As if we needed any further proof that DRM is pretty much bogus.
Last week Wolfire Games announced the "Humble Indie Bundle," a collection of five popular indie games packaged together under one price. The enticing factor was that you could choose to pay whatever you wanted for the package. 2D Boy, creator of World of Goo (part of the bundle) used a similar promotion last year for the first birthday of their game to great success and other indie developers have emulated the concept. The games on offer are largely really great and I already owned three of the five before the deal was even announced. They're also all cross-platform, giving you Windows, OS X and Linux versions for one price. The average donation has been around USD$10.00, with some people donating all the way up to $1000.00. You can pick whatever amount you want with a minimum price of just $0.01; if you want, the financial contribution can be split with the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child's Play, and if you choose it's possible to have your payment go solely to the charities and not to the developers at all. The games include absolutely no DRM and it's a simple route from purchase to download. At present, with a few days left on the sale, the package has raised almost USD$750k.
One might think the lack of DRM coupled with the ability to get five (six, technically, as a bonus developer made one of their games available due to the popularity of the bundle) stellar games for as little as a penny would mitigate the need to pirate the collection. But on a blog post to their site, one of the co-founders of Wolfire Games posted numbers indicating that he believes around 25% of direct downloads of the bundle are pirated; he explains his math on the site, but his guess is that around a quarter of the people who have downloaded the games directly from the site did so following an illicit link.
All of the defensible variables that people use to explain why they pirate games aren't in play here: there's no obtrusive DRM forcing you to provide an internet connection or a blood sample to play and there's no astronomical cost to purchase the games. While Jeffery Rosen ruminates that some people might have turned to piracy because they live in a place where PayPal or Google Checkout don't work (or they simply don't have credit cards), he suspects the majority of it is down to simple laziness– it's easier to click a link than put billing information into a site to get charged a cent. The number of people who emailed support saying they wanted to support the bundle but weren't able to pay was so low that he ended up covering their donations with his own personal funds.
What can be taken away from this? Frustrating as it may be (especially to indie developers, who are hurt by piracy far more directly than big companies), this stuff is inevitable. Wolfire Games purposefully chose the no DRM-route and didn't even make it tricky to download the files in the first place; they considered such technical implementations but ultimately felt like it only did harm:
There is probably a way to get the best of both worlds, [implementing a technical solution to prevent rampant piracy of our download links] but it's not my area of expertise. Making the download experience worse for generous contributors in the name of punishing pirates doesn't really fit with the spirit of the bundle. When considering any kind of DRM, we have to ask ourselves, "How many legitimate users is it ok to inconvenience in order to reduce piracy?" The answer should be none.
It's a rational response to a very real problem. There's no way to eliminate piracy (at least through technical means), but penalising legitimate customers to prevent lost sales certainly isn't the way to go. It's depressing that few big companies understand this, but hopefully Wolfire Games' act of transparency on this issue can provide a bit more sense to this ongoing debate.
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