The other day I saw a bunch of USB sticks for sale at a gas station with greatest hits of various artists and music genres and it got me thinking of physical piracy again. It’s something I haven’t consumed for over 15 years, but with the fall of prices of USB sticks it is completely viable economically if you do the math, and I hope it can even help game piracy.
A 64GB stick costs about 5 US dollars today, and it can carry most AAA games with a few exceptions. That’s 1/12 of the full price, and if you consider the pirate will charge you another 5 dollars for his work, you will still get the game for 1/6 of the release price. But you will obviously think: why would I pay 10 bucks for a game I can download for free? Here is the catch.
There are many games that haven’t been cracked lately because crackers don’t have any incentive to do so other than their own self-satisfaction. If they got paid by some pirate group to do so, then things would be different. I can imagine someone in Russia making a group and paying crackers to crack a game so they can sell it for Russian gamers in the black market. If they come up with some way to make it as hard as possible for the buyers to share these cracked games among them, they could make a lot of money with this.
And here is where the anti-piracy organizations might help the organized crime. With their cat-and-mouse hunt to close online piracy groups, they will make it harder for people to share it online, making the offline piracy more attractive. Would you mind paying 10 bucks for an USB stick or 5 bucks just to copy something to it instead of paying some VPN that might not be enough to hide your traffic?
For old games this wouldn’t work, because they are already very cheap on Steam, but for new releases, I can see this working, and everybody, buyers and sellers, would very happy with the money they’re making and saving.
Would you rather have a game cracked and pay a fraction of the official price for it or pay 70 bucks for it on Steam and have to play it with Denuvo? I could live with some old-fashioned DRM if it meant I was saving 60 dollars.
I would much rather pay full price than still pay for a DRMed version that’s effectively guaranteed to be supporting some sort of organized crime group. Mass distribution at scale, with DRM, by definition means Russian organized crime, or a drug cartel, or some other global bad actor on that scale that’s doing shit like trafficking humans, arms dealing, drugs, etc, as well.
But ignoring that (and that I generally buy my content), I wouldn’t pay $.10 for an illegitimate copy that had an added layer of DRM on it. It’s fundamentally fucking repulsive for some subgroup whose whole business relies on bypassing someone else’s copy control to add their own.