Piracy is a crime, do NOT accept it

[Arenegeth]

Yes you figured that out this topic is about the subject of piracy and how much it hurts the video game industry.

The title of this thread originates however from the warning I heard in the beginning of my original Disney tapes when I was a kid.

So as we all know piracy is nothing new and it's not about games, it's about music DVD and so on.

And everything started back in the days of audio tapes I believe, but now with more media available video games have taken its turn.

After the brief and basic history lesson let me get you here and now, 2005 and piracy in games is worst than ever, in the place that I'm located people rather buy pirated games than originals, also a few years back they were more widely available but lately the local distributors have put a little pressure to the insensitive police.

I actually know not one, but two people that work for local government agencies that actually burn and sell discs!

I also know several policemen that buy and play pirated games; in fact one of them suggested that I should buy as well!

Apparently for the local numbskulls there is nothing illegal in selling and supplying games and copyright infringement is nothing to them.

So what do you have to say about it?

Do you believe that it damages the industry that it should stop or that it benefits the consumer?

You think that games are too expensive or that the police should put more strict regulations and laws regarding piracy and that they should be enforced more vigilant.

So analyze, criticize discuss as I say when I make threads like this one.

More on what I think on the subject and some info about piracy in Europe in specific later.
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"I am ye who walks his own path and thus I walk alone"

[VikiFanatic]

Actually, Here in the Philippines, piracy is extremely prevalent. Since our economy has been failing, it's been a normal issue in our country. Most of the people here never liked to support piracy but have no choice.

Actually, the line between pirated goods and original ones here are thinning. Some of them are already to convincing and have actually pirated even the original barcodes into the products...

My say on piracy is that, we shouldn't support it... I myself prefer to buy original goods. However... Even original goods here are so rare... Almost everything you see was either copied or stolen... But i know they're not bad people. They are just misguided progeny of people who pirated in a time of great need... :cry:
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[Keriaku]

I don't know about bootleg stuff, but for downloading the only reason I'd see necessary to download instead of buy is if the game is unavalabile to your country. Like a game that was never for to NA but you can find with a fan translation as a Rom.
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Inspired by everything

[St. Ajora]

I don't think it's that big of a deal, if we're talking emulation. I download older games off of the net all of the time, but this is stuff that no one is making money off of anyway. As for recent games and such, well I prefer to have the original (everything looks prettier) but I wont be too noble to turn down a copy of a game that I want to play, that's been pirated. The game industry is still going strong; it's not in any danger of failing anytime soon, so I'm not really worried about what sort of "criminal" behaviour I'm exerting.

[Leb]

The problem if that even if it's not a game that a company still makes money off of, you're still stealing someone else's property.

[St. Ajora]

I'm not making a profit off of it, I'm entertaining myself with it. Surely this should bring peace of mind knowing that I am still amused by old rpgs, of course. I mean, they should feel flattered.

But seriously, when you have no other options and the internet market is out of the question, desperate times call for desperate measures.

[Leb]

The fact of the matter is that it's simply not yours to take. If a company wants to get their game out there for fans who can't find it, they'll make it public domain. Some guy did that with his NES or SNES game a while back when he won the rights to it from his company.

[Wataru]

My opinion on this matter is pretty much undefendable and is legally and morally wrong in all respects. I have no problem with it.

As far as games go, I have an NES and SNES emulator on my computer and I have downloaded some games/software from various sites when I could have bought them. The emulators, as St. Ajora said, are for games that you can't find anywhere, you can't get the systems to play them on even if you could find them, and the company isn't making any money off them anymore, either. I mean, buy an old NES game from Gamestop if you want. Nintendo isn't getting the money from that sale anyway, the middleman is. In terms of my other games, I mostly try to download games I used to have (and bought normally) that are no longer made and my CDs are broken/lost. I'm not trying to grab bootlegs of the newest things out there, just old classics you can't find anymore. Stuff like the Kings Quest series, Civilization II and SimTower.

With movies, I will admit I have some bootlegs. However... when a movie comes out, I see it in theatres, say "Hey, that was cool," buy the bootleg, watch it once ... maybe twice, then buy the real DVD release when it comes out. I gave the film company money once when I saw the thing in theatres and then again when I buy the DVD. So what's the harm in getting a copy to watch in the interim? I also have some theatrical bootlegs. I have a copy of RENT and a copy of Titanic. Titanic I bought for research purposes since I was in a production of the show. I've seen RENT three times already and Titanic has been off Broadway for nearly 8 years. It's not like my owning these DVDs is going to cause the producers to lose money.

I remember this debate coming up with Napster many years ago and I wanted to run up to Metallica and slap them all in their greedy corporate faces. How many houses do you need anyway, Lars? You're already a multimillionaire. Just shut up and count the money you have and stop crying about how you can't have more. Anyway, most artists don't make anything off the album sales anyway. Didn't anybody ever see the Behind the Music for TLC? The record companies take most of the money from record sales. The artist is the last to get paid. Artists make their money on tours and merchandising, two things piracy really doens't have any effect on.

In terms of knockoff items (imitation fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck merchandise), I don't buy them simply because of the lesser quality. I don't buy used games or DVDs for the same reason. I like having my own stuff. I don't own much, so when I have somehting I want it to be mine and have it be the real thing, not some second hand version or some cheap knockoff. Call it snobby if you will but that's how I feel.

I have no problem taking money out of the mouth of a greedy corporate giant. They have the balls to charge $50 and more for a new Playstation game, so it's not like they have a problem taking money out of mine. Like I said, it's immoral ind undefendable, but that's how I feel.
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[Samwise]

[Wataru]

[Ashley Riot]

Piracy is easy to condemn, equally easy to fall into. I've fallen into it where music is concerned, for one thing; if I want an MP3 badly, it's right there online, no wait, no $50 fee to own the whole soundtrack- mostly game stuff, sometimes anime openings and such. And I realize how much that sucks, and what I'm doing to the people who work hard composing and compiling these great pieces for my listening, and I'm essentially listening to it for free- something that I should feel is wrong. But I also feel it's wrong to charge $50, a small fortune to some people I know, for a soundtrack when you really only want to listen to one song. Companies have tried to counter this by selling you MP3s, but it's usually a very limited crop, culled from the most popular songs. There is no way I could buy the Ending Roll to Vagrant Story from one of these stands. Kind of a moot point, as I own the Vagrant Story OST, but say I didn't; you'd still get the point.

That's music, though. Games I don't download as much- I have three 2D fighting games on an emulator of a system that is now virtually extinct, and these are not games that are sold anywhere in my country, nor are they easy to gain from overseas. So I may not be in much of a position to comment, but I would never- never, ever, ever, ever, ever- download a ROM of a game that is readily available in the United States of America. Like going out and downloading Knights of the Old Republic 2 and putting it on your XBOX, no charge. That is pure thievery. It always seems worse, doesn't it just, when you steal something big.

Even this isn't absolute, though. Let's take an example we all know about: Suikoden II.

As it stands, I have not played Suikoden II. Given the exhorbitant amount of money being demanded for a good copy of this game, I think it's safe to say that I never will. I simply cannot pay $120, the regular asking price, for a single game. And oh, sure, you hear about these lucky buys all the time..."I found it in a WalMart!" Well, my area doesn't have that much fortune. I've never found Suikoden II for a good price, except on eBay, where I know full well I would be outbid in a heartbeat. It's happened before. I just can't find Suikoden II in this country.

I was recently pointed out to a ROM of Suikoden II. It took me three days of not shutting off my computer, but I downloaded it. MDF-MDS format, NTSC, 288 MB, zip file. It's right there on my hard drive. Matter of fact, I'm a couple clicks away from the folder it's in.

I have not played it yet. I'm starting to wonder if I ever will.

Granted, there's a more technical reason as to why; the aforementioned format has me confused because it clearly will not run in the recommended emulator without freezing. But that's an explanation, not a request for advice. There's another and larger reason I haven't played it yet: I don't feel right playing it. Logically, I should. I now possess something that I had been seeking to own for a long time. This is a hit-or-miss game where opinions are concerned, but most people regard it highly as one of the most fun games of all time, and possibly the one that typified Suikoden as a premier series of games. I got it despite the fact that the prices are huge and the availability scarce. If I just figure out how to play it, I should be happy, right?

But, you know...I also have to listen to the other people, talking about piracy. The odds may be stacked against me, but I still didn't earn this game. It's earning it even less than when you buy a game with birthday money, because in a sense, you do earn birthday money, by being a good person and by celebrating the life you live with the people you love. The basic fact is that I have something I DID NOT PAY FOR, and something...bigger than an MP3. I know it's silly to pull rank on stuff you're getting for free, but compare a 3 MB song of background music to 288 MB of game. Pretty different, eh?

So I don't know what to do. Part of me says keep it. Part of me says delete it. Part of me says keep it as a last resort in case I never DO find Suikoden II...I don't know. I don't usually have this much trouble deciding which choice is right and which choice is wrong. It feels like it should be easy. It's just a game, right? It's not like it's food and I'm starving for it; I can live a perfectly fine life without ever playing one more game. But that's pulling rank, too, isn't it? I dunno.

Chances are I'll probably leave it there for a long time, being my usual indecisive self, then realize some day down the line that it's taking up a good chunk of hard space, and probably delete it. So I'll be saying goodbye to my chances of ever playing Suikoden II. But that would be the right thing to do...wouldn't it?

I feel old, man.
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"I've been shown a lifetime of oddities in a day." -- Ashley Riot

[Aurelien]

Actually, the way to fight piracy is by lowering the price of the original product. People prefer to buy bootleg/pirated stuff because they are MUCH cheaper than the original product. So they compensated the loss of quality for a much cheaper price. If the producer manage to lower the price of original products significant enough to minimize the gap between the price of original products and bootleg/pirated stuff, then people might be hesitant to buy the bootleg/pirated stuff because they save little money at the expense of quality of product and legal issues.

I'll just use Indonesia as an example. A pirated Playstation 2 game there costs around US 50 cents to $2. That's around 1 or 2% of the price of the original product. If the pirated games can be played just fine, why should they pay 50-100 times more expensive? I know that it's wrong, but with the economy situation over there and Indonesia being a poor country, they simply cannot afford the original product's price.

In Indonesia, the way the local producers tried to fight piracy is by keeping their product price low (or at least reasonable) compared to the pirated product's price. Say a pirated DVD costs 50 cents there, the original Indonesian movie DVD would cost them usually between $2 to $5 (depending on the quality of the movie). That is quite a reasonable price, and actually quite encouraged people to buy the original product.

I'm not saying that we should be allowed to buy pirated stuff, but sometimes, it's just impossible to buy the original product due to economic issue and the producers not really making an attempt to care about their market in the third world countries. Unless they start lowering the price in the third world countries, I think piracy would keep on growing over there.
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~City-States of Jowston and Tinto Republic~
06.06.2004 - 20.01.2008

[Arenegeth]

OK I was looking for these figures before I went on with this.

[Aurelien]

[Arcana]

Instead of going through an extensive treatment of the subject at the moment, I'll link to an article I wrote for OCRemix's forums regarding music production software.

http://scrapped.mine.nu/node/view/296

In response to a few things and common misconceptions in this thread.

1) Stopping piracy won't make things cheaper.

2) $50 is a perfectly reasonable price to pay for a video game. I take it, from viewing this thread, that no one has absolutely ANY damn idea how much it costs to create a music CD nowadays. You hear it a lot... "It costs only 2-5 cents to make a CD!" Well, guess what, people. You're not PAYING for the damn CD that the stuff comes on. You're paying the people who spent hundreds and thousands of hours putting things together for you. When you buy the CD, you're paying the artist who performs the songs, the writers who write the lyrics, the engineers who produce the music, the band members, the cover artist, and the production facility that presses the CDs. These people are working a few dozen hours or a few hundred hours, each, to get that CD out the door. How many are hey going to sell, even if it's only $5 a CD? Maybe 5000? And that if it's a pretty well-known artist. Guess what. Most CDs don't sell that many units. At five dollars, that's $25K. Then pay the CD cover artist, the producer, the engineer, the guys running the recording studio, the record publisher, the band members...

It's NOT a big living. Most people who sell CDs don't make a large amount of money.

3) This situation is worse for games. A game that sells 40 000 units is considered a big hit. A game also has many more people working for it - go read the credits at the end of a game some time. There's maybe 10-15 programmers, a character designer, a composer, three or four modelers, a bunch of testers, and of course the producers and management. Each person in a group to make a modern game works full-time, for a year or more to get a game out the door. How many 40-hour work weeks is that?

And you people wonder why games get shittier and shittier as the years go on. As games get more expensive to make, the RISKS that game makers take GOES DOWN because they frankly don't want to risk a million dollars on a game that might totally bomb. Instead of trying to do innovative things, they just take the same engine and then reuse it and write a different story over it because it's cheaper. There's no longer any "big product" that props up all the little products. They take the safe route because it's what sells but they also can't take the risk that something will NOT sell. If games stop selling, people lose jobs. They go into cookie-cutter game ideas. They STOP MAKING SEQUELS. Management determines what to make sequels of based on sales of the previous games.

Frankly, the concept is, "If you cannot afford the game, then DO NOT BUY the game". None of this, "Oh, well our country is having a hard time. We cannot afford the game so we pirate it." If you can't afford a car because you're having a hard economic time, you don't steal it and then drive it without insurance, do you? You just make do without a car. It's not like any of these games or movies are necessary for you to live. It's just that in Asia, everyone loves getting stuff for cheap or for free. Guess who's profiting from the sales - it's the pirates. They're stealing from a company, and then selling it at a profit to them, back to you. The pirates didn't do anything to help build the games and movies... all they're doing is buying it once, and then putting it in their DVD burners. Their DVD costs them 50 cents.

If you're going to pirate something, then at least don't give money to the thieves in the middle and go download it off of bittorrent or something. At least then you're not actively supporting an illegal industry.