Engaging Debate on Piracy and Videogaming

koworld writes "WotR have put out a really intriguing issue on piracy this week. It has Jeff Minter arguing that piracy robs developers of their livelihoods and then a senior industry figure (writing under a pseudonym) offers the counter that piracy has done more to expand the overall videogaming market than any other factor. Just to round off the debate a number of insightful personal accounts of piracy and its effects are also included."

Comments

Piracy, Price, and P2P, 4 Peas in a Pod

[erick99]

I'm a single dad of two boys, aged 10 and 13. I pay for all of their Windows,PS2, and XBox games. I think that the titles cost way too much and I wonder if they really need to cost that much to recover R&D. Maybe they do. I don't know. I have thought about pirating some of the software that they want but I haven't done it yet. Hell, I haven't even backed up the $50 CDs that the damned games come on but I probably should even though I am told on the licensing agreement that I may not do so. I guess the bottom line is this, at some point I will have spent enough and I might just pirate some games - or not. I have this incredible ambient level of guilt (thanks to my Catholicism maybe?) that keeps me from doing it thus far. But, I digress - I think a lot of pirating is directly related to price.

Happy Trails!

Erick

Re:Piracy, Price, and P2P, 4 Peas in a Pod

[TyrranzzX]

As a Pirate, I'll be honest so any corperate drones reading this can get a jist of what the pirates think.

Just today I went out and baught Battlefield Vietnam so I could play with my clan buddies. I pirated it first so that I knew I wouldn't be wasting the $40 it costs.

Why do I do this? Well, because I'm treated like a criminal by the stores and because I'v been shafted a number of times by really bad games. For example, awhile ago I blew $9.99 on the "special edition" of Deus ex, thinking it was the full version. In reality, it as a "specially labeled" demo of the game. I take it back to the store and they won't let me return it. I'v also been dissapointed by Morrowind(shitty engine), Dungeon seige (repeditive), and a slew of other games I'v baught that if I had baught them when they were new for a bunch of money, I'd probably feel real burned. So now, I pirate before I buy.

But, surely you say, I can trust those game reviews, and demo's, right? Goto Gamefaqs, pull up any new game, and then look at the user reviews and compair them to the reviews of the websites that make their money off of reviews. I'v also been misled by demo's being real nice then when you get to the game it sucks. Kinda like they put the best part of the game on the demo, promise more and then don't deliver. Sometimes, you see some in-game movies like the UT2k4 movies that rock and then demo just sucks ass.

Anyway, the reviews convince me look at movies, movies convince me to try the demo, the demo convinces me to pirate, and pirating convinces me to buy. Unfortunatly, however, I don't buy many single player games. Infact, now that I look at the shelf, I think I stopped buying them after Morrowind which was probably the 4th time I got ripped-off on. The box says 800mhz processor, 256 meg ram and a 3d-card with 32 meg ram if I read it right for reccomended requirements, and my system beats all those by 2 times. Infact, if you could run it on those requirements I'd be suprised. On my box it runs like a slideshow on even the low settings.

A big part of that is it's hard to pirate single player games and have some self control and go out and buy the game if you really like it. Most of them you don't know if you like it until you've played through the entire game and by then the point of buying is null.

Anything I play online, however, I make sure I have a legit copy of. Not so much out of fear of persecution, but more out of the fact that the game requires a key to play and if I'm going to be playing a game compeditivly I'd like to have a real copy of it (which is where the last shred of my non-pirating decency lies). I'd say about half of the games I'v played are pirated (which is common, I assure you). I really don't see myself buying a game for $50 without researching it. At $10 on the value-rack, it's an entirely different story (which is where about 2/3 of my non-pirated games that suck come from). Some of the best games I'v ever baught were on the $10 rack, like Tribes and Total Annihilation which I took off of a friends word for like $15 apiece. The one expensive game I baught that rocked was half-life platinum collection for $35. Hopefully Battlefield vietnam will be another good game.

If gaming companies want to stop the pirating and general disrespect their customers give them, they've got to stomp out the bad games, bad advertising, and ripping people off. Inotherwords, show some respect to your customers. They've also got to update their buisness model some. A good game with a single player campaign and decent multiplayer means your average joe is going to buy the game for the SP and multiplayer, and your pirate is going to consider the SP the demo, and the multiplayer the real deal.

The industries real enemies aren't me. Their real enemies are the people who pirate everything regardless of where it came from and then go ahead and sell it for $5, or the people who are the occasional gamer who download the games without paying for th

What about game publishers robbing consumers

[Anonymous Coward]

50 bucks for Max Pain 2?! For 5 friggin hours of gameplay?

cd key

[pythro]

Yea there are alot of games I have downloaded but could not play online multiplayer because my cd key was invalid, but since I liked the game so muc h I bought it so I could get the valid cd key.

Piracy and Video Game Sales

[SilentOne]

Something that I've observed lately with a lot of games has been that cracks have come out that will support an early version of the release. Once the game-crippling bugs have been fixed (corruption in low ver Civ3 anyone?), the crackers have either moved on, or the software has been changed to the point that the game is no longer crackable.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, for one, there has been a great deal of games that my friends and myself have bought that there is no way we would have without a "Try before you buy" version floating around. I mean, who really wants to shell out $50 for 5 hours of MP2? If I'm going to be spending $10 an hour on personal entertainment, then she should have at least shaved that day.

It's the same story since 1980

[Anonymous Coward]

First my Atari cartridges (early 80s) were so high because manufacturing was expensive, then the cassette tapes weren't sold in enough volume, etc. etc. Once a store salesmen told me prices were high because of piracy! Yeah, that's an incentive to buy your product, just yank the price up.

If I can buy a game for $10 at W-M or other big chain (put a $10 bill in a machine, press a button, a CD pops out) then I will buy other games than the overly-hyped big titles that occasionally come out. Of course I'm not talking about the Visual Basic games that are $10 now. Also a slot is nice where you can deposit a broken CD and new, clean one will pop out for free.

I don't want to pay a whole lot for box/manual artwork, TV advertising, and copy-protection licenses.

Single player games?

[Killswitch1968]

Sam and Max 2 and Full Throttle 2 were both canned by Lucas Arts. Although the details are sketchy, I have long suspected it's because pirating single player games is stupidly easy.

Grim Fandango is largely heralded as the greatest adventure game of all time, and yet it's sales were weak. Incidentally, the 2-disc set is avaiable at suprnova.org as of this moment for your pirating pleasure.

Multiplayer games are harder to pirate simply because you need a unique CD-key to get on the networks. Blizzard and Valve are experts at this.

Not to say that piracy is killing the single player genre (Knights of the Old Republic for example), but multiplayer games are a safer bet if you're trying to avoid piracy.

I don't know who this Jeff Minter guy is...

[vyrus128]

... but if this article is any indication, I would say he's a cunt.

But let's forget that, just for a second. I could forgive what a cunt he is, if only his article said anything new or different, made any unique or creative arguments against copyright violation, or indeed made ANY ARGUMENT AT ALL. But he fails to do that. Instead, he uses lots of profanity and random, irrelevant analogies, to what purpose my mind cannot fathom. He admits that "there is too much software out there, and yes, a lot of it is shit," and then rather than make a reasoned argument as to why we should be buying all this shitty software anyway, he falls back to another offensive analogy.

His one seemingly sensible argument is against a strawman: people who rebrand software and sell it as their own. Now, I don't know about you, but I have _never_ seen any claim that anyone is doing this in all the software "piracy" arguments I have ever read. It's a non-issue! People just don't DO it! Maybe, maybe they used to. But the issue here is file-swapping, and you know it, and I know it, and he knows it, and anything else is disingenuous.

And in case anybody would still argue in his favor because he is taking the "moral high ground," I recommend you read where he says that file-swapping in violation of copyright is not so bad after all, when MUSIC is being traded; no, it's only software that deserves the protection of the law. Double-standard, anyone?

No, not only does this Minter guy have nothing useful or intelligent to say, he's also a hyprocrite. In short, a cunt of the worst kind.

Re:Free windows games

[Zigg]

P.S. So many console games drop to $20 if you're just willing to wait a year... If you don't want to buy games at $50, just wait a bit.

It's more my experience that they don't drop to $20 so much as drop off the face of the earth entirely. The $10-$20 racks are full of crap I'd never consider buying at any price.