Bands like it when you yell "Yar" at them.

 I gotta admit, I've done my share of pirating when it came to PC games. Being young, the prospect of being able to try out games for free had an obvious allure to it, especially when Doom 3 came out and I was able to unleash the game onto my friends before they even had a chance to get into a store to buy it. Am I proud it it? Not necessarily, and I haven't really done it much since in the "I'm stealing this" sense. I was more likely to nab the game and give it a spin just to see if I liked it, especially when a game whose style I was unfamiliar with rolled around.

 Neverwinter Nights was a game I bought and did not like, so you could imagine why I was hitting up the tubes to get a copy of the latest games on my computer. One example would be the time that I gave the 06 series of NBA and MLB offerings a download only to find that I completely hated the games. Could I have returned them? Could I have resold them? No, I couldn't, and demos for the games may be around somewhere but they weren't as easy to find as a true pirated copy. What did I do? I promptly deleted them and never touched them again, comforted with the knowledge that I didn't waste $100 just to find out how they weren't up to my standards.

 When a game comes around that I genuinely enjoy, I've bought the game. Fallout 3 was easy to pirate, but I was there in the opening line for a basic copy of the game because I appreciated the direction that game was headed. Same with Ghostbusters: The Video Game, even though I am still furious about the DRM that no one knew was included in the game. Basically, the good work of a publisher should be rewarded, and by no means should they have their work stolen from them.

 This method is a bit fuzzy when it comes to Crysis, however. I'll be honest to the guys at Crytek when I say that they are completely full of shit when they claim that the ungodly numbers they put up were honestly people who bought the game. Customer's are sometimes stupid, but they aren't ALL stupid. There were a list of requirements on the box, but no one could be certain that the game would run decently at all. People see pictures of a game, and they are thinking that there is a chance that they are going to get that very same game. Most computer gamers were smart enough to know that Crysis, specifically designed to be eye candy, might not be the visual orgasm they were hoping to get. Instead of shelling out the money and finding themselves with a game that would have a limited community by the time their computer was expensively upgraded to the point of running it, they pirated it for a test drive. I'm quite sure that a good percentage of those users deleted the game shortly after because they made the justified decision to take the game for a test drive before making the "I can run this" commitment.

 This is a rare case, and in most cases, there's no real excuse for pirating. I'm sort of torn between the Penny Arcade argument which prompted me to write this and the morals of the pirating community. Companies like Infinity Ward, Sony, Blizzard, and Ubisoft have a right to protect themselves from rampant piracy, but what they should never be given the right to do is own the way you use your product. If there's an unlock to be done, most users found that they were happy to use Steam to do so, but to suddenly find that a game is unusable because your ISP went down for repairs or discovering that there is malicious software on your computer that you didn't know you were installing is basically a violation of privacy and trust. In many cases, this is flat out illegal. Usually, when you sign a contract with someone, you tend to fork over the money AFTER you have seen the fine print. The Securom, however, was announced after people bought the games that contained them without prior notice or warning. It's illegal, and a slap in the face. The game is ours.

 So when pirates say, "Oh, hey, we're going to pirate Ghostbusters because of Securom", then I'm torn. I loved the game, and I know that I can just remove Securom and move on with my life. I love the creativity behind the game, and it was all worth the money. Yet, I also think that it's important to let the companies know when they are being complete pricks. In this case, there's a good argument for both sides. There's nothing legal or moral behind the pirates, but the idea that you can give the middle finger in a spot where it matters most to a company, it's wallet, is a powerful thing to have on your side. On the other hand, it's illegal and you're effectively supporting a game that you just didn't feel like paying for. Paralyzing a company with a flood of angry calls would have solved the issues immediately, and the intelligent gamers would find a way to rally and produce a class action lawsuit of some kind or at least convince the offending company that they could if they wanted to.

 Yet, here we are. The pirates keep pirating, and the companies keep slapping down more DRM to the point where you have no idea what software you're actually installing on your computers. There has got to be a different rally call to the angry gamers out there, but unfortunately, the gamers aren't interested in finding out what that is. It's gotten to the point where it's just stealing, plain and simple. There are certain levels of theft, I admit, because anyone out there pirating a Blaster Master game on any system is not really taking money from anyone (the games aren't in print anymore), not winding up with anything valuable since it isn't a legitimate copy, and can only serve to renew interest in a series that's been dead for years. I'm not even entirely sold that pirating old school games actually drives down the value of those games, because let's face it, only a select few people are going to pay the grand for a mint copy of Chrono Trigger, and just because everybody in the world may actually have the game, I don't see them being dissuaded from competing amongst themselves at that price range for a perfect cartridge. Case in point would be the Family Fitness Stadium Events for the NES, because the game itself is not only free on the internet, but common as a Nintendo cart in the form of World Class Track Meet, and yet still fetches insane amounts of cash because of it's physical value as a recalled title.

  Either way, the companies don't necessarily care if you get titles they don't even make anymore half the time. What they do expect is to get something for their work on a title. They are the ones spending the cash to try and entertain you, but by telling them that everything was awesome while not paying for it is only justifying their cause. It just needs to stop. There are other ways of letting them know, and the current way amounts to feeding a troll. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit