Game Pirates, and the Lost Continent

by IceEgg

Original Editorial: Stop Whining, Listen to the Facts

First off, I'm going to go flat out to say that I'm a mixed bag on piracy. Stu makes a valid point about old games. I've been enjoying my SNES emulator, and a plethora of Japanese Famicon games that never came stateside. I cannot express my joy of being able to play Tales of Phantasia, Seiken Densetsu 2, Bahamut Lagoon, and many more (in ENGLISH no less). Emulators are a great way of playing old, hard-to-find, or out of print games. For modern games, they also can have good purposes. Remember before Squaresoft did a reprint of FF Tactics? You couldn't find a copy anywhere except for EBay at $100 a pop.

Modding your system also has its place. Though I do disagree with Stu on the idea that few people actually do it. It's in my experience that in every group of gamers (you know, the buddies you all hang out with to play games), there is at least one person who has a modded system. It's cheap, it's easy, and it's fun. It's also for importing Japanese games. I am still amazed how big the importing gig is right now. Heck, even 3 years ago. And for good reason. I remember getting my Japanese version of Street Fighter Alpha 3 for PS, 5 months before its American release. To my amazement, everything was in English! Sure there was some Kanji here and there, but nothing you couldn't figure out in a couple hours. But now a days, importing is almost second nature. As long as the game's not story intensive (like RPGs), you're good to go. But somehow this is considered illegal (to mod your system, that is).

But I digress. One big thing both Stu and Hindman forgot was the lost continent of gaming piracy: the PC world. Yes, damn me for even mentioning that forbidden realm of high resolutions and amazing frame rates, but I will anyhow. You're right when you say game companies don't lose money when you never intended on buying it in the first place (more on that later). Yes you're correct that pirating old games doesn't take a dime from their wallet. But you're also correct that piracy of a current-day system has never been a serious problem. So ask yourself this... "Why do people complain about piracy so much if it's not that big of a factor?"

The answer is very simple. You're looking in the wrong place. People talking about piracy hurting the gaming community, 9 times outta 10, are referring to the PC gaming world. Most analysts, say from CNN or Forbes, are not gamers. We know this by their absurd comments about games. So they just throw the whole lot in together. PC game pirating is absolutely rampant. And I guarantee that it DOES affect their sales quite drastically. Now I'm only guessing here, but I'd go out on a limb and say that about 2 out of every 10 PC gamers pirated their game (assuming they're all playing the same one). That's a 20% decrease in profits. That's a monumental loss! Heck, even 10% is in the catastrophic range. And don't tell me it's not that high. How many of you people have a pirated version of Windows running on your home computer right now? How many of you have some kind of CDKey Generator for one or more of your applications? How many of you run Kazzah, Hotline, or other P2P programs. How many Warez sites have crashed Internet Explorer on you in the last month? See the trend?

The problem lies in that it's incredibly easy to pirate games on the PC. Mere DAYS after a release, a cracked copy of a game can be running rampant through the net. THOUSANDS of people downloading it every day. Heck we'll take it a step further. Ragnarok Online just went gold a couple weeks ago. Yet long before it did, a pirated bootleg server was up and running with hundreds of people playing it regularly. To my knowledge, there are a multitude of these servers now running. Blizzard just banned 120,000 or so accounts due to cheats, hacks, and illegal CDKeys (aka pirated games) just the other week. 120,000!!!! Let that number settle in. Have you ever seen how many people that actually is? Your average ballpark seats about 50,000 people. Can you image if you took everyone in the ballpark, made them all pay $50 to get in, then $50 to leave, plus a little extra from the concession stands? That's how much money we're talking about here. And don't get me started on the fact that Blizzard runs Battle.net absolutely for free to us.

So don't tell me pirating is ok. And don't you dare say it doesn't affect the gaming companies, and thus the gamers. Don't tell me that games like Half Life 2, Doom 3, Medal of Honor, Unreal 2003, Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, and many more are not worth $50. And we all know that they are, have, and will be cracked and copied and distributed. It definitely has its uses, and can be a great and harmless thing. But in some cases, it is self-destructive. We're only screwing ourselves here people.