Todd Hollenshead is the CEO of id, the developer of the DOOM and Quake series. He gave a talk at GDC about piracy. Unfortunately no transcript or video are available, but here is a summary of his talk (warning, this page’s color selection is hard on the eyes.)
Here is another report on the talk: The first link gives some really fascinating details about how some of id’s titles have been leaked, in particular one case in which source code was leaked due to a security flaw in Linux.
Another article about Hollenshead is here, including the amazing account of a journalist actually making an illegal copy of Hexen 2 to pirate it at a press event!
Here’s another article: It mentions a comment Hollenshead made about how piracy forced id to develop for non-PC platforms. There’s also a really interesting user comment someone named “Empty_One” makes. He points out that if developers are forced 100% to the consoles because of piracy, we won’t see mods any more: you can’t mod a console game. Thus, one of the most promising sources of game innovation – fan-based modding – will die out. There would have been no CounterStrike mod for Half-Life if Half-Life had been console-exclusive. (Incidentally the first comment on that post is from some idiot gleefully announcing how much he’s looking forward to someone pirating the next Quake title).
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