Piracy just doesn’t make sense anymore
When I was a kid, buying a game was a very, very big deal. We don’t all have the same story, but when I was in high school in France a PC game would easily cost 350 francs. (that was roughly $50, and taking inflation into account that would represent about $75 today). My parents would give me 100 francs a month (taking inflation into account, that would be about $20) to buy comic books, music, movies, snacks, drinks, etc… It meant that if I wanted to play 3 (3!) video games a year, I basically had to give up on all other types of entertainment (including going out with friends, etc…) for the whole year. Christmas was kind of the only real way to get video games, but even then, given their prices, it was pretty rare to actually get one (that, and my parents didn’t like video games anyway, so it was tough to get them to consider buying one for Christmas).
The internet was in its infancy back then, and it was really tough to know if a game was actually good or not. If you were lucky, you could base your choice on your favorite video game magazine’s review, feedback from your friends, or, more frequently, on the cover of the game in the store. Let’s just say I’ve sunk good money in terrible games more than once (worst memory: Ghostbusters for the Atari 2600, and yes, that was way before high school). Bottom line is, I quickly became reluctant of sinking 3 months of pocket money into games that could turn out to be awful.
My monthly allowance of 100 francs was mostly used for comic books, snacks, and going out with friends. Piracy was the “obvious” thing to do if I actually wanted to play any games on my computer. And although I’m sure everyone has their own story to tell, it felt like pirating games was pretty much the consensus around me at school, with people passing around huge boxes of floppy disks, or, for the rich among us, CDs that could sometimes contain hundreds of games.
Yes, this was an AAA title back in the days, fond memories, even if I had to pay an arm and a leg for it 🙂
I don’t know how much money kids get from their parents every month these days. I don’t know if the money I got as a kid was average or not. What I know however, is that it’s never been that easy and cheap to get video games legally today. No later than today, I got 9 Android games from the humble bundle for a price of $10. Last month, they had a bunch of Sid Meier games at a huge discount too. Steam regularly have sales, sometimes up to 90% of discount on games that are less than 6 months old. And of course, let’s not forget PS+, Sony’s program which gets me about 60 games per year for $50, including a large amount of AAA titles.
Yes, today I get somewhere between 50 and 100 times the number of games the same amount of money could buy 15 years ago. So when I see people complaining about the price of videos games today, I just don’t really understand where the issue is.
Sure, the discounts and sales don’t necessarily get you the latest and greatest AAA titles, but the situation feels a lot better than what it used to be. To a point that, like many people today, I actually own much more games than I can actually play. The same is true for movies with Netflix, or for music with services such as spotify and pandora. I truly believe piracy is a problem directly related to poor legal alternatives, and that the issue is being resolved with services such as PS+ or Steam.
I do not judge people who pirate. I’ve done my own share of it as a kid and whatever they might be, people have their own reasons. But I still think today piracy makes much less sense than it did back in the nineties.
What’s your take on piracy? Do you have a subscription to a service similar to PS+ ?
Easy answer: you’re absolutely right.
(first post)
Exactly
Non.
Many companies make piracy much more convenient than getting a legal copy 🙁
That’s quite ironic
With all the delays in some countries and the censorship it makes sense to get a pirated copy.
censorship, delay, banning, drm and price are 5 of the main reasons why piracy is so high and sort after. And its not as big as they want you to believe. Its about 5% of gamers. Not really going to do much harm so why all the anti-piracy?
AND a huge thing they dont think about is all those pirates that get the games AND still buy the game. They get the pirated version like a demo.
I got Thief before it was in the shops. I finished it the night before it came out and I still brought it last week. Now where do they put me? a Pirate that wont but it or someone that does buy games? Thats why the piracy ratio is all wrong. It is about 5% as some pirates also buy the games they download.
I completely agree, also once Playstation Now rolls out, that will help even more, and if you like a game or game series, you should buy the game and help support them with your money so they can continue to make those games better and better
They don’t make it easier, we make it easier. The pirates are focused on playing the game, the publishers are focused on making the money.
heck no
heck yes! Every now and then you get that new, shiny game with a horrendous DRM that neewd you to be always online. Oh, and lets not forget, these types of DRM, on lunch day, always gets the servers overloaded and you can’t even play the damn game you payed good money for.
heck YES!
Want proof they are only in it for the money?
DAY 1 DLC. It was made along side the game so it should be part of the game. Its also most likely already on the disc so you have to pay twice for what you already brought.
And Day 1 Patch. Thats proof you are buying a BETA copy of the game. If it was final there would be no day 1 patch and there would be no patches actually as they would’ve paid beta testers to test it and make sure there are no bugs BUT as they want to make money not spend money they now release the game early and let the gamer (you and I) to beta test for free. They watch the forums and fix what people report. Free beta testing.
They no longer care for the gamer or the game, its all money.
Come on, prove be wrong.
>Day 1 Patch. Thats proof you are buying a BETA copy of the game. If it was final there would be no day 1 patch and there would be no patches
I find this laughably naive.
You clearly have no idea about programming, or game development generally (inb4: “I’m a programmer!” Don’t bother. Anyone with a brain can see you’re horribly misinformed.), since you even have the *THOUGHT* that someone could possibly find all the issues in a piece of software so large, and filled with so many variables.
I’ve been working on a game for some time, and testing it myself. Each version I put out, as far as I can tell, has no bugs or issues.
I am then promptly told of 2+ bugs/issues, a minimum of an hour from when I posted the update.
This is all whilst people are complaining that I’m not updating fast enough, there are too many bugs, etc.
That brings me to point 2:
Do you not want your game patched the moment they find an issue, and have a fix for it? Is this somehow the general opinion, and I’m wasting my time fixing bugs and flaws? Basically, are you an idiot, who just doesn’t want patches?
Day 1 DLC isn’t even that bad, *as a concept*.
It’s when it’s horse armour, and not meaningful additional content that the developer didn’t have the funding to make, under their original budget, and so, gambled on this additional content offsetting their costs.
.
Because, and here’s where you need to pay attention, you have a budget.
If you do all the cool stuff you want to do, in your game, you will overshoot your budget, and nothing will get released. And you’ll starve.
Sometimes, the additional things you want to put out there have to be paid content, because unfortunately, you have to eat.
What terrible people we are, needing money to pay bills!
I’ll grant you though, most DLC does appear to be pure fluff.
Woops, tried to use markdown like I was on GitHub.
my only wish is for vita to never get kernel exploit.
Vita itself was born in graveyard…..All this while Sony (US & EU) keeps throwing dead roses on it without any water….
Unfortunately this happens without any kernel exploit on Vita
I hope u get my point
Exactly. All what Sony does is re-release games from the PSP and PSX. The Games they do release designed for the Vita, in my view, are boring. Just waiting until May when the God of War Game come to Vita. Other than that, my Vita stays in Flight Mode since I dont like the Games they release.
Once the Vita does get Hacked and Homebrew is made for it, then I will be interested in it more. Get the Vita side Emulators, and HB Games, and be really happy.
Basically, piracy lets you have a physical copy of the game, which doesn’t happens with Steam, PS+, and Origin. I want physical copies of games, so they’d better make discounts on retail shops, or invest in copy-protection systems.
Old thread I know, but I had to say that steam does allow for creating of a backup of any downloaded game to cd or dvd. How much more physical do you want it?
especially when there are many ways to make money off of internet. you absolutely right, i consider myself as a piracy graduate, now i can buy every game i like thanks to internet.
salut bien d’accore avec toi meme si e france le jeux est a 70eet le salaire dans les 110e
j aimerais bien te lire en français de temps en temps
Cool story dude. But let’s look at this from the savvy consumer’s point of view, instead of the “broke come affluent” side. Let’s see a screenshot of your Instant Game Collection if you have an Australian PS+ account.
(hint: There are currently less than 10 games and they remove most of the old ones every month.)
I moved to Australia from Canada 4 years ago and was surprised to find that the country’s internet connectivity was sub-sub-sub standard and the prices on (almost) everything was at least 50-100% higher than in north america.
At first I noticed the price difference on consumer goods like toothpaste, music and booze. I wasn’t thrilled but I figured it was because Aus is a tiny island in buttfuck nowhere and shipping costs must be high.
But when I went to buy Fallout New Vegas on Steam and found it selling for about $100, I was surprised. I asked my friends back in Canada how they could justify paying $100 for what was basically an expansion… they hadn’t. It was $50 in Canada. I ended up sending a friend $50 to gift me the game on steam instead of paying double. You’re reading that correctly: they paid $50 less than I would have, simply because of their locale.
This is digital distribution we’re talking about. There is no physical copy. There is no shipping, freight, retail space, merchandising, point of sale, , cashier or staff costs. We are talking about the modern gaming distribution service: click to download.
I have no idea how they justify this ***. But this is exactly how I justify piracy. If you have the audacity to try and rob me for 100% of a game’s cost, simply because of my IP address, then I will have the gaul to outright steal your product.
This is called voting with my dollar.
Until I start to see some fair play from the companies making games, I’m not going to play fair either.
Note: http://www.gog.com/ understands this and that’s why they get my money instead of Steam, Microsoft, Sony, etc.
I have PS+, 200+ games on Steam, and 50+ games on GOG. I think if someone wants to get a lot of quality content for a low cost, PS+ is the greatest thing to happen to console game. Sometimes you’ll get games you already own, which happens to me with retail games half the time, but anything digital only that’s released I never own unless it’s on Steam.
I started paying for the Humble Bundle ever since the fourth one. If it’s the main Humble Bundle it’s usually good games, though the Humble Weekly Bundle sometimes has good games. Even if you pay $1 a week, you’re getting more games to play than you have time for.
I have emulated older console games, but this was after the PSX was released and many of these games were no longer for sale. I’ve also pirated a few PC games around that time having no money to purchase them. Other than that, I haven’t. I actually think piracy hurts the industry and with sites like Gamespot, IGN, Gametrailers, Youtube, etc, and high speed internet, finding out whether a game is good or not or atleast to your liking is easy. There’s no need to use the excuse “I’m only downloading it to see if I like it, then finishing it and not purchasing the game even though I say I will.” Back then it was a viable excuse.
One thing I’ll point out that piracy may or may not be the issue is Japanese localized games. In the past almost all the games we received were Japanese in comparison to western. Now days we have next to no Japanese releases in comparison to western releases over here in the west atleast. You have publishers like Square Enix who don’t want to release games like Dragon Warrior 7 or many other games to the 3DS because piracy was so bad on the DS. On the PSP we missed out on so many games like Final Fantasy Type 0, Yakuza Black Panther 1 and 2, Valkyria Chronicles 3, etc, etc, etc because of how bad the piracy was on that system.
I’m not a fan of piracy.
So you think torrents are okay? What if you made a game that you worked hard on and then all you see is the game getting pirated a lot. Would you call it heaven anymore? I really doubt it.
Devs post their games to torrent indexes:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/09/how-one-game-developer-is-making-the-pirate-bay-work-for-him/
https://torrentfreak.com/indie-game-devs-post-pirated-game-on-the-pirate-bay-110909/
Some do so because it’s hilarious:
https://www.vg247.com/2015/08/13/heres-another-cute-indie-anti-piracy-tactic/
They’re also inspired by pirates:
http://kotaku.com/5037902/indie-dev-asks-why-and-pirates-reply
Some use them as free advertising:
https://torrentfreak.com/indie-game-devs-delight-pirate-bay-and-reddit-with-disappearing-torrent-130211/
And some don’t even view piracy as the main problem:
http://indiegames.com/2013/03/team_meats_refenes_apathy_and_.html
I’ll likely upload a finalised joke version of my game, and interact with pirates in much the same manner, because who hasn’t been a pirate, or benefited from piracy previously?
It’s reached the stage where I don’t think anyone can legitimately claim that.
Just ignore him, he’s iranian 😉
lol
And honestly, it’s kinda ironic that a hacker is writting about piracy when they themselves provide the tools for piracy to the community. I know the meaning of ISO loader is to play your own backups. But do you really think that a lot of people will do that?
If you want to stop piracy, then how about stop putting the damn ISO loader. I can tell you that there’s like 20% of the people in here that would only use the ISO loader to play their backups.
The rest of 80% would use it to pirate.
technically playing roms on an emulator is piracy too.
saying that, with the right price and features old games can be sold to even those with a collection of all roms like me.
i have the original sonic as a rom but bought it for ps3
same with wonderboy in monsterland.. i have mame and every rom but still bought it for ps3..
the price was good and have some emu type features.. i’m happy.
I know. I just said ISOs because they are most common in the PSP hacking scene.
With the ps3 I downloaded games but if they were good I’d go buy em. I always liked having a collection while also having backups just in case. I could care less about downloading vita gamed if it becomes possible. I’d enjoy homebrew and 99% of my fun is the actual hacking part.
I agree with you, and still if you cant aford some game , you can allways wait a littel and buy it later second hand ,much cheaper than bran new .
and the only real reason I`m with the psp kernel expl on my vita is Type-0 FF, and Kingdom Hearts BBS FM (and other japan exclusive), wich you can`t have any other way ,and this is the only way to play it in any other language than japanese-wich I do not understand a word.
we all know about torrents..
the point is that there are a lot of us that have started to pay money and don’t feel bad about it.
i am happy with ps+ and like that the humble bundles support charity as well as giving the makers some money they wouldn’t have got.
when the price is right piracy can be avoided.
and torrents aren’t going to help you play online on playstation network.
@Nazarops Yes, Actually they are okay!
@mahyar You’re from Iran too, you forgot to change your name! So here’s an exciting message just for you!! PM: [removed by admin: language on this blog is English, thanks for your understanding]
@stOneskull That sounds kinda logical, but I always had tons of games that I never had chance to play online! Except PS+ which forced me! Cuz vita games really really sux!
You must be really selfish if you think it’s okay. It’s the same as stealing an valuable item from a Store.
A valuable item at a store is a physical item, which the store is deprived of when you steal it.
There may be a loss experienced by the industry, assuming you would have bought that item if you hadn’t been able to pirate it, but it is not the same crime or immoral act as “theft.”
PS Nazar_Ops I thought about what you said earlier a bit and decided to just make a rough count to programs that I’m working with for my job. With all plugins and packages I got this number:
” 120000$ ”
To be honest In this life I don’t feel to work as a dishwasher and save money for those!! Screw hard work!
Eh? There’s no such thing as “hard work” if you have your favorite job, it will never become hard work. So yeah, sounds like you are lazy.
@Nazar_Ops
Because clearly everyone can have their favorite job. lol
I’m sure some of the people digging ditches would gladly trade careers with you! You don’t want that? Sounds like you are lazy.
@Nazar
There’s always hard work 🙂
I love my job, working in a sports centre, meeting the regular customers and having a laugh with them, but when we have events in the main hall, it’s hard work setting up 300 odd chairs and making sure it’s nice and tidy for the next morning, just yesterday for example I had to set up 150 chairs with tables, and move 4 trampolines and 14 crash matts through a couple of doors and into a different room.
I was sweating and scared, if you’ve ever collapsed a trampoline it’s bloody hard to get back up
khob dige chia baladi? kos sher ezafe mizani edeatam mishe?
@Nazar_Ops Damn yeah I’m lazy! Who wants to work 24 hours per day and waste money to buy games, movies, programs, etc!
Instead, I got all of them for free and now I’m working without any issues about buying them. Believe me dude! You don’t wanna miss this life! I’m working and making money! But if you want to do it, you have to work to buy tools for work and then work! It takes too damn time! Which I don’t have to waste! I’m working hard, sometimes ^^ too hard ^^! But I will never ever ever work either hard or not to buy them!!! I work hard to LEARN and DO them!
@mayhar guz nakon khodeto kuni! az kire mano az kune ina bokhor ke zirkhabeshuni! Edde’am kose nanatam pare mikone!
an bokhor torke khar, inja dude dude nakoni khar kose ke migamet.
beshin ba tokhmat bazi kon afarin
@mahyar akhe madar kuni! yevakhti bia goh bokhor inja ke abjit zire kiram nabashe! harumzade bi namus! tork nistam vali kire harchi torke to kose khaharo madare jendat! makhsusan un nane kunit ke hamchin ane obi pas endakhte! toam gomsho boro ba tokhmaye babaye koskeshe harumzadat bazi kon!
To be honest, Piracy is a really big concern for developers. Imaging working day and night, on a project. You’ve dedicated a whole bunch of your free time and after a few days its been released, it’s already starting to get pirated? “Kinda” like saying basically all you did was for nothing. Well you do get a good amount, but if it wasn’t for those pirates you could have earned more. That’s just my opinion. I’ll be honest with you, I have pirated games but that’s only for 1 reason. My parents are so strict they don’t even buy me any games 😛 I gotta buy them all on my own. It’s just they want me to concentrate more on education so it’s understandable I guess. It’s not like they’re to make my life a misery lol. But yeah, I wouldn’t recommend privacy at all, but if you have no choice……It’s your decision lol
Duh, of course it is bad for the developers. They aren’t making any money off it.
Yes that’s exactly why people should consider NOT doing it.
really ? i have a friend that codes for a game company ,,do you know how it is paid? by month nothing that codes is owned by him and has no income if the application is sold more ,,each month the same salarie,so in the end is greed that harms game devs and not a pirate
I completely agree, before i got a paypal account (and my own bank card) and a steam account i used to pirate games, not i own 350+ steam games. i stopped pirating games because i could easily access them legally.
Unfortunately that’s not the case with media where i live because we have no access to netflix or hulu and a majority of shows will only be shows on foxtel so we have many people who download tv shows as they come out or wait a year after it finishes airing in the US (season 3 of Game of Thrones only was just released here last month on Blu-Ray and dvd)
What surprised me on this topic yet different was when I read like 300,000 good, honest, hard working people Jailbroke their IPhones the moment It was Cracked for that new version a short while back. OMG!
And like you said I cannot possibly Play all the PC games nowadays to finish. It’s Just impossible. Oh and CD ‘s and DVD blanks 50 or 100 on a spindle, Can get costly as a backup system w/ movies/ music to boot. If they can do that layering process and create DVD’s to like 500gb storage on a disk. Then that might help us. But nooo there’s so much profit by pumping out lil 700mb and 4.7gb.
it doess make sense ,and i will explain it a liittlle bit further ,i am a low income worker ,yet with academic qualifications etc but unfortunately salaries are low ,games over my area are a 1/20 of my salary, i can afford to buy a game in a while but i cant afford to buy a game that doesnt give what it says .crapware etc , psn subscription is a lie you pay to rent games and you own nothing for me that is no ideal as in the end you are forced to buy the game as you wont probably end it in the timetable given as you have other things to do except gaming. piracy gives me an option to play older games on my console that company doesnt seem to believe that they are profitable anymore and yet i like ,also it does give me the way to choose what dev to support as if i like a game i will want the physical copy in order to support .
to point a finger is easy to come in the other side of road and understand why piracy is another thing ,if a game was 1/40 of my salarie i woudnt mind to buy a *** game but nowadays each buck saved is importand
And if developers want to stop piracy, they need to do this:
Release the game at the same time in all regions (Worldwide Release)
Don’t put a ridiculous price tag on your game.
Treat every region right. Don’t release content for 1 region and ignore the other region. Learn to release stuff worldwide, or don’t even bother releasing the game in other locations than the preferred one.
Listen to your fans. They are the ones that creates your game. If you don’t listen to your fans, your game will have low feedback.
These are the main keys in the gaming industry. If people would have followed these rules, Piracy wouldn’t be an issue.
I know you’re trying to push an agenda here, you want to show the world that not all hackers are pirates. But don’t try to pass a subjective opinion off as fact please.
I think many people are missing the ponit here… and maybe a lot of people as humans always are… greed bastards…There are a loooot of free games on the internet.. and many of them are friking popular like DOTA or free MORPG lets say you are not into that… you have many websites that make previews and reviews about games.. i cant believe you cannot aford to buy a 60 dollar game once a year… and you know about wololo…even thou with PSN+ you have many high quality game for free or at a discount..that make excellent choices.. what the autor says makes total sense… here in mexico i feel this is even worse.. cus many people is making fortunes out of piracy..internet culture.. here is not as big as in europe or USA.. so people still buy piracy directly downloaded form internet.. that i think it is the bigest rip off of the history…. ( computer science ..modern history .. XD) bottom line is people is being really cheap.. this days if you talk about games… and take things for granted…
My view on piracy is that it’s an unbiased demo of a game. Newest example: South Park The Stick of Truth. Being a TV->Game, I was more than skeptical. I pirated it shamelessly, expecting it to be bad. It was in fact so good that I stopped playing around the 20 minute mark and bought it, and WAITED for the EU release a couple days later.
Thing to conclude: Piracy is bad, and you can kid other people into thinking you’re a good pirate, but you alone decide whether you’re a bad pirate or a good pirate.
Well you can feel lucky enough because I never had a wage from my parents, so the possibility of buying videogames is almost impossible. So piracy at my view point does makes sense. And paying 70 or 65€ for a single game I think is too much, if they were cheaper I would be able of buying more.
I think piracy makes perfect sense, allow me to explain. First off, we have usually the same games created for multiple platforms. It used to be just PS3, Xbox 360, PC and now even next gen consoles are getting the same games so that is 6 different platforms a game can be released on. Developers are usually finding effortless ways of porting to different consoles. Not to mention consoles hardware has been reaching this singularity where they too are becoming glorified PCs with cleverly designed proprietary hardware to make them sell like move or kinect. Now whats my point with all this diversity?
You would think with all this diversity and competition prices would drop? That it would be good for the customer. The truth is, it isn’t. Games have been $50 now $60 since PS1. The hardware inside that they use hasn’t been diversifying, the cases and names have. Its always been AMD/INTEL. Its like if I were to build 6 different computers and make an OS specific to each so that I can have the same game charged full price 6 time. Its robbery. If I want to play with my COD with 6 friends who each have a different console, I’d have to buy each platform, then the game 6 times, that is $360 in games alone.
My point is, games should be cheaper than they are now, at least 3x to 6x cheaper based on platform diversity. Exclusives would make more sense to charge more but the whole idea of exclusives is just greed unfolding right before your eyes. Unless I buy a game for $60 that has a key for every platform the price should go down.
Playstation+ would be great if it weren’t for just playstation. Something like a yearly fee for all media content in the world would make pricey seem something of a joke, but with corporate greed that will never happen.
Now what about indie developers? Piracy accommodates for that naturally. If you look at the top 100 pirated games, aka the games being pirated the most, you won’t find a single indie game there that hasn’t already profited. If your game is good, it will be a successes and if its a success it will consequently be among the most pirated games. So piracy is actually a means of determining successes. As an indie developer you want to see your game get pirated, then its all about pricing right.
Now in terms of a solution? A one platform solution. Linux maybe? Probably. Valve definitely knows whats up. That is why they are pushing their games onto Linux. Once people can game on linux, linux will boom. Won’t happen overnight ofcourse and with people becoming more and more tech savvy, I suspect and hope that we can have all the great games we have and even better with out giants like Sony or Microsoft charging pointless licences to developers and making games as absurdly expensive as they our now.
Just my 2 cents.
As a french, I’ll answer you.
Depends where you play.
For example I pirated many PC games (easiest piracy).
But since steam and humble bundles i buy them (when a game I want comes out I prefer to w8 a few weeks so the price drop to 5€ like bioshock inifinite, farcry 3)… Or sometimes I’m very selfish and w8 for an humble bunble with the game xD (was rly mad when I buyed crysis 2 on origin discount and a few days later it came out in a bunble)…
Let’s get to the point. On Vita no need piracy cause of PS+ (nice cheap way to play). But on 3DS I buyed Gateway cause there are not such services on it (I mean PS+, huge discounts or bundles)… So here’s my point of view and obviously I’m smarter than you (sorry for my crappy english).
The simple answer is that, yes, in an ideal world, piracy would be entirely unnecessary today.
But it’s not an ideal world. I’m sure that many of the people on this site have been faced with the same disappointments I have. You go to your nearest game retailer and pick up a shiny new game for $60. Having watched all the trailers a dozen times, you assume that the gameplay is as fun as the trailers were to watch. There isn’t a demo out for that game yet, or if there is it doesn’t cover much, so you haven’t yet had a chance to really test it for yourself but how bad can it really be, right? Wrong. That brand new $60 game is a steaming hunk of unplayable garbage. You take it back to the retailer demanding a refund only to be told that due to their refund policy, your only choice is to sell it back for $1.37.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condoning piracy. What I’m saying is that most gamers don’t turn to piracy until they feel forced into it by the gaming industry. Those among us with morals use piracy to determine whether we really want to give our money to whatever studio released the game or not.
The Vita doesn’t have a piracy “problem” and I don’t see it taking over the world. The PS3 didn’t have a piracy “problem for over half its life and it didn’t take over the world, and in fact, coincidence or not, it didn’t start taking off and being a real threat to the 360 out west until piracy did take off.
Piracy does not affect sales all that much. Period. The DS and Wii were the most easily piratable modern consoles and they’re also the best selling and with the DS having solid software sales across the board, too.
I view “piracy” more as fair use and preservation. Sure, some abuse it, but they’re unlikely to contribute much to the industry anyway, and for those that pirate and can buy games quite easily, they’re scumbags, but nevertheless, don’t affect the industry as a whole enough.
I also want to just shut people up before they start:
Piracy didn’t affect the Dreamcast in the slightest. Hardware and software sales were sky high up until the PS2 came out. EXPLICITLY up to that point. As soon as the PS2 came out, sales tanked in a big and horrifying way. Sales charts DEFINITIVELY prove this.
The PSP also did not have a piracy problem because the platform became its own, too. It was no Nintendo handheld in terms of success, but it made Sony a profit and software sales were pretty decent, especially the end of its life. I do believe that emulation and such affected hardware sales, though. I think that encouraged some people to get a PSP, but it didn’t open pandora’s box to piracy, either. Because sales data does not back this up. When piracy was full swing, so were software sales.
Only one platform had serious, legitimate piracy problems that I can think of, that’s the Famicom disk system. Even the PC didn’t have that serious of a Piracy problem, because when people thought that piracy was ravaging sales, ridiculous DRM was in full effect and that’s no coincidence that when anti-consumer DRM is affecting legitimate customers that legitimate customers say screw you.
Sony’s value incentive form of piracy control that is PS Plus works much better than any DRM out there. They get MORE money and help people who crave value and hopefully have limited cash reserves better options.
I’m not saying piracy is a victimless crime, but sales and piracy is a very complicated matter and there is no cure-all be-all explanation.
Excellent article!! Great work,wololo!ur points are very valid and stuff but I would like to add that games are very expensive in the first month these days and after that they are cheaper on pc ( acceptable and logical in a way). Consoles are sad imo, except for ps+ which is an excellent subscription and gives away a lot of goodies, the physical copies of games for all consoles are never priced cheap(atleast wherever I’ve travelled and lived). A way to combat piracy are free to play titles such as tribes ascend,Team Fortress 2 and uberstrike(to some extent). I’m not saying I don’t pirate,neither am I saying I buy all my games but I’m older now and find free to play titles fun now and no longer pirate, I wait for games to hit the $15 mark (PC games,not used games) and it fits like a glove for my budgets since I’ve just finished college and entering uni now and get a fixed pocket money. Homebrew titles such as wagic,duke nukem based psp ports ,lamecraft etc and the best one so far for me- Cave Story!! Plus I have a developer account for each gadget – WP8,windows,ios,Blackberry,Nokia etc so I get my software free as well or even cheaper if not free for some consumer products.
No need to pirate! It’s free! Crazy Taxi for iOS
https://appsto.re/us/9YcbH.i
Anyways, if you pirate you likely weren’t going to buy it anyways. You simply made a copy that didn’t currently exist so you technically didn’t steal it. Yeah there’s months of hard work and money put into these games but they don’t lose much as you likely weren’t gonna buy it as mentioned above. DRM that links a purchase to your account or console is what makes people want to pirate. Your console does and no your out of luck. Remember when we use to let our friends borrow games and we’d borrow theirs? There were no complaints about that.
I’ve been burned too many times by crappy games and DRM that doesn’t let me play the game I paid for.
For me it’s very hard for me to afford to buy 1 game a year at $60.
I find it that many times trailers and reviews don’t give you the full picture of how good or how bad a game is as a lot of review site are paid by the publishers to give high praise. I’ve been burned by games where the trailers looked great and it got high reviews but I didn’t like it. Then again, I’ve played games that got lousy reviews and I completely enjoyed them.
I don’t pirate like I used to. For me, I had to go to my local library if I wanted to pirate a game as I only had dial-up which is no good for games that are several GBs big.
PS+ is a great value for many games. I have several hundred PSN games that I bought due to the discounts I got from PS+. PS+ is usually an even better value on Black Friday when you can sometimes get a 12 month PS+ card for $30. I have so many games I wouldn’t have considered buying at full price. I just need a bigger Vita card to store them all as 32GB is too small.
While piracy is wrong, sometimes we are given no choice due to the gaming industry’s greed. When it takes most people 10+ hours of work to afford ONE game are you really going to buy something that might be garbage? Then you have computer games that use broken DRM which prevents people who purchased the game from playing it. Look at “Spore”, it was the most pirated game due to the DRM it had. Now that it is on Steam and DRM free people can now enjoy a great game.
The only viable excuse these days for pirating old games is that they are no longer available for purchase or the hardware required to play them is no longer available anywhere.
I leave with a very true comment:
“If you treat your costumers as costumers, you get more costumers. If you treat your costumers as pirates, you get more pirates.”
How much does Sony or the others are paying you to bulshit all this ???
It’s easy to claim that piracy doesn’t make sense and that modern game services ease the process when you actually make a decent bit of capital. But not all of us make a lot of money. I grew up totally poor, so piracy was the obvious solution to playing all the games I could hope for. To this day, I can’t buy the games I want if I also want food or a roof over my head. Poorness, thy name is piracy.
Yo Sí bajo Torrents (._.) Pero es porque soy pobre :/ … Pero conciente estoy de que para un programador su seño es vivir de su talento. No sólo de un programador, cualquier persona desearía poder hacer lo que le apasiona y que además le paguen *o* , pero “Nadie es profeta en su tierra”. En méxico al menos, es muy difícil que alguien desenbolse dinero por una APP que puedes bajar de Taringa( más bien de Identi porque T! ya murió)… Y mejor inviertes $400 pesos en ponerle chip a tu consola que comprar un juego al mes, pagar por poder jugar en línea, etc etc.
Anyway… Al menos podríamos donar en Indiego o similares apoyando con paypal… al menos 0.0
Well, piracy doesn’t make sense in a fully developed country as Japan, US, etc… But I live in Venezuela, and I have seen PS3 games in 5000 BSF wich is the equivalent of 793 dollars.
I think of myself as a gamer though I don’t actually own a console (besides an old Wii with a broken dvd reader).
Here you can find a PS3 or Xbox360 in 22000 BSF wich is 3492 dollars.
I understand that in a developed country almost anybody can own a console, but here in Venezuela if you own a PS3/Xbox360 its because you are a wealthy person.
Those numbers I just mentioned are related to the previous gen. Just Imagine how it is with the current.
Awesome you should think of sontmhieg like that
Thank God you guys don’t live in Greece!
While i will agree, piracy is a lot less..useful? now than it was then (music can be found on youtube (and the like) for free, movies are cheap as heck via netflix (and the like), and steam sales make (most) AAA games very cheap about a year or two after they come out), i will say it still has its importance.
One of which being of course preservation. Companies die, and through piracy some things that were never meant to see the light of day are shown to us (beta cartridges for example.) Not to mention in the impossible event one of the big dogs were to die out (nintendo, microsoft, sony) suddenly, pirates would still be able to offer that chunk of history and culture until things were settled (which could take years or even several years). Not to mention eventually, all cartridges and things will die due to age. The majority of people don’t do all the things required to make them last longer (as there’s no way to prevent failure), and when they’re all gone, that’s the end of it. Sure, they’ll live on in other mediums (PSN, virtual console, etc), but it’s not always the same emulation or experience you had or can have on a real console. Places like GoG (good old games) are getting very old, abandoned games available for re-purchase, and that’s fine with me. The only torrent tracker i can say i was officially dedicated to really only kept very old games, and if GoG put something up for buy, the related torrent would be taken down.
Piracy also gives way for very useful things like hacking the game to create something else (or search for exploits ;P don’t you try and tell me every single exploit found so far was made by people who owned the game originally! That’d be nuts to buy every single PSN game and go hunting)..Or merely just ripping audio/visual assets for personal use. Sure, it can be done via recording hardware, but when i can just slap in my PS3 disc and rip the audio or FMV (I don’t own a blu-ray drive, and before you say OST, some things such as people’s voices and even some songs aren’t always on OSTs) and throw it on my vita, or use it as joke replies to my friends, it makes it far easier (due to nice, clean .wav files, ready to be encoded, verses having to rip the video via hardware, extract the audio from the video, etc etc.) Super Mario World Central for example hosts looaaaads of hacked roms. Granted most, and probably the easiest place to point at hacks come from SNES games, but i can promise you that those famous youtubers out there who play hacks all day more than likely don’t own a dated cartridge of Super Mario World.
On the same level, piracy allows for cheap alternatives to importing..some really fantastic games get translations now and again, and having to pay an upwards of 80-100+ dollars for a single game to me is a bit..nutty. Granted, to me, most games aren’t worth 60 or even 40.
At the end of it..Piracy is bad, sure. I can’t deny that it is, no matter how much i offer words in its favor..the bottom line is that it’s illegal, which innately makes it bad. It’s really an exercise in morals vs patience. But it has its purpose and its use, and while illegal, to me it should be able to stand in the same grey area of the law (where it’s illegal, but rarely enforced) that it is now. ;_;
I have PS+ for my vita but happen to have a ps3. I only pirate games I “should” have ie WipEout i have on my vita AND they have that cross buy so I should get it free anyways, BioShock and all those other ps+ games…
My allowance is like $10/fortnight so some games like Last of Us I’d probably rent out and copy onto my HDD because our internet wouldn’t be capable of getting fast enough and it would eat it out way to badly =/
Honestly speaking I feel that it depends on living conditions. Living in the US, or even most European countries, it’s easy as heck to judge others based on things like piracy. But in some countries it’s extremely expensive to purchase games. Honestly as someone who is living in a country where things are affordable, who am I to judge?
Overall, play what you want to piracy or not, however, if you can afford to purchase games without needing to worry about if you can pay your living expenses, please do so and support the developers of what you like. If you are having trouble paying living expenses in a country where things are affordable, go ahead and pirate them, everyone needs a bit of relaxation, just bear in mind your first goal should be to improve your living conditions to the point where you can afford to support what you enjoy.
Can people stop saying “Piracy is okay if you don’t have a lot of money or a job”. Are you serious? Work harder, or suck it up. That’s a stupid excuse.
Yes, I often stifle a laugh while thinking about the poor and their desire for enjoyment like dinner parties and vacations. Don’t they know their place? Suck it up, untouchables.
Harvest that spice baby….