> They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact.
There are many factors contributing to the ongoing success of steam. Ease of access, a strong network effect, word of mouth from satisfied customers, a strong ecosystem of tools and a modding platform, willingness to work across many platforms and a variety of vendors including competitors, and more.
Boiling this down to one factor of “too many people pirate” is dramatic oversimplification.
I’ve followed a couple indie game developers over the years who started with lofty ideas about selling DRM free games. As soon as they add an online component of any type (e.g. a leaderboard for ranks or high scores) they’re blown away by the number of connections coming in because the number of people playing the game is so much higher than they would have expected from sales alone.
If you’re the kind of person who actually pays for games even when you could pirate them with a few minutes of searching, you probably don’t fully understand how widespread the problem is. Many people will simply not pay for something if there is an option to get it without paying by default.
The only developers who can afford to do DRM-free games are those with such a high volume of users that they’ve passed their target threshold for income and are okay with leaving money on the table. For every 1 person you see claiming they will only spend money on DRM-free games in comments on HN or Reddit, there are probably 100 to 1000 more who don’t care about the DRM status of the game, they just want to buy it and play for a while.
The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option? How many of the people who would try a new game by downloading a pirated copy will actually continue playing it, instead of just trying a bunch of different games, in which case they would prob have refunded anyway? The mere fact that X number of pirated copies are downloaded and executed does not mean that X number of sales would have happened.
Moreover, for offline games, there have always been ways to crack DRMs. I do not have data on that, but I have seen pirated versions of all these DRMed games and I doubt that DRM on its own actually inhibits pirating. Let's not forget that DRM precedes steam, and before it was usually about having to put the cd in order to launch the game. I have used cracks for games I actually owned because I did not want to use the cd, and often a damaged cd could mean being unable to play the game otherwise, even if all assets and files were installed on the hard drive. When a new kind of DRM came out, the only question was how long it would take for it to get cracked.
Pirating software comes with its own price/risks. The people who have less to lose are probably the ones that do not have the money to spend on all these games in the first place. In general going from number of pirated downloads to sales lost is far from straightforward. There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.
> The question is, how many of the people who pirate a game would instead buy it if pirating is not an option?
I don’t think this is as much of a question outside of social media attempts to justify piracy. If only 10% of the pirates would buy the game, that’s still lost sales.
The social media justifications for piracy always assume that the only reason anyone pirates a game or video is because they either couldn’t afford it or wouldn’t buy it anyway. The same arguments were made when Netflix clamped down on account sharing: Everywhere you would find predictions that Netflix would suffer as a result, people would start cancelling their accounts, and they’d regret the decision. Yet the opposite happened and they had more users sign up.
> There is a lot of misunderstanding here about who and why downloads pirated games.
I agree with this statement, but in the opposite direction. The misunderstanding is the mental gymnastics that go into painting all pirates as all poor individuals who have no money and therefore no choice but to pirate games. The reality is that piracy is just a choice of convenience and taking something for free because they can. People from all tax brackets do it.
I do not care about the moral judgements. If somebody cannot afford the game or doesn't want to pay, then they will most probably not buy it, whether they pirate or not. Sure, there is always money to squeeze, but 10% sounds overestimation, esp when the squeezing comes essentially to the expense and inconvenience of the people who actually buy the thing. Which is solely what I care about here. In any case, DRMs never stopped games from being pirated.
Pirating is far from a "choice of convenience" nowadays. Getting a pirated copy is much more complicated than getting it in gog, you do not get updates (I assume you have to search and install it again), and involves serious risk installing malware. Especially with how bug-ridden new games tend to be nowadays, I cannot imagine getting a newly released game without some form of auto-updater.
A lot of successful DRM-free games exist, and games that have DRM are still pirated just fine. Pirating existed in games since ever. It is not for the lack of DRM that a game may fail to sell.
> Sure, there is always money to squeeze, but 10% sounds overestimation,
10% was an example of a low-ball number. I estimate the number is much higher.
> I do not care about the moral judgements.
If you don’t care about moral judgments, why have this conversation at all? Nothing matters, do what you want, pirate everything you can get away with.
The discussion started about DRM/gog. As I said, what I care about is DRM in games. If I buy a game, I want to own it, not rent it. Same as with any software. This is not just moral, it is firstmost practical. If running a game is bound to have steam running, then not getting steam to run means I cannot run the game. This has actually been a real situation where I could install and play games from gog because I could download an offline installer, but not from steam.
I don't care about the morals of pirating in the abstract, because I don't think such an abstract morality makes sense and hence I am not gonna lecture people what they should do (they can decide themselves based on their situation). The argument that without some sort of abstract moral code one will just pirate everything makes no sense. I buy now the games I play because I am fortunate that I have the money to buy them, and because I want to support studios that I consider decent (so that they keep making decent games). Same with any other kind of art.
I've got gamer friends who live in countries / situations where ten dollars is an exorbitant amount of money. Buying a new release at 60+ just isn't a realistic option for most of the population.
So what should they do? Go back and change where they were born? Abstain from participating in modern culture? Or reach out and take the thing which is free?
You can play most games to some degree on hardware that's 10+ years old, but yes, hardware is usually something they've scrounged and saved for.
And do tell, what is the practical price of pirating a game you couldn't afford anyway? Risk of a virus? Some abstract cost to society itself? Nobody cares.
True, this is an opinion but I am guessing you don't know my background. And having some expertese doesn't guarantee my opinion is correct. But I guess I can say I am considered enough of an expert to be asked to speak on panels about the game industry or serve on juries for awards. And you are right it is a complicated question.
Since I am completely embarrassing myself:
- Review of a DRM free game I sold in 1980 https://archive.org/details/BallyArcadeAstrocadeArcadianAltS...
- That you tube link is pretty old, I was on a panel at Games Beat this year, I think because a more interesting person got sick.
All the factors you listed are a huge component of Steam’s success but are mainly for the benefit of consumers. Lack of offline installers is something that makes the vast majority of suppliers comfortable with putting their game on Steam. A platform ideally wants to capture as many consumers as possible but also needs to capture as many suppliers as possible to create a rich marketplace. Negotiating the balance of consumer vs supplier demands is what makes Steam successful as a platform.
It doesn't prove that DRM free is not a viable business.
I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating games for more than 10 years now.
A few bucks costs much less to me these days than a headache with finding a cracked version and installing potential malware on my computer. Not even talking about supporting the artists and developers.
Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you have proper easy installers, easy buying, easy refunds and you are from a middle class and higher - it doesn't make sense to download random executables from the internet. And if you have low-income, you won't buy stuff regardless of DRM and just wait someone to crack it.
This is a valuable lesson I learned when I worked with someone, not at Elastic, but who had previously worked at Elastic. Elastic was one of the original companies who made FOSS but with enterprise licensing work well. We were discussing in a meeting at this place we worked how to design license checking into the product.
What the guy said I found very insightful: he said that you don’t really need to spend a bunch of time and effort creating sophisticated license checks, you just need perhaps a single phone call to a server or something else that can be trivially defeated for anyone with a reasonable amount of technical knowledge. Why? Because the people who would defeat it are the kind of people who make horrible enterprise customers anyway. So in a way it’s just like a cheap lock. Won’t defeat anyone determined, because it’s not designed to. It’s designed to keep already honest people honest
I did something that was almost the same. Used to work for an educational software company that almost solely sold to schools, universities, and government institutions. Sometimes to corporate learning centers. Every sale was on a per-seat basis.
Every single customer we had wanted to be legal. Didn't want to exceed their seats or do anything which would violate their sales agreement. In the case of our government clients, such violations could lead them into legal penalties from their employer.
Despite having an unusually honest customer base, the company insisted on horridly strict and intrusive DRM. Even to the point of using dongles for a time. It frequently broke. Sometimes we had to send techs out to the schools to fix it.
I ended up just ripping all of that out and replacing it with a simple DLL on the Windows client. It talked to an tiny app server side. Used a barely encrypted tiny database which held the two numbers: seats in use & total seats available. If for some reason the DLL couldn't make contact with the server, it would just launch the software anyways. No one would be locked out due to the DRM failing or because the creaky school networks were on the blink again.
This system could have been cracked in five seconds by just about anyone. But it didn't matter since we knew everyone involved was trying to be honest.
Saved a massive amount of time and money. Support calls dropped enormously. Customers were much happier. It's probably my weakest technical accomplishment but it's still one of my proudest accomplishments.
Yeah this - people who grew up gaming in the 80s and 90s now have significant disposable income and are time poor. A game that offers tens or hundreds of hours of entertainment is seriously cost effective when a movie ticket costs half a videogame or a round of drinks.
Malware is potentially very expensive if you have any capital (tradfi or defi) that is anywhere near your gaming rig. Even a brokerage of 5 figures isn't worth touching something that could have malware.
Most the games young players play are all service oriented games anyway
Similar here. When I pirated I did not have the extra money to buy the games anyway, so I would not have bought them. I would also rent a bunch from a video game store, when this was actual a thing back then, which was much cheaper. And a couple that came with pc magazines. Not sure how that worked in the context of the video game industry, but anyway downloading a full game over these internet speeds was a pain.
Once I was more economically stable, I did not download pirated games anymore, and I even bought a bunch that I had played and really liked, even if I barely played them again.
I am not putting any moral stance on this, I was not entitled to play anything without money to pay, but my point is that for me a lack of option to pirate these games would not have implied me paying for them. Probably I would have done something else with my time.
I wish they had a way to transfer licenses. I have a huge steam library and my son is the biggest user. No big deal when he was 7 but now I just want to play my ancient games… and we kick each other out sometimes!
And yeah.. it’s trivial to bypass, but I’d rather have a choice not to.
If you want to play the same exact title, yes. But previous versions would kick you out from playing a shared game if the owner was playing any other title in their library, and they've recently removed that behaviout.
The first game I ever sold had no DRM, it was distributed by cassette tape. I did very well making games for CD-ROM, up until CD burners got cheap.
There's nothing stopping anyone from making a business selling DRM free games. I think you can get original DRM free games on itch.io. There are probably other places. GoG is great, but they don't typically sell new games.
If someone thinks they can make high production value games without DRM I hope they try and succeed. Anyone here who is certain it is possible is welcome to try.
> If someone thinks they can make high production value games without DRM I hope they try and succeed.
CD Projekt RED did exactly that with both Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, which were available on GOG day #1 (and the Steam version did not have any DRM whatsoever) and while the latter had a rough start because of technical issues, they both sold very well and were positively received (after some patches for CP2077 anyway).
GOG also releases many new high production value games on day #1 too, e.g. Expedition 33 (which won a crapton of awards in recent times) was released on it the same day as on Steam. Baldur's Gate 3 was also on GOG on release date as is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon right now, which also seems to be a high production value game with relatively well reception.
The only games missing are those by companies whose business models rely on sucking out gamers' wallets dry with microtransactions (so they need the "protection" from their own customers that DRM provides) or companies that have people making decisions based on assumptions stuck in past decades.
> GoG is great, but they don't typically sell new games.
Many big studios/publishers avoid gog indeed, but others don't, and definitely a lot of new DRM-free games come out there all the time. Maybe it is because of the types of games I want to play, I usually I have no trouble finding them there, with some notable exceptions of course (souls games, outer wilds).
Both clair obscur and Baldur's Gate 3 (goty 2025 & 2023) were in gog since the beginning (bg3 already since its beta). They both definitely sold very well, despite(?) that. All Larian and Obsidian games get there as they come out, as are quite many CRPGs in general, not even counting CDPR's ones. A lot of great/popular indie titles appear in gog around the same time as they do on steam in the last years.
People pirate Steam Games anyway. Stating that people pirate too much to make it viable is purely opinion and not based on numbers. Sure, for AAA games you get 2 to 3 months without a cracked version, but this stops afterward. For non-AAA games, the steam version is usually crackable from day-1.
>The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.
That's not the opinon part.
That pirating is the reason a game business isn't viable is.
Would you have bought every game you pirated?
How much money did you spend on gaming because you got hooked because you could play more games than you could afford otherwise?
If the Apple II had something similar to Steam do you think you would have pirated as much? Ignore the fact that the tech wasn't ready yet and imagine a world where buying Apple II software was as frictionless as buying a Steam game. Also imagine that the software went on deep discounts regularly that allowed you to build up a big backlog of games to play. Do you think you would have been motivated to seek out the seedy underbelly of the software world looking for illicit copies to add to your backlog? Certainly there are some people like that, but they might be a fairly small minority. And then suddenly DRM isn't really helpful because even if it might stop a minority of people who weren't going to buy your game in the first place it always costs you in frustration for paying customers.
It's because the poster assume that each pirated copy ought to have been paid for - which if they had been, then a previously failing game would've been viable.
But this doesn't make the statement true - because the assumption that each pirated copy would've been paid for had there been no piracy. This is the same incorrect logic that music/movie copyright holders use to count pirated works' financial "damages".
It's an opinion that "Most" people pirate games and it's also an opinion that pirating games translates directly to lost sales. As Gabe said and I agree with him piracy, if it's anything a service related problem. You don't need DRM to overcome that. You just need to make a good product and respect you audience. The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies.
>> The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies.
That is also an opinion. Also-- as an aside-- I am curious what you think the "right" reason is for piracy. DRM free games is not a new idea. They have always existed and people have tried different models with them like including advertising. Do you remember the Ford driving simulator? The skittles game. there have been other models and there is a huge universe of DRM free games for decades.
If you don't gain much from restricting copies, please explain to me why it is so common in the best games?
Are you confusing the absence or presence of copy protection with how a game is supposed to make money?
> why it is so common in the best games?
What best games? It's common in design by commitee predatory crap like EA/Ubisoft titles.
Thing is, a pirated copy isn't a lost sale. It's more like free marketing. It's possible that the above assholes would make more profit if they stopped spending on copy protection and advertising and just made and sold games.
In a world where it would be impossible to pirate software, I bet they would have at best 25% more sales. No one can afford to pay for every game, especially at launch price, so they'll just make do with fewer of them.
the CMA says that "this publisher also submitted that for one of its major franchise’s development costs reached $660 million and marketing costs peaked at almost $550 million."
Oh, Darkened Skye? Funny how it's just a fairly bland fantasy 3rd-person action-adventure game and then you get to spellcasting and it's skittles. Also, when I think of video game advertising, I think Cool Spot.
A 'right' reason for illicitly obtaining a video game would be if the game is unobtainable because of licensing shenanigans. Project Cars 2 has the best single player career mode of any existing circuit racing game and it being unavailable because the licenses to the cars (and maybe also the tracks?) expired is a shame.
Exactly. Games are just software, there's no real unit cost to factor in when setting minimum prices, just market strategy. Running sales with different levels of discounts is as close to optimal as possible $/customer without doing stuff like individualized pricing (which surely requires a vast amount of computing power and human effort to do at scale). Only the truly penniless or retro-game fans need to pirate nowadays.
The real unit cost is worker development cost. Like any other tech company, this cost gets muddied in the platform/framework development costs versus more product focused costs.
This is an opinion, stated as if it’s fact.
There are many factors contributing to the ongoing success of steam. Ease of access, a strong network effect, word of mouth from satisfied customers, a strong ecosystem of tools and a modding platform, willingness to work across many platforms and a variety of vendors including competitors, and more.
Boiling this down to one factor of “too many people pirate” is dramatic oversimplification.