The other view on PC piracy

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of articles about the negative effects of piracy on PC gaming sales. It’s interesting to read one from another point of view from a developer of the now really hot PC strategy game Sins of a solar empire that sells great… with no copy protection, unlike others which have a ton of copy protection frustrating their buyers. The writing I think is brilliant as a whole and I can’t hope to cover it with a short quote but I’ll try to pick one anyway:

The number of high end graphics cards sold each year isn’t a trade secret (in some cases you may have to get an NDA but if you’re a partner you can find out). So why are companies making games that require them to sell to 15% of a given market to be profitable? In what other market do companies do that? In other software markets, getting 1% of the target market is considered good.  If you need to sell 500,000 of your game to break even and your game requires Pixel Shader 3 to not look like crap or play like crap, do you you really think that there are 50 MILLION PC users with Pixel Shader 3 capable machines who a) play games and b) will actually buy your game if a pirated version is available?

For a view of the other points he made the full article is a fascinating read IMHO. Nah… I can’t help myself, the article is just too good not to give another quote to tempt you for the full read:

The reason why we don’t put copy protection on our games isn’t because we’re nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don’t like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don’t count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor – we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry.