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Cliff Harris of Positech Games recently lamented publicly that he really didn't know why pirates were stealing his games. So he turned to the world wide web, got picked up by Slashdot, and in came a deluge of responses from people who had pirated his games. He has posted a response to these responses and I have to say his findings are a little bit unusual.

The cries he is hearing from the responding populace, at least those who responded constructively, are that the games cost too much, that their level of polish isn't high enough, and that DRM should be entirely absent. I don't think changing any of these things will help him one bit.

I do think his comments come close to what Brad Wardell recently wrote about making games for your customers, not pirates, and doing a better job that way. At the time his company was riding high on excellent sales of a DRM-free, critically acclaimed PC title called Sins of a Solar Empire. But in the end, I think Cliff's got the wrong idea.

The key problem here is that piracy is easy, and pirates will pay nothing for your wares even if the price law-abiding people pay is perfectly reasonable. Work harder on your games, sure, cut the prices, sounds good to me, and eliminate DRM but don't expect the pirates to stand up and cheer before throwing cold hard cash. Pirates will continue to steal your game because it's free and it's easy and they won't get caught doing it.

It's really that simple. How do you deter that? Copy protection and other technical schemes to secure content are really your only choice.

See: Talking To Pirates