Bluffmaster
Skilled
Is Piracy Good?
Those Super Meat Boy guys believe piracy is the future. They WANT you to steal their games.
Those Super Meat Boy guys believe piracy is the future. They WANT you to steal their games.
Team Meat is two guys, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, best known for the highly regarded platformer Super Meat Boy, and the forthcoming The Binding of Isaac, a dungeon-esque shooter due out on Steam next month.
McMillen believes that the more people who steal his games, the more will eventually buy them. He sees piracy as nothing more than a huge sampling exercise. "If the game gets pirated heavily, if it's a good game that people really like, they're going to either buy it eventually or they're going to tell other people about it. Either way it's just going to come back to a sale." Team Meat is based in the city of Santa Cruz, CA, which prides itself on being weird and counter-cultural. But in games industry terms, these guys aren't just iconoclasts or oddities, they are heretics. The games industry hates piracy. Probably, the games industry would happily agree to the death penalty for anyone caught downloading free goodies.
McMillen has no time for this "old" way of thinking. "The dinosaurs of marketing are really upset by piracy. They think it's literally stealing," he says. "They're old. That's really the reason. They're old and their ideas are old. They don't understand where we are now. They don't understand the mentality of people who are pirating things. They see them as thieves, the same people who go and shoplift. I don't f*@#ing shoplift but I have pirated sh@%-loads of stuff. Like it's just not the same, it's not the same thing at all."
Tommy Refenes adds, "They spend so much money trying to prevent it but they are wasting everyone's time. They are damaging their own businesses. Those gamers who got screwed by DRM problems? I guarantee those people are going to think twice before they buy another game from that publisher." "Sh@% changed," says McMillen, warming to his theme. "Deal with it. Sh@% went digital and this is how it works now. It's really easy to copy and give to other people."
There's a strange paradox going on here. Because although these guys believe piracy is a good thing, its utility as a marketing tool partly depends on people feeling guilty about the act of stealing. People often try games for free, without permission of the copyright holder, but when they like something, they want to own it because they feel bad. So wait, piracy is ok, so long as you feel bad about it? McMillen explains, "The majority of emails that we get that revolve around piracy are people saying, 'I just want to get this off my chest, I stole your game when it came out because I wasn't sure about it and I really, really, really love it and so I bought it because I feel really guilty.' This is a common email."
But there's also the argument that piracy as a sampling tool drives gamers towards the benefits of actual ownership. "Steam knows what it's doing," says McMillen. "It hits the piracy demographic of people who download loads of stuff but when something is on sale they'll buy it because they want to have it to own on Steam for achievements or for leader boards or for social whatever." These guys see piracy as a way for consumers to sort out bad games from good games, before making a purchase. But the economic model breaks down when everybody pirates games, when there's no sense of taboo or guilt. This is why the games industry in countries like India, Russia, and Brazil has struggled to make a dime.
But McMillen and Refenes believe that the growth of free-to-play is just more proof of their theory, that people will happily try games for free any way they can, but will pay for extra benefits if they are made available - something that has never been a part of the piracy scene in countries where piracy has ruled supreme. Refenes says that the piracy scene just saves them the bother of making a demo. "That is our demo," he says.
McMillen adds, "I'll tell you a story that is true. When Meat Boy came out on PC and torrents started going up on Pirate Bay, I would check, I had a friend of mine who said, 'congratulations, I just saw your game in the top 50 on Pirate Bay for games,' and I checked and we were 30th and I was depressed because it wasn't higher, because that's a measure of success." Team Meat judges number of people stealing their games as a measure of success, because they believe that a significant enough proportion of the downloaders will either buy the game themselves, or influence someone else to pay for the game. This is certainly not something the games industry believes, but the move toward free-to-play, in which publishers give permission for their games to be played for free, is likely to change everyone's perspectives.
IGN
A great article. It explains my views on piracy exactly. Its refreshing to see this coming from a developer. Finally someone who truly understands how things work in the modern world.
