Piracy and how it’s ruining gaming
Posted on August 15, 2008 - Filed Under Gaming
Digg recently had a couple of articles about pirating, and I felt that would be a good subject to touch on. One was from ars technia talking about the reasons why people pirate. The other was from games radar talking about both developers and gamers taking responsibility for themselves. Some of you may have had this conversation with me and others might not.
Personally at this point in my life I’m against piracy. Yes, I used to do it with music and an occosianal game here and there. So I understand the appeal to it. Afterall why pay for something when you can get it for free? Well that’s quite simple, because your taking money away from developers. Which means programmers lose jobs, companies go under or sell out to EA, and franchises that you might have loved get scrapped. Is the short term gain worth the long term loss? I can’t say yes and I doubt others give the thought about it. THe ones that do, give the old, well they are still getting paid. Sadly more and more people are being introduced to piracy and realizing how easy it is. We are now seeing a snow ball effect that is putting the PC gaming Market in serious jeporady. It’s also no secret that the ease of piracy on the dreamcast is one of the leading reasons why Sega left the console maker industry.
Now let’s look at the next reason many people give as to why pirate. Price. Yes gaming is expensive, no question about it. $50-$60 for a new game. However just because something is expensive doesn’t mean you can steal it. Are these pirates stealing cars because they are expensive? What about a set of golf clubs? Food? Gas? This is one of the arguements for piracy I’ve never been able to understand. If you can’t afford to game, then obtain a new hobby. I can’t afford a lamborgini, thus I’m not shopping for one. I can’t to eat ribeye every day of the week, thus I don’t. Why gaming has been deemed okay to steal from, because it’s to expensive, is beyond me.
Now not only does it make no sense, you are again shooting yourself in the foot. By pirating you are taking sales and money away from the developers. Thus they raise prices to try to make up for the loss(thus causing more people to pirate). You end up with a cycle of price raises and increased pirates. I will say, I see the PC developers doing a better job then the pirates on this issues. PC games easily could have followed the raise in price of console games but they have stayed at $50 for the most part. Hopefully some pirates will realize this.
Overall, piracy accomplishes nothing but exactly what you don’t want in the long term. The morepirates become popular the more cost goes up, the more intrusive DRM becomes, quality of games lowers, quantity of games lowers. In the end I don’t believe anyone wants that. I hope some of you that find the need to steal games for whatever your reasons may be, will think a little bit more about your decisions.
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2 Responses to “Piracy and how it’s ruining gaming”
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tl;dr, but I for one don’t pirate modern games. I have thought about it however when I can’t install a game I paid good money for because of some bullshit copy protection. It’s this attitude of the consumer being the enemy that will kill commercial gaming, if anything, though I don’t see that happening. Retro piracy is a different matter. Besides, I started looking into freeware gaming, and there are some amazing games that are 100% free.
I skimmed your last paragraph, and it’s a lose-lose situation. Piracy encourages all that stuff, which in turn encourages more piracy, and so on.
However, gaming is not a medium in which I find it in any way respectable to pirate; sometimes it’s despicable, imo. But for music and film, it’s a representation of a changing business model. In these two mediums, the old business model is failing. Meanwhile, artists like Trent Reznor and Radiohead have embraced a new model and method of distribution. This only works because they are already well known, but it is a start. Piracy does it’s part, if the record companies are honest about how it hurts their sales, by showing we’re fed up crappy music and comic book adaption movies. Piracy is a good start, but we still look to the big name studios for content. Because that, ultimately, is where entertainment is heading: user-generated content. art by the masses
How about we stopping being so dependent on extravagant entertainment?
Bring kick the can back!