Dear executives, business people, game developers, and everybody else who expresses an opinion about PC games in the media:
Please stop referring to piracy as theft. As an aspiring game developer whose future carreer sometimes seems in peril due to rampant game piracy, and as a passionate PC gamer whose favourite game platform is constantly threatened by this very problem, I feel your pain. You’re trying to make a living in gaming and you want to sell your games to the PC market, yet you keep losing money to people who illegally download your software.
But copyright infringement is not theft. Not in any practical sense and certainly not according to any nation’s laws. If I steal your car, I will gain a car for free and (crucially!) you will lose your car. If I download your games, you will not lose any games, you will simply not sell me one either – as I’m sure most piracy groups would love to point out, this doesn’t necessarily mean you would sell me a game if I didn’t pirate it, one pirated game != one lost sale. Piracy is not theft in the same way that riding the train without buying a ticket is not theft. Sure, it’s still illegal, but it is not theft.
If I wanted to steal your games, I would have to break into your warehouse and physically remove one or more boxed units of your game from a crate and then take it home with me. That is theft because you will litterally lose a copy of the game. The fact that the physical box, disk, and printed manual is worth a lot less than the data on the disk does not factor into this. Capiche?
“Piracy… Is…. Stealing!”
I love that commercial!
I think it’s depressing that the major media labels don’t consider who the average Pirate is. Actually it’s a person who also on the same time is spending much more money on electronic entertaiment than the good “I never download” person.
Some good links on that:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4718249.stm
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2347/125/
Also I think it’s really annoying when we here in Europe have to wait so long time before a new TV show from USA will air over here, also the same thing goes with games.
So … what provoked you?
Casper: Sorry your post took so long to appear, it got caught in my spam filter, presumably because of the links. I strongly agree about TV shows, the wait for Battlestar Galactica season 4 is killing me, and it’s not even out in the US yet!
EER: Actually this otherwise extremely interesting and full-of-great-points interview with one of the engineers who built DirectX back in The Day™.
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/03/directx-creator.html
I was thinking about writing a post about it but there are so many great points it kinda seems silly to go over each of them and comment with: “I completely agree with this!” or “This is kinda true!” Instead I latched onto his annoying use of the word “stolen” in reference to game piracy and decided to write about that because it pisses me off when people do that.
It’s kinda like calling the Danish People’s Party nazis – it does nothing to make the DPP realize how fundamentally wrong they are, but it does in time kinda make the actual nazis seem less like the muderous psychopaths that they actually were/are.
Casper makes an interesting point — I pirate a lot of games but I also buy a lot of games, including legit copies of games I pirated and enjoyed. I’m not claiming an ethical victory here or anything but I definitely have spent, and will continue to spend, a lot on pc gaming.
Personally I’m all for using piracy as a means to try out a game before you buy it, but I’m afraid the existence of demos kinda invalidates the argument for use in any reasonable debate.
Except that there is no demo for Sim City, or The Sims, or Portal, or Grand Theft Auto, or Oblivion, or Morrowind, or Audiosurf. I think I pretty much summed up every game I have played recently.
In fact, the only game I have played recently that I know HAS a demo is Age of Empires 2. What happened to the demos?
Anyway that interview is pretty interesting and he makes some valid points. We’ll see what the future brings.
I’m sorry, I meant to specify that it doesn’t work for games that have no demos
You’re right, a lot of modern games don’t have demos, which I think is a shame. I think the last demo I played was for Space Rangers 2, over a year ago.