WARNING: Piracy is Not Revenge

It seems like the perfect plot for revenge; Someone wrongs you, you steal their stuff. Like some sort of Robin Hood plot. That seems to be the understanding of many gamer pirates on N4G.

But here's the problem; it really doesn't hurt them as much as it does gamers.

Tell me, what happens every time an extreme new form of DRM releases? What do the publishers say? What do they blame? Piracy.

And here's where it becomes a double-edged sword. When you pirate the game, you become a statistic. Yes, people like statistics. You put a big green bar next to a tiny red bar and you make a sharp statement. You exclaim a large number and you can't be wrong. Publishers know this.

That's why they're more than happy to report their "losses" in the form of how many pirated copies of their game were stolen. It's an easy out to explain poor sales to investors. They "simply" impose stronger DRM the next time. Or have an online pass. Or cut stuff out and sell it in the form of DLC.

MANY have the attitude that pirating the game will make for a good way to get revenge, and thus many pirated copies can probably be attributed to those people.

Imagine if those people didn't pirate the game. Pirated copies could potentially be way down. The lower the number, the less convincing those snotty publishers would be at the next investor's meeting. Imagine some fat guy sweating his suit into a swimsuit as he tries to explain that a few hundred (or even thousand) pirated copies are the reason that blandfest 2012 didn't sell as expected.

Let's knock them down a peg. Don't pirate games when Publishers do something dirty. Just don't play it at all. Miss one game and make a stand.

(Yes, I drew the Pirate)

[pandaboy]

Piracy is just a red-herring for these publishers. DRM took off during an age when piracy was less of an issue, it's main reason of its implementation, in my opinion, was to kill the used game market.

Valve even release data to publishers showing them what happens when you take the strict DRM route.

"Recently I was in a meeting and there’s a company that had a third party DRM solution and we showed them look, this is what happens, at this point in your life cycle your DRM got hacked, right? Now let’s look at the data, did your sales change at all? No, your sales didn’t change one bit."

"...and then we tell them you actually probably lost a whole bunch of sales as near as we can tell, here’s how much money you lost by bundling that with your product."

So there is clearly an ulterior motive to this DRM and it's not to stop piracy since we know, and they know, that it's going to get hacked anyway. I think pirating the likes of mass effect 3 actually sends the message, 'look what happens when you screw over your customers and force origins upon them'.

[PirateThom]

As far as piracy on PC goes, it's not about the DRM or the company. How many times are games illegally downloaded even though they did everything they could to make it "PC gamer friendly"?

I can't wait to see how Rayman Origins stacks up against other Ubisoft titles. No DRM vs Heavy DRM and probably still just as many illegal downloads with the excuse changed to "I wasn't going to pay for a flash game" or something equally ridiculous.

[TopDudeMan]

I agree, even if you are pirating the game, you are showing weakness by stealing it, proving you still want their game. So if they know they're making something people want badly enough to steal, they'll just punish every gamer out there who IS buying it. You're just making it worse. Just don't play the game at all if you have a problem with the company who makes it.

[SilentNegotiator]

Exactly. You get labeled as a "potential market"

And frankly, if they came up with some final solution against piracy, a lot of those people probably would. Not all of them, but a sizable number, perhaps.

[caseh]

Piracy is just a scapegoat and can still be attributed to loss of sales without stats. Always has been and always will, going way back to when the internet was just an idea and fitting as many games as you could onto a single tape cassette was the way forwards.

Sadly there's no way to track pre-owned sales as thats the real loss of revenue right there.

Pirate: I never intended to buy it but want to play it
Pre-owned: I want it but i'm not paying £40 new for it, i'll pay £30.

Pirate would never have bought it, honest consumer paid for it but devs saw no money from it. Unless people can be convinced to buy new piracy will continue to be seen as the prime evil.

[FinaLXiii]

Piracy its getting less relevant these days good to hear that.

[Captain Tuttle]

Really? There are countries where pirated copies are openly sold in stores. I'm not saying that the publishers are handling it right but to claim that piracy is "less relevant" is wrong imo.

[ZombieNinjaPanda]

And there are countries where the only way people can enjoy certain titles are by pirated copies, even if they wanted to pay for them.

[Bladesfist]

Stop trying to beat piracy with DRM and use the time to make your game better. DRM gets you nowhere and just pisses off paying customers. Im looking at you borderlands.

[aaronobst]

I already paid for the PS3 version of Skyrim in November. The game was not NOT fit for release on PS3 at that time. It was a broken, laggy, freezing mess and I had never seen a new release in a condition like that before...

I didn't get the game I paid for so I saw no alternative. ARR!

[SilentNegotiator]

Well honestly, that's not exactly a situation I was thinking of when writing this blog. I meant more that it's harmful for people to pirate a game as a a way to show up the publishers for a practice that they don't like.

Your situation is certainly tricky, but I'd never hold it against you. You expected to get a working game, paid for a working game, and got a broken mess.

[smashcrashbash]

The excuses for piracy are getting more and more pathetic by the day. People don't seem to understand that no matter how much you justify it it is still stealing. You excuses sound exactly like the excuses criminals make to justify what they do. Because some one can afford something doesn't give you the right to take it from them. If the person has ten cars and you have none that doesn't make it okay to take one because the person will have nine more. It's still his car.

Talking about stealing from a company because they have billions of dollars doesn't make what you are doing right. If piracy makes them lose 100 million dollars a year, it is still their 100 million dollars that you stole from them. Don't buy the product if you know very well the company has a history of bad devices or games. If Bethestha makes glitchy games then don't buy their products until they see no one will buy their stuff the way it is and change their ways. That is the civilized way to do it.Games are not water or food. You can do without them if necessary

[RedDead]

I want to play ME3. I'd rather steal from EA than get bummed up the anus with DLC. I know i'm stealing. I don't really care. Me not buying a game won't change anything. The massive majority will buy games regardless. Cod is proof of this. Your paragraph would be right if 'we' were the majority, but we aren't and never will be. And again, I am Stealing. I just don't care anymore. Chances are i'll buy it down the way anyhow when all DLC is bundled with the game. But i'm not buying it the now.

Also, what happens is..more DRM is piled on. More useless DRM> More *** raping with DLC etc. If a publisher wants ME to stop pirating personally. They should stop making the situation worse. Why can't they just make a game that works anymore and has the content in the disk? They are gaining money via DLC and ***hole business practice and losing money via piracy. It is revenge imo. They see us as potential customers? If they do they are retarded and need to think straight.

[smashcrashbash]

So in short you sink to their level over a video game? They do something underhanded or something you don't like so instead of just not buying it you STEAL it instead. So what does that accomplish? If people refuse to buy the game at all then you will get results.

Saying 'I want it so I will take it' is a very childish attitude. So should I go out and shoplift from stores that I think their prices are too high or should I go and steal a car because the car dealer is crooked? Games are not water or food or anything so important that you HAVE to steal it.

BTW of course you don't care. If they could find you and throw you in prison for a few months for doing it you would see how fast you would care.I would love to see you explain to a judge that you stole the games because it wasn't fair and you needed or deserved them

[roguewarrior]

"If the person has ten cars and you have none that doesn't make it okay to take one because the person will have nine more."

Your confusing copying and stealing. If you have a Ferrari, and i steal it. I have a car you have nothing. But if I copy your Ferrari, you have a Car and I have a car. You lose nothing by my gain. The logic behind your example is a complete fallacy.

[Bladesfist]

As notch said: "If piracy is a potentialy lost sale then should bad game reviews be illegal"

[coolbeans]

Your logic is off as well. Piracy is not theft, since the original remains unaffected; HOWEVER, copying one's original ip with no form of payment given (usually determined by MSRP) to its creator(s), or owners of said ip, for your own gain is stealing.

[JD_Shadow]

Or publishers can do things that don't treat legit customers like criminals, and stop peddling the same thing every single time. Gamers can also stop falling for the same trick every single time like they never learn anything the last time.

Boycotts don't work because for every one person that won't buy the game, there are two people ready, willing, and able to replace the one. With the mentality of the younger gamers anymore, as well, you can't get them to either act maturely when speaking about an issue (at least for very long) and stop thinking that everyone is going to react positively to "troll language", or commit to a decision they made. This is why many campaigns to get this fixed don't work, either. They won't work if the people who decide to get involved decide to act like retards and never hold to their convictions.

It's too easy to blame piracy because they don't know the entire basis of the word. If you pirate something, then the copy that you took changed hands. In the case that they are thinking about, there's no copy changing hands. The person who uploaded their copy to a site still has their copy. It's just a new file is made. It could be copyright infringement, but it's then you get into a lot of grey area, such as if the game in question could be attained any other way, that makes it very hard to determine if there was actually a crime being committed there.

The thing is, whatever you want to call it, it's going to happen anyway. You will NEVER stop it because there will always be that aspect of the community that will want something for nothing. So the issue is determining why they do this. The most common answer: convenience. For the most part, outlets like Steam has changed the rules on this aspect. Yes, it's a form of DRM, but Valve has done a terrific job of getting you to WANT to buy a game off of them with the achievements, their regular sales, etc. That's what companies like EA are not getting. Have someone WANT to buy your product at a reasonable price with no strings attached is always a good thing. If someone wants to play a hyped game but you put a million stipulations to it, then they will still find a way to play your game, but they will try to find a way around your hoops, and it usually goes into a bootlegged copy or whatever.

The TL;DR of it is that one group continues to blame the other, and the conversation never goes anywhere. Companies blame piracy for the draconian measures, the "pirates" blame the draconian measures as their reasons (in other words, it's the "which came first" debate). Neither side ever budges for anyone or anything. Unless gamers can grow up and not act like they are at 4chan every single second of their life, and unless companies can start seeing that piracy could be THEIR fault and the END result of the DRM business instead of the other way around, the debate will never get settled, and things will never change.

[mynameisEvil]

I'm sorry, author, but you are incorrect.

In this day and age, everybody with a scrap of power wants to have control. The corporations are the same way. Ubisoft, for instance, KNOWS that DRM doesn't affect pirates. For games, it would take less than 24 hours to crack the DRM and .exe and upload the game, especially when we have scene groups like SKIDROW, RELOADED, and FAIRLIGHT (Hell, remember when Ubisoft actually used RLD's cracked R6V2.exe?). However, they continue to implement DRM. It's not to punish pirates, it's to make them think that, despite fewer sales, they still have control.

That's what DRM is. It's a "feel-good" method for the higher-ups of companies. And, in an effort to fool the actual consumers, they go, "Well, it's piracy's fault." No, it's the feeling of power that gives the higher-ups a hard one.

[blackburn10]

@ coolbeans. what are you talking about. That is the exact same thing.

[coolbeans]

It's not the same thing.

- "If you have a Ferrari, and i steal it. I have a car you have nothing." Like rougewarrior said, this is the basic definition of theft.

- As defined by Merriam-Webster, one way of defining the word 'steal' goes as follows: "c. [+obj]: to wrongly take and use (another person's idea, words, etc.)"

There are a few variations of the definition, but the ones that deal with this issue usually have a phrase like "take without permission" or "wrongly take". A pirate who takes a copy of game without giving compensation to the owner of the game is stealing.

As a person who used to pirate music, I can see the error of my ways. Why can't others?

[pandaboy]

It's more like you're accepting something which was stolen by the person who hacked or made available the pirate copy. You're not actually the one who committed the crime, but you still may question ones morals for using a stolen item.

[coolbeans]

@pandaboy

Umm...accepting stolen property is a crime in the real world. Although stolen property in the real world deprives the original owner of that item, my logic still holds up. You accept something YOU KNOW was 'wrongly taken' for your own personal gain.

I never came in here to say piracy is a defined crime. It's not theft-since no one's deprived of the property-nor is it copyright infringment because that requires the stealer of the original to sell his/her stolen copies. I only came in here to tell the truth: Regardless of whether or not it's against the law, piracy is still stealing.

[ZombieNinjaPanda]

Piracy and theft are two different things altogether. Why is this such a hard concept to understand, I will never know.

Nowhere am I saying pirating is a good thing, nowhere am I denying I don't do it, but to say they are the same thing is just annoying; and it makes you look like you happily eat up what big corporate tells you.

[coolbeans]

"Piracy and theft are two different things altogether. Why is this such a hard concept to understand, I will never know."

Why the heck are you replying to me when any one of my other posts agrees with this notion?

"but to say they are the same thing is just annoying; and it makes you look like you happily eat up what big corporate tells you."

What? All 3 of my posts are used to seperate the legal term of "theft" and the definition of "stealing". To say those two terms are the same thing makes you look like you're trying to hide the truth of what you're actually doing.

[SnakeCQC]

sny thoughts on cod maps or the fact the street fighter vs tekken characters are going to cost £16 even naughty dog with there per psn account online pass(i have one ps3 and 3 accounts for my brothers i dont want them messing up my kill death ratio but i have no choice) and bioware with there after the ending dlc soo many devs are sooo greedy so screw em!

[roguewarrior]

Agree with your overall sentiment, but its the Publishers not the Devs trying to screw us.