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12.12.2006

Opinion: Why Game Piracy Might Help
Hell yea, piracy helps. Even tho i dont support piracy in any way, i'm pretty sure it has not only increased game sales. In my opinion it probably decided some of the biggest console wars as well.

If you check your friends and relatives that own consoles its easy to spot out a few that mainly use pirated software. these people dont make any profit for the software companies of course, but can this be counted as a loss? im sure quite a few of them would have never bought the console if it wasnt for the option to play games for free. the winner of this situation is the console producer, obviously. he doesnt only get the money for the console he wouldnt have sold if it wasnt for piracy (+boosted sale numbers which are extremely important at the start of a new console era). he also gets free mouth to mouth propaganda from all the drug addicted friends that drop by to play pirated video games. from these friends a few can be expected to take the same path which means more free money for sony, microsoft and the rest. however there will probably be a few friends of friends that loved the pirated game, but feel like they should buy the whole thing.. thats of course where the software companies start making their profits from piracy as well. if they are smart they add some online content or similar things that can only be accessed with originals and boom, piracy turned to usefulness again.

In my opinion the whole piracy issue is overrated anyways. especially in the console market since theres mostly some kind of hardware manipulation needed (which can be quite expensive) to run the games.. im not a professional game producer (yet), but are the companies really surprised if people rather pay twice the price for their hardware so they dont have to buy the third new installment of the exact same game mechanics with a different name?

i really wonder if the success of certain consoles would have been the same if it wasnt for piracy. the only solution would be if all consoles would be safe from exploits, but until then it is probably rather a disadvantage if your console doesnt get hacked in time ;)

-Max K.