Hi there, and thanks for consciously choosing not to read GameSpyte instead of just glossing past it. Your brief consideration is all we need. Today, we’ll be celebrating pirates, but not the cool marketable kind with eyeliner and slurred dialogue — the boring, digital kind. Step aboard!
A recent report by Gamasutra suggests that piracy, particularly of DS games, is running rampant in Korea. Kekeke and a bottle of rum! Nintendo complains that “increasing software copies and illegal downloads” will “hamper the development of the game industry.” This explains why their most recent Wii firmware update has thwarted pirates everywhere, preventing them from such nefarious deeds as experimenting with software development at home. That’ll show ‘em! You know, Nintendo, jealousy is so unbecoming of you; just because those pesky geeks and otaku can use a single card to hold more memory for their handheld system than you’ve included in your console, that’s no reason to get upset.
The utterly profound lesson here, obviously, is that pirates are bad, except when they’re good. Clears everything up, doesn’t it? Sony, long since having beaten Nintendo to the kill-functionality-through-firmware punch, has grudgingly admitted that although they hate what pirates do with their systems, they’re okay with those systems being sold to pirates. You can’t use a PSP for evil unless you pony up the dough for that PSP, after all. I wonder how Sony feels about gamers who steal PSPs but then buy tons of legit software. Honestly, the destruction of legal-but-unsupported functions in an effort to combat piracy is an act that we somehow uniquely tolerate from the games industry. Would we be as forgiving in other circumstances? Cars can be used for illegal street racing or vehicluar homicide, but as far as I know, my car hasn’t been programmed to lock up if it gets close to a pedestrian.
The solution here, obviously, is to take a page from the PC industry. Clearly they’ve got it figured out when it comes to fighting pirates! Mass Effect’s DRM, back in the spotlight again, is a good place to look – the game has measures which brutally abuse the legitimate, paying customer to such a degree, that you know it’s got to have stopped all piracy in its tracks in order to be worth it! Sony and Nintendo would definitely like the intended solution for customers who can’t install their game any more: Buy it again! If effectively doubling or tripling the cost of a game won’t drive profits up and stimulate the industry, well, I’m out of ideas.
I know, I know — handling pirates is a tricky business. The lowest common denominator is unfortunately the standard by which we have to set our rules, and that means publishers are left with no choice but to assume that every gamer out there is a potential pirate. So, let’s be fair — that standard really ought to go both ways, don’t you think? Gamers, beware — every publisher whose works you buy, and every game you see, is potentially trying to rob you by passing off stolen and recycled game assets as original content. If one company can do it, then we have to assume they’re all trying to do it. How can you be sure? Perhaps in the future, someone will devise a method of trying out a game without risking financial hardship, allowing gamers to verify if a game is worth purchase, and then pay for it. What an age that would be!
June 20th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
I love the choices of imagery here. Article itself makes some pretty good points, although I have to say that for the last story, it wasn’t so much a “company” that made Limbo of the Lost as it was “three lazy guys in a bar”.
June 26th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Well, if they were in a bar, I think that proves that they were PIRATES. It all fits!