Renegade Kid, Piracy, and the 3DS

Renegade Kid founder Jools Watsham has recently posted a detailed blog of why piracy may keep the studio from creating future products for the 3DS. Piracy is indeed a growing issue and a taboo subject, and our own Dustin Spencer voices his own opinion of the entire situation, explaining why pirates and homebrewers alike should find a new hobby.

[futurefrog]

very enlightening read, very eye opensing

[masterabbott]

Piracy is very bad, its so hard to stop and it as there is always people out there doing it, and in turn that hurts the developers that work to hard to create games that we enjoy playing. if this continues then the smaller developers die out and we lose great quality games.

[FriedGoat]

Yup, I guess that's why there are so many successful indie companies on the pc (the easiest platform to pirate for).

[rainslacker]

I've been saying that piracy harms the end user and industry for the past couple days on similar articles, yet people still deny it, despite the fact I give many examples as to why.

To me a developer dropping support is bad for the end user. One developer...maybe not, but this guy is not alone in his beliefs.

There are some instances where I can see piracy being justifiable, but I still believe the harm outweighs the good.

[LinkageAX]

Piracy is bad kids. Also annoying.

[militissanctus]

Piracy is crap. If you can't afford games, don't play them. You can't eat the candy bar you didn't buy, can you?

[discordman]

Very much agree with you. Sad thing is that most don't seem to care if they are stealing or not.

[coaidant]

Look up the ratio of NDS games sold to NDS consoles sold

[JD_Shadow]

Look up the ratio of NDS shovelware games to NDS games that are actually worth a damn to play. I think you got an answer to that argument.

[koga88]

Isn't this what happened to the PSP? A lot of Western developers moved away from the system thanks to the fact that piracy was running rampant on the handheld? I mean the NDS was easy to do too but that required either the purchase of something else.

[schlanz]

It was way worse with the PSP. The DS was fortunate to appeal to a much, much broader audience (as does the 3DS) that has no interest/knowledge in how to pirate games for the system.

And as morally reprehensible as piracy is, I still have gigantic doubts as to whether it has a meaningful impact on the success or failure of a game released for popular Nintendo systems.

[rainslacker]

Yep. Hardware sales skyrocketed after the first hack, but software sales went down, the opposite of what should happen. It also affected the Vita and it being locked down, sometimes to my great annoyance.

[MasterCornholio]

Game developers need to earn a living to survive which is why we should support good devs by buying their games and punish bad developers by pirating them.

[discordman]

No. We don't need to punish anyone.

[PopRocks359]

Pirating is ILLEGAL. If you want to punish bad developers just avoid their content altogether.

[SonyNGP]

Pretty much. You know you're doing a bad job at not supporting a game if you still want to play it. It's pathetic and makes you look weak.

[bwazy]

I pirate as a form of "testing the waters" of the product I plan to buy. Everything from CD's to Guitar Pro to TV Series (now that I think about it, I don't think I ever pirated an actual video game), I test out to see if I like it, then promptly purchase it afterwards (if deemed not crap by my standards).

I really wish there were more demos out for certain games though. I've wasted a stupid amount of money in my young life on video games that I absolutely hated and could not return.

[megamanX2]

exactly too bad these dummies out there cant see that.

[G-cis]

that why there`s something called a "review"
but reviewer these days is biased as hell lol

[Qrphe]

If I had never pirated Persona 3, Ys Seven, Crisis Core and Disgaea for example, I would have probably never sought their physical copies then actually looked forward to releases from their respective series.

I like how everyone in this article makes generealizations against piracy without providing one shear of factual evidence only really relying on rule of law.

[rainslacker]

I posted this yesterday on another article. Plenty of things in there to consider

http://n4g.com/news/1147249...

That being said, there are times when piracy can be justifiable, such as the examples given here. But while there are people such as yourself that use it for responsible reasons, there are many many more that do not have the buyers mentality and would just prefer to get their stuff for free.

Sad thing about that particular post...it was originally 3 times longer with facts and quotes showing negative effects, but I was limited to 4000 characters, and wanted to address some other things being said.

[smashman98]

Very good article I'm gonna check out renegade kids blog when I get the chance

[JD_Shadow]

There are a few issues to his argument, though.

If you look on Steam, a lot of indie devs are having their games selling. These are from smaller developers, as well, and they don't seem to have much issue getting people to buy the products through there. In fact, it continues to be one of Steam's biggest selling points. Though the approval process and the Greenlight thing can be criticized, thing is that this puts a bit of a dent in that argument. And look how games like Call of Duty keep selling like you wouldn't believe (hard to have to admit, but for the sake of this argument, we must).

Secondly, this is the same argument that we saw when the first iPhone jailbreak was introduced. "This will lead to piracy." Yet, the courts there didn't agree with that, and as we've seen, it's only strengthened the case of people getting the iPhone. We can't cherry pick evidence and provide heresy and say that that's what it is. If we said that with the iPhone and it didn't happen (I'm sure it did happen in a few pockets, but it wasn't enough to be noticeable, obviously), then whose to say that whatever piracy did happen would be so widespread that it would warrant the punishment of everyone.

But the biggest thing is that when you talk about piracy, you have to differentiate piracy from copyright infringement. The latter is a more complicated term and a more complicated set of circumstances in which someone has to actually think of before laying the claim of it. Piracy is more of a buzz word (look how the very uttering of it sparks up the worst of the worst on THIS site), and gets more people to agree with you without understanding it. In order for piracy to happen, a copy of something has to actually change hands without someone's permission. With infrimgement, you need to know if what you're downloading is readily available somewhere. This makes it much harder to prove, so they use the piracy charge because "he stole something from me" is much easier to convince people of than "he got something that I once sold but I can't be bothered to sell anymore". If it's not available, then how can you say that someone took a potential sale away from the developers (because how are you supposed to buy something that's not sold anymore)?

And even if you could, they've said the same thing about used game sales and rentals. Yet, all three of these things have been going on for years and yet the industry has lasted this long. Why? These were supposed to destroy everything gaming. I think there's more about why they blame any of those three things than what they are letting on. They probably just don't want to find a reason why their shitty games didn't sell (not this dev, but publishers in general). You can't use piracy as a way to not have to say that a super hyped game you made just sucked and no one bought it.

[rainslacker]

Steam has it's own culture, and people that use it buy games. I don't know the ratios of people who buy them vs. number of pirated copies though so can't say if piracy directly affects it.

Inverse to your iPhone argument, look at the droid market. It is severely hampered by piracy. In addition to being over saturated, much like iTunes, and despite having cheap games, it was plagued by piracy. It's one reason why F2P became so strong on those markets, albeit not the only one. There's a lot of issues involving those markets, some related to piracy, others related to things like F2P, ad-based, quality control, etc.

In response to your court case about the iPhone, keep in mind just a few months ago the courts saw a strong connection to hacks leading to piracy, so it is still illegal to jailbreak a PS3. That case will likely be followed up on by all the major hardware manufacturers. Whether it affects phones or not is hard to say, since those devices aren't considered gaming machines. I don't really wish to comment on that now since my understanding of the Apple case isn't enough to really make an argument.

Differentiating between infringement and piracy is rather difficult when talking about this issue. Just look how much it took you to describe the difference. Generally when talking about this issue, it is understood what is being talked about, and piracy is just the common term used, although not always correctly so.

There are some positive effects to piracy, and they shouldn't be denied any more than the negative effects should be. The problem is that people do "cherry pick" ideas and situations to prove their point, and that goes for both pro and con on the issue. They then continue to dismiss the claims of the other side, because of those "cherry picked" scenarios.

[crazysammy]

I am not going to say piracy is good. It IS stealing and people who act like because you probably won't get caught makes it ok. It is not.

However my main argument has and will always be, that if you make a good product people will buy it. You will be successful if you run a good company, treat your people well, and make a quality product.

I don't mind people being worried about piracy and I understand how you could feel cheated because someone stole something you worked very hard on but why worry about things you cannot control? Just worry about what you CAN control which is the quality of your product.

There have been MANY indie PC games releasing lately that are DRM free, and would be so easy to copy (and probably were) but were very successful still.

[Qrphe]

If Renegade Kid's games were good he wouldn't have to worry about piracy, end of story. All those indie PC developers that actually developed good games have done well, but let's overglorify Renegade Kid's opinion.

[MikeMyers]

That doesn't make any sense. People pirate good and bad games, good and bad movies, good and bad music. Piracy is just another issue they have to face along with marketing, word of mouth, financial backing and so on. There are many layers to why something is a success or not. Piracy does not legitimize any of those factors.