The Game Composer’s Blog

It’s about time I do the obligatory complaint on this blog about how much it sucks that people pirate instrument samples. Actually, the pirating itself doesn’t bother me so much. It’s not like the people pirating have the drive or talent to do anything worthwhile with their pirated samples. Their talent level is in fact inversely proportional to their laziness. But it does bother me that their pirating does affect me and other legitimate composers.

With each pirated sample, the sample developers feel even more need to a)raise prices and b)inflict even more copy protection on legit users. I’m not sure piracy really does take away from anyone’s profits. The people pirating would probably not have bought the software if the pirated versions were not available. That’s certainly debatable and not really the point of this post. The point is, whether or not there is such a monetary loss, the developers feel the need to raise prices and add copy protection.

Raising prices is an obvious annoyance, though it’s fine in some cases where the samples are so good you would pay almost any price. But some samples do end up going into price points that are far above what the samples are actually worth. Unfortunately, with rampant piracy it’s harder and harder to tell how good particular samples are because you don’t very often have good demos of the samples from which to judge their worth. Developers are so scared of piracy that they are very hesitant to release any free demos. So we’re left with word-of-mouth reviews. That’s ok, but I still want more hands-on experience with a product before I plunk down a few thousand bucks.

The biggest bother to me is the copy protection. I have so many dongles sticking out of my computer it’s ridiculous. And I even had to pay for one of them. What?? I have to pay in order to let the sample developers know that I’m not a bad guy? Didn’t I do that by buying the samples in the first place? So why did I do all that serial number entering online? Oh, that’s just so that the company can legitimize my legitimate copy of my software and let the dongle know that we’re all good. And then I think if I take out the dongle, the computer is instructed to melt so I’m very careful with that. Don’t even get me started about when it’s time to upgrade my computer and I have to remember all these serial numbers and passwords so that I can legitimately uninstall then reinstall. But I can only do the 3 times or something? What happens the 4th time? Oh yeah, more melting… or maybe that’s when it tells my computer to kick me in the groin.

And meanwhile the pirates are laughing at me while they use their samples on any computer they want, installing and uninstalling just for the fun of it. Why am I the one being treated like a criminal? A most vexing state of affairs. So really, it’s not the pirates I’m complaining about. It’s the knee-jerk reaction to them by the developers. But it’s hard to blame them. A lot of work goes in to making samples. I know, since I’ve made some. The sample developers need to make their money so they can continue to bring us better and better representations of real instruments. I hope we can come to a better balance soon though between copy protection and legitimate user annoyance.

One more point… game developers, be very careful dealing with some composers whose rates seem too good to be true. If sample developers find out that the music in your game is using pirated samples (which it probably would be), you could be in for some hurt. Having dev team members use pirated software is never a good idea. Samples especially are easily identified and traced.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this in the future (maybe when I make my next big purchase), but it’s nice to get that off my chest for now. Carry on!