Hi Sandy, I hope you’re well. I have appreciated the recent discussions. I do not agree with your framing.

Regarding piracy, DOOM is a complicated example because shareware was the model. DOOM’s first episode was designed to be freely copied, passed around, uploaded, installed, and played. That enormous unpaid audience was not the same thing as piracy. It was part of how DOOM reached the world.

By the mid-90s, DOOM had something like 20 million shareware installs and more than 2 million paid copies sold. Those 20 million people were not “pirates” by default. A huge number of them were playing the free episode exactly as intended.

That doesn’t excuse people pirating the registered game. However, it’s important not to collapse legal shareware distribution, unpaid reach, and actual piracy into one number.

I also don’t think piracy is what “gutted” id - id is still around and still making games. Piracy may have cost money, but it wasn’t the reason Quake was hard or why people eventually went different ways.

So yes: pay developers. Buy the games you love. Support the people who make them.

But history is messier than “pirates killed the companies.” Sometimes the same free distribution that looked like lost sales was also the thing that made the game impossible to ignore.