There’s a Lot To Learn from Piracy and Pirates, Good Old Games Believes

Piracy on the PC platform has once again become a talked about topic, thanks to inflammatory comments from Ubisoft, but Good Old Games’ Trevor Longino believes the industry can learn a lot from the mechanics of PC games piracy and from pirates themselves.

Ubisoft once again baited PC gamers with some harsh comments about the PC edition of I Am Alive and how players want it to be made only to pirate the title instead of buying it for consoles.

These sort of comments aren’t really helping resolve the issue of piracy, which instead needs to be examined and even studied by games publisher in order to figure out ways of stopping it.

Trevor Longino from Good Old Games, the PC digital distribution service focused on delivering classic titles, without any sort of anti-piracy DRM (Digital Rights Management) software, believes there’s a lot to learn from the phenomenon of piracy.

"By focusing on piracy as the evil enemy of PC gaming", he told GamersMint, "the industry loses sight of two things: first of all, pirates are better at distributing games than many companies are. Why else would someone risk getting malware or a virus on their computer from a torrent, except that they've made it simpler to get a game through pirates than it is through traditional digital distribution?”

“There are definitely things that we can learn from how simple it is to pirate a game compared to purchasing it, installing the client, patching the game, patching the client, activating it, activating the online component, and then-finally!–being able to play."

The second major piece of information gained from studying piracy is that you can’t really stop it altogether, but you can make your game so filled with content that users won’t want to illegally download it.

"People pirate," Longino continues. "They do, and you can't stop that. What you can do-what survey after survey shows-is create enough value in the offer of your game that people buy it anyway. The first exposure these people had to GOG.com came through illegal free copies of the games we sell, and they found our offer so compelling that they sign up and buy from us."

This open mentality, plus the DRM-free nature of GOG’s content will certainly help the service grow next year, when it plans to start adding new games besides its classic offers.