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A Portrait of the UK Game Pirate
Next Generation has a report up on a British study that indicates something like 84 percent of 15 to 18 year olds pirate video games in Britain. 72 percent of those folks pirate games because they can't wait for the UK releases. From the article: "This study shows very clearly the drivers behind videogame piracy...Most respondents who have and will continue to illegally download games are young males, between 15 and 19 years old. They feel videogames are too expensive and resent the long wait for many games released in the US or in Asia before the UK. With a high level of computer literacy, it's easy for them to find a game online and download it. Their friends all do it and why shouldn't they?"
I can also believe that the high prices are a factor. ONE factor.
The real reason. The BASE reason is because its free and easy. You could charge $15 for every game. You know what? The people would still pirate. I can buy CDs for $9.99 off of iTunes now. Do I? Well... I'll leave that up to your imagination. The key here is that FREE is always better that having to pay something. I don't care if the release dates are pushed back and the price is sky-high - free is always best.
Guess not much has changed since I used to pirate 8-bit BBC micro games in the 80's with my friends from high school. Of course, as soon as we published a game ourselves, our attitudes changed ;-)
I guess that absence of homegrown coders is one thing that might be different nowadays -- even kids who were just a few years younger than me were used to computer games being studio affairs; the closest they'd get to writing a game would be designing a level on Doom.
Another thing that may have changed is the thrill of breaking copy protection. That was a big deal for us back then -- we'd compete to crack the encryption on the latest games... then take off the copy protection, put our own logos on, and put the encryption back in place so that lesser pirates couldn't steal our glory, heheh..... I never saw any of the really nasty "black ice" that was rumoured to exist (e.g. antipiracy code that'd deliberately wreck your drive by moving the disk head beyond its physical limit)... I heard Infocom games had a lot of this.
Back then we didn't have to resent the kids in US or Asia, cos no-one except Europeans knew what a BBC was.... in fact, looking back, US kids didn't even have Elite, so we were the privileged ones :)
They feel videogames are too expensive and resent the long wait for many games released in the US or in Asia before the UK.
... and that would be why I stopped. My job doesn't pay me near enough that I can afford to buy a USD40-50 game more than once or twice a year, and no game (except Alpha Centauri and Halo) can keep me entertained for more than a few weeks... I just can't replay the damn things. If I want to play something, my options are:
Actually, it can have more to do with laws. IIRC, when Fallout/Fallout 2 were released, the US version was allowed to have children NPC's (which, by your choice you could kill). The UK, I believe, had laws against children in video games like that, and therefore all the killable child NPC's had to be removed and replaced. It's a small example, but enough minor variations in law can add up to months of delays.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
Seriously, I get 90% of all my games from LAN parties.
I wipe my HDD to make room for ISO's and images, make my way to the party, and we spend an hour setting up, transferring files, and installing the games of the night.
Usually one of us goes out and buys a copy so he can play online, but for the most part I only play these games one time every few months, and you can't rent PC games so that leaves pirating them as the only logical solution. (Like hell we'd try to track down 10 discounted boxes at the local shops at 4am for one night of gaming.)