While we hear a lot about music and movie piracy, videogame piracy is a huge -and, thanks to the droves of players heading online, growing problem.
Now comes word of a growing crackdown in Asia. According to the Financial Times, Nintendo is urging prosecutors in South Korea to investigate videogame bootleg websites being run in the country. This is on the heels of the formation of a group called the Online Games Alliance Against Piracy, which aims to fight pirates in China.
So who are these pirates and why do they do what they do? A few years ago, I interviewed a veteran videogame pirate on the condition of anonymity. Here's what he had to say about his motivation:
"Initially I gravitated towards the warez scene through sheer curiosity and the prospect of downloading free software. At the time (around 1997), the warez scene was cloaked in so much mysticism that your average computer user didn’t have the vaguest inkling that it even existed. Even I had grave doubts after trawling through endless pages of misleading links only to be rewarded with a burgeoning phone bill. When I eventually struck gold I felt compelled to spread the word and slash the learning curve for anyone wanting to follow in my footsteps. In the early days there was very little in the way of instructional material out there aimed squarely at the newbie, hence people lapped it up and were immensely grateful that I was trying to change this. I was receiving hundreds of emails from gamers, some of them penniless, wishing to express their appreciation – without trying to sound pompous about it, I had opened up a whole new world for them.
"Today, with the advent of idiot-proof peer to peer clients, stealing software is as commonplace as eating cornflakes for breakfast, and as a result, my web site is no longer seen as some kind of Mecca for fledgling pirates. They still visit, but for different reasons; they want to find out how they can advance their existing knowledge or discover new, more efficient ways of tracking down the latest goodies. Others are intrigued by the way in which new releases permeate the internet, from their inception within the upper echelons of the warez chain to the point at which they trickle down to Kazaa and other file sharing networks.
"My fascination of the phenomenon hasn’t waned, nonetheless, I download very little warez myself these days. I’m the archetypal, disillusioned young fogy who believes that the games industry has spiralled into a homogenized mush of movie spin-offs and identikit first person shooters. Lots of people share my opinion, but continue to download the latest games citing their lack of innovation as a justification for stealing them. My approach is simply to not download them at all. That said, I haven’t quite mastered the art of refraining from casting doom and gloom aspersions upon the current state of the games industry. I’m still working on that, and am apt to retrace well-trodden rants without warning...
"In the early days I was very gung-ho about piracy and gave little thought to the repercussions of its usage. Over the years I’ve had time to reflect, the upshot being that I’ve had to update many of my staunchly held views. I can categorically state now that I will never have the most remote semblance of sympathy for the Microsoft’s of the software industry, even so, gone are the tired justifications; piracy is a reaction to exploitative prices, is an essential consumer-empowering weapon, and so on.
"I now recognise that there are really only two paths to choose between. We can either download and use warez, admit it is wrong and deal with it, or abstain from downloading it at all. Let’s be honest, no-one needs movies, music, computer games or applications; we choose to download or buy them because we want them – they add to the rich tapestry of life though certainly aren’t essential to survival.
"The laws of free economy dictate that, assuming company x doesn’t have a monopoly and isn’t selling an essential commodity, they can charge whatever they like for the fruits of their labour. It is their prerogative to decide the worth of a particular product, just as it is the prerogative of the consumer to decide not to agree with them. If an item is seemingly priced beyond its value we should cooperatively shun the company responsible and shop elsewhere. The same applies to a piece of software we may deem too buggy, or otherwise flawed, to be worthy of our hard earned cash. It may well be perfectly true that, if the commercial data we choose to download freely wasn’t available, we wouldn’t instead purchase it legitimately. In such cases, the respective industry isn’t losing sales, but the onus remains on us to take responsibility for our actions and not shift the blame elsewhere."
