Team Meat's Tommy Refenes says DRM is more damaging to game developers than piracy is. In a new blog post on his Tumblr, the developer stated that DRM is an ineffective measure against piracy and that the cost of implementing DRM simply isn't worth it.
“I think I can safely say that Super Meat Boy has been pirated at least 200,000 times. We are closing in on 2 million sales and assuming a 10% piracy to sales ratio does not seem unreasonable," wrote Refenes, who argues that piracy does not equate to lost profits.
“As a forward thinking developer who exists in the present, I realize and accept that a pirated copy of a digital game does not equate to money being taken out of my pocket. Team Meat shows no loss in our year end totals due to piracy and neither should any other developer.”
Refenes added that piracy would always exist and DRM measures are broken anyway. Their implementation, he argues, does not make much sense.
“The reality of our current software age is the internet is more efficient at breaking things than companies are at creating them. A company will spend massive amounts of money on DRM and the internet will break it in a matter of days in most cases. When the DRM is broken is it worth the money spent to implement it?
“Did the week of unbroken DRM for your game gain you any sales from potential pirates due to the inability to pirate at launch? Again, there is no way of telling and as such cannot be used as an accurate justification for spending money.”
There is nothing developers can do to stop people from pirating their games, says Refenes, who also said that people are less likely to pirate software if it's easy to buy.
“You can’t force a person to buy your software no more than you can prevent a person from stealing it. People have to WANT to buy your software, people have to WANT to support you.”
