He got his name and product out there, and his response to the responses were that he was pleasantly surprised. The people that steal just because they won't get caught, or because it's some fascist oppression, were just a minority. He's complimenting gamers and pirates alike

I found this rather refreshing in its rational approach to a wide spread problem. Kudos for him. Heh. Kudos.

I counter, how else would you learn their motivations? Yes, it may give some a sense of legitimization, but those that feel that already have self deluded such a sense. See his 5% respondents with politcal/moronic overtones. The gained information is much more valuable than the small amount of harm caused. That said, this should nto be a regular occurance, and should only be used to correct economic/marketing mistakes that have lead to this situation.

I agree with the Rock, Paper, Shotgun blog post that him lowering the price might not be as good an idea in the long run. Pirates still might not be convinced that being honest beats being free, and regular consumers have the psychological roadblock that sees a lower-priced title as evidence that it is shovelware. And this is a real truth of a marketplace. When I was still working for a marketing agency, we once had a game publisher consider different price options, until all our focus testing game back with people less interested in the same game at a lower price, because they associated anything less then $60 as something that had lower quality.

And I know my opinion on this matter has been all to familar around here, but I agree with Elysium. When you take all the complaints together, it amounts to the same lame excuse pirates already use: Let me play your game for free for as long as I want, and only then will I decide if I want to pay for it.

EDIT: That said, I do agree that making it easier to buy games online in a simple manner is a major key in preventing casual piracy.

Elysium, the George W Bush of software terrorism. hehe.

On a slightly different note, I didn't realize there was a Democracy 2, though I had a good bit of fun with the first game. I can't find a review thread, has anyone played it?

Good read and a good case study by him. It really is a shame that only a select people can get onto Steam because I really feel that cuts out a lot of piracy and is (to me) the least evasive form of DRM.

I don't really know much about this, but it seems like it would be wiser to adjust your practice based on actual research. I think it's obvious that the majority of respondents would cite various reasonable sounding excuses for piracy, because they're the ones who feel that their reasons are worth proclaiming. "I pirate because I want things but don't want to pay anything" is not exactly something that one would feel compelled to proclaim. "I pirate because of some grand notion" is the sort of soapbox reason someone may want to brag about.

I think the idea of doing real market research to determine why people pirate and altering your business model to address it is wise. I think asking people why they pirate is probably not going to get you very accurate results.

The article was interesting but I don't trust the developer. I'm still active over at Blue's News and he is too. He's regularly gone on very hostile and often infantile tirades against not only the people on that site who try to rationalize piracy (who I don't agree with) but also those of us who just protest against invasive DRM measures that don't work. He's called us all matter of offensive names and literally said there that anyone who has a problem with DRM is just a thief. He's projecting a very different persona in the article and I'm taking it with mountainous piles of salt.

I played it through several times, it really is very refined after a bunch of patches now. In short:

You are given several scenarios of fictitious countries in different situations. You have a country with health problems, pollution, riots and alcoholism etc. Or a very progressive country with high budget deficit you need to lower. You receive an amount of action points each quarter with which you can enforce new policies (or cancel existing ones). The amount of action points is derived from the support of both the electorate and loyalty of your ministers, so you want to appease them. Disturbing policies such as raising taxes or cancelling pensions are costly. The policies also take time to fully get working, so if you change education system, it may take three years before you see the benefits. You can choose how much money you invest into policies, you have a slider that shows both the cost (or, in the case of taxes, income) and the change of attitude of different groups of voters. The very middle of the screen shows you both the attitude of different groups toward you and their share in the total population. If you know that you don't have many patriots in your country, you don't care about upsetting them by allowing freer immigration. On the other hand with highly religious country you would think twice about abolishing the teaching of creationism.

The best thing in my view is the fact that the game actually uses neural network for modelling the behavior of your electorate. The voters are in various categories at once (they can be both drivers and smokers, or rich and pensioners) but have different affinities towards their "pigeonholes". E.g. they can be moderate patriots, but staunch ecologists and will react as such towards your policies - anti-patriotic acts will not change their attitude as much as anti-eco acts. And the game lists all of your voters with their characteristics, so you can read about them and react accordingly.

The game has a learning curve of about half an hour to hour, but if you like to try different "what if" scenarios, it's much fun. I usually try to build almost libertarian country - low taxes, little in the way of bans, etc., but it's pretty difficult not to get assassinated by either patriots or ecologists in the process Also, as of now, it is DRM-less, so you don't have to type in the serial number (which was the only check, actually).

Oh, I forgot, you can also piss off people by not fulfilling your election promises, which I find quite unrealistic, because in real life people don't even remember the promises, let alone check for their fulfillment. In game, it's therefore easier to just leave some changes (lowering taxes or pollution) for the next period, so you can fulfill the promises easily. You should probably try out the demo and see if you like it. Compared to the first Democracy it's really a great step forward and due to neural networks it's also less deterministic.

His sample was also only representative of those pirates who care enough to actually respond to his question.
I don't buy the "I pirate because of invasive DRM!" argument. Wasn't invasive DRM invented because of piracy? If no one pirated games before DRM, why would they have put DRM in games in the first place? I don't think getting rid of DRM is a feasable solution for large scale developers, though I see how it can work for indie devs as a marketing ploy to boost street cred.
The Price/Game quality argument makes a lot more sense, but it isn't really something you can do much about. "Oh really? I should make my games better and cheaper? Why didn't I think of that??"
I don't think this sets a dangerous precedent, since what motivates this dude to do this informal poll is much different than what dictates the business practices of the vast majority of game devs.

It reminds me of some poll I saw a while ago from a dev asking about how much their users would pay for an XBLA title (I think, I could be getting the details wrong). It was posed basically as: "would you rather pay $5, $10, or $15 for this title?". I'm sure we could all guess the results of that poll.

You forgot to plug your recent Escapist article on the subject.

Maybe but judging by the tone of his responses in the Blue's News thread for this story, I don't think his view has changed much. Maybe it's just on that site due to its very high population of piracy apologists.

I really, REALLY hate justification for "piracy." I don't judge anyone for doing it, however... I just get annoyed by the lame excuses for doing it.

There seem to be a few "real" reasons for why someone would "pirate" a game-- lost disc, want a crack to avoid keeping the disc in the drive, etc. I'd even go so far as to say getting something that is not commercially available (e.g. bootleg music) might fall into this category.

But the TRUE explanation for a vast majority of people IMHO is "I want it, I don't want to pay for it, and I can easily acquire it with little risk."

As for DRM not being a factor... well, tell that to Apple, Amazon, and most of the major music publishers. Most have abandoned their attempts at DRM, since DRM only really ever bothers the paying customer.

Price, at least for me, IS a factor. I rarely buy anything from iTunes... but I had a "friend" *cough* who bought a lot of music from AllofMP3.com. Even though nearly any music can be had for free online, there was still value in the ability to find exactly what you were looking for AND purchase exactly the QUALITY you wanted (CBR, VBR, 128, 192, lossless, etc.). I've yet to see ANY "legal" site offer the same level of customization.