Poll: Is Piracy Really That Bad?

[Agayek]

It depends on how it is used. For example, pirating a game because you can't get it legally, is perfectly acceptable. As is pirating a game if a demo doesn't exist (with the caveat that if you decide you enjoy it and keep playing, you go out and buy it) and things like that.

If all you do is refuse to pay for a game and play it anyway, then you're a thief, it's as simple as that. That does not mean software piracy is inherently bad, there are several cases where it is at minimum acceptable, if not outright good.

 

[blizzaradragon]

I see two reasons to pirate: 1) the game is completely unavailable anywhere close to you so you have no ways of getting the game legitimately, or 2) you are pirating the game so you can do something like apply a ROM hack or a fun game mode that the community made. Pirating for a demo is iffy with me, cause I can see why you want to try before you buy but at the same time why not see if a store has it on display for you to try or if a friend will let you borrow the game for a couple of hours to try it out?

 

[Orcboyphil]

I'll admit it, I am a pirate and whilst I have justifications I'll admit that what I do is against the laws of my country and the international community. However for justification when I pirate games I don't pirate new, the games I download are decades old and no longer available sometimes they where never available in my country. Whilst I feel justified in downloading Skyrim as a protest for the way there treating Mojang I haven't so far and there's no way of actuall telling them that's the reason rather than me just wanting a freebie. As for movies I will pirate the uncensored and banned version of a film I already own. I hate censorship in all its forms and feel an adult should be able to watch whatever they want without an unelected committee applying there outdated notions on my viewing habits. And for TV, I really don't have justification here, I'll download the latest episode of 5-0 because its not on terrestrial TV and my housing association won't allow me to get satellite or cable, nor are they willing to pay for them either (even when I and my house mates offered to up our rents to pay for it).

 

[Ragsnstitches]

For:
1) Allows a larger group of people to play the game, thus offering them a true sampling of what the developer is offering. (Especially for games without demos)
2) A person who resorts to stealing the game wasn't like to purchase it anyway. Unfair to the people who bought it yes, but not truly taking revenue away from the maker.
3) No DRM
4) Ability to acquire a game in a region you'd otherwise be unable to get said game from.
5) Capability to download your game in another location without need to physically carry game with you.

Against:
1) It's illegal.
2) It takes money away from the company producing the game.
3) Very unfair to the people who purchased the game legally.
4) Could subject minors to content their parents/guardians wouldn't want them exposed too.

"FOR":
1) Marketing, Demos, Trailers, TV spots, the internet, all do a fine job at spreading a developers product. Steam is amazing at getting people to buy games with all their offers. You are naive to think the typical pirate will develop brand loyalty when their ethos is "I'm cheap is sin, so fuck you!", so entitling them to a product they haven't earned is bullshit.

2)So why condone it? A person who resorts to violence after drink isn't likely to not fight, it's not fair on the people out that night who get punched up by him, but at least he's giving money to the barkeep. Yeah, not going to fly.

3)No Piracy also = No DRM... Go figure.

4)The only exception, but even then, you can legally purchase a game and crack it yourself if you care enough about it. Also, there ARE other games... it's not likely the industry is short of carbon copies.

5)Steam? Onlive? Origin? Impulse? PSN and XBL to an extent? Also, again, you can crack your games and store then on an External... as long as you don't resell/distribute it the feds won't come crashing through your window.

1-3 and 5 are matters of convenience for the pirate. Most people cope... laziness or some misdirected anger towards DRM are not excuses for Piracy. Also, unless your somehow unfamiliar with rewarding effort, I can't see how you would think someone using your product without it legally been purchased is a good thing.

Point 4 is the only one with any moral strength to it.

Against:
1) It is illegal... for a reason. It's not some obscure or arbitrary law to preserve moral decency. It's a fundamental strut to economics (not just capitalism).

2) Reason enough alone to discount the 5 above points. You are screwing the people who offer you joy at a reasonable cost, backing them into a corner, making them lash out recklessly, encouraging more piracy, encouraging more brash decisions, leading some dystopian future where we need to install cameras to observe us while we masturbate to legally purchased content... oh shit.

3) Personally I don't think the average consumer gives a fuck... unless a game they really liked stops getting support because profits sank due to piracy.

4) Parents job to monitor kids... not the internets. I wish ignorance was illegal.

5) Yes I'm adding some. Sites one may visit to obtain pirated content are rarely, if ever, safe for your computer. There is also no guarantee that what your getting is clean.

6) Kills small companies... you know, those folks who can offer us something new, not action shooter: Modern Future: Battles of War 3 or Fantasy adventure: Dragons! or "That sport game you liked 10 years ago with shiny new graphics".

7) Piracy in any way or form can lead to complacency towards the act, so where do you draw the line? Can you get others to agree with that line? What if others think you go too far? It's the whole "give an inch, they'll take 10" scenario... it WON'T stop with just the odd game/track/film

 

[ashpah111]

My issue with piracy is why is it called piracy?
People who copy games are nothing like pirates.
Pirates attack ships, kill and steal from their victims.
Here we are talking about people who copy 1's and 0's (in a particular order).

The grey area in pirating games is because you are not taking away anything physical from someone else. The victim has no real tangible loss. His intellectual property was stolen, yes - his idea and the hard work to come up with that idea and present that idea as an interactive experience was copied, but he still has his idea and all its derivatives. Unlike regular theft where the victim has a real and tangible loss.

So in my understanding game piracy comes down to how much you respect the rights of someone elses intellectual property.
Like in the film "the social network", the Winklevos brothers felt their idea had been stolen and set a price to what they thought they lost, but the film makes us see another viewpoint too - namely that Mark Zuckerberg felt his facebook idea was not a derivative of their idea and that he therefore really owed them nothing (even though he settled with them out of court to get them off his back).
The ownership of intellectual property is vague by its very nature. Therefore the law to protect it is also vague. Is copying a recipe from a cookbook when you didn't buy the book theft? are you a pirate? Nobody is screaming that cooks and cookbooks will become extinct because of the cookbook pirates. There will always be people who buy the book and there will always be people who just copy the recipe they are interested in.
So too by games.
I don't think its the pirates fault that game production is so expensive in this generation. And its this expense that limits creativity in the game industry - no one can afford to take big risks. its this expense that causes game publishers to close down when they publish a flop. We can't blame it all on piracy.
On the other hand we all like a scapegoat to blame for all our problems.

 

[viranimus]

Here is a thought. Of course not advocating but Piracy does good for all consumers. Honestly its the ONLY thing that is keeping at bay the publishers desire to force digital distribution on the consumers so they can forcibly destroy sectors of the gaming industry that dont shovel profits back to the publisher and undermine legal ownership rights.

 

[Mrrrgggrlllrrrg]

OP you're forgetting one important con, it devalues the entertainment industry as a whole.

In the whole piracy is a very muddy issue and a bit I feel is important is that if the company believes that piracy is rampant then there will be less future risk taking and more about being as appealing to as many people as possible making some artistic sacrifices to make money like you know the business it is.

In last couple generations the entertainment industry has been undervalued to the point where some people will blatantly pirate something without batting an eyelash and many of their peers would think nothing of it. Games for one take a lot of work and money and many times requires the blood, sweat, and tears of developers.

But on the other side of the coin not everything is available everywhere and people will have some reasons but we should at least try to promote the sale of entertainment not to mention the industry itself needs to work on customer relations, as I said its a muddy issue, some people will always pirate and sometimes the industry workers will get frustrated and lash out in a way that will often times hit the customer more than the pirate.

 

[ElPatron]

Piracy is bad enough that it fucks with my (and many other peoples') gaming experience.

The truth is that anything that happens in the industry is going to bite you in the ass.

People could have pirated some games, but no. They have decided to pay for them, resulting in every game of the same genre having elements from said game.


Like some people said before, doesn't bother me. You could shut down the production of AAA games tomorrow morning and I couldn't care less. Piracy isn't the only thing that results in your gaming experience being not as good as you wanted.





And I would like to know how to throw money at companies that no longer exist and can't make profits from very old games, or how can that affect you at all.



By the way, this might be the third time I see a thread about piracy in the last 7 days...

 

[Nuke_em_05]

There are two types of "pirate":

1. Those who simply don't want to pay for it; who can afford it or not.
2. Those who do it for "a reason": demo, business practices, DRM, unavailable legitimately, etc.

You can discuss the points in group 2 until you're blue in the face, and the internet at large is doing so, but that doesn't change the fact that in action and effect group 1 and group 2 are the same. They are both consuming content created with intent of compensation without compensating the creator.

1) Allows a larger group of people to play the game, thus offering them a true sampling of what the developer is offering. (Especially for games without demos):

There are a lot of items that you cannot "try before you buy" with no guarantees or return policies. Life is full of disappointment.

2) A person who resorts to stealing the game wasn't like to purchase it anyway. Unfair to the people who bought it yes, but not truly taking revenue away from the maker.

"Piracy" is consumption (albeit illegitimate), consumption indicates demand. Demand indicates that there exists a price that they would be willing to pay. I imagine such a sales price is reached in the "new" price reductions over time, or sooner in used sales.

3) No DRM

Yet DRM is created to combat piracy, so to pirate in order to spite DRM is only reinforcing the necessity of its existence to the publisher. A nasty little redundant spiral.

4) Ability to acquire a game in a region you'd otherwise be unable to get said game from.

Okay, so "piracy" is a PC platform that works when you have a reasonable internet connection. Legitimate digital distribution platforms are making history of region limitations.

5) Capability to download your game in another location without need to physically carry game with you.

Again, legitimate digital distribution.

Using "Piracy" as protest doesn't work. Boycotting doesn't work if you turn around and pirate it. If you have a problem with DRM, business practices, lack of demos, etc.: don't buy the game and then tell the publisher/developer why you didn't buy the game. This does require not playing the game, because to do so demonstrates that you have assigned value to it in spite of your protest. If you don't buy the game, tell them why, and then pirate the game, they can't tell why each individual pirates, so your point isn't made and all you've done is added to the statistics that likely encourage them to continue the practices with which you disagree.

 

[CommanderKirov]

4) Ability to acquire a game in a region you'd otherwise be unable to get said game from.

This is the only reason people should pirate. Not only games but TV shows and such.

If you cannot acquire the item legally (For a reasonable price as in other countries) than it's free picking.

Also I would make an exception on the case of buying the game before but wanting to install it on a different machine, or just loosing the disc.

 

[Angry_squirrel]

Snip

I see posts like this all the time and they really irritate me.
Hear me out: I personally, did not like Fable 2. I thought it was over-hyped, and that a number of huge exaggerations or even downright lies had been said about the game. Now I think that when I went out and bought that game, the developers were stealing from me. Why? Because they charged me money for something, then didn't give me what they'd promised.

Offering me something and then only delivering parts of that once I've payed them? That's definitely stealing in my mind.
Now were I to download that game, try it, discover what the game actually is, I would be glad I didn't buy it. We as consumers have a right to know what it is we're buying: If someone advertises bread as new, you buy it, then turns out to be stale or moldy, you have every right to be annoyed, you've just been ripped off. Why should things be any different in games? Don't argue that it's acceptable just because it happens a lot; false advertising is nothing but thievery, and a lot of false advertising goes on in games.

Secondly: What is the harm if you pirate a game to find out if it'll run on your system, if you then go out and buy it afterwards? If I buy a game, I want to know that said game is going to work, else I'm getting a raw deal.

I personally think piracy is bad only if you play and enjoy the pirated game. You have every right to know whether or not you're going to enjoy the game, because ultimately that's what you're paying for: Enjoyment. If you don't get said enjoyment because the game wasn't what the developers claimed, or because it doesn't run on your system, then you've been cheated out of your money.

 

[Erana]

And I would like to know how to throw money at companies that no longer exist and can't make profits from very old games, or how can that affect you at all.

While you seem to not be getting what I have posted here, I just have to cite myself to question if you read past the first sentence.

Piracy is bad enough that it fucks with my (and many other peoples') gaming experience.

So instead of trying to justify the kinds of piracy that are making this an issue, why don't we acknowledge that people who are making it a problem (IE: the vast majority who don't give a damn and just want free stuff) and blame them?
I mean, seriously. The people who honestly just pirate current games as demos, or pirate old games aren't what's making these big, scary numbers that are making the money people flip out and do DRM and bullshit like that.

The initial comment was in response to the thread title, in saying that it is
The rest was my going on to say that the people who are downloading it because they want free things, regardless of whether or not they would buy the game if legit was the only means available to them are the problem. We shouldn't bring the people who are in a lighter shade of a morally gray area of illegal downloading (such as the aforementioned download-as-demo or download-unavailable-games people) because they aren't the big problem.

And that's just my two cents into the discussion because, while I'm not going to endorse illegal activity, I'm not going to place those people on the same level as people who are so incredibly entitled, they take whatever they can.

 

[Zack Alklazaris]

Considering its the release date of Saints Row the Third and it ALREADY has a pirated version out. Its bad, at least give it a day, geesh.

 

[Savagezion]

You wouldn't download a car!

LOL, that video you posted is hilarious.

OT: This topic has been done before and always dies without much progression. Mostly I am against piracy but there is a large grey area involved. Also, consider this, for companies that spend millions on DRM, they can't seem to keep tabs on their games getting "leaked" early? That doesn't seem odd to anyone? Hollywood is already suspected to purposely leak movies they think are going to bomb so they can use piracy as a scapegoat. Don't be fooled into thinking the industry is a big helpless idiot. They didn't become millionaires in a dog eat dog world by being helpless idiots.

 

[Twilight_guy]

No. It's not the worse thing ever but generally developers don't have to worry about genocide being committed against them. Its one of the major issues that publishers and developers face in trying to make money and keep afloat so it has become a major policy issue which has intern cause major debate among consumers.

 

[DesertMummy]

Its illegality is not the problem with it, it is the fact that you are cheating a developer out of a money. I can see you wanting to do it if u live in a place where you cant buy it legally, but otherwise, you should give the devs they're money that they earned.

 

[Dr Pussymagnet]

It doesn't matter what anyone says to try to justify pirating. To me, it's just a simple matter of theft.

You didn't pay for it, so don't fucking take it.

 

[w9496]

YES, IT REALLY IS THAT BAD.

Why should they get something for free when I spend money on it? Is that fair? No it's not. Is it illegal for a reason? Hells yeah.

That product that you stole was someones work, and they're not getting any of the benefit of a purchase. Imagine that whatever you do for a living, whether it be designing games or flipping burgers. Now imagine if there was a way for somebody to steal the product, in this case burgers or games, and not seeing a penny for it.