Game developer reveals piracy survey results

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 14 Aug 2008 at 11:52

An independent game developer who asked for people to email him and explain why they pirate his games, has revealed the results of his experiment.

Cliff Harris, maker of the Democracy series, claims his simple question resulted in a deluge of responses with cost revealed as the hot button issue.

"A lot of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating. Many were kids with no cash and lots of time to play games, but many were not ...My games were $19-23, but for a lot of people, it was claimed this was far too high. People talked a lot about impulse buying games if they were much cheaper."

Surprisingly, Harris claims a desire for free stuff represented just 5% of responses with issues regarding game quality a much larger concern: "It was interesting to hear so many complaints about actual game design and gameplay. Not a single person said they had felt ripped off by a game due to substandard visuals or lack of content. The consensus was that games got boring too quickly, were too derivative, and had gameplay issues."

However, Harris seems to single out DRM as the major factor behind piracy, despite the fact that only one of his games has featured it.

"People don't like DRM, we knew that, but the extent to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly misunderstood. If you wanted to change one thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it."

Potentially the most interesting part of the entire survey, however, is not the results but Harris's response to them. On the back of the response, Harris claims he is going to lower the price of his games, never use DRM again and release longer, more representative demos giving gamers a better feel for the product.

He also says he's investigating better digital distribution methods.