this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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Huh, so piracy was less harmful to them than Microsoft. Who'd have thought?
Turns out Microsoft were the real pirates of silicon valley all along.
There actually was a TV movie called Pirates of Silicon Valley. And yeah, Microsoft was the villains at the end of the movie.
It wasn't actually piracy, so much as ripping off customers.
What they were selling was copies of the shareware demo version of doom, which was supposed to be free. When id found out, they sold them empty boxes to put the shareware in and keep selling it.
If people bought the demo and liked the game, they would buy the full version from id by mail order.
Kinda shady tbh.
From the wiki:
Lots of people still didn't have good Internet access in the 90s, so shareware was often sold for cheap in software stores— especially Doom.
It's hard to recall, but I'm my country you'd get the shareware floppies from a special rack at the computer store. I can't remember the price but it might have been a few dollars
Not sure if it's better or worse, but I get "full of shit" vibes from this story. Like he just wanted a "look how unconventional we were" story and didn't think through how it sounded. Who knows
No since the first episode was free anyway they didn't make money on it, but they wanted more copies distributed as much as possible so people would pay for the additional episodes they actually sold. Its a good sales strategy.