I tried again today to pirate my own game. I was hoping I could manage to avoid a virus this time. I went around and around, visiting dozens of sites. One site, I managed to download a 200+ MB file that was “cracked”. Once I unpacked the rar file, I had a whole bunch of compressed files that I didn’t know what to do with. Most of the other sites I visited required that I sign-up before I could download the file. (They don’t tell you this until you go through a few steps; obviously, they’re using it to drive sign-ups to their site. No idea if they wanted to charge money.) I still remember one pirate site that gave a download description that said the game was “uninspired” (heh, thanks for pirating it and panning it at the same time). At least another pirated copy included the suggestion that “if you like the game, buy it”.

I don’t have any bittorrent software installed on any of my computers, so couldn’t try any torrents. Trying to find a usable copy was a huge headache. It seems like I spent over an hour looking around and ended up with nothing. I eventually just gave up.

While I tend to come down hard on piracy and pro-piracy arguments, I wasn’t really angry when I was looking around for pirated copies. (Strangely, I was angry when I saw that guy at the coffeeshop cracking iPhones and installing pirated apps for people; and none of that piracy involved my own software.) My attitude was more just kind of an apathetic “meh, these things happen” with a curiosity about whether or not they actually have a cracked copy. Part of my annoyance with piracy is just the fact that pirate justifications are so bad. Also, the game’s been out for a year, so it seems like a lot of people who were going to buy the game, have already.

I was looking over some numbers today, and a few things stuck out for me. First, I noticed something on the Empires of Steel video. If you look at the YouTube view statistics, here’s what you’d see:

See the big spike of views on September 11th and about a week afterward, and that the sites embedding the video are pirate sites? The number of views jumped from around 5,000 to 15,000 within a week. I happened to check some of the update numbers around that time, and there was a big spike in the number of people getting updates beginning on September 11th and continuing for a few weeks afterward. Obviously, the game was cracked around September 11th.

It would’ve been interesting if there was a spike in sales following the same pattern, but there wasn’t. September and the following month were really bad months for sales. As you could see from the chart I posted a few days ago (and reposted below), September was the fourth worst month for sales over the past twelve months, and October was the 2nd worst month for sales. I don’t really think piracy was the reason for the low sales over those months, since that would suggest that “would be buyers” opted for piracy, instead. I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t know.

I’ve been signed up for Empires of Steel Google Alerts for a long time now. (For those who aren’t familiar with Google Alerts, you can sign up be notified via email whenever google indexes something matching that search criteria. This lets you know anytime something new appears on the internet.) Well, thanks to Google Alerts, I’ve been noticing what appeared to be pirated copies of Empires of Steel showing up on warez sites. One thing I noticed, though, was that the download size was all wrong – which made me suspicious of whether these were actual pirated copies – as opposed to trojans or copies of the demo. For fear of viruses, I didn’t have the courage to actually visit the sites and download the game to see if it was the full game.

Recently, I got my old laptop back from a friend who was borrowing it. So, I thought, “Why not try it with my old laptop? I’ll reinstall the OS immediately after I try it – that’ll fix the problem of getting a virus.” Today, I tried it. I did a google search for “Empires of Steel”, searching for any free downloads on warez sites. Before I even finished the download, I had obviously been infected by a virus. There was a fake anti-virus program that had installed itself on my computer. Whenever I tried to open any application – even MSPaint – my computer would give me an error saying that the file contained a virus, and I could update my virus protection using their antivirus program. It was obviously a scam to get me to pay them money for “virus protection”. Also, when I attempted to go anywhere on the internet, the “anti-virus” program would stop the connection and tell me that the website was infected and they could fix it. It installed itself into the list of startup programs, so a restart didn’t fix anything. My computer was under the complete control of a virus before I even finished downloading a single pirated copy of my game. And I don’t even know for sure that the website had a pirated copy – maybe it was a garbage file with the name “Empires of Steel” so that they could trap people with their “anti-virus” scam.