Software piracy isn't only about cost savings, it's about convenience, as a group of independent game developers are learning the hard way.
Last week, the developers launched a promotion dubbed the "Humble Indie Bundle." It includes five games -- now six -- for any price of the buyer's choosing. Part of the proceeds are also set aside for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play, and buyers could even specify how much of their payment, if any, would go to these organizations and how much would go to the game developers.
But even with the pay-what-you-want model, Wolfire Games' Jeff Rosen estimated that a quarter of Humble Indie Bundle downloads were pirated, using key links distributed at 4chan and other Internet forums.
As it stands, the games do not use DRM, and Rosen said there's not much the developers can do stop the piracy without affecting the people who paid generously for the games. "When considering any kind of DRM, we have to ask ourselves, 'How many legitimate users is it ok to inconvenience in order to reduce piracy?' The answer should be none," Rosen wrote in a blog post.
Rosen simply asked that people who are pirating the game do so on BitTorrent instead of eating the developers' bandwidth. And he asked that people spread the word about the bundle even if they paid nothing for it themselves.
There are several possible explanations for why people pirated the bundle. Some users may live in a country where the bundle's payment options aren't accepted, or they may be sharing the games with their friends after making one large donation instead of several separate ones. And some people may just like the idea of being pirates. But the most logical explanation is that downloading games by clicking a link is a lot easier than walking through an entire payment process. Convenience is key.
Perhaps there's a lesson here. You often hear complaints that blame piracy on a sense of entitlement in the Internet age, but perhaps deterring piracy is as simple as creating better, more convenient ways to pay.
