Piracy, filesharing, killing industry, yadda yadda…
I’ve been thinking about ‘piracy’, filesharing and the like a lot recently as I approach starting my own indie games company. Obviously it’s a concern for any media business as to how your game/ebook/movie/music is being distributed, and naturally you will want to get the biggest return on your effort that you can. But for a long time I haven’t been convinced with the pro-ip groups’ arguments.
The central pillar of all their arguments is that every illegal download is a lost sale. Where that originates from I don’t know and I’ve always considered it bogus.
Well now the details of the actual data the pro-ip groups use and how they came up with their financial figures have been picked apart by the US Government Accountability Office. Full article with link to US Government report: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars
For my part, my thoughts are thus:
There are a large group of people who essentially live on the filesharing networks, leeching and seeding stuff all the time. They are not doing it out of some great internet pirate mission to stick it to big business, they do it because that’s the new distribution medium for anything digital. It isn’t the fact that this content is free that drives them to share, it’s that they love sharing as a form of communicating ideas to others both in their original forms and as mashups and so on, and this mechanism has been shaped organically by filesharing programs, the internet and the users. Many younger generation users of the internet consider it perfectly natural to freely download gigabytes of music and games as the mechanism is already there and they have an ingrained hunger to consume media. The two fit together perfectly. So, these ‘natural sharers’ were never going to buy your game/music/movie in the first place, they do it because that’s simply how digital media is distributed now.
Of course looking at this as an old-school media businessman or someone uninitiated to this new world, the natural thought is “Well, how are you supposed to make money if everything you do is available for free?”. Simple answer is “You are looking at it the wrong way!” Filesharing isn’t theft of property in any sense, it’s a potentially massive and free-to-use marketing tool! One torrent of your game isn’t a lost sale, in the same way that 10 leeches of that torrent isn’t 10 lost sales. Think of it instead as a self-perpetuating digital flyer. Worthless by itself, the more it spreads, the more word gets around that this is something good that is to be shared, the more ‘flyers’ get distributed. With little effort you now have a new audience, who will communicate to all their friends how good this thing is.
Now this means that by trying to crack down on all filesharing by wrongly labelling them as criminals, trying to restrict your content with DRM and suchlike you are actively and deliberately cutting out (not to mention alienating) a potentially massive audience. If just 1% of all those that download a copy of your game think it’s good enough, then that’s 1% of an audience you would never have had if the torrent didn’t exist. And the other 99% will not have “cannibalised” sales, since they were never going to buy anyway, but are instead actively helping seed your game to a bigger audience.
So as far as I see it: higher torrent ranking DOES NOT EQUAL more lost sales. Higher torrent ranking EQUALS bigger customer pool for your 1% conversion.
Oh, but of course this only works if your content is worth talking about in the first place. Don’t dump out shit then blame filesharing for poor sales. It didn’t sell because it was shit, full stop.
