Pirates are heroes! Swashbucklers sailing on Nintendo’s Blue Ocean, they stand against unreasonable DRM, price gouging, distributor hegemony, and all that corporate bad stuff. That is, unless you happen to have released a DRM-free, cheap, independant game called World of Goo. In that case, they’re just thieves.

2D Boy (via Twenty-Sided), developers of the excellent tower construction game, have conducted an informal survey that compares the number of sales they’ve made to the number of IP addresses registering scores on their leaderboards. After doing some reasonable stats, they estimate the piracy rate for World of Goo is 82%. Put another way, only 18% of the players are actually paying for their game. The developers admit that it’s a rough estimate, but not an unreasonable one. So maybe most pirates aren’t so romantic as the vocal pirates would have you believe.

On the other hand, if you take from this that DRM is important to protect developers, that’s wrong too. 2D Boy also points out that a DRM-protected game, Ricochet Infinity, actually suffers a piracy rate of 92%. Adding insult to injury is the fact that pirates only rarely convert to paying paying customers. Although it’s difficult to make direct comparisons between different games with different audiences and market awareness, it’s difficult to ignore those numbers.

So if you happen to be a games distributor reading this news/review blog, ask yourself what you’re getting in exchange for the money and consumer goodwill you spend on DRM. On the other side of the fence, if you’ve pirated World of Goo and liked it, show 2D Boy $20 of your love.

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Tags:   2D Boy · DRM · piracy · World of GooNo Comments

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