It's good that you mentioned secondary and tirtiary markets. In a lot of places like South America for instance, the Black Market is the ONLY market for a lot of games, or at least the only remotely affordable one. Valve even talked about this too.

In a recent interview Gabe talked about how people warned them agaisnt bringing Steam to Russia - saying they'd just get pirated. Now Russia is on track to become Steam's biggest market in Europe.

The bottom line, Charles, is that you're never going to stop people from sharing their culture and from feeling a need and want to participate in their culture. We can have a moral discussion about that, sure, but that wouldn't be specific to video games. And, ultimately, your article is framed with the perceived harm that piracy has on business.

Developers and publishers almost always use piracy as a scapegoat to explain poor sales performances. It's a nice, seemingly intuitive story, but they have no hard data that supports the hypothesis that piracy reduces sales. (Unfortunately, most of the studies on piracy focus on music, but they don't show any correlation between file-sharing and sales.)

There's a growing realization that developers don't need to implement DRM at all (and doing so may be detrimental to their businesses). Other content industries have already realized this (music now comes largely DRM-free in digital form; DVDs and blu-rays release with a digital copy in the box, thus removing the need for paying customers to download a copy for easier formatting shifting).

The games industry is still woefully behind the curve in many ways...even marching headstrong into the abyss.

A major problem with piracy is that it leaves the publisher no control over who benefits from its product. Games are a value; they make people's lives better and easier. No game developer with any self-respect wants his hard work to give aid and comfort to the people tearing him down.

It is impossible to believe that pirating doesn't damage sales, regardless of a lack of quantification, but even considering that as the only issue is grossly myopic. I'd burn and delete every piece I've ever published before I'd let them be used without my permission to support my detractors. 

Also, I wasn't aware people needed to steal in order to share their culture. I tell my friends about the music and games I like with nary a theft.

Rob, the fundamental issue is that pirates (and those who support and apologize for them) feel that content, once created, immediately joins the public domain/culture/society at large. In this view, content always belongs to society, not to the content creators. So naturally, if an individual can't afford it, claims he can't afford it, or just doesn't feel like paying for it, then he should be entitled to it, anyway. Why else do people deserve to have access to games which they haven't paid for (and aren't part of a company promotion)?

It's not about DRM, which I feel is ineffective and anti-consumer. Like Charles said, it's about why companies feel it’s necessary to implement such draconian measures. Ubisoft’s statements on piracy were less-than-eloquent. But their choice to refrain from releasing a specific PC game is a pragmatic business decision. If they feel that the game won't be profitable enough because too many potential consumers pirate rather than purchase it, then their decision is a monetary one. They're not trying to make a moral or political point.

The bottom line is that, given the opportunity to get something for free or pay for it, many people will disregard moral concerns and take it for free. This is my opinion, but it is no less factual than the supposition that pirates were never going to purchase the games in the first place (instead of choosing the free over the paying option).

Hm. This is exactly why I originally intended to refrain from commenting on this...this article (and your comments) are propping up a strawman argument that aims to paint opponents of locking down and privatizing our culture-at-large into a corner of defending piracy and theft.

Sorry, folks. I've played that game one too many times, and I don't have the patience anymore. I'm out.

I know you're gone, so this is for the benefit of others reading this. 

What alternative could there possibly be to the allegedly false dichotomy presented here? 

Savillo suggests that he doesn't want to "privatize" culture, but ALSO that he doesn't support theft and piracy. This issue is black and white. 

Either people are free to dispose of their contributions to their culture as they wish, or they are not and others may make us of those contributions without the permission of the contributors. It is false and impossible that there should be any middle ground here. 

The choice that confronts you is: protect property rights (including intellectual) or endorse theft and abdicate your claim to be a protector of any kind of rights. 

" I'd burn and delete every piece I've ever published before I'd let them be used without my permission to support my detractors." This is the problem with the approach of Ubisoft and a lot of other companies regarding the PC: they place a higher importance on stopping piracy than selling copies. Is it better to sell a million copies of a game with 5 million pirate downloads, or sell no copies with no pirate downloads? Sometimes not selling a product to a certain market won't even prevent piracy. Every time a big Japanese game get's passed over for English localization, someone puts out a pirate version with a fan translation. There's also the world of emulation and the unique case of Taito Type X2 games: An arcade ROM dump of King of Fighters XIII ended up playable on PC, so SNK had to add value to the eventual console version like new characters and DLC. And it shouldn't be wrong to have to add value to a game to prevent piracy. That's just how the market is now and publishers need to adapt to it. The best way is to add value that physically can't be pirated: services like Steam and XBL, or DLC or a heavy online focus, etc. There's little if any justification for piracy (except maybe if you live in a region where something isn't available), but that's not the issue. The issue is that companies like Ubisoft are fighting it the wrong way. There's no way to completely stop piracy of a static digital product. All DRM will eventually be cracked. If people want to pirate they will pirate, so why not dissuade them from wanting to pirate?

Yes, why not dissaude them from wanting to pirate by cracking down in the courts instead of rewarding them for bad behavior? 

I don't say you shouldn't produce anything that has any chance of being stolen whatever, but when the theft is as pervasive as it is in the video game, movie and music industries, there's a point at which you have to get the message across that you won't accept these losses even if your monetary gains outweigh them, and if people don't change their ways, you won't be providing them anything further to pilfer. 

Adding un-piratable value to a product isn't rewarding bad behavior, it's rewarding those who legally buy the product. Going to courts in ways like SOPA run the risk of, once again, punishing your legal customer base AND probably failing to stop piracy. Have we even gone into how relatively little Steamworks games get pirated compared to other PC games?

A court crackdown would cost far more than the act of pirating does, and that cost would be factored down - once again - to the paying customer.

As far as I'm concerned, if your fight against piracy is punishing your paying customer, you're doing it completely wrong. Who punishes the people that pay their wages for NOT stealing? It makes no sense at all.

Why not just add something of value that is impossible to pirate?

There are only so many ways I can say this: 

1. You don't add value to or lower prices of PC games because that rewards the *threat* of piracy. Maybe you do it if you have to, but the point is you shouldn't have to and it shouldn't be taken as anything other than ill-gotten gains.

2. Retaliation has a cost. Its value is deterrence. This will outweigh the court costs in the long run. 

In reference to number 2, here's where you're going wrong, and I don't completley blame you, because it's what you were taught, at least if you were schooled in America:

You're thinking pragmatically, or narrowly and short-term. You're doing a cost-benefit analysis of *right now*, because who knows what will happen in the future?

I know. If you consistently crack down, you won't have to do it for long. You will save enormously in the long run by acting on principle. Pragmatism is not practical. 

If your policy worked, Hitler would have graciously accepted the Sudetenland and retired to Germany forever. 

Again no. You make it sound as if piracy is an organized group demanding value or else. This is just stupid. Adding value is a company trying to determine when people who want to spend their money will spend their money. You are effectively saying sales are a direct result of shoplifting. If you really believed the simplistic objectivist view point exspoused on your Ayn Randian love-blog then you wouldn’t want government interfering with business in any way. Ubi is following through with this idea by attempting to protect their IP themselves. They don’t seem to realize that their strategies only hurt their customers and ultimately themselves. As for your “retaliation” theory, trying taking it to the Pacific Rim or Eastern Europe see how far it gets.

1. It's the cheapest, easiest option that rewards sales and doesn't punish the wrong people. To a business, that has to be infinitely better than spending vast sums of money and/or criminalising the people that pay their wages. I don't see how you can disagree.

2. Actually, I studied business and computing in Cambridge, UK. There are tens of thousands of people in this country not paying rent and not being kicked out, because court costs are too high. If they're too high to consider recovering tens of thousands of pounds, then no one in their right mind is going to take millions of people to court over £10.

"If you don't want what you've made to be experienced by everyone then do not produce anything."

Don't act baffled when nothing is produced. 

Nonsense and hokum. Humans expressed themselves creatively before there was such a thing as Pay-Per-View and they will continue to do so through whatever medium is most appealing to them. How much have you payed to view the Mona Lisa? According to your logic everyone who sees it should pay a fee and the money should go to Da Vinci's estate. Oh wait there is no such thing. Type fan fiction into a search engine. How many of those works were for profit? I'd wager if any of it were behind a pay-gate interest would drop to almost nothing. Free flash games, F2P microtranaction MMOs, Flat out free indie games and useful applications are multitude. These were made for an uncountable number of reasons. Some are hoping to garner good will and eventual customers. Some did it just for the doing. Some were probably obeying the voices in their heads. Ubi can continue to stamp their feet and scream "NO ACCESS! NO ACCESS!" because of some affluent kid in suburbia torrenting and some middle aged guy with a burner in India selling bootlegs, but then you shouldn't be surprised when former customers call them bastards and drop support.