Software pirates are immoral anarchistic beings trying to kill the software industry – at least this how the the software industry portrayed them. But what truth lies in it?
A small indie gaming company from the UK called Positech Games that makes cross-platform games, was so frustrated by the fact their games were pirated and their impossible battle with the pirates that they've openly asked the obvious question that no-one asked so far:
Why do people pirate my games?
And the "pirates" answered – in tons! Cliff Harris (founder of Positech Games) was genuinely taken aback by the answers. Not only the massive amount of them, but also how passionately and well based some of them were written as he mentions in the Guardian. In fact so much that his company changed their view of pirates and took many of their complaints very seriously – he dropped the DRM and copy protection, lowered the prices and was actually motivated to write even better games in the future! What he learnt is that pirates do care about the games – they are just frustrated by how the gaming (or other software, movie or music for that matter) industry does not care for them as users.
You can read more about Positech's new view on pirates on their "Talking to Pirates" page – a true must-have read.