First, I'm not talking about "Abandonware" - old, off-the-market games that you couldn't buy even if you wanted to. As much as it pains me to say this, being a little naughty is just about the only way to get a chance to play some of the all-time classic titles. (Consider the case of the classic economics/strategy game M.U.L.E., which has been unavailable for 20 years. Even if you found and bought a copy, you'd need an Atari 800 or C64 to run it. And after 20 years, how many of those single-sided floppy disks have survived? How many COULD survive?)
I am talking about the mass piracy of current retail products. Let's assume that BananaSoft's hot new game, BananaQuest, arrives in stores for $50. If some h4xxor clown rips the disc image and FTPs/P2Ps it to his favorite warez site, where 500 of his closest friends grab a copy, that's a loss of twenty five thousand dollars. Now, 733t d00dz reading this will immediately object because I am making the assumption that everyone who grabbed a pirate copy would've been willing to buy the game at retail, rather than just giving it a pass altogether. Therefore, they'd respond, we can't know how much money BananaSoft has actually lost.
To quote the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, "Bullshit." While we cannot know for certain exactly how many pirates would become purchasers if they had to bite the bullet and lay down $50, I feel safe in saying most would. Computer gamers, after all, want to play computer games, and a signature title like BananaQuest would be irresistible to the solid majority of them. This argument - "I pirated the game so I wouldn't have to buy it, but if I had to buy it I might not have wanted it after all, but I did want it so I pirated it" - is just nonsense. It's a facile rationalization to smokescreen theft.
Theft? Yes, theft. The folks at BananaSoft put time and effort into BananaQuest and recover their expenses by charging people for the finished work. If you take their work without compensating them, you have stolen their time and effort. It's that simple; a child could understand it.
There is also the detrimental effect on the larger World of Gaming... I was chatting a few months back with several people on a Direct Connect hub who professed to be ardent Sega Dreamcast fans. At one point, I remarked that while the console's death was shame, at least the firesale prices at the end let us all stock up on titles, extra controllers, etc.
They were shocked to hear that I actually bought games for any price. Their entire DreamCast libraries were warezed - every last game. They had dozens of pirated games each, which they offered to share with me. Now, I know Sega made it laughably easy to pirate DC discs, but even so... When I commented that massive piracy might have caused - or at least hastened - the demise of the DC, they became furiously defensive and asked me if I was "some kind of cop."
The next day, the DreamCast pirates got the mods of that Direct Connect hub to banish me. According to the email I got, I am a "fascist" for opposing no-limit, no-questions-asked warezing. Sieg Heil, baby.
The following is a list of defenses of piracy raised in that discussion, and my responses to them.
Piracy is not like theft, because you're not stealing a physical object. It's just computer code
Yes. The special, non-corporeal nature of software makes duplication and distribution very easy, since there are no physical materials involved (as with shoplifting books) and there is no quality or functionality loss over successive generations of copies (as with copying video tapes). The warez folks seem to believe that, since piracy is so damned easy and carries so little individual risk, it occupies a different ethical category than walking out of a music store with the latest Moby CD in your pocket. This is a self-serving lie. It's the Might Makes Right mentality; in this case, the idea that people who are technically clever enough to pirate games are entitled, as some kind of class privilege, to do it.
Okay, let's get this clear: you do not "own" the intellectual property in your computer games, songs, books, videos, DVDs and whatnot unless you hold the copyright. What you have is a limited user license which, under copyright law, allows you to do certain things and not do other things. Generally speaking, personal use and archival copies are okay but mass copying and distribution are not.
Many software stores don't allow returns - I have to pirate stuff so I can "preview" it and not get burned.
The harsh No Return or Same Title Only return policies of most stores are a direct response to rampant piracy. Merchants were forced to take measures to protect themselves against people buying a game only to pirate it and then returning it for a refund. Some stores still accept returns because they prefer to keep people happy and will accept the 'hit' from the inevitable piracy. That's up to the store.
This is where the nature of digital media comes into play. If I buy a book on Friday and return on Monday for a refund, the bookseller knows there is very little chance that I spent those three days making dozens of copies of it - which in turn could be made to make dozens, if not hundreds, more copies, all of them perfect reproductions of the source.
With analog audio/video sources, it's a little easier - I don't need a printing press and truckloads of paper as with duplicating books - but still takes some doing. I'd still need certain equipment and know-how to mass-replicate them without degradation. Even with that, there is a noticeable reduction in quality between generations of audio and video tape - there is also the time element. Unless you have access to high-speed duplication equipment, copies take a lot of time. The gradual loss of quality and the "hassle" of it all serve as brakes upon mass duplication.
With digital media, it's another story. Huge numbers of copies can be made and distributed very quickly and the fidelity to the source material is PERFECT. Little kids can do it. And that's why merchants have lowered the boom.
So what about customers that get stuck with bad games? Well, when a game is "bad" in the sense of being incomplete and barely functional as a software product (like the infamous Ultima 9), then Consumer Rights do come into play. A similar case can be made for games which are advertised and sold on features they don't actually contain (like the infamous Outpost).
If a game is simply "bad" in the sense of boring, cliched and terrible gameplay, then...well, that's life. Be a more careful shopper. Besides, the release of any major game is accompanied by a withering barrage of publicity and critical scrutiny from the paper and online gaming press. Following the release of Morrowind, for example, I counted three dozen detailed reviews on various gaming sites. Within a month of its release, there was more Morrowind information and evaluation than you could possibly read.
Another thing to consider: the better a game is, the more people want to play it and the more inclined they will be to pirate it (assuming the "piracy is no big deal" attitude prevails). One of the most heavily pirated games in recent memory has been WarCraft 3, which is a quality title that's certainly worth the $60 Blizzard charges, put out by a company that is as "pro-gamer" as you can get.
Blizzard is a "good" company making a "good" game. Has this made a difference? No. Warcraft 3 was boosted right and left, which totally gives the lie to the notion that warezing is some kind of consumerist guerrilla action.
Nor is this a new problem; piracy is as old as computer gaming. CD-Burners have been around and affordable for several years now. Before that, pirates relied on the few who had burners to rip the discs and compress/transfer them to a series of floppy disk images, and the titles were moved around in that form. Prior to the availability of broadband Internet access, private BBSs and face-to-face "swap meets" were used to move the goods.
Games on floppy disks were widely pirated - indeed, one of the most notorious pirate operations on the East Coast of the USA - Pirate's Cove, on Long Island - specialized in floppy disk games for the Atari 400/800 and Apple 2/2+. Even then, piracy was not a matter of "customer revenge" against bad games or retailers. The most pirated games were the best ones - M.U.L.E., Starflight, Archon, the Ultimas, etc.
Piracy is not that widespread / that big of a deal.
It's rather hard to quantify something which is illegal and covert by nature. Still, given the prevalence of CD-burners, broadband access for moving large files and ISOs, and easy-as-pie P2P setups like Direct Connect, and given people's proven willingness to get things without paying for them - especially if there is virtually no risk of getting caught - I think it's safe to say that song, movie, TV show and game piracy is widespread.
An important thing to consider is how EASY pirating has become. The whole scene used to be quite "clubby," but with the advent of broadband, burners, etc. it has exploded. Now anyone with a cable modem or DSL line who knows how to set up Direct Connect can run amok in Pirateland like a kid in a candy store. The essential nature of the activity has not changed. What has changed is the ease and scope of it.
Napster, the World HQ of music theft, was a good example. Napster didn't become popular because a few audiophiles were trading handfuls of obscure songs within their little hobby circles. The appeal of Napster was that multitudes of people were "sharing" mountains of MP3s - most certainly including current, commercially-available music.
As for the cost of game piracy, let's do some math. Suppose I run a peer to peer service - like a Direct Connect hub - and I "share" Warcraft 3 with my fellow gamers. Word gets out and 1 person a day downloads it over a three month period until I need the drive space and remove the files. (These are very conservative figures for a hot new game, by the way.)
Blizzard is asking $60 for Warcraft 3. $60 x 31 downloads/month x 3 months = $5580. Five and a half grand is not a trivial amount.
Games are too expensive.
If Blizzard wants to charge $100 for Diablo 3, it's up to them. If I don't like it, I don't have to buy it. If I say, "Well, they need me, Champion of Fair Pricing, to teach them a lesson!" and go around pirating it, I am a nothing but a thief. I've been a computer gamer since the Apple ][+, and I can tell you that game prices have always hovered around the $30-50 range, and often more. $50 for a game that can give you dozens of hours of entertainment is not highway robbery. Am I supposed to feel sympathy for those poor warez kids, who just happen to have powerful computers, high speed CDR drives, broadband Internet access, various video game consoles and the leisure time to consume (and pirate) endless amounts of anime, music, video games, Simpsons episodes and whatnot? We're not talking about people stealing food and medicine. Enough said.
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