Piracy is a big deal these days. Somalians have taken piracy to the next level by taking down boats and holding innocents for mass amounts of money. Pirates have recently been raiding our screens in the form of Johnny Deep’s swashbuckling ways. More soooo though, piracy of media is now on the rise so much that it has become a crime that brings with it a fine that is higher than GBH and Abduction. Only this week, did global hacker superstar George Hotz find a way to hack the PS3 so that it was possible play hacked games and also homebrew games. With all this in mind I want to take a look at piracy and how it is, or isn’t damaging the games market.
Piracy has been curved through the introduction Steam as it has made the downloading of games through legal methods much easier and its success is shown through how many games were bought from it last year. The accessibility to these games and the pricing of these games has not brought piracy to a stop, it never will, but it has helped. Steam has been plagued with those who download and then go on to allow those to torrent the game. Various methods have been tried to curve this, including the controversial use of DRM. Steam is a step in the right direction for making it easier to stop piracy of PC games, but the big problem is how to stop the piracy of console games.
It is reported that piracy has a direct impact on companies and in essence their ability to make games. If the company cant pay its staff, then it can’t make games. Simple as. Torrent Freak reports the Modern Warfare 2 was the most pirated game of 2009, but it was not just the PC version that came into this. Modern Warfare on the XBOX 360 joined the PC version as the most downloaded 360 game, however it is the Wii that suffers a severe hit when it comes to downloads.
Games companies suffer severe consequences of piracy and the loss of revenue through it could lead to the closure of various studios. Pandemic was shut down last year with 200 employees losing their jobs, a decision made by EA but possibly contributed to by piracy.
In this current climate, we suffer from lack of money because of bank piracy is rising, but then developers are trying to fight this in many ways. One of these is to pay as you wish for a game, which was done by Championship Manager last year, which allowed fans who pre ordered the game, a chance to pay what they saw fit. This was a success for Eidos but overall will this be a good idea to keep pursuing. Can you imagine MW2 breaking the $1 billion mark for sales if users were asked to pay whatever they like.
The games industry is in a healthy state however, even with the growing concern of piracy. This cannot be said of the movie industry, which can lose around $6.1 billion in revenue because of it. Yes, piracy is a crime but one believes that is a crime that does not deserve a higher fine than child abduction. Those in power really need to pull their fingers out and concentrate on what is actually damaging society. Downloading a video game is definitely not worse than murder of the 1st degree.
Now please enjoy some piracy adverts that are pure quality, my favourite has to be the one from I.T. Crowd. Never go to the toilet in a policeman’s hat.
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