Robert Florence - writer, performer, owner of a film production company and presenter of video game shows - presented some interesting thoughts on piracy in the games industry. In yesterday's blog on Eurogamer.net, he argues that the game industry should not focus on piracy, but instead on the reasons why gamers won't pay for games. According to Florence, the current industry maintains outdated systems and changes in mindset are necessary to gain the goodwill of gamers.

"Let me tell you what a pirate actually is. It's just a word," Florence says. "Piracy suggests villainy of some kind, when in truth all that punters are doing when taking something for free is "taking something for free". It's like lifting a leaflet, or taking one of those samples of cheese from Tesco's deli counter. It's what people do. There's no malice in it." 

Florence’s example is remarkable, as leaflets or samples of cheese are offered for free anyway and games are not. It is allowed to take a sample of cheese from the counter, but it is not allowed to take a whole piece of cheese without paying.  The same applies to games: sometimes, a demo of a game is offered for free, while the gamer has to pay if he wants to play the complete version of the game. 

Florence believes that the system with fixed prices for games, no matter how good they are or how large the development team was, is outdated. Also, publishers should consider what gamers really want and how much they want to pay for that. "Publishers of blockbuster games argue that they need to charge a premium price to keep delivering a premium product.  But who says we need a "premium product", whatever that is? Did we even ask for that? Is that what we want from games? Massive marketing spend and homogenisation?" 

"If acceptance of reality means that the games industry loses its giant studios, and it all shrinks back to small teams making smaller games and charging less, then so be it. It's said that the recent Kingdoms of Amalur had to sell three million copies to just break even. That's ridiculous. That's a sign of a broken, dated system starting to shut down." Florence argues.

According to Florence, gamers are willing to pay for a game if they think it’s worth the price. "The past hundred years' brutal commodification of stuff, this vile transformation of everything into a protected product of inflated value, has been steamrollered by the advance and democratisation of technology. Progress has led us to a place where the only meaningful currency left is goodwill." 

As Florence gives us some interesting viewpoints to think about, piracy is a real problem in the game industry. For example, the developer of Dead Trigger, sold for only $0.99, made the Android version of its game freely available because of the unbelievably high piracy rate. So, even extremely low prices don’t prevent gamers to download games for free. This raises the question if goodwill is enough for people to take their wallets and pay for games that are, mostly, the result of investments and hard work.  

Read more about developments in the games industry on FutureOfCopyright.com:

• Piracy on Android devices disrupt market for paid games, says Madfinger
• Entertainment industry and the digital era, an interview with Wouter Rutten
• Dutch developers Vlambeer fuel discussion on game cloning

Source: Eurogamer.net

By: Marjolein van der Heide