Piracy: And Why It’s Destroying This Industry

So I wrote this post about two years ago, but since I couldn‘t import my old database, I’m just going to copy and paste it here.  Since this was written two years ago, plenty of things have changed.  I still feel strongly against piracy, but I’ve also edited out quite a bit of swearing I had in my old post.  Please note that there might be a good amount of negativity, but I tried to tone it down a bit, so I do apologize for that.  A lot of this post still matters, so I’m going to paste it below:

Piracy has been around forever and it’s not going anywhere…unfortunately. However, piracy is becoming more and more popular among “kids”. You can unfortunately blame the huge decline of PC gaming, on piracy. I’m going to talk a little bit about the type of piracy and how it’s really hurting everyone.  So you’re a kid about 18-22, and you don’t have too much money. But you hear about this amazing game/application/movie, etc…and you just *have* to have it. But being poor and living off of top ramen, and of course can afford an internet connection, computer, and a cell phone, you can’t afford to buy this item. So what do you do? You download it off the internet for free. Now why would someone do this? Mainly because they’re cheap. I’ve heard every excuse in the book as to why people “pirate”. Everything from “There’s no demo of the game” to “I’m trying before I buy, then I’ll buy after”. The worst I’ve heard is “I’m a poor college student and I can’t afford to buy this”. Come on now, you can afford a computer, your cell phone bill, and obviously food, and “entertainment”; yet you can’t afford to buy that item. It’s just pathetic if you ask me. Granted, I’ll admit that I used to download anything and everything I could, but I was young and stupid back then. Now I make enough money to buy the things I want and in all honesty, if you can’t afford it, you don’t need it.

I was talking to my friend about this topic (and he still downloads anything and everything he can, yet he’s almost 10 years older than I am), and his response was a little shocking. He’s doing it to hurt the “Big Guy”, ie the big corporations. What kind of logic is that? Do you truly understand who you’re actually hurting when you’re pirating? You aren’t hurting the big, rich CEOs; you’re hurting the developers that actually develop these titles. Think about a car company. Now if 90% of their cars were stolen off the lots (from every dealership), you aren’t hurting GM, you’re hurting their workers. As GM already has the money from the dealership. So you\’re hurting the dealership, and the workers. So what does the dealership do? No longer ask for that car, which in turn causes GM to stop production of that car, which hurts the GM employees putting the cars together. Same thing applies to software piracy. You’re only hurting the developers that develop these titles.

I’ll give you another example, Crytek (the developers of Far Cry and Crysis) recently said that Crysis has been pirated at a rate of 20:1. Taking into account that Crysis sold over a million (or was that shipped over a million), 20 million people are stealing your game. So what does Crytek do about this? No more patches for Crysis, and they are no longer developing for the PC exclusively. This is just one company, think about the countless others that are losing tons of money due to this. This is the exact reason why PC gaming is dead right now. Developers have no incentive to keep creating games for the PC, especially if it’s just going to get pirated. What makes me sad, is the fact that people don’t even bat an eye when they’re stealing. It’s just become second nature to them; they just don’t care. All they care about, is the fact that they’re getting this for free.

One very recent form of piracy really ticks me off. Last week, people figured out how to crack every single application on the iTunes App Store. While DRM cracking isn’t new, it’s sad when people are stealing from tiny developers trying to get a name for themselves. On average, the price of an app is about $7. Some are $10, some are $5. A good number are $1, and there are plenty of free applications. I myself have bought 3 different apps. Bejeweled 2 for $10, Trism for $5, and DizzyBee for $3. For a total of $18 I have 3 very good apps. Yet, people still think it’s ok to steal $10 from developers. In actuality, Apple gets 30%, and the dev obviously gets 70%. So, you want to steal 70% of $3? How cheap can you be? My same friend said “Well that adds up”. Well no kidding, but guess what? If you don’t want to pay the $3, you shouldn’t be using the app! If everyone just pirates these apps, what incentive do these developers have to create bigger and better apps?None.  Most of these developers are 1-4 people creating these small apps for you. Stealing that money away from them, is just pathetic. My friend also tells me he does it because he hates Apple. But he owns an iPhone…how does that make any sense?!?! Pathetic and childish. Just grow up people. This mentality came from the Jailbroken apps. All of the apps were free, but people believe that all the apps should be free, so they’re just going to pirate them…on principle! That was the single worst part of the jailbreak community. I remember when a couple pay apps came on Installer, people whined and cried because they had to pay. Sigh.

Jumping ship to probably the single most pirated software on the internet: Adobe Photoshop. Why do people pirate this? The price. They don’t really care what it does, only that it costs about $600 It’s incredibly sad when the user that uses this app, won’t even use 1% of these features. People don’t care though, as my friend says “free is free”. People will do anything and everything to get things for free. Because it’s all anonymous. The only time your ISP will come complaining, is if you download too much. But will they come after you for continuously pirating small things? Nope. And that’s sad. ISPs and other companies really need to work together to nip this piracy crap in the bud. There were talks of creating a TPM-like chip for the PC that will make it so that only original code will run. Personally I think this is a great idea, but for the hardcore hackers, they’ll crack it eventually. But it will stop 90% of the dorks on BitTorrent. Or hell, have it at the Operating System level. The OS can determine if the code isn’t the original, and refuse to run it. But it all comes to Microsoft, and we all know that they do not care about the PC anymore (look at it’s efforts with PC gaming, and *cough* Vista). Mac piracy is slim to none, so I doubt Apple is caring right now about it. So far the only console that hasn’t been “hacked” is the PS3. That could be due to the fact that the security is top notch, or the fact that no one really wants to download 50GB games, then burn them to expensive BD-50 discs. I wish Sony would tighten up the PSP like they did the PS3, as piracy is out of control on that thing . But in Japan, it’s selling like hotcakes (hardware and software).

Sigh, all in all, we (as an industry) need to take a long, hard look at what piracy is doing, and we really need to do something about it. Otherwise it’s just going to be messed up, no matter how hard we try. The hard part is convincing people to pay for something they used to get for free. How can you do that? I don’t truly know. Especially since people don’t care about anyone but themselves.