"Piracy. Irritating but can't do anything about it" Topic

Same day I ran a sale on my game, a thread pops up on one of the "chan" file sharing boards, asking for pirated copies.

Annoying as all hell but not a ton anyone can do.

The fact is, we live in a time, where any creative output (games, books, movies, software, music) is essentially free unless people elect to pay money for it. It's almost a patronage system at that point, ala Feudal Europe.

Heck, I wonder if an established author or company could do that: "world, Pay me X dollars a month and I'll make you all gaming material".

Mantic is largely doing this via Kickstarter.

Yup, KickStarter is the perfect place for this type of thing. If I make XXX dollars, I'll put out this game, then for each Y dollars, I'll put out this supplement/scenario book as a stretch goal.

Piracy is just one of those things that we have to live with as you can't do anything about it. The good news is that MOST gamers will pay you for the PDF's or books. Might be different if our main demographic was high school kids.

Just curious Weasel, but what's your game?

Look into Patreon.

Worth providing a link for Patreon:

patreon.com

I'm more familiar with it for webcomics and Youtube video creation, but it could theoretically work for game publishing as well.

It's the attitude that nothing can be done that causes it to be true.

Cuchulainn – this is it
link

And yeah, Patreon is interesting. You'd need quite a bit of weight behind your name though.

I spent a few hours this weekend tracking down idiots that scanned some of my books and uploaded the whole damn things into a "legit" file sharing site.

Ya gotta love them, they load even the page with the copyright info, and then post it as "non-commercial." Of course what I found was that of they do one, they tend to do batches of them (like entire runs of osprey books and such), and then they 'like' other scanned books their friends have added. So I then spent the time sending a lot of publishers I know e mails as to where they are.

It is a shame, just pay for the game!

Cheap bastards and thieves.

And people wonder why I don't send out electronic copies of my stuff and only send our hard copies. Chuckle, chuckle. They're usually too lazy to scan them even. I always know when I've got a thief on my hands. They never want to give me their postal address. I also design my games so they can't be played unless you make a few things, and that is usually that.

Talk to Sam Mustafa whose games are regularly pirated. He'll give you an earful. I don't like his games, but they are handsome and well done and he deserves to make his money.

I'm curious how many of you commenting have experience with those who pirate or don't? It's quite an interesting and nuanced subject matter.

Certainly those I know who have pirated wargame pdfs do so to support an unsustainably large library of similar products, none of them legitimate (not to mention the other collections of pirated media). They clearly wouldn't have been able to buy all these things, so their consumption and collection habits have been changed by the very presence of the internet and whats on it.

I sometimes wonder what, if anything, they would buy if things were different. The way forwards is more or less sites such as WargameVault, because you can see the things that Steam has done for legitimate sales of computer games and that kind of model has to be the way forwards. Print on demand might be a good option too, provided you can keep the file from leaking.

A lot of them are likely "collectors" who take pride in the size of their collection, with a lot less actual use for it.

It would be interesting to determine how much effect piracy actually has on the publishing industry.

Would the people downloading books buy more books without free downloading or would they instead use library services more often? Has there ever been a study or marketing investigation done to quantify the effects?

I hope a wargaming version of Steam is not the answer. They are the reason I stopped playing PC based videogames. Some of us don't have high speed internet connections, which means anything accessed through Steam is effectively unaccessable. I'd hate to see printed wargaming materials go that route.

In the Barbary Pirate Wars, razing everything (pirates, ships, harbors, dockworkers, etc.) to the ground worked well. Perhaps we should give that another run …

Not to condone this behavior, but I suspect very, very few actual sales are lost because of this. Some folks just love to grab "free" stuff, and if it wasn't (illegally) free, they probably wouldn't bother acquiring it. Similarly, I doubt very many ever even use these items.

Being a person who works on intellectual property, I can say this is a very real problem in the world. And as to authors doing pay as you go? One of the biggest names out there, Stephen King, tried it and gave up pretty quick since it wasn't generating much return on investment for him. If he couldn't make it work, doubtful anyone can. And, for the record, no, I don't like his work – too 'seven year old' for me (not the subject, the writing style).

Rebmarine -

Sorry to hear that Steam wasn't for you. The unfortunate truth is that that's the direction that many industries seem to be headed down.

At least Steam lets you go offline with ease, engage in library sharing and a number of other helpful features. Wargames Vault is an even more benign system and I'm happy with my purchases through them and their affiliates.

Onebookshelf (Wargame vault/rpgnow) also has the advantage of basically being everything Amazon was supposed to be for self-publishing.

This is a bit off-topic I guess, but it's insane how much friendlier to the creator they are.

edit: I made another thread about that instead.

And as to authors doing pay as you go? One of the biggest names out there, Stephen King, tried it and gave up pretty quick since it wasn't generating much return on investment for him. If he couldn't make it work, doubtful anyone can.

Sorry for the late reply, I've been busy teaching a week long grad class on creativity and innovation.

Thinking Steven King can change modern publishing habits is like asking the Rolling Stones to change the way music was delivered. The music industry wasn't transformed from within by stalwart talent trying something new, it was re-imagined by a geek with a vision. The pulp publishing industry just hasn't brought it to the masses in the same way yet, but it's coming.

There's also a question of expectations. If Kings book made him 30 grand would he be satisfied?
Would someone else?