There's a culture in the gaming community that despises what DRM has done to the industry, myself included. By releasing World of Goo without DRM purposefully, 2DBoy sought respect from this niche. By selling it at a "pay what you want" rate, they are saying "I respect what you think, please compensate what you will. I already know you can get it for free. Maybe you just can't afford our 20 dollar price point.".
And they have thus earned this niche's respect and attention, and more importantly, their money. That's quite difficult to earn from an ordinarily pirating gamer.
Wow. They've earned the respect of pirating gamers. That's totally worth taking a pricing hit for. I'm sure the pirating gamers will absolutely support them with their next title.
I didn't buy a single music track until Amazon had DRM free music available. Was it a moral stance? No, it was a pain-in-my-ass stance against iTunes and it's stupid legacy DRM model which forced me into their ecosystem aka iTunes which blows.
That being said, when you're a poor high school/college student it doesn't really matter what has DRM or not, you're just plain broke as shit and get everything you can that is free.
I usually don't pay for games. World of Goo is one of the exceptions. When a small company shows they're savvy and doing a good thing, it becomes worth my money.
When you loop every gamer who downloads games into the category of "pirating gamers", you're missing a lot of subtlety among the individuals you're blasting.
A pirating gamer isn't some dirty scum that you disrespect. They are customers. They tell their friends. They're ordinary people. Some games have 80% of their installs due to piracy.
If you can convince even a small percentage of these customers to pay, you win big. Especially in the game of software development.
"A pirating gamer isn't some dirty scum that you disrespect. They are customers. They tell their friends. They're ordinary people. Some games have 80% of their installs due to piracy.
If you can convince even a small percentage of these customers to pay, you win big. Especially in the game of software development."
It's human nature. If someone can get something for free, most will. People don't like parting with their money. This is why you can't make a business out of donation-ware.
However, it's a problem when the torrent and other illegal sites get keywords in the major search engines for legitimate businesses. Many users will go to those sites first and not end up purchasing the legitimate version. You can't tell me that this doesn't effect sales (The actual amount of sales is up for debate).
There also aren't any real stats on how many people that download illegal software actually end up purchasing something from that company in the future.
In my experience, the only reason these people actually purchase software is because the cracks are too difficult to obtain/too much of a pain in the ass or the company they are working for requires it.
Eventually, I think most software will eventually become services. This way, there is no code to share.
It seems that every few years, the reasons why people decide it is their right to other people's work changes (and it keeps moving to more and more industries).
"If someone can get something for free, most will."
I think you also forget that games are usually not essential for survival. So it is not just a choice between pirate it or buy it, people can also just ignore it. That quite changes the subjective value, and in turn you better make people like you. They will probably buy bread from a baker they hate if it is the only baker in town, but why should they buy games from somebody they hate?
Randy Mulholland of the webcomic Something Positive quit his job when he received in a month donations that exceeded his yearly salary.
Most webcomics that are 'full time jobs' for the artist also sell t-shirts, taking them a slight step outside of 'pure' donationware, but including these artists, the numbers of successful donationware vendors go up.
"Randy Mulholland of the webcomic Something Positive quit his job when he received in a month donations that exceeded his yearly salary."
This is nice for now, but will this continue in the long-term? I know nothing is definite, even when you sell a product, but I just don't see pure donationware working in the long-term (without some other way of supplementing income).
I don't think it's a good position to break down gamers into "pirating" and "non-pirating" gamers. Someone who pirates a title today might pay for your game tomorrow; in fact, someone who pirates your game today might pay for your game in a week, or in a year.
If you adamantly eschew the respect of "pirating gamers," you're cutting off an enormous chunk of your potential market share.
There was at least one study showing that music pirates were also the people who spend the most money on music. I suspect it could be the same for games. Also many pirates turn into paying customers eventually, for example when they earn actual money and are not poor pupils anymore.
Not all markets are the same. I pirate most of my games.
they expect us to enter a store here and pay US$200 for a title. and that's for wii. PS3 are double or more then that.
wiiware? Nintendo wouldn't take my money no matter what. ...in fact, let me try today... yep. amazon still can't ship a 10gram card overseas. "Wii 2000 Points Card cannot be shipped to the selected address."
so, yeah, I pirate most games I play. And dare you to buy world of goo for 200 bucks.
And they have thus earned this niche's respect and attention, and more importantly, their money. That's quite difficult to earn from an ordinarily pirating gamer.