For the past three years I've been running a one-man games company from home, programming games and selling them direct to gamers all over the world.

Over that three years I discovered that all of my games were being pirated and 'shared' online. It's pretty hard to describe the feeling of finding your work pirated. The worst cases are where the person copying and posting your game on the internet insists other pirates 'thank them for their work'.

They mean their work copying the game, not my work actually making it. I had long been a fierce opponent of internet piracy, arguing endlessly and aggressively on web forums against the pirates. I'd actively fought against piracy of my games, getting copies of them removed as soon as they were found, in a never-ending battle.

A while ago I realised that although I thought I knew what the causes of people pirating my games were, I really had no idea. The only people who could really explain why so many people pirate games is the pirates themselves. So, rather innocently, I asked them to email me and tell me why they did it. I promised to read all of them and to keep an open mind. They replied in their thousands and it became a major topic on gaming news sites.

My website crashed as a result and people who couldn't contact me or email me had to post their responses on other sites. It seems nobody had ever bothered to ask this question before. The big games companies had occasionally reached for their lawyers, and the music companies are constantly issuing legal threats, combined with vast efforts to engineer technical methods to prevent piracy, but nobody had ever asked them why they did it.

Some of the responses ran to several pages, a few put Tolstoy to shame. It seems there are a lot of people who have waited a long time to tell the entertainment industry what they thought, and they had a lot to say. The top reasons seemed to be the high price of games, the copy-protection used on them, and the quality of the games themselves. Many of the pirates said they found the majority of games not worth the money, others were resentful of the way copy-protection treated honest customers as criminals. Time and time again people claimed they were happy to buy good games, at sensible prices.

As a result of what I found, I'm changing the way I make and sell my games. I already dropped some prices, and will keep future games cheaper, I abandoned copy-protection on all my games the next day, and resolved to work harder than ever before to make the best games that I can. I went from being demoralised and depressed by pirates to being motivated and encouraged by them. I asked them what they thought, then listened. Given the inability of big media companies to do either, I think I suddenly found my competitive advantage.

Cliff Harris is the founder of Positech Games