Piracy: Current Opinions
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Lewie Proctor pulls in a variety of opinions on piracy over at Savy Gamer, including CEO of TIGA Richard Wilson, indie developer Cliff Harris, and Dmitry Guseff from DRM provider StarForce.
All kinds of new platforms are habituating people to buying downloadable titles, but it’s new territory and there have been a lot of screw ups. The industry is finding it’s way through them, slowly, and pieces like this SavyGamer one will help. Two things really stuck out to me from it. First, Richard Wilson:
“It is not the responsibility of publishers to sustain a secondary market in games.”
He’s quite right. It’s a different matter if they’re trying to actively destroy it, but frankly, it’s entirely up to digital distributors if they want to offer any ability to resell or not. Digital games aren’t property in the same way piracy isn’t theft (it’s copyright infringement), and a lot of people, no matter what their position on piracy, seem to want old models to apply whenever they’re to their advantage.
Tellingly, the most naive and conflicting two of the interviews are with the guy from StarForce, and another from ReleaseLog, a site that links to newly pirated content. It’s interesting that StarForce see their product as a temporary bulwark against piracy rather than any kind of cast iron solution, and that they see making it consumer friendly as fundamentally weakening it. It turns to self-serving fluff as soon as he says discs are more convenient than downloading though.
The second real standout from the piece are Lewie’s own desires for DRM in future, which include:
Publishers should be absolutely open and honest with what DRM they are using. Everyone along the supply chain should take responsibility for communicating to customers exactly how their digital consumer rights are going to be managed.
Ideally, when the DRM devalues the product, the product should be discounted. Charging £30 for a game that can be resold, and charging £30 for an equivalent game with DRM that absolutely [prevents] it from being resold isn’t right. They are inferior products, and should be priced accordingly.
That kind of pricing structure is an interesting idea, though I suspect it would lead to almost universal acceptance of DRM. That in itself is not so bad, but if or when it begins to lock tinkerers and developers out of platforms altogether, or oblige developers to work with DRM whether they like it or not, that’s very, very bad.
(CC image by Mike Baird)