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An In-Depth Look At Game Piracy
TweakGuides is running a detailed examination of PC game piracy. The author begins with a look at the legal, moral, and monetary issues behind copyright infringement, and goes on to measure the scale of game piracy and how it affects developers and publishers. He also discusses some of the intended solutions to piracy. He provides examples of copy protection and DRM schemes that have perhaps done more harm than good, as well as less intrusive measures which are enjoying more success. The author criticizes the "culture of piracy" that has developed, saying. "Fast forward to the 21st century, and piracy has apparently somehow become a political struggle, a fight against greedy corporations and evil copy protection, and in some cases, I've even seen some people refer to the rise of piracy as a 'revolution.' What an absolute farce. ... Piracy is the result of human nature: when faced with the option of getting something for free or paying for it, and in the absence of any significant risks, you don't need complex economic studies to show you that most people will opt for the free route."
Piracy is the result of human nature: when faced with the option of getting something for free or paying for it, and in the absence of any significant risks, you don't need complex economic studies to show you that most people will opt for the free route.
Right, there's also moral values in the balance. To some people piracy is all bad, to some people everything should be free, to some other people it's fine to pirate from big studios but not from small developers who try to make a living out of it. It's called moral values. It varies from people to people, with also varying degrees of importance in the role it plays in decision making.
You just got troll'd!
The OP suggests that "most people will opt for the free route" simply because the product is free. I would argue that due to overly restrictive DRM, people prefer the free route because "hacked" or pirated products are better. I buy DVDs, but I wouldn't buy DRMed movies because it's effectively wasted money -- one day those movies will be unwatchable.
Also, in the field of ebooks, often it is possible to find an ebook that's been pirated when no legal copy exists for sale. In this case, the publishing companies are not servicing a demand that is clearly present. Sure, I could scan in my own paper copy of the book, but why go to the trouble when someone else has already done it?
In general, if something is priced right, I don't mind paying for it. What this means is that I'm a bit of a sucker for sales. The idea behind sales is - "sell to the general public at the retail price, then sell what's left at a sale price to maximize profits." It means that those who ae willing to pay a "premium" to have it right away buy it, and those who aren't in a rush can still become customers at the sale price.
So yes, I agree that high prices don't justify copyright infringement. Then again, how much is there out there that's even worth the cost of a blank dvd?
As to games or songs, I simply can't be bothered. I don't have time to play games (I'd rather read a book, and guess what - I buy them, I don't pirate them) and I got sick of listening to mp3s a long time ago. I want *QUIET*. That's why I prefer my laptop to my desktop - no fan noise.
Software? gnu/linux distros do everything I need it to do, both at work and at home.
As for the people who claim that all pirated game are lost sales, they are wrong. Many of those "lost sales" would never have been made, just as Microsoft can't count me as a lost sale since I use a different OS. I'm simply not their customer, just as many of those "lost sales" would never have taken place if piracy prevention were 100% effective. This is similar to their problem with people selling used games. People sell their used games mostly so that they can buy new games, so it's not like the money doesn't get to them anyway, and the used games "grow the market", same as selling a used car.
The industry is finally seeing the light in a few, rare, instances, and switching to different revenue models - in-game ads, online content, subscription models, etc. In other words, there are solutions that bypass the whole "piracy" problem, rather than treating the customer like a thief.
I got into piracy because as a child i wasn't terribly well off...
If i saved my weekly allowance, it would take me several months to be able to afford a legit game, and i may be able to get one or two at xmas or a birthday.
I started off buying games, quite a few in fact, and i found that a lot didn't live up to the hype, the demos/reviews were often very different from the actual game, like a demo that would include the first level which was quite good, and then the remaining levels were extremely poor and you couldn't save your progress, so you would do the first level, get to the second, die, and have to start again from scratch (the lion king is an example of a game like this)...
So for my stack of 15 or so games, i had 2-3 which were good and got played a lot, and was finding that the newer games performed poorly because my hardware was now out of date... I still had all the advertising hype and peer pressure pushing me to want the new games, but not only could i not afford them but i now couldn't run them adequately either.
So i started pirating games, and spending what little money i had on hardware upgrades. I was better off, i no longer had to be bombarded with commercials for games i couldn't afford to play, which is a very unpleasant feeling for a kid.
I think all the heavy advertising is extremely unpleasant for the poorer kids who cant afford all the latest stuff (not just games, but most things you cant get for free so easily), games are overpriced especially seeing they mostly target kids...
While on the subject, people are always complaining about the level of crime among teenagers and younger kids these days, but is it any wonder why?
When i was that age, the average kid would be walking around with maybe $5 worth of stuff not including clothes, hardly a worthwhile target for robbery... Now, kids have ipods, cellphones and all kinds of other valuables for thieves to target.
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[...] technically you could say they're stealing[...]
Except that no one is stealing anything! There are technical, legal definitions of theft, which don't include the act of making digital copies. It would be difficult to make an unambiguous law so broad that it prohibited both burglary and file sharing. So — technically — you couldn't correctly claim that. Note that I'm not mincing words because I want to assuage my own guilt (I'm an amoralist.), but simply because you said "technically."
Sophistry aside, it's hard to understand the purpose of largely unenforceable laws. The total prohibition of file copying doesn't have popular support. Even if a minority find it immoral or unethical, they will probably need to come to terms with the reality of it. Is it more likely that people will stop sharing files, or that the relevant laws will slowly change as public support for them wanes? From a historical perspective, the illegalization of file sharing does not seem very different from the Prohibition. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) The largest difference I can see is that illegal file sharing hasn't created a criminal class to supply its (cooperative, non-profit) black market.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.