Sandy Petersen, a veteran of id Software, strongly dislikes gamers who pirate games. Recently, he wrote a post on X, where he criticized these individuals and stated that without pirates, id Software would have faced a very different fate.
Doom
According to Petersen, id Software encountered a massive wave of piracy when it released the first Doom. As a result, the company lost a significant portion of its revenue, which had a substantial impact on its future.
“70-90% of Doom players pirated the game. If not for this, we literally would have had far more resources for our work and for developing subsequent games. Possibly, in such a case, the development of Quake might not have financially crippled id Software,” Petersen wrote.
Petersen also recalled the unfortunate story of another studio where he worked — Ensemble Studios. According to him, the team was first forced to agree to an acquisition by Microsoft and later had to shut down entirely due to the damage caused by pirates. Allegedly, at least half of the audience for the original Age of Empires consisted of users with pirated versions of the game, which brought no revenue to Ensemble Studios.
However, Petersen’s statements were disputed by his former colleague at id Software, John Romero. In a response tweet, he emphasized that while he does not condone piracy, he considers Petersen's claims about Doom’s issues not entirely accurate. The game designer reminded that the company itself released a limited free version of the game, allowing everyone interested to try it, thus labeling its users as pirates is not correct. Although, the ratio of these users to paid copy owners was indeed striking: about 20 to 1 in the mid-1990s.
“I also don't think that piracy 'bankrupted' id Software — the company still exists and continues to release games. Piracy might have cost us money, but it wasn’t the reason the development of Quake was challenging, or why people eventually went in different directions,” Romero concluded.