by bobyoko » 02 Jan 2013 18:58
piracy is the effect of an industry intent on devouring itself. think about it. most people don't keep all the games they buy. no one i know does, they trade them in for other games. this means that in order to keep the market artificially inflated (ie so they can continue to sell at $60 a pop), the industry MUST make room for a second hand market. sadly, the second hand market is owned by a near monopoly (lamestop). this means most "gamers" are at the whim of a corporate giant who doesn't care about anything but $, meaning you get, like, 10-15% of your initial investment. this is a scam usually only organized crime can pull off. the corporate model is it's own parasite here. so what should the consumer do? should they blindly continue to throw money into this system (which is abusing it's supporters)? or should they stop supporting the broken way things work, and decide to support a different system of business? i perceive pirating as the natural recourse to being blindly ripped off year after year.
let me ask this: does pirating a game that has sold out of it's print run count as stealing? who exactly am i stealing from if i, say, download one of the TMNT SNES games? who am i hurting buy downloading, say, little king's story, today, in 2013? answer: Absolutely No One. downloading titles from systems which are no longer available hurts only the second hand market, which is already full of collectors who don't care about roms or iso, they care about carts and discs. pirating does next to nothing to the shelf value of second hand goods. a used copy of mario bros, or wii sports, etc is only worth about $2 no matter how many times it's shared via internet (even though big n will charge ya $5 for every system you want it on). the same is also true in reverse. pirating a copy of fire emblem wii does nothing to the secondary market value of the game, and also does nothing to hurt nintendo, as they've already had ample time to move their available stock from shelves. ie there aren't any more new copies of fire emblem in existence (besides in the hands of collectors, of course). also, how many times should we have to buy the same game? most games released in the last generation of games are remakes, sequels, and ports. another thought: shouldn't i have some control over the thing i purchase from a company? i mean, if you buy a chevy camaro, and you want to modify it, you can. but if i want to, say, boot my games from a usb drive instead of by disc (because my device was shipped with a disc drive made as cheaply as possible. seriously, i'm not replacing my wii disc drive again), i should be able to modify my personal item any way i choose. i'm also not agreeing to an unfair second hand market, where i'm the one being constantly ripped off. if you want to offer me a fair price for my games, fine, let's do business. you wanna give me $12 for the game i dropped $60 on yesterday, just because i took the cello off, no way, i'm done. plus, pirates get to play all the best stuff, like fatal frame 4, the uncensored manhunt 2, captain rainbow, zengeki, project zero 2, disaster day of crisis (which is WAY better than the reviews would lead you to believe),etc. there are also some really awesome hacked titles around like mariokart black and the new smb homebrew games made with the reggie editor.
anyway, i simply wanted to give word to thoughts of a different nature than just, "haxors suck." because they don't. actually, all the real hackers i've come in contact with have been exceedingly kind in comparison to most internet folk. oh, and if you're broke from buying all the games, don't feel guilty for a second, hack your wii today. it's a dead system, and the games are nearly worthless on the market. ie, it's not a crime, it's receiving a gift. there's a huge difference.
