Yesterday's biggest news it seems: Cliff from Positech has a great piece up on talking to game pirates. Why they do it, and what might make them stop. Pirates, it turns out, are mostly normal people. And they're mostly normal potential customers, too, given the right scenarios.
This is a simple but seminal piece of work that the whole games industry can - and should - refer to.
Here are some snippets:
- The consensus was that games got boring too quickly, were too derivative, and had gameplay issues.
- I've gone from being demoralized by pirates to actually inspired by them, and I'm working harder than ever before on making my games fun and polished.
- If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it. These gamers are the low hanging fruit of this whole debate.
- Lots of people claimed to pirate because it was easier than going to shops. Many of them said they pirate everything that's not on Steam.
As a result of this, Cliff has halved the cost of his games, removed the DRM and is going to lengthen the demos. As for getting onto Steam... that's tougher. Tricky position for indie devs. There is probably a need for an IndieSteam.
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