Opposable Thumbs

The Humble Bundle is a great deal for gamers for a number of reasons. The games work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. You can pay as little or as much as you want, and you can donate some or all of the money to the included charities. There is absolutely no DRM on any of the games. So why does it look like one quarter of the people enjoying the games have pirated them?

Unpacking the actual numbers behind piracy is often difficult, but Wolfire has been incredibly transparent about its numbers. The result is strong evidence that no matter what steps developers take, piracy will still be an issue.

Piracy is inevitable

We spoke to Jeffery Rosen, cofounder of Wolfire Games, about the piracy rate of the Humble Bundle. "I think piracy is absolutely inevitable—this is a really clear example of it," Rosen said. "People will literally not pay a penny to a charity in order to legitimately get a bundle of games that they want."

Rosen points out that the Bundle has stripped away nearly every rationalization for piracy. "A lot of the common rationalizations for piracy simply don't exist here: DRM, an agent between you and the developers, or high prices. Some people rationalize it by claiming they can't pay—but they could have asked their mom. They could have e-mailed us (we're currently at inbox zero for support requests)." Rosen claims they received thousands of technical support questions throughout the week, about 10 of them relating to payment.

Those who e-mailed and said they couldn't pay? The number was so low that Rosen personally made a contribution on their behalf.

Pirating the Humble Bundle titles is easy. "When I say this bundle is DRM-free—I really mean DRM-free. Not only do the games themselves have no copy protection (not even a simple serial number check), but the Humble Indie Bundle website has limited copy protection," Rosen wrote on the official blog. "That means there are no download limits, everything is reachable on the command-line with 'wget', you can resume downloads, and do anything else you would expect to be able to do with a personal download link." Linux users in particular praised these decisions to make the downloads painless.

Are there reasons to pirate?

Rosen came up with a few reasons people feel the need to pirate games. Laziness is a big one: it's simply easier to click a link than to fill out the fields needed to donate even a single cent. There may be customers who live in an area where PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon are not supported, leaving them with no way to pay. Some people may have made a single large donation for multiple bundles. Others may simply like the feeling of getting something for nothing.

Rosen lays out these reasons, saying that Wolfire doesn't plan on doing anything to thwart those who pirate the games. "When considering any kind of DRM, we have to ask ourselves, 'How many legitimate users is it OK to inconvenience in order to reduce piracy?' The answer should be none."

This is why the DRM debate is so destructive. There is no technology that can't be cracked, and invasive strategies only make the companies targets for the more aggressive hackers and crackers. If you give gamers everything they say they want, there will still be a significant number of people who will grab the game without paying. "A lot of these people don't just pirate the game, they take pleasure in spreading the pirated links to their friends or anonymous buddies for fun," Rosen told Ars. "They just don't care, and if you can't get someone to pay a penny in this case—will they really pay full price for a game?"

While piracy may be frustrating, the bundle has been quite the success: as of this writing almost 84,000 people have paid $716,944 in total for the games.