YAR

What with the recent clampdown on pirates, both digital and analog, I thought it was high time I slap my own thoughts on piracy down here. First, if you hadn't heard: Read This.

Once again, Jim you disgust me but goddamn if I don't agree with you. I wanna start off with this choice quote: "Piracy is the single greatest threat to the development and release of innovative and creative entertainment software that consumers demand and enjoy". I take big issue with that statement. Dinosaurs who ran out of ideas ten years ago trying to please everyone because they don't know how to make a good goddamned game anymore is the greatest threat. Companies that tend to have a huge corporate face and are largely marketing driven are piracy's biggest enemies. Why? Mostly because those companies tend to rely on fooling you rather than delivering lots of content. If you can download a game for free and see that it's like seven hours long with no original ideas whatsoever, you're not going to buy it. However, if you're an idiot and don't know about piracy, you might be dazzled by shiny things and explosions long enough to plunk down sixty dollars. After that, doesn't matter if your experience with the product is great or garbage, you've already paid.

There are companies that make games that don't give a damn about piracy, however. Valve comes to mind as recently saying "pirates are customers you just haven't met yet". And trust me, Valve's games are pirated just as much, if not more than other people's games. So why don't they get all red faced?

They make good games that make money, and through their commitment to quality and staying on top of what the fans want, they've garnered a large army of support. They're rich, and always will be thanks to doing their fucking job.

I'm going to come out and say it: Piracy isn't a significant threat. In fact, it's one of the few weapons consumers of digital media have left. It's a good thing. It's as simple as this: If you make a good game, I will buy it, regardless of whether I have pirated it or not. Hell, I'll buy it if you have some really original ideas in there. I should get a fucking Medal of Radical for buying Matt Hazard at full price. There are people out there who pirate everything, and those people weren't going to buy your shit anyway. They don't have the money. You can sob and say "well then you shouldn't play it!" and if you want to be Policeman FunRuiner, you can do that, but it's irrelevant to sales numbers.

The flip side of this argument is what most people don't get. If you don't make a good game, you don't deserve any money. Shitty games making lots of money are the biggest threat to the industry, not piracy. If you make a shitty game, I hope everyone pirates your game, spreads word about how shitty it is, and then everyone at the company you work for loses their job. Maybe next time you wont make a half-ass garbage product and try and cover up your failure with a glitzy ad campaign. People with talent and vision don't have to worry about things like that happening.

The DS has a huge rate of piracy, and it's due to a number of reasons. There are the technology reasons, (SD cards and DS adapters being cheap), but it's also what the hackfucks have turned the system into: a dumping ground for cheap cash-in detritus sold at 40 bucks a pop. Review scores are irrelevant. The system is filled with so much trash that anything with a cool premise or two minutes of good gameplay gets a disproportionately high score. The only way to be sure that you're not going to be ripped off is pirate the game and see for yourself. Of course, most DS games aren't worth more than a play or two these days, so there go the sales. Even with the huge piracy rate, DS games sell like crack in ghettos, even shitty ones (the games, not the ghettos).

Of course, there's a bright light at the end of the tunnel in all this: Piracy will never be stopped. Pirates will always be better than the companies that try in vain to seal themselves off with lawyers and courts. As long as the internet exists, there will always be a way to get your digital product you spent years and millions on for absolutely free. Now all you have to do in order to avert tragedy is give me a reason to not do so.