer can choose to connect with the pirates and try to turn them into paying customers.
But I have to admit I didn’t even consider the route that Warhorse Studios took when it discovered that a cracking group had put its title Kingdom Come: Deliverance up on torrent sites: pirate them back.
After releasing its action role-playing game Kingdom Come: Deliverance early 2018, the game was quickly cracked by infamous underground group Codex, who released the title online for consumption by the pirating masses. It’s unclear to what extent this event affected sales but within a week of its launch, it had sold a million copies, including more than 300,000 on Steam.
With two million copies sold in the year that followed, Warhorse Studios clearly had a hit on its hands but this year the company showed that it also has a sense of humor. While publicizing a revamp of its headquarters in Prague, the company revealed that it had framed a copy of the information (NFO) file released by Codex with its pirate release, giving it pride of place near the company’s kitchen.
Fans of the studio thought this was hilarious. Some pointed out that the ASCII art, at the very least, could probably be argued to be the copyrighted content of the cracking group, or whoever created it. I’m not sure that’s 100% true, but it seems that Warhorse Studios took the suggestion to heart. In addition to that poster in its kitchen, the game developer is also offering metal prints of the poster to the public, selling them for $ 45 a piece.
Offered at Displate.com, Displates are described as “one-of-a-kind” metal posters “designed to capture your unique passions.” Their creators note that they’re “sturdy, magnet mounted, and durable enough to withstand a lifetime of intense staring.”
While it’s doubtful that the cracking group is going to even care about this at all, that isn’t really the point. The point is that it’s refreshing to see a game maker react to its game being pirated with humor and wit, rather than just throwing a bunch of lawyers at everyone. Sure, it helps that this developer also has a million copies of the game sold to blunt the sting of piracy, but that’s also sort of the point. Whatever the right balance on how to react to game piracy is, it’s probably as close to this example of a humorous response as it is anything else.
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Game Devs Trolling Pirates Goes All The Way Back To At Least The Playstation Days With Spyro 2
When it comes to how game developers react and interact with those that pirate their games, there are obviously plenty of ways to go about it. There’s the ineffective legal route, which puts developers in a bad PR light. There’s the DRM route, which is a hellish waste of time. And, on the other end of the spectrum, there are devs that choose to embrace the internet and attempt to monetize piracy through human connections and innovative business models.
Somewhere in the middle is the less-traveled path of simply fucking with infringers. Whether its embedding antipiracy messages into the gameplay itself, or simply overlaying the entire game with the drone of a vuvuzela, there are a couple of recent examples where developers figured out how to detect cracked versions of their games and using that to torture pirates. While I would argue there are better ways developers could be spending this time and human capital, such as innovating, it’s also true that it’s hard not to smile when the pirates get messed with.
But this goes back much further than the last few years. The always excellent Tech Rules YouTube channel put out the following video on how Spyro 2 on the Playstation 1 tortured those using pirated copies of the game.
The slow burn of this prank on pirates is what makes it both so effective and so infuriating if you believe, as I do, that all of this is mostly time wasted. The joke being played here, with the effects of using a pirated version of the game getting incrementally and progressively more profound, is indeed funny. You can just picture the person playing a cracked version of the game very, very slowly realize he or she is being screwed with.
But it also appears to have taken quite an effort to pull off. And for what? We have no idea how many would-be pirates were converted into paying customers of Spyro 2 by any of this, but I cannot imagine anyone thinks that unknown number is significant. The game was reviewed well, and sold well in several regions, but not at numbers that would seem to justify the time commitment spent to convert whatever the fraction of pirates turned into customers was.
So, again, funny? Yes, absolutely. Mean or harmful? Nah. A useful use of the game developers’ time? I can’t see an argument for that, so why bother with any of this?
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Evidence Mounts: UK Study Shows Better Legal Alternatives Pushing Pirates To Become Customers
The theory that piracy enforcement is a far inferior method for combating copyright infringement when compared with better and innovative business models and offerings is certainly old hat for us here. And, while there have certainly been studies going back years showing that to be the case, it seems notable that the past few months have seen a wave of these studies all coming on top of each other. We had MUSO, of all organizations, essentially concluding a survey it did in the UK showing how much content “pirates” actually buy legitimately by saying, “Hey, content industries, get your shit together!” That was followed quite recently by a study performed by Dutch researchers that did an amazing and large-sampled survey that concluded quite clearly that user-friendly legal alternatives depressed piracy rates at a far greater clip than enforcement measures.
And, now, because good things always come in threes, yet another study in the UK has shown that once-pirates of music are morphing into very real customers due to convenient and user-friendly streaming services.
A new report from market research and data analytics firm YouGov only adds weight to that apparent shift. The headline stat from the company’s Music Report is that just one in ten Brits are currently downloading music illegally. That’s down from almost double (18%) that figure five short years ago.
It’s quite obvious what coincides with that time period of the past five years that could contribute to this reduction in piracy and sure as hell isn’t anything in the enforcement arena. Instead, the YouGov study suggests that the streaming services so many in the music industry have tried desperately to torpedo are responsible for this reduction. And, more interestingly, the report suggests that the trend line is only going to continue, if not accelerate.
More than six out of ten (63%) illegal music downloaders predict they’ll still be pirating in five years’ time but a significant 22% believe they won’t. Just over a third (36%) acknowledge that using unofficial sources for music is becoming more difficult but the summary doesn’t offer reasons why.
“It is now easier to stream music than to pirate it. And the cost is not prohibitive,” one respondent said. “Spotify has everything from new releases to old songs, it filled the vacuum, there was no longer a need for using [an] unverified source,” added another.
In other words, innovators solved the music piracy problem in the UK, as we always said would happen. John Marshall, the associate director at YouGov, was even more explicit in his conclusions, essentially stating that the public was now satisfied with streaming services and mostly had no use for piracy.
All of this is not to say that the music industry doesn’t still have jobs in peril, of course. It’s just that those jobs appear to be the ones involved in copyright enforcement, while the business of music itself should be doing quite well.
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