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Spore Piracy
The topic of game piracy has come up again because of the early release of Spore on bittorrent. In light of this, I made a poll to see if my guess is correct.
Comments
I'll probably buy if for my girlfriend though, as she's quite fond of anything related at all to the Sims.
People bitch about PC gaming dying. Well it's because people pirate games like Spore that causes them to go to closed platforms like the Xbox and Playstation. It's insanely hard to pirate games for those platforms and they make a lot more money because of it. You people need to learn, the only way to get DRM gone is to stop pirating their shit, no matter what they do.
The point I'm trying to make with my poll (yes, I know the poll doesn't really mean anything because it isn't a proper scientific study) is that I don't believe there are actually a significant number of people who pirate things and would have bought those things if piracy was not an option. I used to pirate everything like crazy, but my rate of piracy decreased as my money increased. I was only pirating because I couldn't afford to have the media otherwise. If piracy was not an option I would have simply gone without.
I look at the new DS pirate thingy I have. What am I using it for? I'm using it to play DS and GBA games that are impossible for me to buy reasonably. That includes foreign games and games that are out of print and hard to find. I'm also using it to play games that I would not have bought or played if piracy were not an option.
Media has different values to different people. To some people Spore is worth $100. To some people it's worth $50. To others it is worth $5. In the olden days, the days of my parents, the people for whom it was worth $5 would simply go without. If a new record came out, people willing to pay for it, paid for it. Others opted to listen to it at a friends house, or not listen at all. People "owned' a lot less media. Today there is one difference. People willing to pay for things pay for them, but people who aren't willing to pay get them for free. If piracy were somehow nonexistent, the only difference would be that people who are not willing to pay wouldn't play.
Think about the anime fansubs. What if anime fansubs disappeared? I wouldn't watch. Simple as that. My spending on anime DVDs and related merchandise would go unchanged. In fact, I would probably spend less because I wouldn't be informed and excited about new shows. I think about NES games when I was a kid. My parents would only buy me so many. I had to trade with friends, or play at friend's houses, to get more gaming going on. If piracy had been possible at that time, I would have played a lot more games, but I would have spent the same amount of money in the end.
Another thing about piracy is time. Any pirating, even simple bittorrent, is more inconvenient than buying. It's a lot easier to buy something on Amazon than to bittorrent it. Kids with very little money, lots of free time, and a huge demand for media to occupy them, are going to pirate. The inconvenience for them is cheaper than the money they save. For people like myself the time is worth more than the money, so piracy becomes very unattractive.
The pirates I see are punk kids with no money in the first place. The pirates I see are people who only have a passing interest, and simply wouldn't have bothered if piracy weren't an option. The pirates I see are bootleggers trying to make a profit, who don't actually care about actually consuming the media. The pirates I see are people who are technically breaking the law, but are doing good by bringing media across international borders for the world to enjoy. Where is the truly evil pirate? Where is the person who pirates things, and never buys them, but would buy them if piracy weren't an option? Where are these people? I am sure that they exist, but I am confident that their numbers are so low as to be insignificant in the grand scheme.
Would you shoplift a loaf of bread from a store? No one is really going to miss it, it's only a couple dollars and the bread manufacturers make millions probably. No harm no foul, right?
All copyright issues really come down to "no harm, no foul." Either one believes in this doctrine, one doesn't, or one has a complicated rationale for a grey area between the two.
Of course, some people, "harm, still no foul" is the phrase, but that's an essentially different argument altogether.
****Re-Checked, it's now down to 30% - 50% on consumer electronics and entertainment
The analogy is flawed. In copyright, can a person who would not have consumed the media otherwise be considered to have harmed the creator?
As for as morals go, pirating it < pirating, waiting for price to drop and purchasing then < buying it now.
EDIT: I picked the "Pirating because I'm poor, otherwise I wouldn't play the game at all" option, but my torrent is going 1.5kb/s when I'm lucky, so I won't get to play the game until there are more seeds.
Spore, blah, it might be fun, but it doesn't excite me, so I don't see a reason to spend a lot of money on it.
EDIT:Addition added.