Stardock and game piracy

One of the most well-regarded sci-fiction PC strategy games released in recent years was Stardock’s Galactic Civilization II. Now, not only was this game known for its game AI, it also garnered attention for its novel implementation of copy protection, and specifically that the game CD itself had no copy protection.

Brad Wardell, Stardock’s CEO, has just given a substantial interview with Shacknews.com and in it he explains his contrarian standpoint on game piracy at a day and age when companies are coming up with all sorts of ways to circumvent folks from bootlegging their wares. Well worth a read, and it’s right here with excerpts below.

We come from the shareware world on the non-game side of things, so we know all about piracy. To us, these game developers complaining about it, it’s like, “Welcome to the party. We’ve been dealing with this for a long time, when you guys were still making cartridges.”

The answer is that you focus on people who buy your stuff, who will buy computer software. The game industry is the only industry that I know of that sweats people playing their games even if they were never gonna buy them. It’s completely different form the software industry in this regard. Adobe for example–I’m sure they don’t like the fact that people pirate Adobe Photoshop, but I doubt they’re losing sleep over it. There’s no major common business software that I can think of where they go through the elaborate lengths to control piracy that the game industry does.

And the difference is that in the game industry, the emphasis is on keeping pirates from playing the game, regardless of if they’re ever gonna purchase your product. Whereas in the software industry, the emphasis is on making people who would otherwise buy your product to buy it. And I know that seems like a subtle distinction, but it’s a lot easier to focus on getting people who might otherwise buy your game to buy it.