Dicto Simpliciter, Narcissism and Piracy
Dicto Simpliciter, Narcissism and Piracy
A recent thread on the “Business” forum of Joel on Software once again rehashed the question of how to deal with software pirates.
I’ve posted about this before, at the Indie Gamer Forums mostly, and also in my book, but I’ll take a moment and re-iterate my stance for the Joe Indie audience:
Take sufficient measures to ensure that most of the general populace will not be able to use your software/game without (sooner or later) paying for it. And then move on. Perform the occasional review to make sure that you haven’t inadvertently given away the cow with the milk samples, but otherwise don’t lose sleep over it.
Life is just too short to spend your valuable time and energy trying to create the ultimate, unbreakable code. Because, well, you can’t. You’ll lose every time.
Except in one case: If your software/game is server-based, and requires a paid account before users can access it, then you’re basically pirate free. (At least until the server software is hacked and ported to some server farm in the Far East…)
Some people like impossible challenges. Me, I prefer to get something done.
My typical approach to the software piracy issue is to point out that the bulk of humanity will pay for what they use provided:
Many software developers, however, make the following erroneous assumptions:
The first reflects poorly on those who believe it. The second is an example of dicto simpliciter, a logical fallacy. “Dicto simpliciter” is a sweeping generalization, literally “spoken simply” in Latin.
Before anyone launches into some variation of “if I can find the crackz of my games, so can my playerz”, take a deep breath and count up by powers of 2. Thank you for proving my point: you are not average and are not a representative sample of the Average Computer User, who feels excited that sometimes Word doesn’t screw up and lose the letter he’s trying to write.
Today, as I considered the issue once again, I realized yet another fallacy inherent in the overreactions to software piracy:
Narcissism.
Ok, narcissism isn’t so much a fallacy as a character flaw, but bear with me.
Most indie software/game developers are aware of “conversion rate”, or the percentage of downloads/trials of their software that result in an actual sale. The Semi-Mythical Example Shareware Conversion Rate is 1%, which means that 1 out of every 100 downloads results in a sale.. Some software does better, some does worse. Regardless, the conversion rate demonstrates the basic idea that most of the people who look at a piece of software don’t buy it.
So, with that in mind, making the assumption that every download of a cracked version of your software/game is a lost sale is simply narcissism. Egomania, even. What else would you call the belief that your software/game is so good that everyone everywhere (even if they don’t speak the same native language you do) is going to just love it and spend hours upon hours enjoying it and cheating you out of your money?
In fact, it’s reasonable to assume that the “piracy conversion rate” (the percentage of downloads of a cracked version versus the number of copies ever used) is less than the standard conversion rate. Why? Because the pirates are almost certainly not your target market.
In conclusion, I will say that, yes, there is a very definite economic benefit in making sure that your game/software can’t be easily hijacked. But there is a point, and you hit that point much sooner rather than later, when you run into diminishing returns, when the work required to get any further improvement either costs you more than you gain or so pisses off your honest customers that they drop you like a poor choice of dance partner after the beer goggles wear off.
-David
[...] Una entrada publicada hoy en el blog de David Michael me ha dado el empujón que me hacÃa falta para hablar sobre este tema que siempre interesa mucho cuando uno se adentra en el mercado shareware, pues ya no es la distribuidora la que se ocupa del sistema anticopia del juego (ni de otras mil cosas de las que ahora debes ocuparte tú). [...]
Perfection.
That’s the only way to describe this essay. I don’t play PC games at all for the simple reason that I am unwilling to submit my production machine to the whims and caprices of developers and publishers telling me I may not use the software in the ways I deem appropriate (without the CD in the drive, for example), or even modifying the behavior of my machine (much anti-cheat and anti-piracy software interacts unfavorably with developer tools, for instance).
I bought both an Xbox and a PS2 for this reason, and all the gaming I’ve done in recent years has been on those two platforms. I’m considering buying a DS lite, since I spend less time at home able to sit in front of the television and twiddle my thumbs. I’m also considering supporting indie games, especially for Mac, buy shelling out for them – but I won’t if they embrace obnoxious “anti-piracy” practices that degrade my performance and utility.
[...] At Joe Indie, Dicto Simpliciter, Narcissism and Piracy warns developers about being overzealous with copy protection. I think it goes well with my DRM post from yesterday. [...]