Some personal thoughts on piracy (warning - long post)

[Nospheratu]

Hi all. I hope you won't mind another long post - i tend to get carried away, but at least I can write good in english

I've read the blog post "1 month after the release of Amnesia" and 1st off, i'm VERY happy to hear that you have reached and surpassed your sales quotas and that you will continue doing what you're so good at.

I wanted to write something in the blog but for some reason it wouldn't let me, so i decided to write it here; hopefully I won't start a sh.tstorm by doing so (if yes, please remove this post).

I would like to write a few notes on the writer's perception of piracy in the blog post and my own expirience and point of view, but for that I'll first have to cover myself in ashes of shameful guilt and admit it: i got this game from a friend, who downloaded the pirated version, shat bricks and then forwarded it to me. I'm not making excuses here; i really didn't download it myself but even so, I didn't buy it (yet) for which I am truly sorry (more on that a bit further).

Now, on to my comments. For me it seems that the writer of this post probably hasn't pirated much/any stuff from the internet, since some of the views are a bit off from the real situation, regardless of what many of you might think... here we go:

"First of all, once you have played Amnesia there is little meaning to play again. A person pirating the game and finishing it has no real reason to go back."

Wrong - it totally depends on the individual person. If i take myself as an example: I got it for free, played it through and was so amazed, that after regaining my senses i immideately started to play it again, this time with the commentary enabled, since I was so fascinated that i wanted to know the process behind this gem. I am now close to finishing it for the second time and I am very happy to have learned who did what, where and why (btw, the hommage to "Event Horizon" totally blew my mind, i loved the movie). Also, you didn't even take the custom story function in to account - I have downloaded Wake and Survival and I'm in the middle in each of them, so I'll definitely continue to play Amnesia in one form or another for quite a while. But even then I won't uninstall it - becouse your level editor is free and I can start making custom stories myself (thanks a million)!

"It is quite common to read on forums that people have downloaded a pirated version and say that they will probably buy it later. The question here is how many actually does this?"

I can sincerely say that I have ALWAYS bought the things which made a lasting impression on me, even if I have pirated them before; I have a whole 2m long rack of original CD's, movies and games at home to prove it. As an example: I downloaded and finished the whole Warcraft 3 saga TWICE and after that I was still impressed enough to go buy the Warcraft 3 Warchest set, which today sits on that rack, still unpacked and in original wrapping.
My problem with buying Amnesia is - it is only available over the net My credit card is sadly not compatible for paying over the net, but even if it was, i just do not trust such payments (I'm over 30 and thus a bit old-fashioned). I simply like to go in to a shop, take the box from the shelf, go to the cashier and pay for it with cash - becouse then i can see the bills leaving my wallet and the box i got for them in my hand. Let me assure you: if i saw it in a store, I would have bought it in a moment's notice and put it on my rack.
I admit that there are a lot more people who never buy already pirated stuff - but believe it or not, some of us actually DO have enough of a conscience to try and help those who are really deservant of our support.

"So even if a player likes it and determines that it is well worth paying for, there is no incentive to do so. ... Even if you really liked the game and want to support the developers, it basically feels like money down the drain since you get nothing extra after paying."

Wrong again - it still depends on the individual person and his/her perception of worth.
My first incentive to actually buy something i have already downloaded is having the gratification that I can call myself a sensible pirate, the knowledge that I actually helped the artist and a fuzzy feeling each time I look at the original boxes on my rack. The second incentive which i have already mentioned before is the actual physical feeling of holding the product in my hand, to be able to flip through a booklet, watch the extras on a DVD and simply having a real 3D product on a shelf. Has anyone of you ever relishly smelled the fresh paint in a CD booklet when unpacking it? See, that's the feeling I'm talking about; you simply can't get that from a mp3 folder on your hard drive.
Again, sadly many pirates do not have such values and just download all they can just for the sake of being free, but please keep in mind that some people do think and act different.

Also I have to mention this: I know exactly how the guys at Frictional felt when being on their minimal wages - becouse I'm on my minimal wage too, for years now.
The times are rough, the monetary system sucks, companies are closing down and when all the monthly bills (for the appartment, car, gas, food, water, heat, electricity, health insurance etc.) are paid, many of us are faced with the decision of saving up the remaining money for the case the next paycheck will never come instead of spending it for original CD's, movies and games. But tell me this: just becouse my company isn't doing ok and I receive a minimal wage, does that automatically mean that I can't listen to my favourite music, watch movies and play games? What do i have left then? If I couldn't get some of that stuff for free, I would be forced to come home from work and watch TV, then go to sleep, then repeat this untill i loose my TV and appartment or bite the bullet. I'm sorry but I do not intend to live such a life, even if it means pirating stuff from the internet (HOLY SH..., this actually reminded me of Daniel's mindset, wow ).

So, what can we all do about it? In the global scale not much can be done except wait & see how things will evolve (like with the inception of radio, TV, VHS, CD's, and DVD's), but it helps to think and act as FLEXIBLE as possible and sometimes make economically doubtful decisions, even if they seem a bad idea in the short run.
In Frictional's case the developers bit the sour apple and decided to make Amnesia, even if it meant working a year on minimal wages (I salute your courage & decision). In order to cut the costs further they decided to make the game only available over the internet; becouse advertisement is also very costly, most of it would rely on word of mouth and viral marketing via YouTube videos. After Amnesia was made, all they could do was cross fingers and hope that they'll get their fair credit. And what happened? Despite all these economically bad decisions the game turned out a success: the sales have gone over the minimal required quotas and beyond, the game is played, praised and recommended everywhere and the 5 people who made it got their credit back, not to mention that they have become somewhat of a legend amongst the gaming community. I mean - everywhere you can read that Amnesia is probably the scariest game ever made untill today AND it was made by just 5 people! Frictional games have thus entered video game history and made a benchmark in horror games. Sure, it doesn't make paying the bills any easier, but you have become legends, at least in my book (also think of this: Vincent Van Gogh lived, worked and died in poverty but today his work is priceless and he will be remembered forever.)

To wrap it up: I promise you that even if it will take a few years for me to get a internet-payment capable credit card or a pay-pal account, i WILL eventually buy Amnesia - simply becouse you guys deserve it. Untill then, I will recommend it to others whenever I can and try to get my friends to buy it, so you'll get more free advertisement, plus I'll participate here with new ideas & projects (hopefully).

Oh, and please don't flame me (too much), I am just being honest. Bye!

[superluser]

I can sincerely say that I have ALWAYS bought the things which made a lasting impression on me, even if I have pirated them before; I have a whole 2m long rack of original CD's, movies and games at home to prove it. As an example: I downloaded and finished the whole Warcraft 3 saga TWICE and after that I was still impressed enough to go buy the Warcraft 3 Warchest set, which today sits on that rack, still unpacked and in original wrapping.

Wrong again - it still depends on the individual person and his/her perception of worth.
My first incentive to actually buy something i have already downloaded is having the gratification that I can call myself a sensible pirate, the knowledge that I actually helped the artist and a fuzzy feeling each time I look at the original boxes on my rack.

I wanted to make a point about this the last time it came up. We have essentially decoupled the cost of a digital product from the product itself. You can get just about any digital product for free. Once we decouple that, we essentially have two prices: cost of the product (in material) and cost for supporting the people who made it.

For physical products, the first price is obvious: it's the price that will prevent the clerk from giving it to you. The second price is rather intangible and involves paying the clerk, paying the other people at the store, paying the truck driver to deliver it, paying the money for the driver's gas, paying some guy in the Northern Marianas for making it, paying the people who designed it...

For digital products, the first price is all easily ignored. You don't often think of the price for your internet connection, the price for the electricity, the price for the hosting service or any other less tangibles, but the second price is obvious: the price for the people to make your product.

People perceive these two prices to be out of sync for digital goods, so they simply look at the first price and decide what they should pay based on it (and the price they decide is zero dollars). The model for paying for things needs to be changed if we are going to have any success in digital goods. The way to do this, based on my own personal experience, and based on statements like the one by Nospheratu, is to appeal to patronage.

I will gladly pay for something if I know that it will support some artists whose work I want to see more of, but on the same side of the coin, I will (and have) refused to pay people for work that I don't want to see more of.

An example of the former is Penumbra and Amnesia. I downloaded the Penumbra Overture demo and loved it. I had to buy it to support you guys. Piracy was not an option for me at that point. Then, I preordered Amnesia because I wanted to support Frictional again. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I would rather have paid the full price as a preorder to be reimbursed after the release to make sure that you guys got enough money to make it.

An example of the latter would be the Animatrix. I hated the Matrix series (yes, even the first film), which I thought was just a poorly-executed, all flash and no substance exposition of some ideas that had been better explored in earlier films like Dark City and had been done to death in novels. Later, I found out that one of my favorite artists, Peter Chung, had done one of the bits in the Animatrix. I couldn't exactly pay for the lousy thing, because they wouldn't take it as an endorsement of Peter Chung, they'd take it as a vote for more things from the Wachowski bros., which would probably mean more Matrix-like crap. So I pirated it to make sure I didn't pay for it--not because I wanted it for free, but because I wanted to express my opinion of the work. Then, the Wachowski bros. made V for Vendetta, which was good enough that I was able to revise my opinion and rent a copy (see, happy ending; I paid for it in the end).

Whoever figures out how to make a new model for digital content will be a very rich man, but it cannot be the same model as the physical concept model. Physical concepts have a very strong physical rights management that makes a lot of natural sense in a way that digital rights management never can, and figuring out a way to make the digital price for patronage seem as natural and obvious as the physical price for ownage is pretty much the key to a successful digital economy. If we can figure out how to make that happen.

[Deu sex]

very long, but very interesting comment.

and you can now buy the game by mobile phone !

[hollowleviathan]

The problem with the patronage angle is that people will often and easily base their decision whether to purchase (patronize) at least partly on the perceived need of the artists. A well-off company will get less sympathy from pirates than, say, Amanita Design, makers of Machinarium. In the end it's either a flawed perception of entitlement (IE I'll pay when and if I want to spare the money), or a move towards videogames as financed without expectation of return by grants from wealthy philanthropists. Neither seems ideal.

[Spooder Wekd]

So you are saying you pirate stuff that is not worth your money, and that if something is obscenely popular and good and the devs dont need more money you actually buy it. So you would walk into a store and steal cheap toys because they arent worth buying? or you would rape a hooker because shes not hot enough to pay for? its the same EXACT thing. OKAY? So you are a pirate, a thief, a sinner, and a criminal. You are also a hypocrite. So shut your ignorant ass up and get out of the damned forums where real men belong. Wow you are a royal asshole

[Deu sex]

waw that was really hard !

I dislike piracy too ^^

but lot of my friends do this... I think a lot of people is not really consious of how it kills the videogame industry...

[hollowleviathan]

How can they be unaware of what widespread theft does to companies?

[mattwestwick]

This chap seems genuinely remorseful for having to pirate this game. Otherwise he wouldn't have posted here.

The most interesting point he makes is that there is no phsyical worth to the game. It's just data, a purely digital object: so doesn't deserve money. To assign worth to something digital you have to counterbalance it with something more traditionally assosciated with worth: status!

You can't show it to your friends, or watch as someone admires your copy of a game and this is a big part of consumerism. As it stands, Amnesia is a largely solitary creation. You can buy and play it, feeling that no one else knows you have it and that your purchase doesn't matter since there are in theory an infinite number of copies.

The interface in Steam counteracts this by displaying your accumulated wealth of products to friends and onlookers. Although all you have is another copy, it is another copy that someone else doesn't have! and it tells them when you are playing it and they are not! From this comes an emulated form of phsyical worth. Something that you can see! and something that is teased at others without it. No wonder steam is so efficient at digital distribution. They mimic the sensation of buying something shiny but without having to make a phsyical object.

Taking the traditional stance that amnesia should be a physical product is not the appropriate one.
Although hard to rationalise and comprehend: you do not pay frictional for their arrangement of ones and zeros. You pay them for the experience!

Simply because it is easy to steal from them, it does not make it any more forgiveable. It is all the worse that they refuse to take a militant stance on the theft of their creation as it means you are stealing from genuine hard-working people like this poster claims to be.

Pay them their dues. You will be a lot more content with yourself for doing this. It may seem like no big difference but for the sake of a few people typing a few words for you to change your mind, I think it is worth it.

[Spooder Wekd]

Wow, I really can't believe this guy comes on here admitting to stealing a game we all love and expects support? I hope he gets whats coming to him. Good to see others are as offended as I am!

[Nospheratu]

1st off: thanks for mentioning that Amnesia can now be bought via mobile phone - I'll check it out today and buy it. Next:

So you are saying you pirate stuff that is not worth your money, and that if something is obscenely popular and good and the devs dont need more money you actually buy it. So you would walk into a store and steal cheap toys because they arent worth buying? or you would rape a hooker because shes not hot enough to pay for? its the same EXACT thing. OKAY? So you are a pirate, a thief, a sinner, and a criminal. You are also a hypocrite. So shut your ignorant ass up and get out of the damned forums where real men belong. Wow you are a royal asshole
...
Wow, I really can't believe this guy comes on here admitting to stealing a game we all love and expects support? I hope he gets whats coming to him. Good to see others are as offended as I am!

Wait, what?
We must have some kind of misunderstanding here (not to mention a very angry & bitter guy at the other side). I never mentioned that I pirate stuff becouse it isn't worth my money - I'm saying this: If something catches my interest on the internet and I end up downloading it becouse of that, I will get the real product if the expirience of listening/watching/playing the product was worth it in my opinion; if not, I'll just delete it right away. My main point was that for this to happen one needs the right frame of mind, or better the common decency to go back and pay for the stuff you have enjoyed. Your hooker theory doesn't make any sense, but nvm
You should also read twice before you post hard insults like me being a pirate (although I admit that), a thief, a sinner (lucky for me I don't believe in hell ), a criminal and a hypocrite (thanks - look at me care for your opinion). I explicitly wrote that I didn't download/pirate it myself but got it from a friend who did just that (again - not trying to make excuses, simply telling the truth); if one of your friends stole a car and then lended it to you and you were cought by the police in it, what would you say: "I stole it" or "my friend stole it"?
As for the last part - where did you see that I wanted to get any support? I just wrote my PERSONAL (read the thread name) opinion on the part of the blog post regarding piracy, since while reading it I got the feeling that the perspective was quite generalized and I wanted to write my personal expiriences and opinions. I don't care what the general population thinks about this issue, but I DO care about what the 5 guys who made Amnesia think about this issue and that's why I wrote this post - to admit my part of the guilt and try explain from my side why this behaviour is hapenning. So you hope I get what's coming to me - and what is that? Are you going to call the internet police or pray that a rock falls on my head? Either way my comment to that is "whatever". Other posters, who you claim were as offended as you, actually wrote much more coherent and sensible posts instead of blind bashing and insulting, so kudos to them.

As for superluser's and mattwick's post, you raised a good issue - the "digital only" products which are becoming increasingly common in our modern age and have no tangible worth. I agree wholeheartedly with the opinion that with Amnesia "you don't pay for the product but for the expirience", and becouse my expirience with it was so good, i promised earlier that I'll buy it even if it would take me a few years to do (so yay for mobile phones). I just wanted to mention that in order for the various industries to go on, ALL have to change, not just the consumer or just the industry. The consumers and pirates should definitely develop a personal sense of decency towards the artist/product they enjoyed and be willing to play fair and pay for it but on the other hand the movie/game/music industry should also become more flexible and less harshly acccusing towards pirates. For the flexibility part Frictional's decision to work for minimal wages in order to finish a product is a good example - if they wouldn't yield, they wouldn't have made Amnesia and wouldn't ultimately receive their fair credit and praises. So what is better, not yielding to the new digital market mechanics and slowly sink, or rethink the situation, adapt and come out victorious? The nice Steam sales-mechanic explanation above is another such example and even better - it actually works in practice.

In my country there has recently been a great showcase regarding this issue: two music artists who are known to make very funny and satirical music, wanted to make a new CD but didn't have the money to do so. Since they knew they wouldn't get almost any money back from recording the CD (becouse of piracy), they made an arrangement with the biggest national milk company: the deal was that the company would pay for their CD which would include funny commercials about the company's milk and related products; they would also serve as their trademark models for a TV commercial and jumbo commercials. The best part is that the whole CD was never sold anywhere but is FREELY available in mp3 form from their website and the milk company's website. So what was the final take for the two artists, the company and the consumers?
The artists a) got their CD made, b) got a lot of screen time and advertisement, c) didn't earn any money but also didn't loose any money - but they gained many new listeners and fans and thus more potential for future earnings.
The milk company a) got 2 recognisable persons to make free commercials for them, b) got the best possible advertising on the CD, c) distributed these commercials to more people than they could in any other form - anyone could just download them for free and did so hapilly (if you see commercials on the TV, you mostly just change the chanel).
Us listeners a) got a very good CD for FREE, b) laughed our ass off on account of all the funny comercials on it and c) developed a new special fondness towards the 2 artists and the company who helped them.

So there you go - everybody CAN be a winner, all it takes is some thinking outside of the box I'll leave this thread on this note, see you around.

EDIT: I checked the mobile payment option and found out that "there are currently no payment options available for your country", so I'll check back regularly to purchase the game when it becomes available. 20$ is equivalent to about 14€, which is definitly worth it, so it's safe to say that I'll keep my promise.