Games industry: Making the piracy problem worse

[Len]

10 Years Ago This Month: Some publishers look at the recording industry's disastrous reaction to file-sharing and basically copy it

The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.

A Pirate's Life For Us

It's hard to find a facet of the games industry that hasn't undergone some drastic changes in the past decade, but one that doesn't get enough attention is the nature of piracy. It's still around, of course, but the advent of free-to-play games has taken away much of the incentive to pirate while the ubiquity of constantly connected devices has given platforms and publishers more tools to verify the people playing their games are doing so legitimately.

10 years ago, piracy was a much more pressing topic, especially as the music industry's Napster-induced upheaval was still fresh in everyone's minds. The music industry's reaction to piracy made a bad problem worse, yet there were some in games who wanted to copy it for their own anyway.

For example, the Entertainment Software Association tapped the Recording Industry Association of America's senior VP of litigation and legal affairs Kenneth Doroshow to be its general counsel. Doroshow's RIAA tenure came during a span when the trade group filed suit against 35,000 individual people for pirating music online in a public relations nightmare that generated headlines about how the group was suing single mothers, children, people with serious disabilities, and in one case, a dead woman. (The group said it would be changing its tactics several months' after Doroshow's departure.)

Fortunately, the ESA did not onboard the RIAA's tactics along with Doroshow. However, a group of European game developers and publishers saw what the RIAA had been doing and apparently thought, "That sounds good to us," threatening to sue 25,000 people identified as file-sharing their games unless they coughed up £300 in restitution. That group included Atari, Codemasters, Reality Pump, Techland, and Topware Interactive.

Then-EA Sports boss Peter Moore played the voice of reason in response to those threats, saying, "I'm not a huge fan of trying to punish your consumer. Albeit these people have clearly stolen intellectual property, I think there are better ways of resolving this within our power as developers and publishers.

"Yes, we've got to find solutions. We absolutely should crack down on piracy. People put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into their content and deserve to get paid for it. It's absolutely wrong; it is stealing.

"But at the same time, I think there are better solutions than chasing people for money. I'm not sure what they are, other than to build game experiences that make it more difficult for there to be any value in pirating games."

And that's pretty much what EA and a lot of other developers and publishers have done. Even Atari and its fellow litigious game makers quietly dropped their pursuit of individuals a few months later.

A decade on, we're still writing stories about the cat-and-mouse games between hackers and publishers, but we're also running stories about reports that find piracy doesn't hurt sales, or developers who pirate their own game rather than see it benefit key resellers.