The Burning Double-Edged Sword

by Lunar Phoenix

Imagine making the ‘perfect’ game, the game that you thought up, spent years creating and finally after much pavement beating, found a developer to help make your dream a reality. Months of planning go by, music scores written up, storyline tweaks and imputes, art work conceived and drawn, loads of money poured into advertising this game. Testers and video game magazines play through the game and proclaim it a great game for its genre and a must have for any gamer. Three months after the game is finally released to a much-anticipated crowd the game is considered a flop. Money wasted on a game that no one is even playing you’re dropped from the company and forced to go back to whatever life you had before you came up with the game.

How did this happen?

Were game testers and video game magazines, the eyes and ears of the gaming industry for all of us so very wrong? How can people who spend their days doing nothing ‘but’ playing video games be so horribly wrong about this game?

Then you click on the Internet one night to wail about the game’s failure to one of your friends when you come across a ROM site. Hidden among countless websites for video games is a site giving away free ROMs for different systems. Curious you look around and find that lo and behold the game you made was hacked into, made into a ROM and put out on the net for free within the first few weeks of publication.

Your game didn’t fail, people just found a way to enjoy it without paying you a dime.

I can agree with the creation of the ROM system and emulators for the NES and Super NES among other systems that are now very old. You’d be lucky just to ‘find’ one of the older systems much less find it and the game in perfect working order. Without spending a load of money at least. But for the Playstation, N64, or Dreamcast, what’s the point? The systems are still out and still relatively new though being outdated; they aren’t over a decade old. Handheld players can argue that a few games are dark and unplayable, but that is an issue to take up with the company that produces the game.

Take what was stated above and apply it to any field of entertainment. Movies that no one goes to anymore because they are being shown for free or sold illegally over the Internet. Suddenly good movies and bad movies are lumped together since no one knows what is considered ‘good’ anymore. After all only five or six people went to see the movie so they could copy it and put it on the net with their T1 connection.

Take that and apply it to music, downloading whole CDs rather then buying a CD. Before it was more understandable since the prices were ridiculously high, the boxes holding the CDs made no clear sense either. In collage it’s easy to explain away, you just don’t have the money to buy any of this stuff. How can you buy a CD when a schoolbook alone can cost anywhere up to $20.00s and over? Why would you ‘want’ to buy a CD for one song that rocks when all the others suck? Getting a computer with a CD burner a download program and some cheap blank CD’s is much quicker and has a better result then sitting down fumbling with CD’s for a single song that you like amid a sea of failure tunes.

People claim we’re in a state of economic trouble? Why shouldn’t we be? America isn’t run for free after all, home of the free doesn’t equal home of the get everything for free without working for it.

Go to a music store, since right now they’re being hit the hardest. Look at all the people who work there alone and think; because people don’t buy music much anymore this is the amount of people who work there. People who can’t afford many employees tend not to hire more then they can properly pay. But how can they afford five or six people to run a store at a time when all the store’s income is pouring through Internet connections? That person who could be working at a record store, a movie theater, or a game store is now competing against everyone else for jobs that aren’t being hit for piracy. Why should you, who lack job experience, new out of middle or high school, get the job over someone who has experience working in retail? After all you cost them their job it’s only right and fitting that they take your job. There are only so many fast food restaurants, gas stations, and clothes stores that can hire you in your town and only so many people who were already out of school before you that have them.

There’s this old Korean story I read once in a book of translated Korean works. It was about a wife with a lazy husband. How lazy you ask? So lazy that he didn’t even feed himself, she had to do it for him. Finally one day she had to go on a trip to see her family, this being old OLD Korea long before the West ever found them. In preparation for that long trip she took many rice cakes and put a thread through them before hanging them around his neck. She left and came back finding her husband dead and not a single rice cake had been touched. He had been too lazy to even lift his hand to the cakes then to his mouth.

Much like how things are going in the modern day. We were so greedy for money we found machines that could do the work of hundreds and replaced all those hundreds with a few machines. Thus crowding other job markets with people desperate for work. Now we’re doing it again, finding new, fast and free methods to satisfy ourselves while taking those same people, us included, and putting us on the welfare line. I hate to break it to you but you’re not that smart. You’re not the only person who’s downloading music, video games, movies, and computer programs for free over Kazaa and other programs. For that matter you’re just another person who may end up downloading a virus from a corrupt CD or getting a blank tape that someone sold you as a trick for your money.

Moral of this rant, prioritize. The next time you’re looking at a game or a series of songs that you want from a single artist, don’t just hop on the computer and download it for free somewhere. Work for the money and buy it. Then that pile of bad games that people often mention won’t be made anymore cuz the higher ups know what sells and what doesn’t because they’re seeing the fruits of their labor actually working rather then being smuggled through the net.

Side note: Just cuz you live in another country and can’t get all the games doesn’t mean do it either. There’s a cure for your problem, it’s called a hostile take over of company and country. Can’t stop the games from coming if you own the country… or try corrupting Prince William.