I thought this was a joke, but subsequent posts seem to indicate that this is to be taken seriously. You've got to be kidding!

I speak as one whose salary is comes 100% through charitable donations (I am the pastor of a church). And I've got to tell you ... even with people who claim that God is #1 in their lives, you get a *lot* of "free riders" who will gladly take all that you provide without giving a bit of support.

So actually, the whole issue does come down to an issue of morality and ethics. Yes, there will always be "pirates" (another word for "theives") who will dishonestly take what they want at the expense of others. Stardock's "gamble" with no copy protection is counting on there being enough honest people to pay for the product. They are perhaps banking on their "we trust you" policy to influence borderline pirates into becoming honest purchasers. They are also hoping that rewarding honest people will engender a long-term trust in them as a company. To the degree that it is succeeding (and, happily, it seems to be succeeding), it is because there is a good number of people who are honest or who want to be honest. Apart from that, it would not work.

So, Brad and crew, thank you for your approach, and I wish you continued success. I am doing two things to support you:
1) Buying your products (I just got SOASE -- good job!)
2) Continuing to preach "Thou Shalt Not Steal!!!"

One thing I've learned from economics.

The difference in choice between $2.00 and .01 is much smaller then the difference between $1.99 and free.

People tend to light up at free.

As for Stardock customers being different. Perhaps GCII customers are more affluent and therefore the opportunity cost of purchasing legitimately is lower?

Like I said before charity isn't the only income source. In the world of software there are also support contracts, customized versions (e.g. client specific extensions, integration with other products) and so on.



The question shouldn't be about the moral and ethical implications of piracy. Instead one should question whether it's ethical to demand much money for a product that has zero long-term costs for the individual copy.

Take a real, physical product. It costs an amount of X for development and further improvements. In addition, each copy costs an amount of Y as physical labor is involved.
After the initial investment has payed off, product price gets close to production costs, as otherwise someone else would sell a cheaper product.

Now take software and other forms of so-called "intellectual property": It costs X for development and maintenance. Each copy costs exactly nothing. After initial investment has payed off, price stays high. And nobody can sell the same for less, as patent and copyright prevents it. As an example why this is bad, have a look at the music industry. They are still making profit out of music that got written 50 or more years ago. The original artists are long gone yet that cash cow gets milked endlessly. Doesn't seem right to me.

I thought that argument was a load of BS myself. I play FPS and RPGs as well as RTS and TBS, the reason I've bought Stardock's products is a combination of them having great games, having great support for those games and being anti-copy protection.

I honestly doubt that strategy gamers are more affluent/more honest/less tech savvy or whatever crappy reason people are trying to blame Stardock's success on. Stardock is successful because they have a great product and they support and respect their customers AND potential customers.

I didn't play any of ILE's games but from reading the reviews I highly doubt they reached the same level of depth and originality as those from SD, to quote the first review of TQ I read: "There's no way around it: Titan Quest, like its source material, is all about clicking on monsters until they die and seeing what flies out of their bodies afterwards". I can't remember reading anything this negative about Galactic Civ.

On top of this, they have copy protection working against them by both inconveniencing their existing customers and scaring off potential customers.

It's always sad to see a game developer go under, but in the end it's not just the industry that's to blame.

I bought stardocks games, both the originals..

Why? because I pirated them and LOVED them.. they have built up a trust for making a good playing game.

Would I pirate again?

No, and for a few reasons,

1 demos are easy to download, yes it may take a hour, but you know # 2 wont bite you. and it gives you a good chance to see the game out.

2 Sadly the state of the no-cd fixes and such are no longer safe, it used to be that you could download a crack for photoshop or the game of the week.

Nowadays you are likely to get that crack, but you don't realize you are now a spambot... or someone is looking at your keystrokes, stealing your identity and bank info.

3 I realize that if I support good games and music, I feel better.

4 The industry has CHANGED, its not just stardock, there is steam/valve (never tried them)
Music and Movies are available via Itunes/netflix/Amazon at a DECENT price.
You have such variety to purchase from its SCARY..


So would I pirate? not again, and i will never recomend the "warez" scene to anyone because of the security issues that they will ALWAYS have.

I don't believe those statistics on piracy for a second. I don't know a single person who pirates PC games. I'd be surprised if it was even 10%. I know quite a few with chipped consoles though.

Yeah, I didn't even get into that. I simply don't believe that 90% of the copies out there are illegal. Maybe in some country where the game isn't published or has no history of copyright laws, but not in the vast majority of the first world.

That number is distinctly less than credible, at least in the first world. I understand piracy is rampant in Asia and eastern Europe, though.

Why is it potentially unethical for a producer to set a price for a product that isn't necessary to human survival, i.e. food, water, shelter? Planned economy folks buy into the idea that someone other than the producer should set a "reasonable" price for a product. That kind of populist thinking will actually get you less of what you desire. The more you try to restrict a producer's ability to charge a price set by a lawful free market the less product you'll get or the lesser quality of the product.

The late Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize winning economist) pointed out that there is a cost for the lack of trust between buyers and sellers in any economy. The greater the lack of trust the greater the cost to the economy. For example, let's say we have an apple seller. Now this apple seller fears being robbed or killed if the apples are out on display, because it’s happened to other apple vendors. This will drive apple sellers out of the market. In the meantime apple prices will go up. If prices go high enough, the apple seller will be able to hire/invest in a response to the apple thieves/killers. Maybe it will be armed guards, maybe it will be some other security measure, but rest assured that whatever course of action is taken, it will have a cost that will be passed on to apple buyers. The problem is not the apple seller, nor the apple buyers, but the root of the problem is the apple thieves/killers. But when we don't see the apple thieves because they're prevented by the apple seller's security measures, we buyers complain that the apple seller is charging too high a price, that the seller's made enough money, that the threat isn't real, that the seller doesn't need armed guards protecting his apple stand, all the while not realizing that as soon as the armed guards are gone the thieves/killers will return. (yeah that's a long sentence)

So the same is true with software companies. If no one pirated software, it would have a lower cost. Why? Several reasons. 1) Less money spent coming up with ways to discourage piracy. 2) More money would be made by software vendors that in turn would cause greater competition (provided there is a low entry cost, which is the case for this industry, you don't have to build a $500 million production facility to get started). More competition means more products competing for your $$, which leads to increased supply, which leads to lower prices, which causes an equilibrium to occur related to the selling price of the product and its production cost.

And don't try using the argument that the pirate market is a free market, because it is not. There is no free/voluntary exchange between a buyer and seller at an agreed upon price. Why? Because there is no seller. There is however a victim of theft. And it doesn't matter that I've got a supposedly unlimited supply of apples. Why? Because if I don't sell enough apples to pay me enough to live on (or a sufficient return on investment), then I'll go into some other business or invest my money in some other business.

Theft/piracy, whatever you want to call it, it has a cost to the buyer and the seller for which neither was responsible. And if piracy helps get more people to buy the product then why don't developers just stop with the security measures and give their product away for free to everyone, or tell the pirates/thieves how to crack them? Why? Because that company will be out of business. It's not a viable business model. If it were, companies would be paying pirates to steal their product.

Now I agree that some security measures are less annoying than others to the buyer. Being strip searched at the apple stand is worse than being videotaped.

So I would like to ask the question a different way. Is it ethical for thieves/pirates to cause my cost to purchase a product to be higher? Is it ethical for thieves/pirates to decrease someone else's assets?

There is so much misinformation here, it's terrifying.

My background: I have been a cracker privately and very briefly for a large cracking group. I published a paper about cracking winzip on fravia's site, back when it was all about reverse engineering. I have legally cracked software for which my company no longer had the source in order to deal with a y2k issue. Sometimes I just crack something that's free just to see what kinds of fun things I can do by changing the machine code.

I am not a guru in this field, but I know my way around olly and IDA fairly well.

I pirate things. Many things. I pay for most everything I like, and I don't pirate anything that's easier to get legally. For me, it's not a bit about price vs. worth - it's about price vs. convenience. I bought the Orange box from valve because I could download it instantly. Torrents are slow as hell, especially for something that's still new. Easy sell for me. I subscribe to Netflix because the wait is about the same for downloading a movie, but I have guaranteed (or nearly) good quality, plus the new instant watch selection of TV isn't awful. I don't buy any music at all, but I legally listen to pandora.com because it's convenient and of decent enough quality.

I heard about the original GC when I was on a civ 3 forum bitching about the crappy AI (I pirated civ 3, then bought it when I liked it, just for the record). So I pirated GC1. I liked it, so I bought it. When I heard about GC2, I pirated it again. It didn't impress me terribly, but I noticed their policy was STILL to not have copy protection. So I paid $70 for 10 tokens and got the GC2 + DA combo and later TA. I grew to really enjoy GC2, which came as a surprise to me, because I bought it primarily to support a company that was doing the RIGHT THING. Not punishing the customers with BS copy protections. I will likely never pirate anything else from SD, because I trust their reputation.

Is piracy "right"? Definitely not. Is it a form of stealing? Absolutely. But we do it because we are lazy or we just don't trust that a piece of software is worth $50. When you remove those two factors, us middle-class pirates stop pirating.

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One huge misconception here is the idea that "most" cracks have trojans and spyware in them. A cracking group has a reputation to uphold. They do not take kindly when a member releases a crack with a virus or malware of any kind. They will boot that member if something like that occurs, possibly even the first time (depending on severity and whether the malware could have been an accident). The "scene" will stop trading with the group if the group is releasing bad cracks. The whole scene teams up to share pirated stuff - there are the suppliers, who get protected stuff up before it's available commercially, the server guys who run the FTP servers and supply bandwidth, the crackers, the DVD rippers, etc. Each one belongs to the "network" as a whole, and gets all the free stuff they could want in return for their services. A given cracking group needs to be releasing quality "goods" in order to stay on the network. It is not good for a group to get the boot. The group does not want this. It is in their best interest to release good stuff.

This is not to say software cracks don't go out with trojans in them - of course some do! But the vast majority (80-90%) do not.

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90% of worldwide users are pirates? BS, I say! Of course I cannot show evidence to refute this statistic, but let's think here. Say a game like The Sims 2, which sold around 13 million copies worldwide (so says Wikipedia). A game that popular and (dare I say it) that easy to crack, is likely to be on the higher end of piracy stats, so 90% works for me. This means that that game was pirated by nearly 120 MILLION people. To me that's a pretty outrageous figure for any game.

Additionally, there is literally no way to measure piracy. Pirates don't fill out "What did I pirate recently" on a census form. Torrent downloads can't easily be tracked as far as I know, and even if they could, they are fairly meaningless, as a single person may pirate the same thing three times in his life if his computer changes or hard drive fails or whatever. By the same token, those of us who download and later pay are technically pirates, but definitely not a lost sale. I stole Civ 3, liked it, and paid - that download may have looked like piracy, but a week later I was a paying customer.

And you can't always be sure of piracy. I played Knights of the Old Republic 2 all the way through, but never bought it - a friend loaned me the original CDs he purchased. That's a "lost sale" by the same definition as piracy is. If a survey were taken of how many people played KoToR 2 vs. how many bought it, my figure would look like piracy. But it was 100% legit. By the same token, my friend loaned me some TV shows on DVD, but I preferred my computer for viewing (call me nutty, but really I'm just terribly lazy), so I torrented them even though I had the legit DVDs sitting on my desk the whole time. Is that piracy? I have no idea.

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Another misconception is that stardock customers are somehow "different" than other customers. Not at all true. The success of valve's steam should be an indicator to anybody who isn't whining about their failure of a company that FPS players are keen on paying for quality games if it's convenient. If a game is released today on Steam, I can get it today. Waiting for a crack may take several days, and I'll pay rather than wait, if I'm actually interested in the game.

And Titan Quest... come on. That game failed because it was just another D2 clone. Nothing special about that game, at least in terms of the initial impression it gives, and reviews (both critic and "normal" people). I couldn't even bring myself to spend the time downloading. May not have been a bad game, but it just wasn't something that the market was craving.

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Piracy helped Iron Lore close down? BS! I don't know any of my pirate friends who were any more interested in their games than I was! The studio just wasn't producing anything groundbreaking, and in the harsh game development world, you have to do something that's going to get attention!

Stardock has the most in-depth 4X game I've ever seen. And their copy protection model has attracted a ton of free attention. PR is good, so doing things that surprise people always helps. I bet SD wouldn't be as successful if they did the traditional copy protection model.

Additionally, if IL was writing such devious copy protections into their games that they would just do a crash to desktop, they paved the way for their own funeral. Copy protections of all sorts have proven time and again that they "detect piracy" in the honest people from time to time. So some of those "pirates" the article talks about almost certainly were legitimate customers. And by making a few legit users' lives hell, they deserved the backlash of angry pirates whose complaints were perfectly valid. Remember, software engineers are very far from perfect. We make some of the stupidest mistakes. We are some of the most absent-minded people. If a simple game like GC1 can be buggy on 1-2% of the install base, imagine how buggy the really "clever" copy protection schemes can be.

The CD protections of the late 90s were so bad, some companies actually GAVE AWAY a no-cd patch (Firaxis on Civ 3, for instance) on request.

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Piracy will not stop through a "please respect us" effort. It will not stop through triple-layered DRM. There is no way to stop a pirate. Hardware can be bypassed, software can always be cracked. Nothing can stop piracy, and the only thing that truly slows it down is convenience. The majority of people I know who pirate things (say 10 or so who I actually talk to about these issues) have a hard time justifying a weeklong torrent download if a little cash will get them what they want instantly. Steam, SDCentral, iTunes, etc.

Note that Amazon.com is selling DRM-free music now. Pirates love that. Not to help us pirate more stuff, but because we value our "rights". Kind of perverse, eh?

Stardock has proven that making something easy to steal doesn't equate to an incredible increase in piracy. They have proven in my case that making it more convenient to buy than steal means a gained sale, even if stealing was easy and far cheaper.

I believe Valve is proving the same thing with Steam. It has an internet component, but that can be disabled once you "activate" the product once.

Amazon's DRM-free MP3s are proving that music that has no security isn't destroying the music industry.

Companies aren't going to get on board quickly, but it is something they're seeing. The majority of copy protected software is copy-protected for one main reason - the vendors of copy protection have amazing ways of "proving" that (a) piracy is at 90% worldwide, and ( their protection will slow down that piracy greatly. Both assertions are flat-out lies.

So the real question you should ask about ethics is quite simply, how wrong is it for a company to lie so much that they increase their client's customer's costs while providing no benefit to the client? Your apple stand shouldn't be paying 10% of its income to hire long-term security guards who are only able to protect your apples for a day.

Wow. That thread was started less then a week ago and it already has 20+ pages of text? Reminds me of that quote, "never discuss religion or politics in polite company". I guess piracy would also fit the bill nicely . Everyone seems to have such a deadset opinion on it. Those who disagree get decapitated and burned at the stake, or at the very least, drawn into 500+ post arguments.

Well, in case anyone cares, hes my opinion on it. I'll try and keep it short . People need more responsibility. Piracy is a very good way to reward good games. Companies have to maintain a level of quality since they can no longer rely on flashy graphics and a marketing campaign to boost sales since the full game is right there. If its bad, everyone who played it won't buy it.

The problem is people are lazy. Once you have it, even if you really liked it, its very hard to convince yourself to actually go out and get it. Why should you spend money on someone you already enjoyed? Many people fool themselves into thinking "well if they added this or had that, then i would have bought it" when its just because they can't bother. If your going to pirate something to test it, then you really have to be truthful with yourself.

Simply put, support the things you really do enjoy. If everyone did this, piracy would not be a problem.

I think that's a really good point, the fact is for someone earning a steady income who isn't tied down with a family, 40-50 bucks isn't all that much to spend - it's a couple of rounds of drinks really and if you're sitting at the comp bored and you happen to read about this great game the fact that you can just pay and download it and play within like half an hour is a really great thing.

If you're going to pirate it might take up to a day to download via torrents, you might not be able to get the patches, there's always added risk (albeit fairly small) that it might be fake or contain a Trojan.

I mean for me I'd like to try the game first so I'd be more likely to put up waiting for the torrent, even though I would buy the game anyway if it's good (like I've done with GC2 and Soase) but I definitely think the convenience factor of direct download has gotten them as many sales if not more than the lack of copy protection.





yeah I agree, Steam as well has the direct purchase and download, I used it to buy the orange box - I doubt I would have paid the price the stores were asking. Where I live it's literally half the price if you download it.

Damn pirates. Don't want to pay $50 for a game? Its too much? Christ, how do they feed themselves? $50 is what? 2 trips to a resturaunt? Your monthly cell phone bill? Don't even get me started on how far $50 gets you when your car breaks down. Hell, I drive a POS Pontiac vibe with excellent gas mileage AND PAY $30 EVERY TIME I NEED GAS.

Good point - and for those of us who want to support game developers who do the rare deed of building a really good game, we'd rather see our money going to the company anyway, not wasted on physical costs like transportation, cardboard, CD printing, and the cut the stores take.

Maybe it makes a big difference, maybe not, but the convenience factor seems like it's a two-way street. I don't pirate the game, and Stardock (or Valve) keeps a little more money in their pocket.