Piracy and Loss

I’ve talked about piracy before but there are two recent articles that have struck a chord with me:

– Tommy Refenes from Team Meat posted in IndieGames.com (via Gamasutra) his own thoughts about piracy, DRM and sales. If I had spent a year trying to coherently put all my thoughts on the subject together, I wouldn’t have come up with anything better than this: Apathy and Refunds are more dangerous than piracy.

Loss due to piracy is an implied loss because it is not a calculable loss. You cannot, with any accuracy, state that because your game was pirated 300 times you lost 300 sales. You cannot prove even one lost sale because there is no evidence to state that any one person who pirated your game would have bought your game if piracy did not exist. From an accounting perspective it’s speculative and a company cannot accurately determine loss or gain based on speculative accounting.

– And over on Techdirt, a post about an Indie film distributor who has spent $30,000 sending DMCA takedown notices to sites hosting copies of her films that is a perfect example of someone not getting, or being aware of any of the points made in the blog post above: Indie Film Distributor Spends Half Her Profits Sending DMCA Takedowns, But Is It Worth It?

“The fact is that removing illegal options won’t generate sales. Removing a negative (“lost sale via illegal download”) doesn’t create a positive (“gained[?] sale”). It simply levels off at $0. Positive efforts will tilt that scale back towards the creators. Negative efforts max out at $0, at best.”

So for any writers or game-makers worried about piracy, don’t be! Be more worried about people either not being aware of, or finding no reason to buy your stuff. Make them aware and give them a reason to buy.