“You Asked For This” – The Road to SimCity is Paved with Anti-Piracy Emotional Blackmail

“You wouldn’t steal a car…”

It’s difficult to get an unbiased view on piracy. People who download content illegally are either thieves or are paving the way for a more consumer-friendly tomorrow; publishers are either protecting their intellectual property or are pushing honest gamers to jump through hoops in order to enjoy their purchase (often when pirates get access without any issue). Sometimes the line between the two options blurs and all the statements end up being true. This has come further into light thanks to EA’s SimCity, which boasts a need for an always-on connection and which has spent its first week of release at times completely unplayable. 

We’ve all been told that piracy is stealing, that each game pirated is a meal out of a developer’s baby’s mouth. Many of us have believed it. Many of us have defended it. What if we were wrong?

PIRACY! IS! THEFT!

There’s a pretty common defense for piracy, one that gets repeated whenever the “piracy is theft” line is pulled out. “Imagine,” the defenders say, “that your car is stolen, but it’s still there in the morning.” The distinction is in the fact that nothing is actually stolen, nothing is unusable or cannot ever be sold again. Piracy isn’t theft, piracy is piracy. The main reason I bring this up is to highlight the fact that, for almost as long as video games have been around, copyright owners have been telling you that copying a floppy disk or buying a movie from a man with a van puts you at the same level as somebody who steals cars or picks pockets.

If you’re under the age of thirty, your opinion has somehow been affected by images like the early example above. A smug football player reports a pirate and gets £1000 in return. Which do you think is the good guy?

I think there’s another distinction to make here, though. The smug footballer and his lover (it’s the only way the transition between locker room and early morning post delivery makes sense) have reported somebody who is selling software. The average pirate doesn’t sell software, they use it for personal use. Does that make any difference to the morality of downloading a game? The people who make these adverts don’t seem to think so.

You see, these adverts aren’t designed for the people that pirate. Pirates generally know they’re not going to get caught; they’re almost certain that there’s no way a gang of masked men are going to burst into their living room in the middle of the night, looking for the man who downloaded The Hangover Part II. These South Park-esque images are the sort of nightmares that stop people from trying it, stop them from condoning it. They don’t make the issue any more understandable, they rarely explain why it’s wrong, it’s just that it is wrong. 

By not educating people, you end up with a problem like the R4. As soon as the non-gamer decided that Nintendo were somehow going mad for releasing a peripheral that literally allowed you to download any game for free instead of buying it, the war on piracy was lost. People were going into game stores and asking about them – I’ve seen it myself more than once just standing in line – because they genuinely thought this was a real product. They didn’t want to spend £35 on a game that their kid will play for a couple of hours, they want to spend once on a container device and then give their kid what they want.

If you’re rolling your eyes because you understand that the R4 is not official and that it cost Nintendo millions of pounds, you have a deeper understanding of this situation than the average person. Nintendo could have tried to cash in on this by releasing an “official” R4 and having it linked to a store where the owner could purchase games for a small amount a piece. These people were going to get R4s anyway, whether they bought them from GAME or from Ebay, so why shouldn’t Nintendo have a little of that pie? Why shouldn’t they make money from people that aren’t necessarily bad, but who don’t understand what they’re doing?

Shouldn’t Nintendo have dealt with the situation as it was and either try to raise awareness among those who were being told by shop clerks to get their piracy fix online or try to get a little money from them? Doesn’t that make sense?

No. What Nintendo did was they spent millions and millions of dollars trying to stop the sale of R4 devices. They got the product made illegal in countries all over the world. They didn’t educate, they didn’t try to take advantage of what the average consumer actually wants – they just threw money at the problem because they’d much rather have you spending £35 for a new game. And you know what that did? I can still go and buy any number of R4 devices from some pretty mainstream looking websites, I can still download roms for free within days of them being on the market; Nintendo’s efforts did absolutely nothing. Go jump on Google, go and look for yourself. If anything, the coverage of Nintendo’s anti-piracy methods have increased sales and a flood of fakes have entered the market. It’s looking more and more likely that a fully working 3DS R4 is only a matter of time away. And worse, those same paremts still buy R4s for less than a new game, they still tell their friends about Nintendo’s miracle device and they still contribute nothing to the production of a game.

Where did it all go wrong?

Monetizing the Pirates

For thirty years, software companies have been trying to fight the pirates. That is a losing battle. Games take only a few moments to crack and be released on PC for free, Tomb Raider on 360 was leaked up to a fortnight before its official release date and worse can be said for Halo 4 and Gears of War: Judgement. If you look at facts like these and feel a pang of hatred towards the pirates, you’re feeling the wrong thing. If you have to wait a fortnight to be allowed to pay £40 for a game you want, or you can download it and burn it to a disk today, which sounds more reasonable?

Take the morality out of it and one of those situations sounds ridiculous.

Good Old Games announced not long ago that a great deal of their traffic was coming from torrenting websites, and that the conversion rate for purchases was higher than that from Google. It’s no surprise that people who like games buy more games – even if they pirate others – but I find this fact fascinating. People are willing to buy two decade old games for a price they deem fair from a website they trust. That should mean they’d be willing to buy new games under the same circumstances (and recent experiments from Square Enix and Ubisoft with the quick drop in price on Sleeping Dogs, Hitman Absolution and Far Cry 3 seem to confirm this). Consider, for a second, if more publishers put their millions of anti-piracy money into finding ways of monetizing the pirates. A Lovefilm-like subscription service which allows you to play any game from a certain publisher; a lowering of initial price; even a DRM free version of a game, or a demo might convert a few people. Many of these things, specifically the demo, have been written off by developers in the past for being too expensive. I wonder how much the DRM for SimCity cost?

I’m in no way pro-piracy, but this is an issue that has been made black and white by the very people who benefit from it being black and white. Pirates aren’t necessarily evil people, there are a lot of reasons to pirate a piece of software. Publishers should be trying to solve the reasons people pirate, they shouldn’t be trying to convince people that it’s as simple as wanting free games. I hesitate to reference Gabe Newell, because it happens too often in articles like this, but piracy really is an issue of service, of convenience. Publishers have to find a way of being better than free, of being easier than copy and pasting a crack to an installation folder. They could do it as well.

I make it sound so simple, which it isn’t. Publishers exist based on how things work today. They exist on a game reaching a store and people buying that game. To change that would be equivalent to a country’s leader forcing all politicians to work for free, or to a petrol company releasing an energy source that’s cheaper and lasts longer. It’s too big a bet. A company that exists on bad games might not want people to be able to take back their purchase, they might not want to give the consumer a choice. That’s why they fight for things to stay the way they are, because when everything inevitably changes, not every major company is going to make that jump.

SimCity

When SimCity was announced to need a constant online connection, people complained. After decades of being told that the pirates were the bad guys, people with the money to purchase the game were being punished. How’s that fair? 

It doesn’t matter.

SimCity probably won’t ever be pirated, and if it is it will be on a private server, not entirely like the experience you’d have if you bought the game. For all intents and purposes, EA have beaten the pirates. It’s cost them PR, confidence and fans, but for years those same people have likely been very vocal about the evils of pirating, probably because they’ve had it force fed to them on splash screens and at the beginning of videos and DVDs for as long as they remember. EA (and Blizzard before them) have created a platform that is unlikely to ever be easy to access without paying first. It’s a small win in a war full of 30 years of losses, but it’s a win that means EA have beat the pirates rather than given into their reasons for pirating.

Had things worked as they should have done from the get go, this would have been an interesting chance to see if pirates really will pay if they don’t have the option to “steal.” 

Conclusion

Piracy isn’t a new issue. From bootleg vinyl to the latest video games, various publishers of creative work have fought for decades to make people get products on official “our way or no way” terms. It was only a few years ago that the music industry was attacking tab websites and now we’re left bitter by the poor launch of SimCity. The entertainment industry needs a new solution in the fight against piracy, perhaps even asking people why they download for free instead of paying. It won’t happen though. Publishers will keep on fighting, because although not everything is perfect, things probably won’t get better and they just might get worse.

The developers deserve to make back their money but, as the anti-piracy budget increases each year and as people like those who bought the R4 (or even pre-owned) fail to see the consequences of their actions, they’ll see less and less until something changes.