Here in America I know a lot of people who love playing games but live on limited budgets and can't afford to spend $200 a month on games, so instead they wait for sales, deals, trade games on the internet, share with friends etc.. For such people in can get rather frustrating when you put a lot of effort, time and patience into a hobby you love and someone else obtains all the games you want well before you can afford them and runs around posting about how awesome said game is and how everyone should be playing when the only reason they have a copy is because they stole it.


Also a large number of games don't produce record profits and piracy helps keep some of these games from ever seeing a sequel.

Stealing is not ok. I have zero respect for anybody that steals. People like to pretend it is ok to steal code because it is not physical, but that is crap. Like what others above have said, this code does not just fall from the sky. Many games this gen are made by over a hundred people. Those are the people that you are skrewing when you steal a game.

The world is much to forgiving now. We need to get back to choping peoples hands of for stealing. This BS of charging money, or 3 years in jail is a joke.

One last reason a lot of people get pissed off over piracy is because, you are causing a problem that can, and will result in the games that they enjoy playing to be less innovative, and more conservitive. The worst case scenario is that it will completely kill a system or a company. Look at how piracy has effected the PSP and the Dreamcast. Stay off this site if you are going to make a thread supporting theft.

Don't group me with these pirates as I actually buy or rent my games.  Just saying.  I think you have a good point.  But you can't kill someone for stealing.  Killing someone would be breaking one of the ten commendments(stealing is too)

In the early '90s, the Internet in its current form didn't even exist. Are you seriously comparing a handful of nerds on whatever proto-'net existed at the time to the extremely easy availability of programs like BitTorrent today?

Piracy is stealing do you think its ok to go into your local wal mart find a copy of mercanareis 2 put it under your coat and walk out?

If someone really tried to do that wouldn't the alarms go off when they try to exit the store.  Also, that glass case that Walmart have the games in is there for a reason.

He wasn't asking "would it be easy?" he's asking "would it be ethical?"

Piracy in many cases isn't direct theft . A can't deprive B by downloading a game he never would have bought, A can deprive B if he stole his game from a shop or downloaded the game instead of purchasing it.

Developers tend to blame the crapiness of their games for declining sales , do something new and original and it's likely your game will sell .

In the case of a game like Grand Theft Auto, the 100,000 to 1,000,000 sales that are (theoritically) lost because of piracy are really not that big of a deal because the game will sell well enough to be profitable on its own ... On the other hand, when you're dealing with a smaller niche title like Psychonauts the loss of 100,000 to 1,000,000 sales may make the difference between Majesco being a profitable company or not.

Music is a different beast all together in my opinion ...

The reason why the industry is struggling in a time when recording and marketing costs are at an all time low is because they're stuck in an obsolete business model where they need to sell a massive quantity of albums at a massive mark-up in order to cover the costs they choose to take. Rather than trying to develop artists organically through touring and localized marketing (as the industry used to do) the industry throws around money in an attempt to make an artist instantly super popular; on average they will promote 6 to 8 artists with (well) over $10,000,000 budgets each to get 1 successful artist. Since the artists are not particularly talented, and have a fickle fanbase (due to how they became popular) they tend to only have one or two albums which sells well enough to recover all of the costs associated with marketing the band.

Piracy or not, the music industries business model is dying because how people access music is becomming far less centeralized due to the internet. I suspect that in the future the 18 year old super famous rock-stars will disapear and be replaced by dozens of smaller (and older) bands who make a decent living through touring, merchandise, and music sales.

Well it has turned devs away from the PSP to a small degree, and it does damage small developers. With niche titles, most of them are aimed at the extreme hardcore, and those are the type more likely to pirate, as they know how easy it is, and so developers will go with the more mainstream (casual) ideas, if piracy does become a major problem on the home consoles