Pray you never have to hear John Romero wish you well. The legendary Doom designer has been politely – but brutally – correcting the record on video game history for years, and this time he's here to tell us all about the reality of computer game piracy. The short version? He'd prefer that you paid developers for their games, but piracy didn't kill the beloved studios of the '90s.
Earlier this week, Sandy Petersen – another id Software veteran who worked on the original Doom – asserted on Twitter that "70-90% of Doom's players pirated it," arguing that, without the resulting lost sales, "We would literally have had so much more for our workspace and upcoming projects." If those pirates had instead purchased the game, "Quake may not have gutted id Software." He concludes that "Damn pirates are the guys who killed game companies. like Atari, Amiga, Cinemaware, 3D Realms (Duke Nukem!)"
At least, that's Petersen's version of events. It's important to note that the original Doom used a distribution model that'll be utterly foreign to modern gamers: shareware. The whole first chapter of the game was distributed for free, and players could choose to register – paying the purchase price – to unlock the rest of the campaign. This is where Romero, in the tradition he's built over the past half-decade, hopes that Sandy is doing well.
"By the mid-90s, DOOM had something like 20 million shareware installs and more than 2 million paid copies sold," Romero says on Twitter. "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."
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,… https://t.co/a7sAS5HseJJune 29, 2026
It seems Romero is suggesting that Petersen's assertion about a "70-90%" piracy rate for Doom actually includes the shareware copies of the game, which… Yes. Shareware copies were, by definition, not pirated ones.
"I also don’t think piracy is what 'gutted' id – id is still around and still making games," Romero continues. "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."
Game developers deserve to be paid for their work, but the notion that "one pirated copy equals one lost sale" has always been a false dichotomy. Certainly, some pirates download games instead of paying for them, but many more of them never would've bought the game in the first place. The shareware distribution model recognized that fact by giving potential players a generous portion of a game and expecting that they'd love it enough to pay for more.
That's roughly how Valve boss Gabe Newell saw the issue of piracy in 2009, when he argued that "people are happy to pay money" for "a great product delivered on their terms." I think Doom certainly qualified in the '90s, and here in the '20s, the fact that Doom games are now being sold on Steam despite easily pirated versions existing all over the internet suggests that both Newell and Romero are onto something.
Who am I to argue with the forefather of the best FPS games out there?
