Safe Haven

It might not seem all that important to acknowledge that a figure like 4.5 million is necessarily an estimate that could be wildly inaccurate in either direction. Plenty of people in the industry are happy to shrug and say, "it's a lot - what else matters?". Yet for years, we've had figures calculated on flimsier evidence than this which have entered into the realms of canonical information; they have been used as the basis for further calculations on things like impact on sales or even job losses, and waved under the noses of legislators and bureaucrats in support of draconian legal reform.

The reality is that numbers like this don't tell us anything worthwhile. They don't tell us how many times a game has been illegally downloaded, beyond "quite a few times". More importantly, rough estimates gleaned by watching bits of data move between IP addresses tell us nothing about the people doing the downloading - about their motivations, their finances, their locations. There's not even the shadow of an attempt to glean more granular data, and nothing upon which to base such an attempt. We don't know how many of those downloaded games went into the hands of children, how many to adults. How many of those who downloaded had credit cards that could be used to buy the game legally online? How many lived in territories where they couldn't access it? Indeed, never mind this kind of detailed information - how many pirated copies of the game were actually installed, and how many still languish, untouched, on the hard drives of compulsive digital media hoarders?

Iwinski and his company understands his job is not to wage war on the pirates, it's to nurture and grow the audience of a million paying customers

I'm not saying that those factors materially impact on the piracy figures - I'm simply saying that I don't know the answer to those questions, and no matter who you are, nor do you. As such, phrases like "lost sales" or "lost revenue" are next to meaningless; they're statements of ideology and PR rather than statements of fact. Of course it's annoying to see work you've done being passed around for free, but if you're in the business of content creation, your job involves rising above the natural gut reaction of "those thieving bastards!" and thinking about how to approach this market reality in a way that secures your livelihood.

This is why it's so exasperating to see self-styled captains of our industry who still haven't moved past spouting off ideological tirades against piracy. Yes, it's illegal, and yes it's wrong, but it happens and it's your job to find a way to adapt your business to cope with that. In a digital world, the unit cost of items which are free to duplicate tends towards zero. That's a flat reality, and your wailing and gnashing of teeth singles you out as nothing more than a dinosaur who doesn't have the imagination to see past that reality. The thing you ought to be scared of isn't the pirates - it's the fact that our industry also has lots of small, intelligent mammals running around, with clever ideas and brilliant insight, and they'll be happy to inherit the world when you're extinct.

Iwinski and his company, happily, are among the mammals. Faced with 4.5 million pirates (maybe, possibly, who knows?) and a million paying customers, he understands his job better than countless others in the games industry do - it's not to wage war on the pirates, it's to nurture and grow the audience of a million paying customers. DRM, which hurts customers and is easily bypassed by pirates, is dispensed with. Ideas which add value to the game for the people who love it - collector's items, special editions, and so on - are promoted. Spending time hating the people who steal your game detracts from the amount of time you have to love the people who paid for it. CD Project RED gets that. So many others in our business have so very much to learn from them.