Originally Posted by Stargazer
Originally Posted by Tranjspd
...Piracy is stealing. The damage from piracy to studios is real. It is getting harder and harder to make large PC games that are worth playing...
A few corrections:
  • "Piracy" (aka unauthorised copying) is not theft legally or ethically. Theft means either permanently depriving someone of an item or otherwise claiming ownership of it (see section 1 of the Theft Act 1968 for one example). As such, it is publishers that are more likely to commit theft when they appropriate or incorporate content produced by others and claim it as their own (e.g. with some of the older games offered by GOG like Arcanum or Flatout, the publisher has supplied a cracked version without giving credit to the groups concerned).
  • The "damage" from piracy is a questionable topic - copying has been around since the earliest days of computing and it hasn't stopped certain companies from becoming multi-billion dollar behemoths. Also see the links posted above regarding surveys showing no relation between P2P traffic and music sales.
  • The only sense in which PC games are getting "harder" to make is that the budgets for AAA titles have ballooned (mainly to cover graphics) and that publishers have in turn aimed for the lowest common denominator. The fact that several Kickstarter games have achieved critical and commercial success (e.g. D:OS, FTL, Xenonauts, Shadowrun Returns) shows that the market for good single-player games is healthy and simply suffering from neglect by big-name fashion-blinkered publishers whose idea of customer service is trying to nickel and dime the general public for all they're worth.
Rant over (I hope)...


I'm not a lawyer...so there's no way I can argue what the legal definition of piracy is.

However...I think it should be abundantly clear that piracy is morally wrong.

Just imagine this scenario...

Jim spends 3 years working and living on little money to create his dream game, with the hopes that he will be able to support himself one day. He finally releases his game, selling it for $10 on his site.

But what happens is that one person buys the game, and then posts it on a popular site where everyone else downloads it for free. Everyone is playing Jim's game, but Jim is still destitute...despite having worked so hard to make his game.

So...I have to ask, has something wrong happened here? And if so, who is at fault? I think it should be fairly obvious, that it's not Jim.