Finally I have to ask. What is your take on piracy? Specifically people illegally downloading and using programs that are normally to be paid for.
It is just an interesting topic that I like to hear different developers opinions on.
I think I've written snippets about this elsewhere but maybe not all together.
First, there are two levels of piracy. Level 1 is the normal stuff we think about. Some dude pirates the game for his own use or to pass around to his friends. Level 2 piracy is where someone sells illegal copies of the game.
Level 1 piracy is bad but mostly because of inertia. The mistake is believing that a pirate is a missed customer. It's not like stealing a physical item that not only deprives you of that sale but the real sale of the physical item to a paying customer. There is no tangible product here and an extra download costs me basically nothing. So it's only the initial missed sale that is in discussion.
Pirates don't really buy games and you will be unlikely to convert them to customers because of that. Moreover, the harder you make a game to pirate the more of a challenge it will be... the pirating becomes the game to them. I don't really want to play that game.
But, if level 1 piracy is rampant then you risk cases where your game is easier to pirate than it is to buy and play. Games with heavy DRM, or that require "phoning home", etc. are more ripe for potentially legitimate customers trying out a cracked version that they found somewhere. So that's the inertia I was talking about.
In my opinion, a game on one side needs to make sure that it is as easy as possible for honest, law-abiding players to pay for that game. And on the other side, it needs to make it inconvenient to casually pirate it... either through value-added accounts or just the most basic copy protection. For the average user, it needs to be easier to buy than to pirate it and it needs to be reasonably priced. Mythruna will go with the "value-added" account approach. With luck, it's also relatively uninteresting to pirate and so you won't find a cracked version of your game on every warez site in the world.
Level 2 piracy is outright theft and covered by any number of real criminal laws including fraud, misrepresentation, etc.. These are the easier ones to prosecute because there is a money trail... well, if it's done in a country where the legal system can handle such things. (And if not, you are in a similar situation to level 1 piracy anyway. Someone buying your game for pennies isn't going to be able to afford a many dollar price tag.)
This post from Wolfire games really resonated with me:
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracyIt nicely stated (with numbers in some cases) the way I've felt about this for a long time.
