bd - What you are seemingly incapable of realizing is that the vast majority of people who pirate use the money they didn't spend to buy food. They wouldn't have bought that game or another game, they'd just sit there contemplating suicide because they have to work themselves to death just to stay alive, never own anything, and don't have any form of entertainment. Again, most pirates just don't have money for games, period.

Monsta - Again, most pirates just don't have money for games, period. PC is even worse for this, because at least with consoles you have to get them for gaming. PCs are general purpose devices and therefore a little more common in the poor countries where most piracy occurs. Crysis's situation was exacerbated by the fact that everyone knew long before it launched that it wasn't going to be a good game. When devs make good games with genuine appeal it simply doesn't matter how much piracy there is, that game will sell well. There are bound to be far, far more pirated copies of San Andreas than Crysis, yet it is the best selling game on the best selling system at 17-18 million.

If their product was good, they wouldn't have had any complaints about piracy, and that's because piracy isn't the issue, they are. Even if piracy didn't exist they would have lost just as big on Crysis, there would just be less people around that could say they played it.

And after that, no one took money out of EA's pockets or products off their shelves, so it's completely incomparable to stealing from a store. Not just de facto, but legally as well.

@ChichiriMuyo: I do understand, but i'm not talking about some poor third world countries, but the western countries that has people who can buy the games they want. Often the situation is that people just pirate for the reason of owning something.
I do agree that piracy isn't hurting industries as much as the industries would like you to think, but it still is hurting. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly.

Also, different people have different reasons to pirate stuff and all the reasons aren't equally as unjustified as other reasons.

NintendoMan said: piracy is fine, deal with it

 

 QFT

bdbdbd said: About the piracy, the excuse that "i wouldn't have bought it anyway" is pretty lame IMO, since why did you pirate it in the first place and you propably would have bought something else instead. I had thousands of NES, SNES and Megadrive ROMs on my PC around five years ago. I played three of those games a couple of times. I haven't had the ROMs in years anymore for, as pretty obvious, it just didn't make any sense to have them. The only thing i have pirated in the last few years is music. I'm not paying 10-20€ for a record that has one good song and i'm not purchasing them digitally since i need them on CD to be able to play them in my car and it's just as illegal to burn legitemately purchased music to CD as it is to burn pirated music.

So its ok to pirate music because you dont feel you should have to pay full price for a crappy album, but its not ok to pirate a game if say someone doesnt feel like paying for a crappy game? Quick someone find me a pic of the pot calling the kettle black......you cant sit here and try to make an arguement for one form of pirating being wrong, when you openly admit to another being perfectly ok in your mind.

 

bdbdbd said: @Nirvana: I'd recall someone saying here in VGC that you can pirate software for PS3, but then you can't go online with it.

 

 It's weird, they found a way to play ps2 backups off the PS3 harddrive , but I don't think they have found a way to boot a PS3 game itself yet, last time I checked.

http://www.ps3hax.net/showthread.php?t=8750

@Docholliday: I didn't say i was doing the right thing. Just pointed out my excuse.
Now, in reality i wouldn't have any problems if it would be legal to copy legit songs to a CD.
And, i do buy CD:s every now and then.

The problem with the PSP isn't its hackability, it's the fact that it doesn't have many pick-up-and-play games and also that it was marketed too much as an all-in-one media device and not enough as a handheld gaming device.

If hackability, P2P, had any significant effect on the industry, then all oft he record labels would have gone out of business years ago considering that it's been possible for quite some time to download an artist's entire discography within a few hours tops(and even less if there are concurrent downloads).

As someone who has been modding and hacking consoles for over ten years, I can say that it's far easier to do this kind of thing on a DS, and yet that handheld hasn't seen such low software sales.

Sony has to take a lot of the blame. They initially marketed the device as something that was good for playing movies and music. However, Sony in their infinite wisdom only gave the option of buying overpriced UMD movies. Who in their right mind would spend more money for a lower quality movie that they couldn't even use on any other device? It's that arrogance that motivated hackers to build tools so they could use their own legal dvds on their PSP, which in turn led to the development of game copying tools and hacking culture.

The lesson here? Don't make a device and try to rip people off with something less convenient and higher priced. There is simply no way to justify charging more for a UMD movie than a higher quality DVD movie. That's the kind of greed that causes resentment.

Not only that, the UMD uses more power than flash memory. So using the device as intended actually decreases performance.

docholliday said: Once again, the debate wasnt about right or wrong. It had to do with the financial aspects of pirating and the affects it has on the market as a whole. I dont think anyone has actually came out and said its "ok" to pirate or that its a good thing. I know I said myself that I dont condone it. But im not here to pass judgement on something so miniscul when it comes down to the bigger picture and whats really important in life.

 

Historically, intellectual property rights have always been considered something of a necessary evil (in order to encourage content creation) among intellectuals and law givers. "Piracy" has for the most part been considered a good thing, because it makes knowledge and art available to more people, which in turn increases happiness and productivity in a society. In other words piracy have been considered a good thing for the same reasons public libraries are considered a good thing.

This is why public non-profit distribution of pirated software was legal in the US until the introduction of the DMCA in 1998. And this is in part why the DMCA have remained controversial.

Anyway, all copyrights have an expiration date. If you make a game you don't own it. You just have exclusive distribution rights for a limited time (50 years in EU, 75 years in NA). After that the game belongs to everyone.

It is much more difficult to mod a PSP than it is to mod a 360!