Piracy

1. Piracy Is Overstated

Tim opens by noting he hasn't really discussed piracy with colleagues since the Fallout days, when they debated whether to put DRM on the CD. He's heard dire warnings about piracy for decades — that it's costing the industry enormous amounts of money and undermining everything — but he doesn't see much evidence for it.

The people he knew who pirated games wouldn't have bought them anyway. They either didn't have the money or were pirating just to complete a collection. You can't lose a sale you were never going to have.

2. Give Consumers a Reason to Buy

Tim argues that whenever consumers are offered a genuine reason to purchase, they do. In the physical era, pack-in items drove sales — cloth maps, coins, tchotchkes. People would buy games specifically for these extras. He recalls people framing cloth maps on their walls. The best pack-ins weren't copy protection measures with codes on them; they were simply fun to have and useful while playing.

2.1. The Fallout Manual

As an aside, Tim mentions that Fallout shipped with a wide spiral-bound manual that opened flat — really cool, but expensive to produce. There were complaints about the cost, and for Fallout 2 it was completely taken off the table, replaced with a standard bound manual.

3. Digital Distribution Solved It

Now that things are digital, Tim doesn't think piracy is as big a deal for two reasons:

• It's super easy to buy a game — the friction is gone
• Digital libraries are convenient — you have an account on Steam, GOG, or Epic with every game you've ever bought, downloadable anytime, no discs to manage

Once paying gives you the best product and the best services, people stop pirating. People are willing to pay when paying is the superior experience.

4. Anti-Piracy Measures Hurt Legitimate Customers

Tim's core objection to DRM is that it usually hurts valid consumers more than pirates. He gives several examples:

4.1. Bad Sectors on Floppies

On the Atari, developers would put bad sectors on floppy discs. The game would try to read the sector — if it could, it knew the copy was pirated. But pirates quickly figured out how to write bad sectors by adjusting floppy drive speed during writes. Meanwhile, the protection made games run slower and start up longer for everyone.

4.2. The Color Wheel Incident

In his first year at Interplay, Tim tried to play a game that used a color wheel as copy protection — you had to match symbols by both shape and color. Tim, who has whole-spectrum color vision deficiency (not just red-green), couldn't do it at all. After several failed attempts, he went to the executive producer's office and ranted. The producer didn't believe him, saying "you're not color blind, you can see that." Tim explained he's not red-green colorblind — he's whole spectrum.

The irony: Tim could have trivially hacked the check to accept any input. He tried explaining to pro-DRM advocates how trivial these measures were to circumvent, but no one cared.

4.3. The Pirated Version Is Better

When pirates strip out DRM, the game often runs faster, has a better frame rate, doesn't pause randomly, and starts up quicker. At that point, why would anyone want to play the legitimate version?

5. Piracy as Game Preservation

Tim points out that several games survive today only because of piracy. Games that shipped on floppies from companies that no longer exist, with source code lost to time — those floppies have all decayed by now. The only reason some of these games are still playable is because someone pirated them and moved the files to a hard drive or uploaded them to the internet.

He's careful to note this doesn't justify piracy, but it demonstrates that piracy isn't all bad.

6. The Cult Classic Problem

Tim acknowledges a more personal side of piracy. Some of his older games are cult classics that didn't sell well but were heavily pirated. While piracy may not have been the primary cause of poor sales (bugginess and shipping incomplete were factors too), it certainly didn't help. When publishers look at previous sales figures to decide on new deals, low numbers mean no sequel — regardless of the reason.

His message to people who pirated those games and now complain about wanting more like them: don't justify piracy with that. Piracy didn't help.

7. Bigger Problems Than Piracy

Tim says piracy doesn't even make his top 10 list of industry concerns. He identifies two much bigger issues:

7.1. Too Many Hands in the Pie

When a game makes money, too many parties take a cut before developers see anything. Publishers take a big chunk claiming they supplied capital and took the risk (though Tim notes developers seem to take far more risk, given how many studios go under). Then digital storefronts like Steam, Epic, or GOG take their cut. If you used a game engine like Unity or Unreal, they take a cut too. What finally reaches the developer is much smaller than it used to be — and with so many games releasing, the overall pie is being sliced into ever tinier pieces.

7.2. No Royalties for Individual Developers

Most companies have no provisions for giving royalties to developers. This creates several problems:

• No loyalty — developers jump to wherever the salary is higher, especially with remote work. There's nothing tying them to the success of the game they made.
• Brain drain — Tim recalls the 90s and early 2000s when 3D artists left games for movies because the pay was better. The game industry took years to recover. He sees the same thing happening now with narrative designers.
• No skin in the game — if a game does well, the individual developer benefits more from leveraging that into a job hop than from staying.

7.3. The Troika Model

At Troika Games, when Sierra gave them royalties for Arcanum, they took half and rolled it into the next game. The other half was split evenly between every developer who worked on the game. Tim thought this was the perfect model — it gave everyone a stake in the game's success. Unfortunately, they couldn't get that deal on any subsequent contract, and it fell away entirely.

8. Conclusion

Tim's summary is straightforward: piracy is bad, but it's not nearly as bad as people claim, and there are far worse things to worry about. The industry should focus on revenue distribution, developer compensation, and making the legitimate product the best possible experience — not on DRM measures that punish the people who actually pay.

9. References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnhAzecN150