Super Meat Boy is a well regarded platformer created by two men, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, calling themselves Team Meat. The duo seems to think that piracy will eventually lead to sales and other developers are spending far too much cash trying to prevent it.
On a recent DarkZero podcast the team addressed the idea of game piracy and made it very clear that they could care less that people are stealing their game. "Our game was hugely pirated -- we don’t f#cking care," said Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillen. The guys went on to point out that people are playing their game regardless of how they acquired it, “If there are let’s say 200,000 copies of Super Meat Boy that are getting passed around for free, that’s 200,000 people who are playing the game."
McMillen strongly believes that pirated copies of the game will eventually come back around to a sale one way or another. "If they like this game there’s a really high probability of their friends coming around and seeing it or them posting about it on their blogs. And it’s not cool to go round and say I really like this game that I stole, so they’re not going to say that. So it’s going to come around to sales."
From the sound of things Team Meat is not at all interested in even attempting to protect their games from being pirated. McMillen and Refenes made the point that companies are spending a great deal of money preventing people from pirating games and even then folks find ways around it. The Team Meat standpoint is why bother, eventually we'll get a sale.
The way Team Meat is painting this is interesting because they are actually relying on shame to loop piracy back around to sales. The guys feel that people will eventually feel guilty for pirating a game or they will download it to try it out and then decide it is worth a buy. That's kind of like saying piracy is just fine as long as you eventually feel bad about it and buy the game.
McMillen claims this guilt is really common, "The majority of emails that we get that revolve around piracy are people saying, 'I just want to get this off my chest, I stole your game when it came out because I wasn't sure about it and I really, really, really love it and so I bought it because I feel really guilty.' This is a common email."
The real question here is does that guilt apply when it isn't a very small developer trying to keep their heads above water? Would a consumer feel the same kind of guilt over pirating Call of Duty: Black Ops as they did Super Meat Boy? It doesn't necessarily make sense for all developers to just drop DRM and see if it comes back around to sales. The public perception of a publisher likely factors into whether or not someone will feel guilty for pirating a game. The other factor here is cost. The more a game costs to make the more difficult it is to recoup those costs, which means every pirated copy that doesn't become a sale is damaging.
The response of other indie game developers to Team Meat's declaration that they don't care about piracy will be interesting to track. Will other companies be swayed by the idea that guilt over piracy will drive sales or will the industry hold fast to fighting against piracy at any cost?
