Freezing Single Point Spear

by D.K. aka Anarhist

Original Editorial: The Burning Double-Edged Sword

Lunar Phoenix starts off equating personal failure with piracy. Just because somebody ripped your game and made a 'ROM' of it, your game flopped and you are in financial ruin. If that were true Warcraft 3 would have NEVER made it off the ground as beta versions permeated every single college campus on the planet. There was a hacked CD image of the whole game available even before the official release. Yet WC3 sold many copies. Why? Because majority of people out there will prefer to pay for a product than steal it. Toward the end she has a side note: "Just cuz you live in another country and can't get all the games doesn't mean do it either." Hrm, Bahamut Lagoon as well as FF5 come to mind. Both are brilliant games that were not released in the U.S. Some people got together and translated it, and for that I am eternally grateful, because otherwise we'd be 2 great classic games short. Nintendo could have made a killing selling these games, but they chose not to localize them. I am sure they knew of consequences. Most importantly, and I can't stress this enough, companies do not pay for piracy. We, the gamers, do. While they never give a precise number as to percent loss in revenue due to piracy, they do jack up game prices to unimaginable heights. CD protections, Copy protection, serial numbers all translate directly into cost as those things cost money in licensing and manufacturing. Of course none of those protections prevent piracy but the cost, my friends, is passed on to us. The bottom line is this, piracy is direct product of exorbitant prices, not of greed and laziness of gamers as Lady Lunar Phoenix tries to suggest. Piracy does not cause a pile of bad games, as LLP states. That's absolutely ridiculous (Bad games is another topic, however)! Most important, however, is that we, gamers, pay for everything (CD protection, copy protection serial number generation, etc.) as well as fabled 'piracy' revenue lost: they are all incorporated into that hefty $50 price tag on the newest release. The developer does not suffer, the publisher does not suffer and the store, most certainly does not suffer. The only ones whoare penalized are us.