The state of PC piracy in 2016
Piracy seems like it should be so simple, right? Stealing games is wrong. The end. But piracy is one of the most charged, complex, and divisive debates in gaming. Follow a piracy discussion long enough and it will spiral through issues as complicated as international economic policy, the concept of 'ownership' for digital property, game preservation, and the principle of the PC as an unrestricted technology platform.
Piracy in 2016, the age of digital distribution, indie gaming, and Steam’s dominance, is a different animal from the PC piracy of 1990 or 2000 or 2010. Unlicensed software distribution is just as illegal as it was when
Don’t Copy That Floppy was a meaningful anti-piracy strategy, but our own understanding of the crime and its motivations haven’t kept pace with technology.
To get the pulse of modern piracy in PC gaming today, we spoke to pirates, developers, and publishers. We also spoke to the executive behind the newest digital rights management software (DRM) Denuvo, which has effectively paused global piracy for any game that uses it.
Crime rates
One of the reasons piracy is a difficult subject is that it’s nearly impossible to know how big a problem it really is. Like any black market, official numbers don’t exist. There’s no central entity to compile a comprehensive list of every illegal download. Unlike other black markets, though, there are also no physical goods or industrial production trails to provide a baseline for rough estimates.
Some developers and analysts have thrown surprising figures into that information vacuum. Most famously, in 2012, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot made waves by
claiming that 93% of PC players are pirates who don’t pay for games: “On PC it's only around five to seven percent of the players who pay for [free-to-play], but normally on PC it's only about five to seven percent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated.” According to Guillemot, high piracy rates forced Ubisoft to develop free-to-play games, which are easier to make and harder to pirate.
"At the time, our internal and external research showed that it reached [93-95%] for some popular PC titles,” Chris Early, VP of Digital Publishing at Ubisoft, told me when I asked him how Ubisoft felt about Guillemot’s piracy estimate four years later. Other developers have backed up Ubisoft’s numbers here: a post from the creators of Game Dev Tycoon back in 2013 also showed that, after one day on sale,
93.6% of players had pirated the game.
Though even in context Guillemot’s full quote doesn’t draw distinctions between popular games and PC gamers as a whole, Early insists that “we were not saying those were all lost sales or that the same situation applied for all PC games or in all countries.”
Running opposite to Ubisoft’s approach to DRM, which includes the Uplay launcher and various server-verification programs, Witcher developer CD Projekt RED has become a champion for what Marcin Iwiński, co-founder and joint CEO, calls the “carrot, not stick” approach.
“As long as there are any barriers, annoyances, performance slow downs, or any other kind of inconvenience for the end user, we will always choose the DRM-free approach,” Iwiński says. “We want gamers to buy our games because they want to and not because they don’t have the technical possibility to pirate them. For us, it’s always about doing more, giving additional value, and convincing gamers to buy our titles that way.”
As far as numbers go, Iwiński confirms that exact numbers are impossible. While over 20 million units of the Witcher series have been sold, Iwiński says that a “super rough crystal-ball-gazing estimation” of three to four times as many pirated copies have been downloaded. “However, I think that the numbers don’t tell the story as well as the positive feedback does,” Iwiński says. “Nothing makes me happier than seeing gamers commenting that they used to have a pirated copy ... but—as we treat them fair and work hard to give them the best value with free DLCs, great expansions, etc—they decided to buy a legal copy.”
While we can’t say for certain how many games played on PCs overall are pirated, it’s definitely not 93%. After Guillemot’s comments in 2012, Matt Ployhar, an employee at Intel, published a
massive post number-crunching piracy rates, global sales, and the best available data. By taking the five most popular games on torrent sites and comparing them across platforms, Ployhar guessed that 17.6 million units, together making up 14.6% of the global PC games market, were illegal downloads.
Ployhar also looked at Steam’s hardware survey data, which, at the time, included a list of commonly installed applications. In this voluntary survey of the most active and dedicated Steam users, torrent clients are represented in 30-35% of PCs surveyed. Assuming that everyone with a torrent client installed used it to pirate games, which is surely inaccurate, this survey provides Ployhar’s guess for a number in the top range: 15-35% of PC gamers steal games.
According to marketing research company
Tru Optik, though, 15-35% is still much lower than reality. By tracking torrent downloads for several years, Tru Optik is trying to build a picture of the media most popular and in demand with younger audiences. According to
their report for 2014, a staggering 2.4 billion games were downloaded that year. This volume of downloads is 136 times higher than Ployhar’s most aggressive guess.
According to Tru Optik's report for 2014, a staggering 2.4 billion games were downloaded that year.
Tru Optik’s sample report doesn’t make a distinction between PC games and other types of games, but it’s certain to be the lion’s share. By viewing the top 100 most popular games on Pirate Bay right now, I found that 94.6% of all game piracy activity was for PC games. Assuming those rates are representative, almost all of 2014’s 2.4 billion illegal downloads were for PC games.
That said, it could also be true that Ployhar’s Steam survey estimate was also true: perhaps 30-35% of all PC gamers pirate games, but the volume of games they pirate is astronomically higher than expected.
Since 2012, the global PC game market has grown from
$18.6 billion in revenueto
$30 billion in revenue. DRM solutions have grown more aggressive and resistant to circumvention, and free-to-play games have become popular. Law enforcement efforts to stop organized software piracy have become more aggressive, with popular sites like
Kick Ass Torrents and
Torrentz shutting down within the past month. Regardless of what it was in 2012 and what it may be now, if this trend continues, piracy rates will necessarily decline.
“I think soon the whole discussion about DRM will be irrelevant anyway,” CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwiński told me at the end of our interview. “Even today, the importance of DRM is way smaller than it was a few years ago. Games are rich in online functionalities, which—if done well—add great value to the experience and pirating becomes irrelevant. Quite often [piracy] just makes no sense, as you miss out on the core social/community part of the experience.”
Follow the motive
Now we have a ballpark figure of how many PC gamers pirate their games, who are these players, and why are they motivated to steal?
Reddit’s game-cracking community,
r/CrackStatus, is an active hub of pirates. Nearly 15,000 readers check in to learn when, or if, or how a new game will be cracked. At the center of this operation, I find someone I wasn’t expecting: a recent IT graduate in Bulgaria. Working under the name Overkill, this gamer made it clear that piracy is about simple economics.
“Games here cost too much, considering the minimum wage is low too. I think that's why most people pirate games—they lack money,” Overkill told me. “Considering the crap ports [we had] in the last year, I don't want to spend a ton of money on a game that's bad or has a bad port.”
Overkill isn’t exaggerating when he says “a ton of money.” Digital distribution through sites such as GOG and Steam has created an incredible opportunity for growth in the global game market, but it’s also exposed bleak differences in how technology, games, and leisure prices impact different people all over the world. We’ve written before about
how game prices can differ around the world and are unfairly high in some regions. Smaller economies and areas that have experienced war or unrest get hit hard in this exchange.
In Bulgaria, a new game frequently costs almost a third of a minimum wage earner’s monthly income.
In Bulgaria, the national minimum wage is around лв340 Leva per month. An exciting new game on release day frequently costs лв120 Leva, or almost a third of a minimum wage earner’s monthly income. For readers in the US, imagine if every major release cost just south of $400.“The thing is, they think $50 and €50 is the same for every country, but it's not, because the wages and economy are different,” Overkill says. Other forms of entertainment, like movies or concerts, are not overpriced because they are priced for the local economy, not by international publishers pricing to the Euro.
For people plugged into the global, egalitarian internet, this can be galling. Finding a community of like-minded fans and interacting with them as peers can be a life-changing experience for a game enthusiast geographically removed from mainstream tech culture, in the same way BBSes and forums were a safe haven for shy nerds in the 90s and 2000s. Without the ethical debate, which could continue forever, having a game priced far out of your budget due to bureaucratic oversight does make piracy more understandable—at least when compared to gamers who simply don’t
want to pay.
And to be clear, the number of pirates who don’t want to pay is very large. According to the tracking report from Tru Optik,
most active pirates are from the United States, followed by Brazil and the United Kingdom. Pirates I spoke to in Bulgaria and Australia may have a good economic argument, but they are not representative of most pirates.
Still, Overkill rushes to tell me, again and again, that when he likes a game, he buys it in the next Steam sale. At Bulgarian prices, Steam sales are a crucial opportunity for him. (Valve did not respond to a request for comment on this story.)
For Overkill, piracy is about risk avoidance. If you can’t trust reviews, as many of my interviewees claimed, and you can’t trust in quality ports, pirating before buying is the best way to avoid costly mistakes.
The DRM arms race
For Overkill and the other pirates on r/CrackStatus, a new player is messing up their system. Released in 2014, Denuvo Anti-Tamper has emerged as a new anti-piracy tool for developers—and a topic of conversation that now dominates r/CrackStatus. Numerous posts bemoan Denuvo’s resistance to cracking, with several commenters forecasting the death of piracy itself. At the top of the subreddit, a list of games employing Denuvo has been compiled alongside a tag reading, “Not Cracked.”
“Here is an important point: anti-tamper is not DRM—we don’t manage any rights.” Reinhard Blaukovitsch, chief executive and co-founder of Denuvo, tells me this after I repeatedly referred to his company’s main product as
DRM. “This is done by the game platform as an industry-standard one-time authentication… The security lies in making it harder to circumvent this DRM with our anti-tamper security layer on top.
”Basically, Steam or Uplay is the DRM for games purchased through those storefronts. When you run a game, the Steam application on your PC checks in with Steam servers and verifies that yes, you did buy a copy of this game. When pirates successfully crack a game, they’re tricking Steam servers with an invalid proof of purchase. It’s this falsified communication that Denuvo works to stop.
Though Blaukovitsch tells me that Denuvo is a completely new product based on a new architecture, many of the minds behind it helped create SecuROM, one of PC gaming’s
most unpopular DRM schemes. Over the years, PC gamers have settled into the idea that DRM usually comes with some kind of consequence for paying customers that pirates neatly avoid—that’s one reason CD Projekt and GOG earn so much goodwill for championing DRM-free releases. As Overkill summarized, “[P]rotection like Denuvo is harming even legit customers because they suffer from lower frame rates and have random activation errors and such.”
Early rumors seemed to confirm this fear when users claimed that Denuvo wrote and re-wrote large volumes of encryption data and damaged hard drives. These rumors
turned out to be false by
all accounts. As for causing lower frame rates, Blaukovitsch disagrees.
“While we put a lot of effort into making sure that anti-tamper cannot be easily cracked, even more important is that the paying customer is not affected,” Blaukovitsch said. “There are some misconceptions that copy protection will always add an overhead to protected games. Some people say that this is a given fact because you add security code to the game and this must result in a performance loss… We only alter parts of the game that are not executed during active gameplay, like loading screens or during startup of a game. By this approach the code of the actual gameplay stays untouched ... resulting in no performance loss."
Whatever the consequences for paying customers, real or imagined, Denuvo seems to be working really, really well. The list of uncracked Denuvo games on r/CrackStatus is growing. And it’s in this unlikely place that I find an area where Blaukovitsch and Overkill agree on something: Denuvo’s dominance won’t last forever.
“[C]rackers are hard at work trying to crack [Denuvo’s] protection and have gotten really good results and are moving up strong... People should understand that piracy will never die,” Overkill says near the end of our interview. “It might take a while for it to come back, but it'll come back stronger than ever.”
“Although there is [talk] that we might prevent piracy completely going forward,” Blaukovitsch says, “we have a more realistic view: our focus is to help publishers to secure the initial sales windows of their games, hence
delayingpiracy.”
Blaukovitsch’s statement ended up being more prophetic than he thought. A few days after our interview, a cracker named Voski found an exploit that simply
bypassed Denuvo, making pirated versions of Doom and Inside playable for the group. Within a day or so, Denuvo had fixed the exploit.
As this article is published, news is circulating that Denuvo has been cracked, this time for
Rise of the Tomb Raider, which was released in January. After almost a year of stalemate, the arms race between Denuvo and pirate communities is accelerating again. To celebrate, the moderators of r/CrackStatus changed the flair on the list of Denuvo games from “Not Cracked” to “Cracked.” The subreddit has been flooded with new links and joy over this possibly minor victory.
In some ways, though, even the arms race is going according to Denuvo’s rules. Denuvo and publishers aren’t trying to end all piracy forever. If Denuvo can protect major publishers from cracking through initial launch windows and the months immediately following, publishers will have protected their launch revenue. “We can see many posts in piracy forums like Reddit, etc. of people stating that they bought the game as no crack was available—we see this for every game we protect,” Blaukovitsch says. “This is direct and very good feedback for us and shows that we [are doing] something right.”
Piracy as publicity
Denuvo and projects like it are gaining ground among big game publishers eager to protect high-value investments. But in the years since digital distribution reorganized the game development world, big publishers are no longer the entire picture. Indie games and small studios are responsible for a huge explosion of ideas and creativity in games. Some of these games are released for free or for a token payment, and the potential success for indie stardom can be huge. Indie developers have even more of an incentive to protect their work.
However, most indie developers don’t have the bandwidth to think about DRM, according to Rami Ismail, co-founder of indie dev team Vlambeer. One- or two-person dev teams don’t want to provide customer support for stolen copies, and they don’t want to spend any of their precious time inventing a new DRM system. Instead, they just go with the default: releasing a game on an online store usually comes with that store’s DRM protection.
Third-party DRM schemes like Denuvo are cost-prohibitive for indie teams, Ismail tells me. “DRM in general exists to convince people to not wait for the crack, not to stop piracy,” he says. “It's something that changes the value proposition: do you want to play
now, or do you want to play
free? For AAA titles, the launch day is huge. For indies, the launch day is one of the many small spikes they get out of launch, sales, video content, online communities, etc. DRM just wasn't built for that.”
If you’ve spent millions of dollars developing a game, thousands of people getting your $60 game for free is a revenue nightmare. Advertising budgets big enough to
force Liam Neeson to grumble through a half-assed rendition of his Taken monologue for a Super Bowl commercial tend to reach everyone, even people who don’t play games or don’t care about your game in particular.
But indie game developers don’t live in that universe. For small developers, thousands of people getting your game, playing it, and talking about it isn’t a nightmare, it’s the publicity that dreams are made of and ad budgets can’t buy. In that lens, torrent sites can look a lot like the most effective marketing apparatus ever assembled.
“With how difficult gaining visibility is, it has been argued [piracy is] probably even for the best—I never know how to feel about that idea,” Ismail says. “I think it's up to the developer to figure out how they feel about piracy. Personally, we acknowledge that we make games in a global market, with wildly different economies for different people—if someone genuinely can't afford our games, we don't want to get in their way.”
Some developers have gone so far as giving the piracy ecosystem a little nudge. Just to get the ball rolling, as it were. “It isn't unusual,” Ismail says when I ask him about developers uploading their own games to piracy hubs or torrent clients. “
Hotline Miami did that,
McPixel did that—a lot of indie developers are rather aware of the power of piracy. I've heard people argue that ‘a game isn't a success until there's a torrent,’ and there's one really easy way of ensuring there is.”
Growing word-of-mouth and a broad gesture of goodwill has helped these small developers become larger developers. CD Projekt has seen its sales rise dramatically with each new installment of the Witcher series, something that Iwiński attributes to fans’ goodwill. “Did the fact that it’s easier to pirate our game increase our audience? I don’t know,” Iwiński says. “However, I am pretty convinced that making games packed with content, easy to install and update, and working without an online connection, sure did… [A] lot of trust has been established thanks to our DRM-free approach and strong post-release support of both The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3. We sold six million units of The Witcher 3 in the first six weeks—that’s a lot of gamers out there trusting us with their money.”
Of course, not all small developers choose to embrace piracy, and becoming a vocal supporter of a game does not, in and of itself, make loud piracy more OK than silent piracy. Indie developers need champions, but exposure doesn’t automatically pay the rent through increased legitimate sales. Piracy in 2016 is now entangled with another issue:
key reselling, which often involves the selling of “stolen” game codes purchased with fraudulently obtained credit cards. The keys resold on marketplaces like G2A and Kinguin
are paid for, but if the original purchase was fraudulent, the end result for developers is mostly the same as piracy.
The need for legitimate, salary-paying game sales is the crux of the matter. Though piracy looks different in 2016 than it did in 1999, the central tension has stayed the same: in order to make great games, people need to be paid to spend time making them. No matter what technology defeats or replaces Denuvo in the future, that fact is going to continue being true.
