Piracy by the bundle

by theworm · Published May 12, 2010 · Updated September 3, 2013

I’m sure all of you bought the Humble Indie Bundle last week (if not, shame :), and it’s still on sale!), which raised over $1million for charity, indie developers and the EFF. It was a very successful experiment in both selling indie developed games, the key factors being that there was no DRM and you could pay what you wanted for the collection of games.

However, in a very illuminating blog post, Wolfire estimates that up to 25% of the downloads of the game are pirated, as they define it: “users download from shared links from forums and other places without actually contributing anything”, not including torrents. Now remember that this is a bundle of games which are all DRM-free, that you can pay as little as $0.01 for and where you personally decide who gets the money: charity, the EFF, the developers or a combination of any. Despite this, people are still finding ways to get it for free.

Now there are two ways to look at this. Either:

1. This proves that there is an absolute need for DRM to prevent unauthorised downloads, since even giving the option to pay just one cent does not prevent piracy.

2. This proves that DRM and price are irrelevant factors when it comes to piracy.

My disagreement with point of view 1. is that I have yet to hear of any game that uses DRM that has not been cracked and ended up on bittorrent. Yes it may take some time for newer/harder methods to be broken, but they always get there in the end – witness the Ubisoft ‘always online’ DRM which has now been cracked in two different ways. Therefore the argument that DRM prevents piracy is false. At the very best it delays it by a month.

But if point of view 2. is correct, doesn’t this mean that that 25% of people who downloaded a copy of the bundle for free (approx. 25,000 people) are pirates? Well ‘pirates’ is an extremely nebulous term which can be defined to mean what people would like it to mean at any one time. Avoiding using that term means you have to look in detail at the kind of people who are actually downloading titles for free. Here is a non-exhaustive breakdown formed from my own thoughts, those of Wolfire and from some commenters on their blog:

Crackers whose only goal is to break DRM on titles to be the first to get the game online = a very small minority of people who do it for the prestige for themselves or their group
Those who refuse to pay = a group of people who won’t pay for anything digital be it games, movies or music, mostly for a personal belief that by doing so they are giving a finger to the ‘system’
Those who are unable to pay = they don’t have any money to pay
Those who can’t pay = people who don’t have credit cards/PayPal accounts or access to one, in the West most likely to be kids, elsewhere in the world, likely to be a heck of a lot of people (see comments in the Wolfire blog by people from South Africa and Russia for instance)
Those who are lazy = can’t be bothered filling in card details or going through PayPal login, especially for cheap impulse purchases
Those who expect anything they download to be free

Out of these, in the case of the Humble Indie Bundle we can discount: crackers since there was no DRM, and those ‘unable to pay’ since you could pay 1 cent if you wished. What’s left is the 25,000 who downloaded the games for free.

Now those guys who refused to pay, not even a cent (which they could choose to give to charity btw), well they are just selfish wankers in this case as there is no ‘man’ they are ‘sticking’ anything ‘to’. Not saying they are always selfish wankers despite the fact I don’t agree with their beliefs, but in this case they definitely are.

This then leaves three main groups: those who can’t pay even though they want to (kids, no credit card for personal or poor credit reasons or those in countries with no/poor credit card systems or cards that cannot be linked to PayPal), those who can’t deal with complicated payment systems and those that believe that anything downloadable is free (all ages, all races, all over the world).

If we go back to point 2. above, we find this agrees with it.

DRM is irrelevant as these people are not crackers proving a point and because they would not have bought a DRM copy anyway since they would always have got their copy through filesharing or a free link where it’s already been cracked.

Price is irrelevant in two ways. The ‘free downloaders’ to whom digital == free do not care if the game originally cost $100 or$1, it doesn’t even register with them. This is a generation where a digital video of their friends on holiday is equivalent to a video of the film Iron Man for instance. The reasons for this I won’t go into here to keep this post small, but I will discuss at some point. Secondly those who couldn’t pay or were too lazy to pay wanted to pay, but were prevented by technical/financial admin/national/tedious payment system reasons.

The payment issues can be solved by giving people as many ways to pay as you possibly can, thus preventing them from having to seek out a free version. The remainder, to whom everything digital is intrinsically free are not your customers anyway as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, so don’t worry about them.

So, this being the case, Wolfire’s decision that they are not going to do much about the free downloading (other than request those people torrent it instead to save their server bandwidth) makes perfect sense. In their own words:

“When considering any kind of DRM, we have to ask ourselves, “How many legitimate users is it ok to inconvenience in order to reduce piracy?” The answer should be none.”