Piracy. Statistically, half of you are already rating this article at a fat furious zero, because I’m obviously going to slag off pirates and because I’m obviously just a sanctimonious ***hole who obviously doesn’t get that piracy isn’t stealing because pirates wouldn’t buy games anyway and I should go die in a hole because obviously this article isn’t worth the bandwidth you could’ve used on your torrents instead. So while the rest of you are doing that (zeroes for heroes!), we’ll be talking about piracy like mature, reasonable people.
One of the most enduring memories of my 80s’ childhood is a pair of black Dysan 5 ¼” floppy high density (1.2MB!) disks with “Space Quest 3” scrawled on them in ballpoint pen. I played that game just about a zillion times. I learned the word “glean” from it. I can still hum the Astro Chicken theme tune. I didn’t pay for the game – I got it from my friend Erik, who everyone else called Arthur because his real name was Artur but people couldn’t pronounce it properly. I also got Quest for Glory 2 and the old Prince of Persia from him. Then later on I made other new friends with other new games. At some point, I had a copied copy of Curse of Monkey Island. There was also the original Unreal Tournament, Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, and Windows XP. And Half-Life 2, obviously. I mean, I bought plenty of games too – I still own a boxed 5 ¼” floppy disk version of Sierra’s Conquests of the Longbow, all the way from 1991 – but my hard drives were aiding and abetting many fugitives of copyright law.
I could try and justify all that freeloading, of course – I was, like, 10 years old, I didn’t get much pocket money, I didn’t make much money, I didn’t have access to the internet for authentication, I’m paraplegic, I fought in ‘Nam, man. I might also claim I was struck suddenly one day by some wondrous, religious epiphany that made me decide to abandon my wicked ways. The first of these would be boring and predictable, and the second a lie. I stopped pirating stuff because I tried cracking a piece of pirated software and ended up reformatting my hard disks the next day because the crack came bundled with something called W32.HLLW.Donk.B that basically ate my laptop while presumably trying to find my credit card details. Because really, the people who write and distribute cracked and pirated software are scumbags, and because the people who keep these guys doing what they do by downloading and using their services are scumbags too. Myself totally included.
Most regular people wouldn’t want to deal with people like this in their day to day lives – I mean, if you want to buy a new car, you probably don’t go over to that guy who that other guy knows who that one guy says will give you a good deal if you tell him this guy sent you, just don’t ask any questions – so why does anyone dispense with all that good sense when it comes to anything else? What was I thinking? I probably wasn’t thinking at all.
This is an entire industry dedicated to circumventing and undermining legitimate business practices – that is, the production, supply, and trade of marketable commodities. Well, capitalism. Piracy looks at all this and declares, “BUT WE’RE NUT GUNNA,” and then proceeds to simply cram everything it can get into its pockets. And its pockets, lunging from metaphor to reality, are the internet. There’s pretty much nothing you can’t download from the internet. There’s pretty much nothing you can’t download from the internet two weeks before it’s supposed to be released. And I think it’s all too easy to wave the big, red FREE DATA FOR EVERYONE, COMRADES flag when you’re not the guy whose stuff is being downloaded off the internet at warp factor 9. And that guy is out there. You might think you’re sticking it to the faceless fascist corporate dog pig, but you’re not really. The faceless fascist corporate dog pig isn’t the guy who writes code in a cubicle for a monthly salary that’s never enough and ten days of paid vacation annually. The guy that’s probably a lot like you or me, really. I might never have stopped to think about it all before, but I do now.
Piracy apologists usually fall into one of two main categories – there’s the “try before you buy lol” people, and the “a pirated game is not a lost sale lol” people. Both of these are easy enough to dismiss – games demos and reviews, and demonstrable reality. Let’s look at indie dev 2D Boy’s World of Goo. Its PC release holds a 90 aggregate on Metacritic.com, there’s a demo of the complete first level of the game available on its official website as well as Steam, and the game’s going cheap – just $19.99. It also has a piracy rate of 82%. That means just about 8 out of every 10 copies of World of Goo is a pirated copy. Does each and every single one of those 8 out of 10 copies really count for a person who was never going to buy the game anyway? Really? Reeeeaaaally? In a world of unlikely statistics, that one sort of seems the most unlikely of all.
Then there’s the people who don’t actually distribute or download pirated software, but without whom a lot of it wouldn’t be possible in the first place – the people who supply mod chips for consoles. I recently got myself into an argument about this with a person who runs a console servicing business. Sure, he repairs faulty consoles – a sadly all-too necessary service given the grotty manufacturing standards of current generation hardware – but he also installs mod chips. Mod chips are installed for the sole purpose of facilitating the use of pirated software, although everyone involved is quick to use facile euphemisms like “backups” instead of “pirated software”. Backups and nice coffee coasters notwithstanding, the only reason mod chips exist is to circumvent and undermine those legitimate business practices I mentioned before. All the 100% satisfaction guaranteed console repairs in the world won’t absolve anyone of making profits in the piracy industry, even if it’s just a bit on the side. That’s kinda like running a medical clinic with a back room dealing in black market kidneys, and still expecting to maintain a reputable business standard. You might have the most awesome dispensary on the planet, but the stuff moving in and out of that nondescript storage closet over there is going to attract flies. There’s a tiny vindictive part of me that wants to name and shame him here, while a huge practical part of me realises that doing so would probably only bring him more illicit business.
What exactly is my point, anyway? I’m such a hypocrite, after all, and putting on my “WELL I OWN ALL MY STUFF TOTALLY LEGITIMATELY NOW LOL” t-shirt seems such a smug and feeble excuse for denouncing everyone else now. And no matter what I or anyone else might say anyway, piracy is always going to be around. So I suppose I’m prompting discussion instead.
These are my opinions, what are yours?
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