Dave Perry: Pirates Can't be Out-Coded

Responding to the prosecution of four defendants in the Pirate Bay case Dave Perry, chief creative officer for Acclaim, has basically said that the games industry's approach is wrong.

In a blog posting Perry said that "...the solution isn't to fight in courts, or to play 'revision ping pong' with hackers, it's to move forward and design convenience, quality and access at a mass market price. That's what will get people to pay, even if there's an inferior pirate version available on some dodgy website."

Perry said that, in a nutshell, the pirates can't be out-coded. "So for me the only thing that really happened with the Pirate Bay legal decision is that this will slow down "public" piracy a bit for a short period of time, until the next method surfaces (with absolutely no traceable central command, nobody makes money off it, nobody to sue), comes along. Will this happen? Of course it will, it's a certainty!"

He made example of the constant cycle of PSP firmware updates being released, followed by the inevitable successful hack.

Expanding on what he sees as the solution, Perry referred to a talk he once heard about music piracy, saying, "The REAL way to beat piracy is to focus on "convenience", "quality", "access". I once heard a speech about the "right price" for music. That's a price where you'd rather pay for the quality, proper meta-tags, "The Real Thing" etc. That's nearly what iTunes offers, but it's too expensive (as the speaker said after his analysis), and so the first company to actually work out that "not worth piracy" price, will suddenly make piracy "inconvenient". You don't have to agree, but it's an interesting idea."

Perry also pointed to Acclaim's business model, saying, "ALL our games are free to play, you only pay if you fall in love with the game", noting that the company has "ZERO piracy" and saying that file sharers actually save the company money on bandwidth.

He further mentioned his own investment in cloud-based gaming as a potential solution.

He does, of course, have a point. Digital anti-piracy methods slow it down at best, while anti-piracy lawsuits leave a nasty, tangy whiff in the air. Remember that time Atari tried to sue an elderly Scottish couple who'd never played a game in their lives?

You can read more about what happened to the Pirate Bay guys here.

^{Source: David Perry}