Interview with the CD Projekt's founder ("Pirates are underserved customers")

[Nalano]

Why pay when you can have same thing for free? It's that simple.

Convenience.

Pirating means having to find a seed, use a crack and take precautions against viruses. Pirating means being on your own for updates and addons and multiplayer.

If a service manages to make all that go away - with consistent downloads and autopatching and support - and doesn't add any problems of its own - with intrusive DRM - and it keeps its prices within the realm of feasibility - with Russian- and soon Brazilian-specific pricing - then it might actually be able to compete with free games.

Indeed, the quality of the game need not come into the equation.

[Finicky]

Some delicious corporate coolaid there moho :p

Devs shouldn't be designing their games or drm around pirates, they should design them for the people who would buy them.
Insulting customers or potential customers with always online drm, activation limits etc will only piss them off, they pay for the product they don't give a shit about what the publisher thinks of pirates, they just want what's theirs for their hard earned money.

I don't care if i'm a minority who buys or doesn't buy games based on principle, some of us still HAVE principles you know.
Not everyone is a jaded cynical shitbag who just shrugs everything off as 'well that's how the world works today' (maybe in the US of A it only works that way ,not so much the rest of the more sane world)

The pity party needs to fucking stop, make good games, stop whining and earn your fucking paycheck instead of trying to manipulate people into certain behavior.

Again, developers need to earn their fanbase, build up their brandname and maintain their integrity in the eye of the consumer, each new game is a new value proposition, each customer has their own treshold for how much value they expect for their money.
It's up to the developer to offer as much value as they reasonably can, instead most are interested more in milking as much money as they can from a subset of easily manipulated sheep. And then they are surprised when the majority doesn't fall for it and/or they lose everything on their next high turnover scam when the sheep get distracted by something else or get bored.
Ops, forgot to build loyalty, now you're fucked.

The market will keep smacking this shit down , the few fads that make it despite these practices through heavy marketing (until they burn out, like all fads eventually do) are the exception to the rule, too bad publishers are too blinded by greed to want to see that.

Few publishers care about sustainable business anymore, noone will take responsibility for what they put out (13 layers of middle managment for every productive employee, the employee being the one who gets the sack after gross mismanagment and inefficient use of budget causes losses when 'only' a million people buy the game instead of 10 million) but they all want to grab and run with a piece of the pie while the growthmania rush lasts.
Noone cares how many heads they step on to chase the quick buck either.

Thankfully most get what they have coming for them, too bad all their shitty noise also drowns out and dilutes most of the actual productive talent and work in the business.

Thank god for the few sane havens like valve or cdpr who are still interested in sustainable business, and good luck to all the startups who aspire to it as well , and may everyone that doesn't crash and burn spectacularly.
/rant.

[deano2099]

You can't beat pirates, but you can't win most of them with a good product. At the end of the day, they can get a game for free or for $60. For someone who doesn't give a single fuck about morality/econimics aspect of piracy, there is really no choice. Why pay when you can have same thing for free? It's that simple. Quality of the game doesn't even come into equation.

But you can pull in the crowd who always pirated stuff but for them $60 is no longer a big deal. And they're the most important ones as they are the most likely to buy lots of games.

Converting relatively poor people who can only afford to buy 2-3 games a year any way isn't hugely helpful.

[squirrel]

It's not cool to always assume that people will steal if they can get away from the consequences. Games do not sell well because and only because they are poor. Games with good quality will always sell well, for both singleplayer and multiplayer. Why would people always argue to try to refute this theory?

GOG.com is selling game software W/O DRM, so do you witness any of them being circulated by the pirates? I mean, most of them have DRM in their first release, so you can easily tell of download of pirated version is from GOG or not.

[b0rsuk]

I'm not surprised that a platform like GOG, selling cheap old games, has appeared in Poland. Price is a huge factor here and billboards advertise price more often than quality. Supermarkets which sell good but more expensive stuff close down.

There is a strong correlation between wealth of a country and the software piracy rate. I think the best estimate of relative wealth is purchasing power parity (how much you earn compared to how much you can buy for it).
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...a_2007_IMF.png

Among countries with electricity and widespread computers, Poland is one of poorer ones. High rates of piracy are also in Russian Federation and even higher in China.

[Lukasz]

Yet russia is only behind Germany in europe when it comes on how much money it brings them. And germany was always the biggest PC game market in Europe.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...n-piracy.shtml

[Mohorovicic]

Convenience.

I would call it "Relying on first world rampart consumerism" myself.

Pirating a game isn't any harder than downloading it off of online service, really, and believe it or not but patches get cracked too.

Online of course is the eternal bane of pirates, but since f2p is becoming a thing...

[Nalano]

Not everyone is a jaded cynical shitbag who just shrugs everything off as 'well that's how the world works today' (maybe in the US of A it only works that way ,not so much the rest of the more sane world

HEY! Hey. Not all of us American douchebags are capitalist American douchebags.

I would call it "Relying on first world rampart consumerism" myself.

You say tomato, I say tomato.

I've pirated a lot of games. Especially Ubisoft games of late. It's slightly more annoying to pirate them than to download them off Steam. Steam's platform is as much a no-brainer as one can get. I've almost forgotten what installing a game was like. Yeah, it's like being impatient because potatoes take a WHOLE THREE MINUTES in the microwave (and I'm hungry now), but convenience is convenience.

[Lukasz]

I would call it "Relying on first world rampart consumerism" myself.

Pirating a game isn't any harder than downloading it off of online service, really, and believe it or not but patches get cracked too.

Online of course is the eternal bane of pirates, but since f2p is becoming a thing...

?
Pirating games is harder than using gog or steam. no worries about finding cracked patches, no worries about which torrent will work.


so yeah. people do pay for convenience.

[Finicky]

?
Pirating games is harder than using gog or steam. no worries about finding cracked patches, no worries about which torrent will work.


so yeah. people do pay for convenience.

Idk, rayman is a question of clicking a magnet link, right click mount in daemon tools, click install, click play.

Through steam I have to go dig out my bank card, use my little pin machine thingy to enter a safety code twice.
And that is the best case scenario (I like steam because they allow instant bank transactions, most online stores force you to use paypal, and lots of people in europe use bank cards with pins, not credit cards with 15 percent interest). Paypal is a cunt to use these days since it won't even let you pay most of the time without linking a credit card.

No worrying about trusting some random online store or game launcher with your credit card info either.
No getting kicked out of my games when my net drops, no not being able to launch the games when uplay is down (hi driver SF, I want my 5 bucks from the steam sale back you piece of trash malware) .
Hell driver SF stutters when the Uplay servers are overloaded unless you play in offline mode.

There is nothing to gain from playing a ubi game legitimately, only a lot of potential headaches and a lot of ifs and buts.

Pirated games will work in 10 years, I can guarantee you that always online games with the logic calculated server side won't ^^

[Nalano]

Idk, rayman is a question of clicking a magnet link, right click mount in daemon tools, click install, click play.

Through steam I have to go dig out my bank card, use my little pin machine thingy to enter a safety code twice.

This is me on Steam:

Click Steam. Click Store. Browse games. Click game. Click Buy. Click Authorize. Click Okay. Wait half an hour. Click game. Wait a minute for DirectX to install (again). Play.

This is me on uTorrent:

Click browser. Click torrent site. Browse torrents. Click game. Click Download. Click Run. Wait half an hour (if it's new. Wait twelve hours if it's old). Click virtual drive. Click mount. Click Readme. Click keygen. Copy key. Click Setup. Paste key. Wait five minutes. Copy cracked exe. Click hosts file. Add line. Click game. Play.

Both doable. Piracy is slightly more of a headache. Not as much of a headache as running UbiDRM (or some of the older, even more malware-like DRM), but more annoying than just pressing "buy."

[soldant]

Both doable. Piracy is slightly more of a headache. Not as much of a headache as running UbiDRM (or some of the older, even more malware-like DRM), but more annoying than just pressing "buy."

The headache can increase when there are regular patches or content updates which the pirates can't keep up with. For example pirating pretty much any of the ARMA games within about a year of their release is largely pointless, because the patches move very quickly (and fix critical issues because apparently BIS never do any testing) and FADE protection is non-intrusive and remarkably effective. Of course releasing a buggy game that requires extensive patching to become playable isn't the best strategy, but still it's another element of convenience to consider. Since most games that support mods frequently require the latest version of the game, easy access to updates without relying on a crack is a factor.

The threat of viruses etc is also largely overstated on anything other than Usenet. I'm guessing people only ever harp on about it due to virus scanners employing heuristic scanning methods which flag keygens or cracks as malicious due to their activity, not because they deliver a malicious payload or carry out a malicious action.

[RogerMellie]

Just wanted to say thanks for the translation. Much appreciated.

[Caddybear]

I like this man.

[b0rsuk]

Piracy is least viable for obscure games with regular updates. I had a pirated version of Dominions 2 and have an original Dominions 3. I think they also seeded fake key generators.

The threat of viruses etc is also largely overstated on anything other than Usenet. I'm guessing people only ever harp on about it due to virus scanners employing heuristic scanning methods which flag keygens or cracks as malicious due to their activity, not because they deliver a malicious payload or carry out a malicious action.

The threat of mythical, old-school viruses that would erase your hard drive or steal credit card details. It's more profitable and safer to make your computer silently send spam. Zombified machines ready to send spam are dime a dozen. This is why spam is so hard to block: it's sent by hordes of compromised Windows machines. It's decentralized, there's no single IP to block.

Back to CD Projekt, I like it that the founder says how much money they lost on failed projects (20 mln). The article doesn't specify the currency, so it could be in złoty (polish currency) or dollar, which is totally possible because the company has strong connections to American industry.

[DaftPunk]

I Don't know what are you talking about people,piracy couldn't be more easy then it is. I'll admit i download games here and there,and i buy allot of them as well,but pirating is so simple that even my sister is capable of downloading "complex" stuff and installing it with no problems. Also viruses ? Never got any of them and i don't even have antivirus system.

[deano2099]

Also worth noting, if the piracy rates really are around 90%, arguments like "convenience" only need to convert 1 in 9 pirates to double your game's sales.

[b0rsuk]

Also viruses ? Never got any of them and i don't even have antivirus system.

I once heard a Warcraft 3 player complain he's never seen anyone use the Invisibility spell.

[OrangyTang]

I Don't know what are you talking about people,piracy couldn't be more easy then it is. I'll admit i download games here and there,and i buy allot of them as well,but pirating is so simple that even my sister is capable of downloading "complex" stuff and installing it with no problems. Also viruses ? Never got any of them and i don't even have antivirus system.

If you don't have an anti-virus program installed, how do you know you don't have any? Not all viruses actually alter how your computer visually behaves.

You could, for example, be part of numerous botnets and be sending spam emails right at this moment.

I'm guessing people only ever harp on about it due to virus scanners employing heuristic scanning methods which flag keygens or cracks as malicious due to their activity, not because they deliver a malicious payload or carry out a malicious action.

If there's a whole category of software that's widely downloaded from unverified sources and is 'known' to contain lots of false-positives, don't you think that would be the *first* place any virus author would start?

Edit: bloody hell why does pasting text always screw up the italics. :S

[soldant]

If there's a whole category of software that's widely downloaded from unverified sources and is 'known' to contain lots of false-positives, don't you think that would be the *first* place any virus author would start?

...except I'm yet to see any evidence that the popular torrents actually carry malicious payloads, because those that actually do are generally nuked. It's another reason why communities allow comments - to identify dodgy files. The only system that's still in regular use where you have a high chance of getting infected is usenet, but even then communities popped up to identify safe packages. The "OMG VIRUS DUN DOWNLOAD" stuff is mostly due to a keygen or crack being flagged by a virus scanner which only thinks the exe is malicious due to its activity (which I suppose in general terms it is, since it's modifying things to bypass copy protection).


That said you're 100% correct that the real threat comes from the more silent malware which steals data or joins a botnet, though if the program was outputting a significant amount of network traffic I'd say most people on RPS would eventually notice something is amiss.