Pray you never have to hear John Romero wish you well. The legendary Doom designer has spent years correcting the record on video game history, and this week he turned his attention to a debate over the reality of software piracy in the 1990s.
The conversation began when fellow id Software veteran Sandy Petersen took to social media to argue that "70-90% of Doom's players pirated it." Petersen suggested that this massive loss of potential sales directly harmed the studio's ability to fund upcoming projects, claiming that "damn pirates" were responsible for the downfall of various companies like Atari, Amiga, and 3D Realms.
Romero, however, pushed back on this characterization, noting that Petersen’s math fails to account for the unique distribution model used at the time. "By the mid-90s, DOOM had something like 20 million shareware installs and more than 2 million paid copies sold," Romero wrote. "Those 20 million people were not 'pirates' by default. A huge number of them were playing the free episode exactly as intended."
Distinguishing Shareware from Piracy
The core of the disagreement lies in how the industry operated during the Doom era. The game utilized a shareware model where the first chapter was distributed for free, allowing players to experience the game before deciding whether to register and pay for the remaining episodes. Romero argues that conflating this legal, free distribution with actual piracy creates a false narrative.
"It’s important not to collapse legal shareware distribution, unpaid reach, and actual piracy into one number." — John Romero
While Romero agrees that developers deserve to be paid for their work and that people should buy the games they love, he rejects the idea that "one pirated copy equals one lost sale." He points out that the very same free distribution that appeared to be a loss of revenue was also the primary driver that made Doom "impossible to ignore" in the first place.
The Long-Term Impact on id Software
Petersen’s claim that piracy "gutted" id Software was met with a firm correction from Romero. "I also don’t think piracy is what 'gutted' id – id is still around and still making games," Romero noted. He emphasized that while piracy certainly had a financial cost, it was not the underlying cause of the development hurdles faced during the production of Quake or the eventual changes in the company's staffing.
The debate mirrors sentiments shared by industry figures like Valve's Gabe Newell, who famously argued that piracy is often a service issue. When a great product is delivered on the player's terms, they are generally happy to pay for it. The fact that the Doom series remains a commercial success on storefronts like Steam, even decades later, suggests that the balance between accessibility and monetization remains as relevant in the 2020s as it was during the shareware era.