Purchasing downloads is harder than pirating the same content

So I wanted to buy a computer game. I thought "there are probably sites that allow you to download games for money. It's supposed to be easy, cheaper than a hard copy, and I get to feel good that I bought a legitimate copy".

Turns out that it's not so simple. I have to sign up. OK. I have to download their special downloading program. OK. I have to turn off my firewall. Can't. I contact their support. After a few days of back and forth emails I give up.

I'm specifically talking about "Steam" and "Direct 2 Drive".

By now I could have gotten a pirated copy for free, with no sign up, no special downloading program. Damn.

So I thought "what about music? It's probably easier."

Again, not so. I have to download a special program, I have to sign up, and after a few frustrated days I finally find out that the service is unavailable in my country.

Those were "iTunes" and "Napster".

And downloading songs for free takes 5 minutes.

Damn, I want to pay for my games and music, why do those companies have to make it so hard for me?

Well, what security program do you use on your computer? With some of them you can leave the firewall running and still download stuff quite readily.

I'm not asking for help. I asked their support already. I want to discuss the phenomenon of companies making it hard to purchase from them.

It is rather annoying indeed. Sometimes it feels as if anti-pirating measures are invented to punish people for purchasing legal copies. Because who has to deal with requiring constant connection to the net, entering codes (and if you want to reinstall the game you already own because, say, computer crashed, and you've lost the code - the game is Lost Forever), security programs that are worse than viruses etc? Right, only people who bought legal copy have to deal with them. Whether it gives trouble to "active" pirates - that is, those who actually steal and hack the game and place it in the net - is an open question, but after the pirates are done with game pirate "users" - those who simply download pirated product - can play hassle-free.

Th free information pirates steal anything and everything they see, the companies respond with tighter security, and then everyone else gets shafted. It's cyclical.

And a losing battle for those butthurt over piracy. You'll never have a successful business model in the long run if you continually tighten your draconian measures like DRM and poor distribution systems.

When the alternative is 10 years of actually owning something you created (the average length of copyright idealized by most "reformers") or not getting to own it at all, are your honestly surprised?

edited 2nd Oct '11 10:09:23 AM by USAF713

I think it's a lot like doing everything once - it's a lot of faff and doing a cheap and nasty (or outright illegal) job is a lot quicker. Say, you never bought anything physical before in your life (eg. you're an alien or little child). You get hungry and see a sandwich in a deli. Security is pretty rubbish - you could just walk out with it (you hope!) Or you go and figure out what money is, how to get it, how to carry it with you, what to say to the counter person. When you successfully do it once you can do it again and again, easier now you've figured it out.

Where the metaphor breaks down is that it's so much easier to steal products on the Internet - as if in the real world everyone had teleportation! And the security has to get draconian to compensate, but no-one's really got any better alternatives yet. For example, I understand that offering music free and letting people donate went nowhere. The most successful alternative I've seen is the freemium/online subscription model in video games. And even those games often get cloned if they're popular enough.

There are business models completly immune to piracy, FYI.

And, I don't think anyone makes it delibrately hard to purchase from them. For instance, I bought Worms Reloaded off of Steam a few days ago, and I was playing within 5 minutes of pressing "Buy." (This is partially my University-level bandwidth as well, but Steam has nothing to do with that.)

edited 2nd Oct '11 10:52:00 AM by Yej

It's more or less that corporations have discovered that when they sell you digital media, they can attach EUL As. You can't do that with physical components (you also can't pirate it because copying stuff is meaningless in the physical world).

If someone sold you a box, you took the box and then that's it. You could smash the box, use the box and reverse engineer it, buy the components that make up the box and make another box in your home.

Software? They want you to buy software, can't use it anywhere but how they say and want to have the right to strip it away from you at any time. Steam games can only be played on steam, downloaded through steam, updated through steam and they have already cancelled people's copies of games because they felt the customer somehow violated the EULA. Which means, the user never owned anything despite paying a wad of money to the corporation.

I don't agree with piracy but when the alternative is corporations telling you that paying them money is meaningless and they own everything, that's not correct either.

Sounds good to me - what are they? I know freemium/subscription is very resistant to piracy (but not to cloning). The same is true of offering real-world products (though cheap ripoffs abound). Live performances/arcades?

edited 2nd Oct '11 10:54:10 AM by betaalpha

Arcades maybe. Live performances typically crack down on audience recording.

The one I thought of out of the gate was open source, because even with subscription/freemium models you still have private servers.

Kickstarter-esque. "Here's a cool thing. If you pay me $10,000, collectively, I'll release this second cool thing."

Wouldn't work for proper, high-end video games and movies. You don't spend hundreds of millions of dollars and hope you'll get paid later. At least there's a degree of certainty in the current system, with relation to that.

Isn't this all fundamentally because the people behind selling them think if they let people just download a DRM-free file without much barriers, then they'll get the idea to do it for all their friends, but they'd be too scared to steal something? I don't know how DRM-free sites like GOG do, or iTunes or whatever now I suppose....but I figure the "punishment" is primarily based on dependence upon people who just don't know how to pirate but would give lots of free copies away...

I think I'd be less inclined to ever pirate anything if they gave information about who and where the money goes to, personally, DRM hasn't been too bothersome to me so far...well, a few times it has I guess.

Yeah, that can work for small indie developers with other day jobs, but by the time you get to larger structures it's not feasible at all. Career developers have to be paid as they're working, not "maybe afterward".

People told Steam that it was pretty much impossible to do business in Russia due to large-scale piracy. When they went in anyway and bothered to provide better service and localization than random Internet schmucks it wound up being one of their biggest customers.

edited 2nd Oct '11 11:31:01 AM by Pykrete

I just realized a fundamental contradiction with my argument compared to how I usually look at economics. Huh. Nevermind, then...

Then ask for $250,000 and budget it appropriatly.

Do you honestly expect them to make things like, say, Avatar or Star Wars or Halo or Gears Of War with only $250,000? That's probably not enough to build one set or design a level or two...

Yeah, I mean that'd be enough to pay about 15 engineers/artists for a year if they made less than I did as an intern.

Now watch the credits of your average C-list video game and count the names.

edited 2nd Oct '11 12:03:16 PM by Pykrete

People told Steam that it was pretty much impossible to do business in Russia due to large-scale piracy. When they went in anyway and bothered to provide better service and localization than random Internet schmucks it wound up being one of their biggest customers.

Good.

I have only pirated one game ever, to be clear. I bought the rest. (And regretted a good few of them. My brain won't move on from it.) But with movies and TV shows I'm thinking of stopping buying DV Ds altogether, I own hundreds and it's a huge pile of regret, I'll never rewatch them. If some decent ways to watch stuff was available, like Netflix, I'd pay for that (I would love something like Netflix). But the only option here is to buy everything you want, which is really quite expensive. If the only people who are offering movies online here is iTunes and they charge MORE then a DVD in a retail store in town, for a less useful way to watch the movie, then I don't want to pay for them anymore, except at the cinema...there is a rental chain but they're few and far between, and we don't have a Car.

edited 2nd Oct '11 12:09:33 PM by occono

You can ask for arbitarary amounts of money, that was just an example.

Still, nobody is going to want to spring for that kind of cash when the possible returns are wispy and inconclusively likely at best...

That's why you release things for free, at least to begin with. "This is what I can produce. Now 100,000 of you give me $5 each."

edited 2nd Oct '11 12:56:12 PM by Yej

Except $5 per person isn't what happens. The typical breakdown of a freemium game is:

• 98% don't pay anything
• 1.5% provide about 10% of profits
• 0.5% provide about 90% of profits

You could even make an argument that the last category capitalizes on compulsive disorders or something, because from what I've played of freemium games on Kong or Newgrounds, that pretty accurately describes a hell of a lot of the continued paying customers. The second category usually drop a few bucks for a head start or as they leave, and don't really stick around any longer than the first category.

edited 2nd Oct '11 1:29:26 PM by Pykrete