Oh Sean, you are full of venom. (I nearly said something else)

Firstly, I buy my games, so feel free to listen.

As I said above I buy my video games, as does everybody I know who plays games in the tech environment that I work in. We are fortunate to have jobs that pay us enough to have a modicum of disposable income. However, if I cast my mind back to when I was young, spotty, had £2 a week pocket money and an Amiga, I did pirate games. The reason was a simple socio-economic one, I couldn't afford to buy any.

I can state as certainty that not one game sale was lost through my piracy as a 13-14 year old. For me to buy an Amiga game would have meant staying at home for 13 weeks without doing anyting. No tennis, no cinema, no music, no swimming, no fizzy drink, no sweets, nothing. My only opportunity for income boosting work was a paper round, and in an area with 200 kids of suitable age and a total of 11 paper-round slots there was almost no hope of getting one. Mine wasn't one of those 'cash for chores' households either.

If you successfully managed to stamp out piracy, I can tell you exactly what would happen. There would be a lot of second-hand consoles and PC's on the market as kids who'd got bored of the game their PC/console came with, and had no hope of getting another game before Christmas, sold them due to disuse, because they'd got to thinking that they'd rather have a bike/skateboard/guitar/radio-controlled car etc. than a dusty plastic box they never use.

You'd actually shrink the market. You may not like it, but piracy is the hook that keeps kids into gaming until the point that they have an income and can afford it legitimately.

I'm not saying it should be this way, but I don't see the industry coming up with any innovative ideas around 'purchase price based on ability to pay', I just see media companies trying to sue children.

I do download games, and I have to be hounest, I don't feel that guilty about it.

Sean Sands released a game that still, to this day, will not run on full graphics settings well. And he gets angry at me and people like me that he released a game that only 2% of gamers can play well on high? Does he understand business? Niche products are NOT big sellers. They never have been and never will. Why is Crysis a niche product? If you have a crap comp would you buy it? If you just spent $3000 on a comp would you? The target market for this game was huge, but in reality they targeted the wrong market. They wanted all young FPSers to play when only those with amazing comps would.

Ever since napster in the 90s I have been downloading things. So downloading a game is no great shakes, call downloading music a 'gateway drug'. I know it is not legal but that will never stop me. If I think I will play a game for maybe a week if that or just see what all the commotion is about I will download it.

But if there is a ground breaking game, WAR, WoW, Spore, WiC, COD4, E:TW, M:TW etc... I will buy them. And do you know why? Because they are good games, supported by good companies with good track records of customer satisfaction. And yes I BOUGHT Sins! Another awsesome game by the way.

I also bought all of the BF2 series....

And why all the hate on EA lol, they make your games better 8). Unless you are terrible at computers and dont know how to work around DRM etc.

Geoffrey42:

Nobody justified crime (yet).

The above quote is barely a "defense" of piracy. It was a pure statement that pirates don't do what they do for free, unless they also steal the hardware, but I doubt it. This does not make the piracy "okay", it just means it is not "free".

Widgets? Did anyone make a statement indicating this was okay? Is this in response to anyone, or are you just having a reflex reaction to the subject of "piracy"? PLUS: Moulds and widgets and the supplies to produce additional copies cost money. Most IP pirates engage in what they do because it has no additional noticeable cost to them. The pirates that do what you're talking about? They put bounties on DVD-sniffing dogs in Malaysia, and nobody has ever tried to defend them... Go home and play with your straw-man by yourself.

No, your lunatic fringe statements don't make any sense. Which conversation are you in?

I'm sorry... who are you talking to? The one "quote" you seem to have honed in on is barely identifiable as a "defense" of piracy, yet you go on for paragraphs pretending we're all defending piracy?

Way to miss the point.

My statements might be a little extreme or bizarre, but that is merely to make a point.(Which, again, you missed.) If your flawed logic makes no sense in these scenarios, how does it make sense in the real world?

"I paid money for a game, for some reason I cannot play it anymore(damage, loss of CD key, etc) so it is right and fair for me to steal a copy?" Lets throw this into the out-of-context-machine i recently acquired and let us see what comes out.

I have purchased a widget(nothing in particular, could be anything from a watch to a plane) and it stops working. Well, I paid good money for it, therefore I own the rights to get as many of these widgets as I want without paying 1 cent more. Sounds fair to me. What about the manufacture of the widgets? Where is the fairness to him? He designed and built these things and for the right to use them he should be paid what he deems fair market value. If you have a problem with that, DON'T USE HIS WIDGETS!

And that analogy of the Dell, banks, account limits, and kidneys makes no sense either. You also appeared to have missed the point. Let me try again: You spend money on a fantastic printer, amazing ink, and pristine paper. You now have the means to make copies of $100 bills, so it is your god given right to do so? After all, you are not hurting anybody, just printing some money that you didn't have to work for. Sounds fair and legal.

The "Try it then buy it(or not)" logic is also full of holes. You cannot compare it to test driving a car, hearing a song on the radio, or any of that other nonsense. If you want to try a game before you buy it, you get the demo or rent the game. Demo's are available for a great many games and are perfectly legal, so try those. They are often free or very, very cheap. You idea of the car would be better translated to stealing a car, driving it around, then buying another one because you like the handling. Most illogical.

My last comment in this post, yes I have more but I have shit to do, is the idea of excluding you cowards from the discussions. Remember that piracy is illegal. Plain and simple. Using the out-of-context-machine(needs a better name) yet again, lets try something.

A government has enacted laws to make theft illegal(crazy I know). They are still having a problem with theft, so they try several things but nothing works. Their next step is to call a town hall style meeting with the thieves and try to talk with them about what will keep them from stealing peoples shit. Where do you see this going?

Again, be a productive member of society and stop stealing shit.

Kiltman

P.S. Plato was wrong. People don't uphold justice because of a lack of cahones, it is because they have a sense of right and wrong. In Virginia, many of the public schools and official buildings have a system of anybody who is in a fight is guilty. I have, on several occasions, jumped in a fight to help those who are clearly being wronged DESPITE social consequences. Compassion for fellow man is the driving force for many on the "justice" side. Ask any Marine, Soldier, or sailor why they do it, and I promise you it is NOT because of a fear of the consequences.

kiltmanfortywo:
Lets throw this into the out-of-context-machine

Way out of context. Right out of the context of data duplication not having a material cost...

The closest you're coming to a coherent rebuttal is your $100 bill counterfeiting argument which does encapsulate the concept of reproduction being costless (or close enough). But it contains another serious flaw. Games have use value and so are valuable no matter how many there are. Money doesn't have any use value, it's value is based solely on rarity and so each additional unit devalues all other units in existence.

Nufoo:
QFT. This didn't seem like an article so much as a blog post. The problem with excluding pirates from the debate is that, without talking to them (us), you can only speculate on their motivations. That, apparently, leads to crap like Mass Effect's DRM, which, judging by BioWare's forums, was pretty counter-productive.

Actaully, you dont have to speculate on thier motives. Their motives ARE free stuff, nothing deeper.

To Angron, if I use your logic I can steal cars because I bought one and these ones that I steal cost too much?

Ash1300:
The industry should listen to pirates. They might learn something.

They could listen to them, but they would not learn anything. Pirates pirate because its free. If you really want to know if a game works, consult people on the internet.

The long, considered agreement for the article I had planned would be easier if not for that picture of plushie Captain Jack Sparrow.

domicius:
The funny thing, of course, being that piracy has been around at least as long as the gaming industry, and has yet to be blamed for the death of a single format.

Currently being blamed-and not unrightly so-for the decrease in PC game sales and the increasing tendency of developers to prefer consoles.

The question is not one of morality, but of economics. When a good is overpriced, people will prefer the cheaper alternative. And piracy is not free; you still have to buy a gaming PC (expensive) before you can get onto the bandwagon.

Please look up the "Broken Window Fallacy" and come back to this thread.

I recommend reading up about Brad Wardell, CEO of PC games makers Ironclad. They made Sins of a Solar Empire, sold it online without copy protection, and made money. The piracy argument does not hold.

Your argument doesn't hold.

That's not an insult; your argument literally doesn't make any sense. Even as DVD sales rose, so did piracy, and the industry still did well. If a man is running, and slows to a walk, he's still moving forward. The argument is not that enough people are pirating to make sales negative-which is essentially what you're implying-but that people are pirating who would've otherwise bought the game.

Geoffrey42:
Cevat's 20-to-1 figure is inflated, and without hard evidence otherwise, I think he's very far off.

So do I; a poll, taken of PC pirates and linked-to by Kotaku, claimed that only one in one thousand pirates had any intention of paying for the games they downloaded. At all. If that figure is anything close to accurate...

Yes, PC developers are abandoning the PC in droves. Is piracy really the cause of it though? Sure seems like an easy scapegoat. As Skrapt above me mentions, developers have attempted a variety of things in the name of "curbing piracy", but so very few of them have actually stopped pirates, and almost all of them have made life harder on paying customers.

Hence, the move to consoles. You can spend less money on Copy Protection and more on making games.

Back to the example of the wonderful Crysis, which was programmed to only run optimally on the top 1% of hardware in existence (at time of launch, for the entirety of the oh-so-crucial first few weeks, as discussed in every other article on the current gaming/retail landscape). Artificially restricting your own market, and then complaining that not enough people bought your product? What are you, insane?

Funny thing; if a game sells poorly and the publisher blames piracy, it's because the game is crap. If a game sells well and the publisher speaks out against piracy, they should just shut up because they're making millions of dollars.

You know what pirates do? They fix those things for me.

Couldn't they do that just as easily with a regular game? Homebrew up a patch?

Makaze:

Way out of context. Right out of the context of data duplication not having a material cost...

The closest you're coming to a coherent rebuttal is your $100 bill counterfeiting argument which does encapsulate the concept of reproduction being costless (or close enough). But it contains another serious flaw. Games have use value and so are valuable no matter how many there are. Money doesn't have any use value, it's value is based solely on rarity and so each additional unit devalues all other units in existence.

First, everybody on the thread needs to stop taking analogies literally. The purpose of one is to draw attention to a detail or a different point of view, concept, or make a point. It is next to impossible to find a 100% accurate analogy for IP piracy because for 2000 years there has been nothing close to it except patent and copyright fraud; even those are stretches.

People who fail to grasp that are about as logical as reading the fable "Tortoise and the Hare" and proclaiming the overall doucebaggery of rabbits as creatures who gloat to much.

It might be a stretch for some of the "pirating is cool" crowd but try using your brain to understand more than the obvious.

Johnwood, you seem to be playing equivocator(for the unlearned, somebody who will argue for anybody) here.;)
Your last paragraph in post 1 has a very good point. Even though it is not causing a negative economic growth, it is still hurting. Gaming is an industry and they want as much money as they can get. But very good points, glad to see someone on here who can think geometrically.

One point you made does not make sense however. The part of the game that sells and speaks out against piracy not being entitled to do so because they are already making millions. It's a business and they want all the money possible for the work they put into a product.

Putting this into my trusty OOCTM (trying new names) we get this fantastic result: I sell widgets(yes, widgets. Get over it) and they sell like hotcakes! However, somebody starts making exact copies of my widgets and giving them away for free. Because I have a booming industry already, can I not raise a stink about something I feel is unfair? After all, I came up with it, own the patents and the copyrights, and created a working product. How is this fair to silence me because I made a good product?

Kiltman

Karisse:
The concept of being able to try-before-you-buy already exists - it's called RENTING.

Show me where I can rent PC games please.

so because you cannot rent the games it gives you the right to steal them?

Kiltman

kiltmanfortywo:
One point you made does not make sense however. The part of the game that sells and speaks out against piracy not being entitled to do so because they are already making millions. It's a business and they want all the money possible for the work they put into a product.

I know. My point was that there's an incredibly hypocritical double standard at play. When Crytek complained about low Crysis sales, piracy advocates said their actions were justified because the game was terrible. When GTAIV ROMS were leaked, the exact same people said that the game was going to make millions anyway.

And I don't care about 'profit' so much as someone's right to control what happens to the stuff they make, be it a game or a garage door. There are ways to make derivates without significantly altering the value of the original-see fanfic-but piracy is not one of those ways.

What I dislike most is all the rationalizations about piracy. I'd rather have an honest thief than one who's really good at lying to himself.

panfist:

Karisse:
The concept of being able to try-before-you-buy already exists - it's called RENTING.

Show me where I can rent PC games please.

I dunno. Show me where you get to take something you want because you can't try it first, please.

The "I wouldn't have bought it anyway so nobody gets hurt" argument and the "well it's ok because I couldn't afford the high prices" arguments are just plain stupid...

I want a Ferrari...can't afford one, not gonna be buying one. If I steal one is it still a crime? Last time I checked...yes. A simple fact of life...unless you are from a VERY small percentage of humans on this planet, there will ALWAYS be things you want but cannot afford...or would like to have but can't justify the price. The fact that in this instance it is easy to steal does not make it condonable.

and for the "Would you buy a CD before you even heard one song?"...yeah, I do it all the time for bands I know I like...did it with 2 CD's just this week :) I either stick to bands / movies / games I like, or I check out some reviews from people I trust...there are boatloads of gaming magazines and websites...and if you know what reviewers tend to have similar tastes than it becomes pretty easy to pick winners.

In Australia, I've seen brand new console and pc games as high as $110. This is understandable for the latest games (although still a little overpriced in my opinion) and on a student income, I'd never dream of paying that much for a game. Instead of downloading a game simply because I want it, I came to a realisation. THERE ARE OTHER GAMES OUT THERE!

Just a few days ago I bought a brand new, legitimate copy of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay for $10. Yeah, ten freaking dollars! And it's a bloody good game! Instead of holding my breath for Starcraft 2, I went out and payed $27 for Starcraft + Broodwar! People who can afford games but download them just because they want them now-and-for-free are just criminals.

Buying old games is good and all but I would like to see developers producing low cost but still awesome games. Ikaruga was developed by no less than 3 people. No, not a typo, three people. Theres no reason companies cant make cheap, great games with lower end graphics to open up a whole new market to them.

If you havent already, read this:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_158/5045-Piracy-and-the-Underground-Economy

I agree with most of the points in it. The subject of piracy isn't good vs evil, red vs blue, orks vs humans, it's a whole crazy spectrum that looks bad in one light and good in another.

panfist:
Show me where I can rent PC games please.

I suppose Metaboli could be considered renting. ;)

kiltmanfortywo:

"I paid money for a game, for some reason I cannot play it anymore(damage, loss of CD key, etc) so it is right and fair for me to steal a copy?" Lets throw this into the out-of-context-machine i recently acquired and let us see what comes out.

I have purchased a widget(nothing in particular, could be anything from a watch to a plane) and it stops working. Well, I paid good money for it, therefore I own the rights to get as many of these widgets as I want without paying 1 cent more. Sounds fair to me. What about the manufacture of the widgets? Where is the fairness to him? He designed and built these things and for the right to use them he should be paid what he deems fair market value. If you have a problem with that, DON'T USE HIS WIDGETS!

But when you're buying a PC game, or any other PC software, you aren't buying the disc, or even the software on that disc, you're buying a license to use that software. It doesn't matter where that software comes from, so long as you are still the owner of that license (ie, you haven't sold it on to someone else). The disc becoming damaged or the data on the disc somehow becoming unreadable has no effect on that. If you buy another copy because you can't use your other copy, you just end up with two licenses.

Anyway, the only games I've downloaded are the ones that literally can not be bought new any more, and I don't really see why I should have to pay massive amounts of money on Ebay when the developers wouldn't be benefiting from it anyway. Even though I can't afford new-release games, I don't download them, I just wait for the price to drop.

Piracy has been around for a decade? Surely quite a lot longer than that.

Anyway, I have a pirated copy of a game on my system at the moment.

Why? Well, I bought the original after thoroughly enjoying the trial and then the disc broke.

Now, the lovely Anti-Pirate device means I can't play this without the disc, but the lovely Piracy device means I can.

So, I'm actually being forced to Pirate.

There's also the huge abandonware network (completely legal) and whilst I will always BUY a copy of a game I like, I really don't want to spend my hard-earned money (like I have) buying games that, although they say work on my system, don't.

So far: GRAW 2 and a number of recent games simply won't work; Guild Wars, EQ2, EQ1, Auto Assault etc. take over a DAY's worth of downloads just to work, as does Hidden and Dangerous, Vampire the Masquerade etc.

Of my favourite games at the moment, four need to have constant disc accessing, which is ruining my drive. And for a quick download, I'm free of that constant machine-crunching whine.

So...the view is...When Pirates provide more helpful service than Manufacturers, why trust the latter?

[I have NEVER pirated a game myself though. I've released a few via freeware though.]

The_root_of_all_evil:

There's also the huge abandonware network (completely legal)

Abandonware is not legal, you just probably won't get in (much) trouble for it.

kiltmanfortywo:
First, everybody on the thread needs to stop taking analogies literally. The purpose of one is to draw attention to a detail or a different point of view, concept, or make a point. It is next to impossible to find a 100% accurate analogy for IP piracy because for 2000 years there has been nothing close to it except patent and copyright fraud; even those are stretches.

How can we not take your analogies seriously when they're pretty much the only thing you argue your point with? If you can't get an even faintly accurate analogy, don't use them. I'm amused by your rebuttal of my Dell argument, especially seeing as that was supporting your argument by explaining one of your points, something you utterly failed to do.

You are right and I agree with you that it is a business's prerogative to make money. This is undeniable. This is why I pay for my games. However when said business begins to enforce ridiculous measures that penalise me and other paying customers while barely hurting piracy, while those same filthy pirates develop a method that allows me to bypass these measures, I become increasingly tempted to turn to piracy. Not necessarily because I have any rights to do so, but because the business needs a slap and this the only way I could do it.

And please try and refrain from insulting your opposition's intelligence. No-one here is stupid and you're just lowering the tone of the debate.

Wow... it's fascinating how easy it is for people debating on a forum (even one as relatively civil and eloquent as The Escapist) to:
1) Pose statements as absolute facts when they are actually nothing of the sort
2) Take things out of context and nit pick ad nauseum.

sharp_as_a_cork:
Wow... it's fascinating how easy it is for people debating on a forum (even one as relatively civil and eloquent as The Escapist) to:
1) Pose statements as absolute facts when they are actually nothing of the sort
2) Take things out of context and nit pick ad nauseum.

People here are trying to protect themselves or make themselves look better than other. Because of that people do not act rationally, similar to a console war I suppose.

sharp_as_a_cork:
Wow... it's fascinating how easy it is for people debating on a forum (even one as relatively civil and eloquent as The Escapist) to:
1) Pose statements as absolute facts when they are actually nothing of the sort
2) Take things out of context and nit pick ad nauseum.

Just like you've done?

JonnWood:
Funny thing; if a game sells poorly and the publisher blames piracy, it's because the game is crap. If a game sells well and the publisher speaks out against piracy, they should just shut up because they're making millions of dollars.

You know what pirates do? They fix those things for me.

Couldn't they do that just as easily with a regular game? Homebrew up a patch?

You've just mixed console piracy with PC piracy, and while there are parallels, I think it best if we keep discussions of the two separate. While I'm willing to entertain the notion that PC piracy is significantly affecting PC game sales, you've got a long road to hoe to convince me that the console market is even maybe suffering at the hands of console piracy (in the West).

I have not played Crysis... I am not making a judgment about its quality. I am merely looking at the launch of Crysis through the lens of the time I spent in business classes, and through the lens of all the articles across various gaming-oriented websites which discuss the retail cycle, and the importance of the first few weeks. Crytek intentionally targeted Crysis to the extreme end of the PC performance spectrum (establishing it as the de facto reference/test-bed standard for all new PC hardware, and spawning its own internet meme). In so doing, they self-limited their potential audience. Did they capture 100% of their potential market at 3.1 million? I don't know. Not everyone with the hardware to run it is an FPS fan. Were their potential sales ever, EVER 60 million? Ha. As the average PC becomes more and more capable of running Crysis, I think you'll see their sales grow, but those sales will be largely useless to the company, because they are past the box office weekend.

Per the homebrew comment, yes, other people could fix those things for me. I was not saying that I pirated the game in order to employ those fixes, simply that the pirate community was the one providing the necessary patches for me.

Geoffrey42:

You've just mixed console piracy with PC piracy, and while there are parallels, I think it best if we keep discussions of the two separate.

Acquaintance of mine had Mariokart on the Wii a few days before it was released.

I'm not sure there is a difference.

Singing Gremlin:

How can we not take your analogies seriously when they're pretty much the only thing you argue your point with? If you can't get an even faintly accurate analogy, don't use them. I'm amused by your rebuttal of my Dell argument, especially seeing as that was supporting your argument by explaining one of your points, something you utterly failed to do.

You are right and I agree with you that it is a business's prerogative to make money. This is undeniable. This is why I pay for my games. However when said business begins to enforce ridiculous measures that penalise me and other paying customers while barely hurting piracy, while those same filthy pirates develop a method that allows me to bypass these measures, I become increasingly tempted to turn to piracy. Not necessarily because I have any rights to do so, but because the business needs a slap and this the only way I could do it.

And please try and refrain from insulting your opposition's intelligence. No-one here is stupid and you're just lowering the tone of the debate.

Analogies are how I work and the easiest way to argue this point without resorting to massively long posts(longer that what I got now atleast.)

The idea of trying to rationalize the actions of pirates is all pointless; in the end of the day, they still stole material and are, therefore, criminals. The best argument that tries to say it is not stealing is the one made by sircannonfodder in saying that you purchase the license to allow you to use the software.

This license allows you to use company x's exact version of the software. When a patch or download is released, you have to recheck the license agreement. Piracy does not give you their(the company's) version of the software. It might look the same on the surface but once you pry open the coding and make it run without a cd you have changed the coding, therefore the software, and you do not own a license to that product. Read your license agreement on any game, you will most likely find a clause in there about not messing around with the coding, reverse engineering, or something to that effect.

People who try to justify piracy are, in fact, lying to them selves for the purpose to make them selves feel better. It all comes down to one cause: convenience. The convenience of not having to scour the market looking for a game; the convenience of not having to pay for a game; the convenience of not having to insert a CD. Stop being so lazy.

Kiltman

P.S. Johnwood, now that I see it fleshed out a bit, it makes alot more sense. Thanks for clarifying.

kiltmanfortywo:
Great job justifying crime guys.

Y'all (pirates and their defenders) are slime. You ARE making horrible points and arguments. "Pirating isn't totally free, they still have to buy the PC." So bank robbery is just fine as long as I purchase a quality gun? I would love to see your upbringing and ask you parents how they think you could possibly pass as a functioning member of society.

Say you have some great idea. You make widgets(nothing in particular, just something people want). You spend years crafting the perfect widget, getting the right handle, the right curves and lines, the perfect weight and feel in the hand. You sell your widget for $50 because you think it is worth it. Some people buy it, but somebody else gets one from a friend and starts making moulds of it and giving them away for free. Is this legal? Moral? Ethical? Beneficial in any way AT ALL?

Take your excuses for piracy and apply them to the real world for a second. "Your car is to expensive, so I'll steal somebody else's" "I broke my old T.V., I'll just take that one" "No, I will not stop taking your wallet, I paid good money for these sticky gloves and I'll be damned if I don't use them!" Do any of those make sense?

Y'all don't deserve to have a voice in any argument. Your opinion is worthless, you points are void, and you have no damn excuse. Stop being cheap and get a job to buy your games, music, and videos like people who are worth something.

Until that point, you are spineless cowards who are trying to claim something that ain't yours. GROW A PAIR!

I know for a fact you've commited a crime, so shut the hell up and stop being a prick.

kiltmanfortywo:

I have purchased a widget(nothing in particular, could be anything from a watch to a plane) and it stops working. Well, I paid good money for it, therefore I own the rights to get as many of these widgets as I want without paying 1 cent more. Sounds fair to me. What about the manufacture of the widgets? Where is the fairness to him? He designed and built these things and for the right to use them he should be paid what he deems fair market value. If you have a problem with that, DON'T USE HIS WIDGETS!

Cept, In the case of the widget, you get the rights to own, change, modify or otherwise screw with said widget, and it is given in buying that: The widget is your problem from then on out, any problems that occur are YOUR problem.
In the case of a video game you are explicitly buying the RIGHT TO PLAY THE GAME, Not the game itself, therefore any problems afterward are the problem of the company, you are not buying the right to own said game, just to play it.
SO if you have the right to play a game, do you need to pay to get another copy?
IQ=100;
If (Answer) IQ-=30;
else IQ+=10;

Singing Gremlin:

This license allows you to use company x's exact version of the software. When a patch or download is released, you have to recheck the license agreement. Piracy does not give you their(the company's) version of the software. It might look the same on the surface but once you pry open the coding and make it run without a cd you have changed the coding, therefore the software, and you do not own a license to that product. Read your license agreement on any game, you will most likely find a clause in there about not messing around with the coding, reverse engineering, or something to that effect.

People who try to justify piracy are, in fact, lying to them selves for the purpose to make them selves feel better. It all comes down to one cause: convenience. The convenience of not having to scour the market looking for a game; the convenience of not having to pay for a game; the convenience of not having to insert a CD. Stop being so lazy.

Kiltman

P.S. Johnwood, now that I see it fleshed out a bit, it makes alot more sense. Thanks for clarifying.

One does not need to mess with any of the games code to create a new program that will modify memory addresses or emulate the startup sequence to a game, so as to get the game to boot without a cd.

A huge fallacy i see in each and every anti piracy argument is that they consider piracy stealing instead of copying.

To demonstrate it, using your car analogy:
If you have a car and it breaks it's still wrong to steal somebody elses car because that way the other person ends up with no car, which he still paid for just like you.

However, if we apply internet rules here, you don't take another person's car, you just make a perfect copy of another car without affecting the original at all.

Piracy does NOT involve breaking into a game store and harvesting the games there.

And where exactly does that 0.1% of pirates would actualy pay number come from and in what context was that poll?

Asehujiko:
Surely they bring their load of bullshit as well but i've yet to hear anything sensible from the objectivist camp.

/defect

Sorry Ayn, you can't mix Nietzsche with economics and come out with anything sensible.

To those who say that piracy's immorality is the primary reason to not do it, well, that's just not going to work. Morality is subjective and plenty of people find little reasons to justify their actions. Sure not every single torrent I've downloaded can be written off as justified but I don't seek moral fortitude in all my actions. If you want to stop piracy, then provide practical arguments against it. Prove that we're strangling the industry with statistics, not quotes or anecdotes. Unless you can prove to me that I am forcing software developers to quit their jobs and stop making games because piracy has made it impractical to make a profit, only then will you have a valid argument.

Piracy has been around for years and the gaming, movie, and music industries don't seem to be letting up. I still believe there's substantial money to be made in those fields or else we'd see the end of them years ago. Also, it becomes increasingly harder to point to piracy as the cause of any downturns due to the poor economy. Less money going around means less games. Piracy is a symptom of that problem(getting it for free is a solution to not getting it at all), not the cause.

I'll be honest- this is prolly the worst article I've read on the Escapist. This article was essentially a 5 year old kid sticking his fingers in his ears and childishly shouting "La La La, I can't hear you!" at the top of his lungs. And to think that Mr Sands wrote an article advocating completely the opposite just a few months ago.

On piracy, I'll just say these few words. If I found a Ferrarri in the street, unlocked, unguarded, ready to go, would I steal it? No. I'd like to think my morals are better than that.

...however, if I could download a Ferrarri... well, that's another matter entirely.

John Galt:

/defect

Sorry Ayn, you can't mix Nietzsche with economics and come out with anything sensible.

Without asking why you have "John Galt" for an account name, I just want to give you points for nerd philosopher megafunny, while avoiding starting a discussion on Nietzsche's perspectivism versus Rand's imitation. But I'm sure she is rolling in her grave, or would be if she weren't an atheist and therefore gone forever.

Popped over here from the other piracy thread this week, and I'm going to commit a mild faux pas by posting the same link I did over there to an interesting method Insomniac used way-back-when to combat piracy:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_01.htm

On top of being interesting from a technical standpoint, I think it gives a more realistic illustration of some of the industry's perspective toward piracy. A lot of the grandiose generalizations the pirate community uses to paint developers and publishers create an unrealistic adversarial picture; each side is out to paint the other as stupid. Realistically this isn't as true of many parts of the development community, large portions of which hate the RIAA. It really just depends on who you're talking about and to -- a guy in a suit who has to make his explanations to shareholders (and he's a person, too, with a family to feed and a career to protect), a gal programming a game and putting her life into it, a studio head who has to keep their boat above water in order to keep doing what they love.

The thing about piracy is that it's so abstracted from the perceptions of its consequences that it's easy to think of as "harmless" or "a victimless crime". It isn't. Those who glorify piracy or say that it's harmless need to be ready to accept an industry with fewer games being made as a result. But that consequence is so abstract and separated from the actual actions involved in downloading a game that people have to actually think about the ramifications of their actions in order to make an ethical judgment about it. For a lot of people it's easier just to download the game and duck behind a lot of rhetoric when challenged on it.

That being said, we should, as a community and as game makers, be listening to pirates. The Spyro experience shows the dynamic very well -- it's adversarial, but it's also weirdly symbiotic. It's not in the pirates' best interest to destroy the industry, either. And if we want people to stop killing our livelihood we do need to address these ideological notions, deconstruct them and illustrate to the pirate community -- even if not for their sake but for the more casually involved who can actually have their minds changed -- exactly what the damage is, in a realistic fashion. It's very, very difficult to do, because the realities of the damage are complex and difficult to track, but reinforcing the adversarial stance only exacerbates the problem.

It's hard to visualize "games that aren't being made" -- it's very abstract -- but make no mistake that this is absolutely the cost of piracy. That said, it's also a disservice to the development community to say that we're unwilling to talk about it ("I'm not a racist, but..."), when in fact that discussion has been going on for a good long time, and will continue. (All THAT being said, Sean, I enjoyed the article for its alternate perspective on the issue.)

You are confusing "playing the game" with "using the software." On your end of things it looks identical, but you are using a modified or changed version of said software, thereby breaking the license agreement. If the programmer designed the game to have to run with the CD but you pull the data from the CD to your hard drive, you are changing the software merely by switching where it is accessed from. Read your license agreements fully and they will say that by playing the game, you agree not to do x, y, and z. This typically includes reverse engineering, changing source coding, and altering the program in any way.

With the idea of intellectual property (IP) it is impossible to differentiate copying from stealing. IP basically means that the owner of the IP, be they EA, MS, or who ever, owns the data and is allowing you to use it. This is the very basis of what copyright and trademark law is about; an idea or concept being owned by an individual.

Movies and music being downloaded without permission from the artists or producers is illegal and considered piracy, so how do y'all think the same does not apply to IP's like video games as well?

Kiltman

P.S. What law do you know for a fact I have broken, Aries_Split? I can guarantee you piracy isn't it if I have broken one.

I don't know does this saying exist in English, but here goes: "Opportunity makes a thief." And Internet is that opportunity, like others posted already. Brad Wardell and Cevat Yerli are wrong when they think piracy is just about people deciding where to spend their money, it's just that they don't want to spend their money. So I think stuff like Steam is the best to prevent it. Or possibly something like games coming on somekind of flash drives, so that there's no need to install the game on computer, everything's handled from the flash drive. Hell, I don't know much about tecnhical stuff so I probably should just shut up. It would probably costs more too.

Oh yeah, about Crytek, let's defend them a bit. Or actually, let's not be ridiculous.

Stating Crysis works only on 1% of computers is stupid. Maybe this is the same as the "10 means perfect" -argument: I'll never understand how people can think that way. I mean, damnit, what about putting graphics settings to high, medium or even low? For crying out loud guys, you loved Portal and Crysis probably has better graphics on medium. Think about the gameplay, damnit, gameplay!

Though no 1.3 patch sucks, I agree with that.