Stop Whining, Listen To The Facts

by Robust Stu

Original Editorial: Piracy and Morality

With all the talk about video game piracy going on on RPGamer.com lately, I figured I'd chime in with my two cents on the whole deal. Is piracy really a bad thing? Ostensibly, the answer would be "of course it is, the game companies lose a lot of money on piracy, you tool. Why did you even bother asking?" However, I think there's a lot more to the situation than is immediately apparent.

Let me say this: as far as pirating games currently on the market, I'll agree, piracy is a bad thing. For example, if I bought the hot new game that just came out last week and made copies for all my friends, then I'll agree, I'm probably costing the game companies a lot of money, as not only am I making copies, but the people who get those copies are going to make copies for their friends and so on. But there's several things to remember that will make you see that the game companies might not be losing as much money on the whole deal as they might like you to believe.

For one, let me say this: I've been using emulators and ROMs since about 1998. During that time, I've downloaded and enjoyed many games that I either owned during their day or at least had my eye on for systems such as the NES, SNES, Genesis, Gameboy and Atari 2600. Now, if you're paying attention, you'll notice that none of those systems or games for those systems had been in production for years by the point emulation became a possibility. Legally yes, emulation is probably illegal, regardless of whether you actually own the system/cartridge you're downloading off the internet. But I have news for everybody...nobody's going to make any significant amount of money off the two copies of Super Mario World sitting in the used games bin at your local Gamestop. In other words, if NES, SNES or Atari games were still in production, but were being copied and distributed on the internet, THEN the companies would be losing money. But as it stands, no games have been produced or distributed for any of those systems in several years, so if the only way people can get their hands on the game is by downloading it off the internet, then nobody's losing money on them, are they?

Another thing to consider is that emulation of systems isn't generally possible until after the lifespan of said system is over. In other words, emulation didn't really take off until 1997-98 or so, long after the lifespan of the NES, SNES, Genesis, or any other systems of those and previous generations. Emulation of the Playstation was possible, but wasn't really perfected until late 2001 or so, after the Playstation 2 had come out and production of Playstation games had started dropping off. Playstation 2 emulation is still years away from perfection, and even being possible given how powerful your computer has to be to emulate such a system.

Here's another thing to think about...even if people wanted to pirate games for current systems, all of which use DVD technology, DVD burning isn't yet affordable enough for the average Joe to go out and start burning copies of Xenosaga for all their friends. Until it becomes more affordable,, piracy is going to be minimal for the latest generation of systems.

Another point that should be brought up is that yes, mod-chipping your system to play pirated gamed that would otherwise be locked out is possible, but you'd really be surprised how few people know about such things. And of the people who DO know about it, even fewer would know how to go about chipping their systems.

So let's review the facts: if people are mostly downloading and playing games for dead systems, are only capable of emulating systems past their day, don't have the means to copy games, and even if they could they most likely wouldn't know how to get those games to run on their systems, it doesn't sound like anybody's losing a whole lot of money on the deal, does it? So next time you hear somebody pissing and moaning about how the game companies are losing so many millions of dollars on all this horrible video game piracy, think about what I said here today.