iGame Radio

You know that someone has fallen to the lowest of lows when they steal a luxury for a penny. No one can say that video games are a necessity in life. You can’t eat them. You can’t put them over your head to keep out the chill and protect you from the elements. You can’t drink them to stay hydrated. So, buying them means that you’ve decided you have enough of your necessities and have enough left over to get a luxury or two.

When a company like Wolfire Games, in conjunction with a bunch of other awesome companies, decides to offer the work that they have sweated over for whatever price you want to pay…basically, a penny…and you steal it anyway? That’s pretty pathetic. And yet, this is what Wolfire has found is happening with the Humble Indie Bundle.

Wolfire has determined that about 25% of the Humble Indie Bundles that are downloaded are “pirated”. This is in quotes for good reason, because, as they have mentioned, it’s hard to tell whether all of the bundles that are being downloaded but don’t seem to be associated with a payment are in fact pirated bundles. Here are some of the reasons:

1. There are some assumptions made to come to the conclusions regarding how much is being downloaded. For example, Wolfire assumes that not everyone has downloaded their games immediately upon purchase/gifting, and so assumed that the total bandwidth couldn’t be divided by the size of the bundle itself (plus the Samorost 2 game) to get the total number of downloaders. This is a valid assumption…after all, I myself have purchased a bundle early on, but haven’t downloaded a single game yet. The reason is that I wanted to wait until the server wasn’t being hit quite as hard, and during a weekend when I have more time. Plus, there is no way to know exactly when people started downloading the Samorost 2 game as well, or the exact percentage who are downloading right now as opposed to who aren’t, etc.

2. Some may be donating in a group manner, so it looks like one person donated a large amount, and then downloaded a lot of copies. In actuality, in this scenario, this one person is the point man, if you will, of a group that has donated because s/he is the only one with a PayPal account, for example. S/he downloads enough for all of the people who donated to the group fund. It’s still legitimate, but just doesn’t look so.

3. Some are from countries where financial processors that Wolfire is using are not available (PayPal, Amazon, Google Checkout). In this scenario, downloaders would pay for the bundle if they could, but can’t. They still want to enjoy the content, and feel it’s wrong to be denied this. Some may call this pirating, but I would add that if they can’t pay for it, then they can’t be considered legitimate purchasers that Wolfire is losing. I myself have been in this position before, and have in fact downloaded content that was not available in the States by license and I couldn’t pay for. Later, when it became available, I then turned around and paid for the domestic copy, because it was never my intent to steal from the content provider. I always wanted to make sure that they were paid for their work, when they could accept my money. However, taking content and then reselling it…that’s blatant theft.

Obviously, because there is no DRM and limited copy protection on the site, it is not that difficult for a pirate to download illegitimate copies of the bundle. And Wolfire doesn’t look at Bittorrent sites, either…just places like Steam, 4chan, etc where people are posting keys for free. Still, it’s surprising that the number of downloads that aren’t connected to a legitimate purchase are around 25%. And considering that some are most likely falling into one of the categories above, the number that could be considered real piracy is even lower. After hearing huge numbers like 90% piracy rate all of the time, this is a very different number, based on some more solid statistics.

What is Wolfire going to do about this? Hire a lawyer, trace IP addresses, implement DRM and copyright protection?

“No — we will just focus on making cool games, having great customer service, and hope for the best,” says Jeff from Wolfire. “It sure seems to be working right now!”

Yes, it sure seems to be. In less than 7 full days, the Humble Indie Bundle reached $1 million dollars for five games that have all been on the market for at the very least 1.5 years prior to the bundle, and you have a pretty awesome response from the gaming community to the support of two great charities and five great Indie game developers.

In a parting comment regarding piracy and DRM, Jeff added, “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.”