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| RenCutypoison said: I read a few good articles on gamasutra about chinese clones, that just seem horrible. But piracy has change a lot since ps1 era you know. With the development of the internet people are more aware of the reality of the gaming industry, closer to their favourite developpers. Now there are steam sales and humble bundle for low bank accounts, and free to play games have learned us that, even if you can play a game for free, there is no shame in donating for the devs. The value of collecting has gone up with digital too, and the shame surrounding video game is disappearing, it's not a kids hobby now; so even pirates want to have their favourite games on their shelves. DRMs must be the worst on devs side tough. It's more work, and noone can actually be sure you gain anything with them =/ In the end every games end up cracked (Even Simcity 5 lately) |
The worst is the game leaking before release. Everything will be cracked in the end, hence all the hyping up and banking heavily on day 1 sales. It's a nuisance while developing, every version has to be protected.
My pirating days were before the cd-rom. 5.25" and later 3.5" floppies, plus downloading by 9600 baud modem from BBS. Getting a good BBS number was gold in those days. Special events to get together to copy sofware were regular occurances. It's much better nowadays.
Whether it was a kid's hobbie, mostly I guess. All you needed was a dual tape deck after all. My dad brought home the kings/police/space quest series for pc, copied at work I assume. And he was a software developer himself... Maybe he kept the boxes and manuals hidden somewhere, I never saw them. I do remember printing out manuals for sim city and fs4, so I guess no boxes.
We did have some legit games, cartridges for the MSX. Just a few though, rest all copied on casette tapes. At least there was a real benefit to legit games those days, stick in cartridge play instantly, or load from tape for 10 minutes with 20% failure rate. Nowdays it's almost the other way around :/
I guess in the end it turned out ok for the video game industry. Having grown up with a wide selection of different games, I still have the same hunger for more 25 years later. I think I have made up for it by now with a bit over 500 purchased games before vgchartz' game database shut down.
However if you're still pirating in your twenties, grow up, grow a conscience.
