"One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates." -Gabe Newell
imma copy paste a part of my comment to explain why thats a joke quick story, sometime in 2021 my fallout new vegas stopped working, it was giving me a steam error (specifically a steam error), that error code was last seen around 2013 in skyrim and nobody knows how to fix it, i had to pirate the game to get rid of it, later i had to reinstall the game and installed the steam version, error came up again, steam support was useless and bethesda support told me it was a steam issue and that i should go to them, they couldnt even tell me what the error code meant, steam effectively came into my home, smashed the disc and told me to cry about it
Jason Hall over at Pirate said he finds it more of a pricing issue as a lot of players in Brazil were pirating his game. After he repriced the game so it was more reflective of the Brazilian economy’s state. Piracy went down 🤷
There's a quote from Neil Gaiman on piracy that I found interesting. He talked about how when he first found out his works were being shared online for free he was upset, but over time he noticed that he was getting increased sales in regions where his works were being pirated a lot. He realized people were discovering him via piracy and then eventually buying his books. He convinced his publisher to let him put American Gods online for free for a limited time, and when he did his sales increased significantly. Now this was literature not videogames, so it doesn't translate 1:1, but I still found it to be an interesting insight.
This pretty much mirrors my experience growing up in the 90s (in an mid-developed country). If it wasn't for pirated games no one would've even known what videogames were. Pirated games' ability to spread like wildfire basically built the foundation for interest in the product, which allowed the market to explode once companies were able to deliver easily accessible products. This is obviously very different now, but I still believe easy access to videogames at a young age creates life-long customers. Although these days it's f2p games that are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, making pirating even less relevant.
A good analog for putting something up for free and then reaping the rewards of increased sales would be bands letting people copy and share their demo tape or Doom having the first chunk of levels be free. People are more willing to support something they've had a chance to interact with and find some connection.
When I was a kid, and couldn't buy games because I didn't have money, I used to pirate games. When I started working and had money, I tried buying all the games I pirated as a child. I really like that Steam and GOG have most of them.
Many such cases. I loved Half Life 1, and bought HL2 on Steam, and Steam is my primary game library ever since. It loads up in a second, unlike Epic Launcher which takes a minute. I usually don't buy games at release, so a couple of months later, it's on sale, most of the bugs are fixed, drivers are updated,... But that doesn't mean I don't buy any game at release. If Assetto Corsa 2 (simracing title) comes out tomorrow, I'm buying it ASAP.
When i was a kid it was before steam, my parents never understood why i needed more than like 2 games on the pc, and most shops didn't had any games i liked, kazza, emule and bit torrent was my only way to get any games to play.
@@TREEKO978 Hah I did the same thing, once I got a job I bought all games I finished pirated. Some games were difficult to get, like I bought retail big box copy of PC version of MGS1 on ebay for some insane money.
I've always used piracy in place of demos given they've just kind of evaporated in the modern landscape, any game I genuinely enjoy I end up buying. Though, lately I've been using it for any game that has embedded DRM like Denuvo, because, my stance is if I have to have DRM I don't own what I bought any way. Unless I get to own it, why buy it? If DRM is removed down the line, or there's a DRM free version like on GOG I go out of my way to purchase it then/that version however. DRM isn't necessary, and giant games like Cyberpunk 2077 that even offered refunds due to its poor release state being as successful as it was proves this, given it was released on GOG.
About 80% of my steam library has 0 hours in because I first pirated a game, beat it and then felt the need to support creators because I liked the content
went back and bought the games I pirated as a kid/teenager because my family was poor, well, at least the good ones :D But instead of paying for switch online + expansion to play gba games I will always chose emulation over paying for a service.
Thank you for starting with the "piracy are non-sales" argument. That's really the core of it, I always felt the panic about piracy was more mindless money men assuming that they could get blood from a stone.
@@NoHiro-qc4dv I live in a small town and growing up there werent too many that I knew, owned original games. While Tim is a good source, its also only one source.
@donelton1839 well okay let's unpack that. You lived in a small town where a lot of people would pirate games. That tells me that it was a poor town where most people could not afford to buy games. This does not mean that all those people pirating the game were sales the companies that made the game could have gotten but were robbed of: it means those people were never going to be able to afford buying those games in the first place. There are a lot of games people likely would have never played if they couldn't pirate it. I can tell you right now that there are more people who pirated a game they couldn't afford and later bought it because they liked the game than there are people who couldn't pirate/crack a game so they bought it. As I said, and as Tim said: Piracy is generally a nonsale, as in it was never going to be a sale, as in the person wasn't going to buy the game in the first place. If anything piracy is lowkey advertising, getting people to play games and franchises they may have never touched with the potential they may spend money on the title/series later in the form of games or, more importantly, merch.
Giving a little bit of my experience with piracy. If it wasn't for piracy i may have not got as much into gaming as i am today, nor would i be working in the games industry. But this is the perspective of someone that lives in Brazil.
Exactly. I pirated a lot of games as poor kid but nowadays as someone who has stable job and enough money, i just buy them and support it. If it wasnt for pirating, i wouldn't be paying customer today
Yeah your import duties definitely didn't help there. I remember a friend in São Paolo talking about the price of the then upcoming PS3, quite a barrier to entry without piracy given your average income outside the elite.
the current issue with Brazil is more or less a 4X problem, the value of the currency is a lot lower, where a 60USD game is effectively like asking an American to pay 200-300 USD. this is why 1-to-1 price conversions don't always make sense. and a reasonable to the individual price conversion requires manual intervention.
In Russia we got your games in 90s and 00s only in bootlegged versions, but it helped to spread a good word about them. Nevertheless, we couldn't even find and afford license back then.
Also there was no such thing as copyright in the soviet block up to the 90's so the only way anyone would get any games at all (for their microcomputers or any of the knock off consoles) would be through piracy. Alternatively you'd have to directly import a legit copy from beyond the iron curtain for an insane amount of money (in dollars, possession of which was technically illegal btw). It's only thanks to piracy that a lot people got into computers/gaming at all.
I remember the times in like 98-02 in northern Russia, when there would be a bootleg and a official copy on the shelf, side by side, with like a 1000% price difference. They would play the same, why would I buy a more expensive one? I didn't know any better.
My first RPG was Arcanum. It was never officially published in Russia, so, of course, it was a pirate version with pirate translation of texts. As we used to joke, "the translation was done by professional programmers". There were a lot of bugs in the game, some of which appeared in the pirate version and prevented you from progressing through the main quest. And yet, it was this glitchy version that became a lifelong love for many Russian players. Thank you for the game, and thank you to the pirates for bringing it to us in those years.
Same thing in Ukraine at the time - the only place in my town where games were sold had only counterfeit games and i (as well as almost every average person in early 00's) had no idea about "piracy" - this shop was as legit for me, as any other where i bought stuff. But the most important thing - it was affordable. I still had to save money for entire month, as a kid, to have enough for a new game (they were sold for $2-4 per cd) and i can't see how in the world it woul be possible for me to buy a licensed game which would cost probably $30+ when my parent's salary at that time was less than $100 per month.
My Russian CD version of Arcanum has crashed after you leave the, ahem, crash site. The tragedy of trying to make it to run and eventually getting another pirated CD is still there with me 20+ years later.
I know that the Russians loved Fallout because there is a game called 'ENCASED' I like to call "A Russian Love Letter to Fallout"...same with a game called 'ATOM RPG'(although I believe that developer is Ukrainian. Some of the BEST games in the recent years have come out of 'Easter European' developers. It would be interesting to see a 'Russian' take on 'Arcanum'.
I learned English to play KOTOR2, since it was translated by professional Promt. For foreigners or those too young to know what Promt was - remember all those "translated 100 times" videos? It's on par with that. Nothing makes sense and blasters are called PROM programmators for some reason. Don't know how piracy affected the industry, but it certainly helped me in my studies.
I agree. Capcom just recently decided to force a DRM to their games, even decade old ones, all of a sudden, even though it was mainly to stop people from modding them, I believe, and not due to piracy itself. And I found that bizarre because for one: DRMs never work. Hackers always have and always will find ways to crack the games and pirate them anyway. And secondly, like you said, DRMs harm the actual customers who paid for their legitimate copies by slowing down the games', and in the worst cases even their PCs', performances. DRMs are thus a no-win/no-win solution to a problem that isn't even nearly as big of a problem as some devs/publishers might think. And for the sake of preserving videogames in general, especially live service and other types of online-only games whose existence rely on working servers, I think pirating is even morally justifiable. Like Vanilla World of Warcraft. Yes Blizzard offers Classic servers now but for over a decade after the first expansion came out in 2007 the only way to play the old school WoW from 2004 was via unofficial private servers.
I only pirated games when I was young and poor. Once I got my first job, I bought every single game I play. It's to support company/developer, show them that I want to have more of this and to own it in my library to play anywhere I want. I also get ability to review, receive support and so on. Steam is extremally good at what it does. As long as they keep their philosophy intact, this is kind of monopoly we can tolerate.
I think at this point, Steam / valve are greedy with the cut they take from sales. Tim calls this out in the video as one of the real, major threats to developers, too many hands in the pot. Valve are in a position where they are so obscenely profitable that they could comfortably afford to take half of what they do and they'd still be printing money hand over fist (it's not their only revenue stream, after all). 30% just seems like such an arbitrary and antiquated figure. I think Steam is hands down the best platform but you're a fool to want a monopoly.
@@HeretixAevum I never said I want. I said I am fine with (as it currently is). Any successful company could decrease the price but it would only make them make less money. For me it's fair when prices are affordable, competitive and when product value feels to justify the price. I am all in for competition though I don't see people with libraries full of games leaving. Only way would be Steam making game ownership data tradeable with other company but that would be making their own competition which is not smart. To be honest it's hard for me to imagine competition to Steam. GOG offers different variety of games and I bought some games here too though I went full Steam about 2 years ago.
is morally acceptable if there is no other way to play It amazes me that some people think it's immoral or somehow worse than the horrible things big corporations like EA have done and still do daily lol
you are confused - there's nothing capitalism going on with what is going on@@renaigh it's socialism - taxes, trade market/stock markets, world banks - this is all socialism Please learn things instead of just perpetuatinig what sounds good/makes you feel better. corporations = exist because socialism learn it
I think it's also acceptable to pirate if there is no way to BUY. As in, I bought it, I own it. Not bought, as in, I rent the ability to access your game for the foreseeable future. Honestly, that's why I buy games of GOG.
I live in Brazil, where most AAA games currently cost a quarter of our minimum wage. Consequently, i go pirate, but later, when these games go on sale(specially the good ones), I purchase them. The Xbox Game Pass has been quite helpful; however, I foresee a future where many companies introduce their own game pass services. To keep track of their games, I would need to subscribe to 3 or 4 different game passes, and that's when piracy might make a comeback.
this EXACTLY whats happening with film and television. I'm starting to have to pirate again, which I stopped doing at age like 20, now I'm 30 and piracy is becoming necessary again :/
@@donelton1839 i get where you're coming from but that thinking is flawed. First, the 4 games, do you know you like them or are they even good/worth putting in the time required to play? Second, why $30? With that logic the game has been reduced in price because of a. It's an older title possibly 3+ years old, b. It's not a good game and developers & publishers are trying to make money back, or c. There's a sale going on, which you cannot reasonably rely on for specific titles. Personal example I just got Red Dead Special edition on sale for $30 while retail is still $100. That being said I do kinda agree with you. Game pass ultimate is $18 a month (includes Xbox Live and EA Play) and if you add Ubisoft+ for an additional $10 thats almost $350 a year for a games library you may only touch 1 or 2 games. The systems broke.
@@sgtstr3am785 I would say it all depends on how many games you plan to play. I have both of them (tho not the ultimate or whatever) and currently im mostly satisfied. Simply because on EA I can play 4-5 games without forking over more money than the subscription cost. Ubisoft isnt really at the same point but its not a loss so far.
Opening Ultima IV box and taking out the map is one of my best gaming memories. I still remember that moment exactly as it happened all these decades later.
@@LiraeNoir Yes the game blew my mind. Sorry to hear about the map, I don't have it either. I just didn't realize the importance of these memories as a teenager and this stuff got thrown away when I got a better computer.
1:25 It is precisely all those "never would have had a sale" being counted as "lost sales" that leads to piracy being labeled as "stealing". Meanwhile there are several dozen games I legitimately purchased that are only currently available through filesharing, yet somehow that's never counted as stealing.
Obviously the argument that piracy is stealing is more than "my lost sales." Simplifying it that way is just as silly as saying "pirates are just people who don't want to pay for software. Get a job scrub." It's never that simple. Sure, one can argue it is or isn't stealing, but that's semantics, not the morality or ethics of the topic or even whether or not it should be legally allowed. It's still using another's work without their consent (or more accurately in a legal sense, a form of copyright infringement). The same as sneaking into a movie theater without buying a ticket (that's roughly the moral weight I personally put into it). Sure, nothing physical is taken, but what was taken was a product or service provided to paying customers that belonged to someone else. It's something that has a market value and isn't in the public domain. They aren't receiving pay for the use of the work they own. To me, that's immoral, the same as not paying someone a living wage for the work they do. I consider it a form of exploitation, but that's also another sidetrack. One could argue a change to IP laws, which in my opinion are atrocious in the US and Canada (I think Fallout is old enough to be in the public domain in my perfect world), but that's a whole other argument. As is whether or not it can be boiled down to "Stealing."
That "stealing" label is a manipulation. Because even at the worse of it, personal content piracy is not, and never has been theft. In fact I don't know a single jurisdiction where it is classified in the same category as theft or burglary, it's usually with counterfeiting or IP infringement. Which is kind of obvious. If I steal your chair, I have it and you do not, that's theft. If I copy your game or music, you still have it. Piracy is bootlegging, not theft.
@@LiraeNoir Which also leads into the definition of "theft" to begin with, outside of a legal sense. Ideas aren't physical, but people "steal" ideas all the time. Identity theft is another can of worms, as the identity is still with the original individual, it's just being used by another person (unless they are dead, but then imo stealing from the dead shouldn't count as stealing either. They're dead, they aren't going to have the capacity to care). Regardless, what you said is correct, it's an issue with copyright infringement more than anything else - the argument that it's theft in a legal sense is a sidetrack and meaningless for someone to argue. The whole issue of piracy would be way less controversial if IP laws weren't such a bloated mess.
Man, when I got Fallout for the first time (on Steam), I remember obsessing over how nice the PDF of the manual looked. So thematic and beautiful, and I always wished I could have it. It really makes me miss physical format and the amount of love there used to be in games, nowadays, you only get things like that by preordering special editions. Very nice video! I'm really enjoying your channel :)
One of my favourite examples of physical presentation of games from my childhood was Dreamweb. It came with a manual, of course, but it also came with the Diary Of A [Mad] Man, presented as the journal of the lead character you played as, Ryan, as his mental state degraded. It was tied not just into the story and themes, but also puzzles (names, dates, codes, etc). I wonder if that began as piracy protection. Unlikely, given how much effort and thought was put into the concept, but it certainly worked neatly for that kind of approach to game authentication. I bought about 6 or 7 boxed games for the entire XB1 gen, and these days I don't really even think about physical purchases. So for me the 360 era was the last of the physical culture of game ownership. Circa 2024, I couldn't really care less about maps and manuals. They're nice to glance at every few years, but I'd rather not fill up my shelves with games or films or shows, and accumulate *stuff* that's wasting huge amounts of plastic and will likely need to be gotten rid of. However... Even if patch and point updates make physical games kinda pointless (I don't think Starfield even fits on a disc, so that physical edition is literally pointless... ), the aim of publishers and service/platform providers is increasingly about denying consumer rights/options, and essentially holding all Content™ ransom. *That* is a potentially huge threat to culture in general, and so I'm increasingly seeing more value than ever in physical media. 4K discs for film in particular might really be worth the £25 you might have to pay for them, but that's a very expensive solution.
I've got the Fallout games (Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, New Vegas and Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel) as freebies in the Epic Games Store. And they're in my backlog now.
I actually discovered Arcanum in a stall at an open-air market in Taipei City -- being sold right next to a whole bunch of bootlegs. Well, at least I *assume* the copy of Arcanum I bought was legit -- it definitely had all the accoutrements. Including two sets of all the paper inserts (one in English, another in Chinese). I've probably still got them, somewhere.... I am a bit curious about that version of the game, assuming it was, in fact, legit. Like... how did Troika games end up doing in overseas markets? Better or worse? Was there a lot of demand for CRPGs in the Asian PC gaming markets back in the early-00s? The narrative I'd always heard was the PC gaming was extremely niche on that side of the world (though notably, as of last year's Steam Survey, China now holds the *majority* of Steam users) way back then, and text-heavy CRPGs would seem exceptionally costly to localize, and especially impenetrable to those audiences if not localized or (as is often the case with Chinese games brought over to us Anglophones today) localized poorly. I guess... that's more of a ramble than a question. Sorry! I suppose at the end of the day I'm just curious about what it was like back then when it came to decisions about releasing games -- specifically *your* games -- abroad. Like... what considerations were there? Was it a gamble? If so, did it ever pay off? Or, conversely, did it ever go horribly wrong?
There are some old manuscripts from antiquity or beyond that we only know about, and can read, because someone somewhere copied them. We might not call that piracy, per se, but it is adjacent to what we do call piracy. Throughout history access to media has always been a concern, and preservation of that media is hand and hand with that.
Regarding the point at 3:34, I think the birth of the live service model and just the more general trend now of creating single player games with arbitrary online components has created numerous examples of this in recent years. And whilst technically those things may not strictly be "DRM", they do often fulfil the same function whilst providing no additional value to gamers. There are multiple single player games I could name over the past few years where, if you purchase them legitimately, you'll need to connect to a server to unlock X, or to play game mode Y, even though it's all completely single player content and literally stored on the disc or as a part of the game download on your local storage. One example I can think of even requires you to log in to the game's server every 30 days just to play the offline single player mode. Whereas, if you pirate those games instead, the pirates have sometimes completely decoupled them from their servers and/or spoofed the connection on the user's end, so you can access all of the content without an internet connection. In cases like those the pirate can sometimes be getting exactly the same experience as the paying customer, only without any of the negative restrictions. And in cases where access to the game is completely gated behind a server connection or "check-in", the pirate effectively has more ownership over their copy than the paying customer does.
One commenter to a video critique/review of a fairly recent "live service" game touched upon this succinctly. "I cannot evade the feeling of being more and more estranged by 'games as service'. [I]t's like all singleplayer...the last frontier of introversion that had to be colonized to harvest more money and this game is a literal representation of this." (It is, actually.) The "live service" model in the video game industry ("Games as a Service" - GaaS) is merely a copy of yet another (greedy) tech industry trend: Software as a Service (SaaS). When's the last time you bought and actually owned a copy of an OS or software product? Same has occurred with video games.
When I was a teenager, some 30 years ago or more, when I was a highschool student, I regularly took part in a behavior which was considered "piracy", for 3-4 years or so. With 3 friends of mine we bought a CD burner, evenly splitting the cost, and each of us rented the games we wanted (yes, that was a major thing back then) and copied them. That way we got full games at the cost of a single day of renting. The result for me was I tried a lot more games I could have in that period. But the actual money I did spend in games was exactly the same I would have otherwise spent by buying full games the legitimate way: that was all I (and my parents) could afford to allot to that "hobby" of mine. I mean: back then the gaming industry got less money from me directly (or rather from the gaming shops I rented games from), but I think my economic contribution to the video game system as a whole wasn't much less significant, and for sure it helped to keep the machine going to a certain degree. (BTW, the games I buy nowadays, almost always much later than day one, at various level of discount, cost actually less then a single day of rental costed back then, even without considering inflation!) Just a way of "soft piracy", so to speak, which isn't usually considered at all, when it was indeed quite prominent at that time here in Italy. Thanks for your videos!
@@cionni78 Mi pare 8.000-10.000 Lire, a seconda dell'anno e del gioco (ma sono passati 30+ anni, non ci giurerei; per altro mi pare che il primo giorno costasse qualche mila-lire in più rispetto ai giorni successivi, oppure c'era uno sconto per 3 giorni o per 5 giorni...). Adesso prima di comprare un gioco aspetto che scenda attorno ai 4,00-6,00 Euro (salvo rarissime eccezioni), e anche così ho più giochi favolosi da parte, mai nemmeno lanciati, di quanti avrò mai tempo di finirne.
Witcher 3 is best example anti piracy DRM is pointless . It had zero protection and sold in records! Also, majority of piracy is done in countries where average income per month is so low , that that there is no way they can afford to buy 30-60$ game.
I remember there were no licensed copies of games in Russia back in 2000s. You'd go to a sketchy shack in nearby market and buy a disc for 5-10$ and pray it at least installs and runs. And quality of translation was “as of som guy with dislexiya tiped random words”. Also there were deliberately bad translations, because to turn Snake into Ынаке you really have to put thought into it. Ы is the same key as S on keyboard, but the rest of the word is transliterated. I mean, there probably were original disks with official translations at 1C or maybe some big tech shops, but those probably costed 3 times as much and you had to go to center of Moscow (or other big city) to get them.
it's funny as an industry guy you're sort of inferred version of the question is 'what's good about piracy?' and as a consumer i think a lot of people would take it as 'what's bad about piracy?' since we don't see the impact really, and we only see the benefits, no annoying drm, preservation, permanent ownership etc. so i'm glad you did talk about the negative impact too, lol.
Piracy was one best ways to enter into gamig in Latino Amerca due to very high prices in consoles as well as games wich will never be consider among companies due to fear of lossing money, now days is a lot better to be able to purchase classics because many plataforms mantain classic games at very good prices. Thank you Tim for making Fallout, it was worth every penny i hope and pray that you´ll get to make another Fallout alongside the old team.
Ubisofts Uplay "service" convinced me to never buy any of their games again, and since then I've really tried to stay away from games that require an online connection, another launcher, etc. It's just not worth the extra headache. The other thing that really bothers me is all the data mining game companies are doing on unsuspecting customers, game makers get away with so many anti-consumer practices, mostly because normal people have no clue it's even happening, or believe the corporate "excuses". I can't think of another industry that has such huge advantages and yet treats their customers like dirt constantly. You also have a lot of games that are getting killed, because they never thought of an end of life plan and the customer has no recompense, that just seems outright criminal. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this epidemic. A whole generation isn't going to be able to go play through their "fallout" or whatever their classics will be, because it required an online connection and the servers will have long been shut down, or they just killed it, like Anthem, overwatch 1, Spore etc. games are getting killed so fast anymore and no one seems to care. I can't even imagine working at EA or the like where 3-7 years of people's work is just killed never to be seen again, how could anyone who actually enjoys games, work there? Thankfully people have preserved all the stuff I grew up on, but the current generation is screwed.
As per my piracy comment, that makes me think of a question: Does it make any difference how many people buy a game on launch, vs buy a (discounted) game with all DLC, in developer/publisher decision making? As in, does the percentage of people waiting for a "finished" game move the needle in any way?
Yes, it matters a lot. You can look that up for any number of games that have been considered failures because they sold poorly at launch. It is very rare that these games are later considered a success just because they eventually sold well. By the time that may or may not happen, a potential sequel has often already been cancelled or declined.
The creative director/writer of Days Gone talked about this. Roughly paraphrased, he said the game did not get a sequel because too many people waited to play it and bought it for cheap. Strange thing to say, but nonetheless suggestive that these early sales matter quite a lot for some game makers. Guessing the publishers and such use them as a metric for success, which opens (or closes) doors.
@@whatdoesthisthingdo Yeah it definitely seems to be that way. Whenever you hear about how well a game sold, it's almost always within the context of "within the first two days/weeks/months."
@@whatdoesthisthingdounfortunately for Days Gone it released at a time when folks just had less money to spend in the first place so we had to wait for sales to afford it. And that's going to get worse since real income is continuing to shrink. But yeah publishers only care about release metrics never later.
There are a lot of insightful comments here, so I just want to chip in, not by adding anything really, but just by saying that I feel that when piracy plays a role in preserving old games, it does a very important service. Preserving old games so that they can be played in the future is somewhat high on my list of things I care about and I always find it so frustrating that there doesn't seem to be more emphasis on this aspect from the companies. I guess we need to habilitate games as creative works of expression akin to movies, books and music in order for this to happen. Then, maybe, we could get the people making them unionized, too, as you briefly touched upon.
An amusing preservation related fact is that a lot of Rockstar's older games which you can buy on Steam are actually just retail copies sold with the same "no CD" cracked .exe that pirates created back when the games originally released. In other words, there's a good chance that the only reason Take Two/Rockstar can even sell those games today is because of pirates lol.
I love video games, and I used to pirate every game I played, and I played A LOT of games. Now that I have a stable income, over the past few years I have bought every single game I played that I thought was a good game. Majority of people who pirate do so because it is the only option for them, either because of financial situations or the lack of availability (eg. many old games). Companies don't loose any money on customers that don't exist. If piracy wasn't an option, I wouldn't be able to play games in the first place. I wouldn't be able to get into this hobby. And I wouldn't have bought those games now. And I really do believe people who pirate are likely to convert to customers in the future, if it's possible for them. Piracy is not a bad thing.
When I was young my parents weren't willing to buy me games often, but my uncle got me tons of pirated games and eventually I started downloading them myself. That's how I would discover and play new games. Now that I have my own income I own over 2000 games across PC storefronts and haven't pirated anything in over a decade.
These videos have been probably my favorite content in recent months. Always insightful. Wish I had the privilege of working with and learning from Tim in a professional setting
Tim is one of the good ones. Man cares about the player, the experience. Not concerned about just getting his money and screw the gamers. He also knows that not all piracy is bad and see the entire spectrum. Massive respect.
Great video, Tim. The topic gets argued to death online, but it's great to hear insight from someone with industry experience that acknowledges the pros and cons.
I remember downloading cracked exe file for Command and Conquer 3 even though I had the original game. The cracked exe was basically a no-cd patch for me. Man, I hated the waiting for the cd/dvd to spin up just to start loading from HDD. And yes, I pirated games before, but always bought them if I liked them. Take it as - the pirated copy was a demo for me.
Yeah having to avoid disc swapping was a reason I often employed the cracked exes because having to do the shuffle for the copy protection was annoying as hell on Sonic Adventure DX in particular, it always wants you to have had both discs in the drive on start up which gets annoying when you did a full install off both so you shouldn't have had to. But I'd be lying if I said I hadn't pirated stuff over the years especially when there was no shareware version to check out first.
I appreciate your answer very much, Tim! I got the notification from RU-vid but now I finally decided to hit the notification bell. I don't think I have that on for anyone else yet. Always enjoy your videos!
Thank you for discussing this topic openly. I dont often hear devs speaking up about piracy, in any way, so im glad to see your channel not shying away from such topics. Could not agree more with your views. Especially when it comes game preservation. Also ownership; coming from the old school physical delivery system, I find the difficulty of managing your library offline and sharing with your friends so annoying. Also I cannot believe that most publisher backed dev studios do not get almost any royalties!!! It's crazy😢 Thank you again and have a great day!
Steam has proven that if you price games according to the economic environment in the target region, piracy rates can be drastically reduced. which is to say -- it's the publishers' fault almost entirely.
One thing very much misunderstood by gamers and seemingly even devs - you said specifically "buy your games on steam, wipe them locally but you still own them" NO With services like steam you do NOT own your games, and access can and will be revoked at any given time with no valid reason necessary. This is a MASSIVE incentive to pirate the game instead
When I was a child, there were only pirate copies of games being sold in my country. There were literally no official copies, because there were no companies who could get licenses to games, then translate them, then sell them. Only pirates bothered with translating and selling games. It was like that for years. Then official distributors came, then steam and piracy died out. But now its back to piracy again, because most of the publishers do not want to sell their games to russians. It's not a complaint btw, I know why things are the way they are. Just telling a story... Sometimes people do want to buy games, they just can't.
Especially today, we can’t talk about piracy without bringing up digital license ownership rights, and the many exploitative practices used against consumers in games. Your discussion on unionizing video games is something I hadn’t ever thought of, but is absolutely vital. I feel like every developer should own their own creative IP regardless of what company they were working at
Thumbs up to the Gabe Newell quotes going around, but also... imagine how much money and time is being invested in developing DRM and other anti-high-seas measures... money that could go into game development and actually creative aspects.
I grew up with like C64, Amiga and such. There was a lot of piracy, but tbh that was mostly due to accessability. There was no game store easily accessible that had much games and such (at least around where I did live). Games spread faster by friends copy of each other. Once internet became a thing access increased a lot, could start order games online.
It's true that digital has made it super easy to buy games and movies. But sadly it has also made it very easy for companies to take things away from paying customers. Which is part of the reason why I've reverted to getting physical copies of things.
I'm glad you mentioned being able to download the entirety of Fallout from the disc to a computer. This was how I was introduced to the game. A friend of mine that I road the school bus with told me I had to check out this game that was set in a wasteland in the future and he handed me the CD case on a Friday afternoon and told me to install it and get it back to him Monday. I did and here we are many many years later and to date I have purchased 3 copies of Fallout, 4 copies of Fallout 4, 2 copies of Fallout 3, 4 copies of New Vegas, 2 copies of Tactics, 2 copies of Fallout 4, a copy of 76 and two copies of Tactics. In fact I specifically purchased a PlayStation 3 and 4 to play Fallout 3 and 4 respectively. I thought the ability to copy and share Fallout was just the cherry on the sundae and it helped to solidify my franchise loyalty. So I suppose I did pirate Fallout but I think I've more than handsomely repaid my debt. PS I still have my original VTSG from Fallout and I still make recipes from the back of the book.
One issue I've noticed trending with games that's fueling a new wave of piracy is updates and ownership. A lot of people I know had a wake up call with the Sony/Discovery debacle. Not to mention Capcom putting drm back in games though updates. Bethesda updating old games and breaking mods. Take Two updating games and removing music. Paradox completely revamping games and changing core mechanics, even removing features. Piracy solves all those issues. Steam is pretty safe as long as Newell is alive and in control. But what happens when someone new takes the reins? What happens if, heaven forbid, the company goes public? As an outsider, public companies seem to be the bane of the industry as far as consumers are concerned.
Yeah I agree with all of this. Also Bethesda modding is probably gonna be pretty dead going forward if their antics with Skyrim are any indication imo. What Bethesda are basically trying to do at this point, ever since Skyrim Special Edition released really, is turn their games into a community driven live service. I've been thinking for a while that the best possible move the Skyrim (and Fallout 4 now) modding community could make is to just begin only catering to the GOG version. But I don't think they'll actually do that, it's too much of an upheaval and it would basically require the modders to shaft their fans who play on Steam. All I mean is, if modders did that, it would free them from having to deal with Bethesda's BS since that version of the game is competely decoupled from Bethesda's servers and by extension the "Creation Club".
@@yewtewbstew547 "Bethesda modding is probably gonna be pretty dead going forward" -- Of course, people have been saying "gaming is dead" due to industry shenanigans for decades and yet it remains a multibillion dollar industry in which the proceeds of labor upon video game creation and production are still being hoovered up primarily by these mulinational conglomerates, the first instinct of which upon newly "acquiring" a publisher or studio is to "trim" the workforce of the companies underneath their "umbrella" in the interest of "efficiency". ("Umbrella Corporation," indeed.) It's always struck me as strange, to say the least, how many of us actually think human "consumption" can continue at relatively the same rate as it has historically in perpetuity when most of us are being left with little to nothing to consume with. It's not sustainable, that's for sure, and actually has proved devastating in too many ways to count. I suspect we haven't seen the worst of it yet. A day may come when none of us are creating and playing video games anymore because merely surviving will be foremost on our minds. That's what upsets me about the mishandling of franchises like Fallout. Fallout is a perfect metaphor for what we're enduring as a species and, yet, its IP owners can't be bothered to do anything with it aside from provide escapist distractions and participate in the fleecing.
Oh wow I asked this like 2 months ago, but guess he saw another person's question. Doesn't matter, I'm still intrigued to hear his thoughts on the matter
Thank you for your input. Tim, a question that is related to piracy somewhat. What's your opinion on games that are relying on a central server to function and will inevitably die when the central server goes down? (and piracy becomes the only viable way to play those games) Do you think developers should provide an end of life plan for those kinds of games?
There was so much in this video that I was emphatically nodding my head in agreement with. In my opinion, most consumers are very willing to buy a game legally and want to support game devs. The only time I see people trotting out the “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing” thing is in response to aggressive, egregious monetization schemes or when the anti-piracy software hampers the playability of the game. I personally only pirate when I can’t buy something legally. I don’t think the working from home thing is what caused people to stop being loyal to the companies they worked for. It’s not limited to the game industry either. Corporations have been ranking and yanking us for share holder value since the 80’s. You may have been insulated from it in the gaming industry until games got bigger and the entities got more corporate. Millennials were afraid to rock the boat for a while after the Great Recession, but now that we’ve all been laid off at least once, it’s not the motivator it used to be. We know we are not going to retire with a crew we’ve worked with for 30 years, we’re going to be job hopping in every industry to get promotions and pay raises. This makes us look like go getters now. The pandemic just gave people enough of a cushion to feel comfortable looking for greener pastures and we (workers) were rewarded for it. That also fueled hot union summer. And about the lack of appreciation for the narrative designers - I’ve seen it and I don’t understand it. Money men seem to imagine that the creative part of the gaming industry is the easy part and they think they can replace those creatives with AI. And, well, you can have AI write your narratives, but then your narrative will suck and you will still need someone to turn it into something meaningful. Those people should be paid. They are more important than the executives that do not add any value to the product. Really liked this video :)
My first copies of Fallout were definitely not legally purchased, but over time I've more than made up for this. My Steam and GOG libraries are huge. I'll only resort to piracy to test out a game before making a final purchasing decision, or if it's unavailable for purchase at a fair regional price.
Hi Tim, I would love to hear your opinions on the Subscription models like Xbox Game Pass, PS+ Ea Play etc. Do you think do they hurt the industry? Are they a price solution the new titles? Do they cause monopolys? How is going to effect the end user?
Seeing as one of his major games (outer worlds) is or at least was on game pass seems to me that he at least agrees with the platform, at the end of the day you want as many users as possible to play your teams code, be it a legit, or not so legit method of obtainment, the way I see it is if you care that deeply about a small group of people who are trying to save money while also enjoying what everyone else is then we’re you ever really about the passion of video games to begin with?
@@sneedchuckfeedseed I mean he played a pretty big role in its development, and game pass is a service, you don’t technically own the game when you download it through game pass either and I feel like Tim like any other dev would like knowing that a copy of their code wouldn’t go defunct if a company went bankrupt, just like how old drm like those color wheels didn’t matter when pirates cracked it
I think in many cases piracy helps build a community around the game. I've pirated a lot in my whole life, but the games that I really enjoyed at the end I bought them on sales and I'm still playing for hundreds of hours.
Hypothetical: Let's say we legalize piracy, any form, tomorrow. People can freely download the works of others, they can do what they please with them, burn copies, infringe on any copyright, all that stuff. Do you think people would continue buying the products or go for the cheaper option? What about when inflation hits or when a pandemic hits? What about small developers or developers who live off the earnings they make from an indie game? I'm not asking these questions in an argumentative tone or anything, I'm just curious as to what this world would look like.
It's not a hypothetical because in most countries these laws are not enforced when it comes to personal use (because it's a civil matter and the company itself usually has to pursue a case). Most people choose the legal way not because of fear of legal consequences but because it's easier to drop a couple of bucks on Steam or for hundreds of movies on Netflix than to bother with piracy. Time is money. @@sudafedup
Hi Tim! I honestly love every one of your games and I pirated every single one of them. Because I didn't have money for them. I bought all of them later when I was better off even though I already completed them and no longer played them. Thank you for your hard work and love you put into your work! I discovered this channel recently and have been binging it since, appreciating you even more for it!
On the topic of pack-ins, one tongue in cheek PC platformer had a folded pinup model poster in the boxed release, you know, the center fold stuff. I'd pay good money for that boxed copy, but sadly there were so few of them.
Piracy (cracks) was one of the only ways I could bypass parental controls as a kid. Now as an adult, I pay for the collector's editions of the same franchises. Because when a game franchise is good, it's a lifelong investment.
i had both fallout 1 & 2 on pirated cd's back in the 90's. i think they are still somewhere in my parents' apartment. it was virtually impossible to get an official cd where i lived, i would have to travel to moscow for that. besides, there was no official russian localization. there were unofficial translations and they only worked with pirated disks. they were, of course, cheaper, too. but would i buy a cheaper pirate cd over an official one if they were sitting on the same shelf? probably not. i later bought both games on official cd's when i moved to another city. my ex has them unless she has dumped the whole collection. i ended up buying both games for the third time, from gog, english version this time. ironically, we're back in the 20th century now, these days i would have to download them from torrent trackers.
The second I could afford my own games I stopped pirating.... aaand I started again when the games I wanted were simply impossible to own (e.g. Red Alert 2).
i'm from Brazil, games are really expensive here so yeah, i used to pirate games alot. but now with Gamepass and Steam sales i really don't see a reason to pirate a game anymore. "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates"
One thing also about piracy, living in Brazil is that it's a social issue, here in less than 10 years AAA games triple their price while in US they just got a $10 increase, indie games almost double their price last year because Steam change their currency exchange policy, and now in Argentina with a big recession and a newly elected very but already catastrophic president Steam made dollar the default price making some games having more than 1000% increase overnight, so it's hard to expect people from some country to not pirate a game because even when we have money, we need to choose one or 2 games and leave the rest to buy on sale or never buy because how much abusive the price can be in some countries. And it's something I almost never saw any developer, publisher, platform to discuss, and I guess its because the majority of them just dont take us in consideration.
Game pricing discussion is usually very first world centric, yes. I sometimes wonder if a game dev would make more money if they sold their game for $5 instead of $20, since the latter would have a much wider audience that's willing to buy it. I'm not sure if any indie dev has played around with the pricing like that as an experiment yet.
There was a indie dev on twitter sometime ago that said that the demo of their game was played a lot and well received here in BRazil (cant remember the game), but a lot of the messages were that while people enjoyed the game a lot they will wait for sale or not buy due to price. So the devs charged $4 here instead of the usual $15/$20 and the result is that the game sold a good ammount here, I can't remember the exactly %, but it was high. At least one dev tried, but when I talk to indie devs usually they use the default steam price.
I dabbled in piracy over the years. Either to play games before I bought them or see if I would enjoy it. Piracy was forced on me by the original release of Spore. The game had a three install max limit before you had to contact EA for a new key. Well, my game failed to install three times, so I got locked out of a game i bought the collectors edition to. Rather than contacting EA for a new key, I just pirated it (it was one of the most pirated games at the time due to its DRM) and never looked back. Still was disappointed with the game. It didn't live up to the GDC 2005 hype.
Great video! I think it's also important to remember that some games aren't available in every region. The original Shin Megami Tensei released in the early 90s, and for a long time, you could only experience the game in English by pirating a copy and applying a fanmade translation patch. There was an official English release in 2013, but it had virtually no marketing and was delisted a year later due to poor sales.
I've pirated a lot of games in my youth. And I can honestly say that being from a poor background, being able to play games and watch movies for free have greatly contributed to me purchasing more games and movies as an adult with a disposable income. I track down games and movies which I experienced originally as pirated versions just to be able to own legit copies of them. Sadly, some of them can only be found on the 2nd hand market, which is bad both for me and the developer. I have to take a gamble with the condition of the CD or DVD i'm buying, and I also sometimes pay a lot more than the retail price was. (A recent example: I paid about 40 dollars for a 2nd hand DVD of Hammer Production's Dracula two weeks ago) And the developers and publishers of course don't see the money I put down for it. If only they made their older titles more accessible, they'd get that revenue from me with pleasure. But had I never got to experience these games and movies originally, there's a slim chance I ever would've paid for them.
Addendum: I have to use an app to keep track of my DVD collection, and so far it's in excess of 250 titles. My video game collection if you count my Steam library is 100 plus games as well, with most of them taken up by physical copies that were priced at retail price during purchase. So I think it's fair to say that I have paid my fair share, and will continue to do so since I definitely plan to expand my library.
The discussion of royalties is huge. As an aside, being an aspiring writer who loves games, itd be awesome to do narrative design for games but I have to be honest that my goals lay in novels and screenplay first, the become established with income then move to games because there simply isnt the same success to be had in the field, despite it being a no brainer choice for me if it was even slightly more comprable.
You are 100% right on *ALL* points. I've been on every side of this dilemma. I once was a broke little kid with a bunch of copied tapes and disks, teaching myself to program and hack games in the 8-bit era. Then PCs got big and I leveled up with pirated copies of Borland Pascal, C, Turbo Assembler, and Visual Basic. I dialed into dozens of BBS lines to find and trade software and meet like-minded people. Next thing you know, I'm a teenager making indie DOS games, duplicating floppies, printing my own labels and selling them for $5 a pop at the neighbourhood computer store. I took those stacks of fives and started mailing cheques to a bunch of indie devs around the globe whose tools I had used (this was long before Paypal). Then one day I started creating music software: little synthesizers, beat makers and effects. I sold them on my web site at the time, but I also uploaded them to torrent sites and newsgroups, complete with a working license key - I self-pirated. I got a bunch of paying customers that way, people who found my stuff on a pirate site, tried it and liked it so much they wanted to buy a legit copy, just like I had done way back in the day.
Young me growing in Brazil, where economy is/was bad, could not afford to buy a game. We got copies with friends and kept expanding our games collection until we figured out our favorite games. And then, maybe if a sequel was released we would buy a single original game per year. The feeling of having the REAL game, with the BOX and CD, and cloth maps and manual, guide and all that would be extra in the game box was AMAZING! But we could not risk to just buy a game with our very limited budget...so..we tried first...
You're totally correct about the lost sale argument. Most games I pirate, I would not buy anyway. I only pirate games when I'm not sure if I like the game, and when the 2-hour time limit on refunds on Steam is not enough. If it turns out that I do like the game, I will almost always buy it (unless it has a really bad DRM on it).
And there's an inverse behavior at play, too: superfluous sales. People who pirate the game may not ever buy the game, no matter their circumstances... and, likewise, people who buy the game may not ever play it, no matter their circumstances.
@Netherfly True. Especially now with Humble Bundle. A lot of those games never get played at all but they do get activated on Steam which makes them count as a sale.
Back in my country there was no way to buy games even if i had the money, but ever since I moved aboard I bought almost all the games i have played. Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 being the first one ever. I don't really regret pirating.
For me the biggest problem with the industry rn is big publicly traded publishers that have to put their share holders needs before the needs of their customers.
"big publicly traded publishers" and...console manufacturers? The manufacteres are buying the publishers; the publishers are buying the studios; and the studios are...developing and releasing games that are beneath even the standards they set for themselves. Names like Bioware and Arkane were highly respected not all that long ago. Gee. I wonder what changed? And CD Projekt? Que coincidencia that Cyberpunk 2077's development and release roughly coincided with the company's going public on the Polish stock market. Does anyone see a pattern developing here? I truly feel for video game artists and developers these days. They're overworked and underpaid and placed under ever more tremendous pressure to produce a mere product for the quarterly earnings reports as opposed to a memorable experience.
Only times I ever pirated where when I was poor / lost my job. If I have money, I buy games including ones I previously pirated because I love the creators. When you can barely afford to eat, you absolutely NEED some sort of pick me up / escapism to survive at the same time you cannot afford it. But if you're a good person, when you finally have cash again, of course you spend it on those creators who helped you in your time of need.
when i was a kid i pirated games that i couldnt buy or wasnt available where i was and when i got a job i actually went back to purchase those games and the DLCs to support the devs
This has got to be the pinnacle of workout entertainment for me, dont actually need to look at screen, been watching these for a while now and its genuinely a pleasure to hear, whats imo a legendary old school game developer talk on some of my favorite games growing up. Its like your my uncle, its christmas and i'v got the opportunity to just ask you some random stuff about the old days of you at Interplay. The internet, technology sure has come along way for us to be parasocially connected in this way. I wish you good health and a day Mr. Cain. Your conduct and articulation and overall demeanor is very admirable to me, i feel i'v unintentially learned good amount from you, your wisdom and realistic perspective on games, the gaming industry and game development, which for me personally is a bit of a pipe dream. I get told im an idea's guy, but i seldom put those idea's to use, maybe there just wrong. Anyway, Thank you, and good Day Mr. Cain.
Back in the day I couldn't afford buying any games, but when I graduated from school and got a job, I went back and bought every single game that I can remember that I pirated and was still available to purchase. It was sad to see some of my favorite game companies went out of business (like Westwood Studios and Troika) and I felt responsible for it, even though I wouldn't be able to purchase a copy anyway. But I probably wouldn't be as big of a gamer today if there were no piracy. Now I buy every game that looks good, just to support developers, even though I don't have time to play all of them.
Players (especially older ones, from the era of floppy discs or CDs) more or less know this stuff but hearing it from an industry man, and a respectable one for that matter, gives new levels of credibility to the arguments.
I played pirated Fallout in 97 when I was 10, english version, did not get far. Then a year later local magazine Level covermounted it and made czech translation and it immediately became my favourite game ever. They did the same with Fallout 2 in early 2000, I still remember vividly buying the magazine and counting every second to get back home from school so I could start playing. Anyway, piracy is not a huge deal these days, with gamepass, epic, humble, constant sales...
I'm curious about how Fallout became popular in Czech Republic, Poland and post-USSR countries. This is where all the hard core modders are from. Quite possibly the reason is the availability of these unofficial translations and pirate releases.
When I was a young teenager, I only had a small weekly allowance, so I couldn't buy many games, so I only bought the really best ones and pirated the rest. I purchased both Fallout and Fallout 2 among many others.
Most of the time when I listen to a podcast about indies or even creators in bigger studios, their start was with piracy, either because they weren't rich, parent wouldn't buy games, or just because their entire country wouldn't get consoles/games at all. If piracy wasn't a thing, games as a medium would just be a worse, way less diverse place.
abandonware was the first thing that came to mind going into the video but from what i hear piracy seems common on steam nowadays too and exploits like @thespiffingbrit made videos on whenever such were possible like subscribing to some kind of gamepass, getting the games with a big sale then refunding the full price
Played most games pirated back in the day including Fallout, because I literally could not buy them in this part of Europe. I still remember in high school saving money for a few months in order to get the bronze edition of Half Life 2 that was sitting in a computer store on display, bought it and cherish to this day in my collection. I've bought the classic fallout games several times since (on steam, gog and disks I found in thrift stores). Whatever grievances companies have with piracy, the DRM they employ is unwarranted. They should try hard and discourage it, because preventing it only causes more problems in the industry - including the spread of viruses and trojans.
When I was a kid, I turned to piracy a lot because of availability. I remember I had to install Steam to install one of the Counter-Strikes at one point, but I didn't really occur to me that there were games on there. At the time when Fallout 3 came around and I started learning about Fallout 1 and 2, they didn't sell Fallout 1 and 2 in stores anymore, at least not in the EU. If not for piracy, I would probably have never experienced Fallout before years later when I found the "Fallout Collection" released by Ubisoft. And I still bought that.
